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The message is not that we should expect to bow to every misdeed or atrocity. It is that the “good guys” — granted the impossibility that we can ever reach global consensus about who these are — cannot and should not intervene militarily whenever they see bad stuff happen.

I am just completing a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of its most important lessons is that while Kennedy played a masterly diplomatic hand, it is most unlikely that America’s will could have prevailed — the Soviet nuclear weapons withdrawn from Cuba — without the underpinning threat of American force.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and even his most hawkish generals knew that America possessed an overwhelming superiority, both of conventional weapons in the Caribbean region and nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Soviet Union. US superiority of the latter was on the order of 17 to 1. And thanks to the intelligence officer Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who slipped his nation’s secrets to the West, the Americans knew that the Soviets recognized their own weakness.

Moreover, the will and solidarity of the US and its allies to confront the Soviets remained strong in the Cold War. American presidents often found themselves having to restrain the eagerness not only of the military brass, but also of some ordinary citizens, to go head to head with “the Russkies.”

The bipolar Cold War planet has been replaced by a multipolar one, in which a tenuous American superiority persists, but is no longer unchallengeable.

If you think this represents appeasement, watch the new Netflix movie “Munich: The Edge of War,” which stars Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain.

A well-briefed military friend of mine believes that the Chinese are not yet quite ready for a showdown over Taiwan, but he thinks they will seek one within a few years, confident of a local victory.

Biden deserves more sympathy than he is currently receiving for his vacillation on Ukraine. The old, moth-eaten allegation of appeasement is being levelled by his foes both at home and abroad. Yet the US cannot be expected to face down Putin alone, far less to go to war with him.

Today we live in an entirely different strategic environment

Thus, the likelihood is that if Putin attacks Ukraine, he can secure the territory he wants without suffering serious military consequences, beyond whatever losses the courageous Ukrainians can inflict on Russian forces.

The real challenge for the West is to summon the will to punish Putin and his friends in the language they understand best — that of money. Economic sanctions against Russia as a country are right, but not remotely sufficient. The only meaningful weapon is an assault upon the fortunes and lifestyles of the Kremlin’s gangster clique, held and invested around the world.

As for the US, the only party to the confrontation that matters, it seems absolutely right to do everything possible to deter Putin, and to punish him if he goes ahead with his cold-blooded plan to kill thousands of people, to score a victory that shores up his unpopular domestic polity. But one should not resort to threats, nor offer promises to the Ukrainians, that there is no intention of fulfilling.

Most of America’s European “allies” — the quotation marks are emphatic — are too fearful that the Kremlin will cut off their gas supplies to provide Washington with meaningful backing. Europe’s attitude to serious foreign policy and security issues is frankly decadent.

by cutting his 1938 deal with Hitler, he bought vital time for Britain to re-arm before the war that he recognized was coming.

Harris makes a good additional point, that Hitler thought himself cheated out of a military assault on Czechoslovakia that he wanted, and expected to get. In other words, appeasement was clever.

As a historian, I do not go all the way with Harris about this. He seems right that Britain could not realistically have fought in 1938.

I still think that Chamberlain was a weak, foolish old man who shrank from unwelcome realities.

His worst contribution to history is that Munich gave appeasement — which some of us would call a recognition of realities — a bad name. My hero among historical and strategic gurus, the Oxford professor Michael Howard, often said, “If you are dealing with foreign leaders less monstrous than was Hitler, appeasement can be a very sensible policy.”

We must reluctantly acknowledge that both Russia’s Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping can commit acts of aggression in their own backyards that we are unable to prevent, and which are not worth a general war.

It means scrapping rules about weapons exports, a huge boost in defence spending and an end to Russian energy imports. A Russian gas pipeline to Germany called Nord Stream 2 has already been suspended.

"For the foreseeable future, co-operation with Russia will not occur. It will be more about containment and deterrence and, if needed, defence against Russia," Mr Schmid tells me.

Unexpectedly hawkish words for a party that until seven weeks ago believed Germany's historical guilt and moral duty to make up for Nazi crimes meant peace with Russia at all costs.

Even Germany's view of its own history is changing.

Until the invasion mainstream opinion was that German reunification was thanks to dialogue with Moscow by another SPD chancellor, Willy Brandt. But now the debate has shifted, with reminders that Mr Brandt's diplomacy was backed up by strong deterrence, including a West German defence budget of 3% of GDP.

The issue of German historical war guilt has also become more nuanced. Before the invasion the government argued against weapon deliveries to Ukraine because of Nazi crimes against Russia.

"Under Putin, official Russian policy tried to monopolise the memory of the Second World War for the bilateral German-Russian relationship," explains Mr Schmid. This blinded parts of German society to the suffering of Ukrainians during he war, he adds.

Now there is a greater awareness of Ukraine's traumas under the Nazis.

Berlin's rhetoric has shifted dramatically. But some ask whether actions are following fast enough. Certainly warm words of support are not enough for Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky. He has criticised Germany's continued reliance on Russian oil and gas.

In a BBC interview last week, Mr Zelensky called payments for Russian energy "blood money". And a planned visit to Kyiv by President Steinmeier was cancelled at the last minute.

certainly German politicians and commentators interpret the failed visit as a sign of Ukraine's distrust in the German president, who as foreign minister under Angela Merkel spent years trying to achieve peace by engaging with Russia.

"Our partners look at us, and say: OK, you do a Zeitenwende but what are you practically doing?" she says. "On sanctions we are timid and on weapons delivery, we are reluctant. So, rightly, they wonder what that Zeitenwende is about, and given that Germany is a big economic, military, political power in the middle of Europe, whatever we do makes a difference, in good ways and bad."

"This is a dilemma that Germany has created itself," argues political scientist Liana Fix, head of the Körber Foundation. "That's obviously difficult to accept for other countries, who are willing to go ahead with an embargo and have done their homework on energy diversification."

Ironically, it's a Green Party politician, Economy Minister Robert Habeck, from a party that for years has been calling for energy independence from Russia, who is having to solve this dilemma.

On military support for Ukraine, Berlin says it is prepared to send whatever weapons Kyiv needs. But there are allegations that some ministries are getting tied up in bureaucracy. Here, too, it is a Green politician, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who is pushing the governing coalition to go faster. She has called for heavy weaponry, such as tanks or fighter jets, for Ukraine.

Olaf Scholz has to keep his party onside, govern in a three-way coalition and overturn Germany's guilt-laden pacifist identity overnight.

But even his allies say the chancellor should at least communicate better what's going on

Meanwhile, it feels like many individual Germans are going through their own Zeitenwende. Ariane Bemmer, a columnist for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, has written about reassessing her own feelings towards Russia. "I definitely got it wrong, it's like losing a friend,"

Like many in the former West Germany in the 1980s, she was wary of US-style cutthroat capitalism. She bought a book called Ami Go Home - she never read it, but felt it would look good on her bookshelf - and was intrigued by the reforms in Russia.

"In America you had Ronald Reagan as a president, which was a shock for us. We thought: what will he do, this crazy actor with his cowboy boots? Will he set the world on fire? Russia was a place where all the good changes were, perestroika, freedom, wind of change," she says.

Few in Germany think that now. In one recent poll, 55% of Germans said Berlin should send heavy weapons, such as tanks and fighter jets, to Ukraine to fight against Russia.

For Ariane, and many other Germans, any lingering Russophile romanticism vanished for good the day Putin's tanks rolled over Ukraine's border.

When it comes to actions that were truly alarming during the Trump administration, the first event I noted was the new president’s visit to CIA headquarters, where he lied about the size of the crowd at his inauguration and insisted without evidence that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 election. This pattern of outright, flagrant, self-aggrandizing lies continued throughout Trump’s presidency

we’re starting to hear a familiar panic from the left. It reached an especially high pitch last week when the final decisions of the Supreme Court’s 2022 term were announced.

Even if you disagree with these decisions, I think it’s pretty clear that they are exactly what you’d expect to see from a court with a solid conservative majority. Unless we assume the United States should be a one-party state that governs uniformly from the liberal-progressive left, such an outcome should be understood as normal, or abnormal only in the sense that the court swung left in the decades following the New Deal and has been slowly moving in a rightward direction since the Reagan administration, making its current configuration a divergence from the previous era’s ideological expectations.

There is certainly nothing alarming about the court’s closing decisions, and thus neither are they evidence that the Supreme Court itself is “illegitimate,” as some applause-seeking pundits have alleged.

In my view, most of the term-ending decisions at the high court were expressions of conservatism rather than reaction.

precious few people want to be part of a movement that’s merely “less evil.” They don’t want to be or do anything evil at all. They want to be proud of their president. They want to be proud of their movement.

while it might be easy to reconcile a one-time action (like a vote) as less evil, it becomes far more difficult when your political affiliation is part of your identity. 

Many millions of Republicans aren’t just Republicans on Election Day, they’re Republicans every day. And Donald Trump placed every-day Republicans in a constant dilemma. Did you point it out when he did evil things? Or did you mainly remain silent, trusting in the notion that no matter how bad Trump was, his opponents were worse?

even worse, did the tension between Trump’s actions and your own morality grow so great that you started to redefine morality itself?

How many people made the migration from supporting Trump in spite of his character to supporting him because of who he was? I can think of countless folks, in both public and private life. 

That’s what discipling looks like.

Ted Cruz says his pronouns are “kiss my ass’ not just because he corrupted himself for Trump but because the crowd is corrupt as well. The same analysis goes for Josh Hawley’s refusal to apologize for his fist salute or his election challenge. He is morally corrupt. That cheering crowd is morally corrupt. 

Why? Because they’ve absorbed the lessons Trump taught. Fight the left with profane anger. Never apologize.

In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention passed one of the most prescient and important resolutions in the denomination’s history. Its Resolution on Moral Character of Public Officials

First, he’s the undeniable front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination, and there are reports he might even announce his candidacy before the 2022 midterms.

Second, the January 6 Committee is doing an extraordinary job using the words of Trump’s own officials to fully expose to anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear that Trump corruptly and likely criminally engineered an American coup.

Third, Axios reported this week on potential Trump plans for a second term, including a radical civil service reform that could lead to the government being stocked not with thousands of Trumpist officials, but with tens of thousands—discipled by Trump, imitating Trump, devoted to Trump. 

We should expect Trump to fill the government with his most loyal servants, and the January 6 hearings have taught us that loyalty to Trump sometimes requires lawlessness.

hy write about Trump and Christianity again? Three reasons.

“Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”

Over the weeks, the months, and the years, when the price of calling out actual evil—even an alleged lesser evil—is ostracization and alienation, then it’s often only a matter of time before your mind turns “lesser evil” into “not evil at all.” 

There is no binary choice. Republican Christians can say to Trump, right now, that there is no case for him over other Republicans—men or women who can choose better judges than Democrats, pursue better policies than Democrats, and defeat Joe Biden without resorting to lies and conspiracy theories and without corrupting the conscience of the church.

American Christian political leaders behave in public more like Trump than like Christ. American Christian families are torn apart by MAGA members who behave—the instant the topic turns to politics—more like Trump than like Christ.

They’d been discipled by Trump.

“Fealty to the law meant nothing to him. The country’s interests meant nothing to him. The only oath he has taken is to his own greed and self-preservation.” But that does not mean voters can ignore the obvious conflict that occurs when someone simultaneously thwarts a government investigation and pledges to enforce the Constitution.

Tribe notes that Article VI of the Constitution specifies that public officials must take an oath “not just to obey the Constitution and laws of the United States but ‘to support this Constitution.’ ”

In other words, should members of Congress implicated in the plot to overturn the 2020 election choose to take the Fifth, they would be setting up a conflict between their self-interest and the interest in upholding and supporting the Constitution

True, the Constitution spells out no disqualifications for federal office, other than conviction through impeachment and Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars a person from office if they have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

voters certainly should consider the underlying conflict when a candidate for office takes the Fifth, especially when the issue goes to the core of our democracy.

Defenders might insist that Trump has not been convicted of any crime. But voters are allowed to draw their own conclusions about not only his underlying conduct but also his refusal to testify.

there is a “bond” between an official and the people of the nation, which is “created by election or appointment and also cemented by the oath of office.” Just as a civil jury can draw an adverse conclusion from Trump’s refusal to answer questions, “it should be disqualifying for Trump if he seeks to run again.”

Taking the Fifth is their prerogative, but it is the prerogative of voters to hold it against them as evidence that they are putting themselves above the interests of the country.

What began as a revolutionary set of technologies ended up concentrating enormous private power over key services and locking in business models that come at extraordinary cost to our privacy and security.

The trajectory of the Web 2.0 era was not inevitable — it was instead shaped by a broad range of policy choices. And we now face another moment of choice. As the use of A.I. becomes more widespread, public officials have a responsibility to ensure this hard-learned history doesn’t repeat itself.

the Federal Trade Commission is taking a close look at how we can best achieve our dual mandate to promote fair competition and to protect Americans from unfair or deceptive practices.

we already can see several risks. The expanding adoption of A.I. risks further locking in the market dominance of large incumbent technology firms. A handful of powerful businesses control the necessary raw materials that start-ups and other companies rely on to develop and deploy A.I. tools. This includes cloud services and computing power, as well as vast stores of data.

Enforcers have the dual responsibility of watching out for the dangers posed by new A.I. technologies while promoting the fair competition needed to ensure the market for these technologies develops lawfully.

generative A.I. risks turbocharging fraud. It may not be ready to replace professional writers, but it can already do a vastly better job of crafting a seemingly authentic message than your average con artist — equipping scammers to generate content quickly and cheaply.

bots are even being instructed to use words or phrases targeted at specific groups and communities. Scammers, for example, can draft highly targeted spear-phishing emails based on individual users’ social media posts. Alongside tools that create deep fake videos and voice clones, these technologies can be used to facilitate fraud and extortion on a massive scale.

we will look not just at the fly-by-night scammers deploying these tools but also at the upstream firms that are enabling them.

these A.I. tools are being trained on huge troves of data in ways that are largely unchecked. Because they may be fed information riddled with errors and bias, these technologies risk automating discrimination

We once again find ourselves at a key decision point. Can we continue to be the home of world-leading technology without accepting race-to-the-bottom business models and monopolistic control that locks out higher quality products or the next big idea? Yes — if we make the right policy choices.

In the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Teixeira told friends that he saw a storm gathering. “He was afraid they would target White people,” his friend said. “He had told me quite a few times he thought they need to be prepared for a revolution.” The friend said Teixeira spoke approvingly of Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager who shot three people, two fatally, during protests that summer in Kenosha, Wis., claiming that he had acted in self-defense

Teixeira wanted his online companions, many of them teenage boys, to “be prepared for things the government might do, reinforcing to them that the government was lying to them,”

Teixeira asserted that “lots of FBI agents were found to have sympathized with the Jan 6 rioters,” and he said naive members of the intelligence community, of which he was technically a part, had been “cucked.” He referred to mainstream press as “zogshit,” appropriating a popular white-supremacist slur for the “Zionist Occupied Government.” Friends said that during live video chats, Teixeira expounded on baseless accusations of shadowy, sinister control by Jewish and liberal elites, as well as corrupt law enforcement authorities.

Already united by their love of guns and their Orthodox Christian faith, two members of Thug Shaker Central said their nascent political beliefs became hardened and more polarized during the isolation of the pandemic. Unable to see their local friends in person, the young members spent their entire days in front of screens and came under the influence of outsize online figures like Teixeira. Some on the server saw him as an older brother — others, friends said, like a father figure.

In interviews, some of the members struggled to explain worldviews that had developed largely online, and expressed remorse. Several admitted they had become radicalized during the pandemic and were influenced by Teixeira, whose own politics seemed animated by social grievances and an obsession with guns.

The members may have sensed they were treading into dangerous political waters, even before leaked classified documents started circulating. During video chats, some hid their faces behind masks, fearful of being publicly identified with a group of self-professed bigots, Teixeira’s close friend said.

The interest in video games and conservative politics was accompanied by an acute obsession with violence, the friend said. “He would send me a video of someone getting killed, ISIS executions, mass shootings, war videos. People would screen-share it, and he would laugh very loudly and be very happy to watch these things with everyone else. He absolutely enjoyed gore.”

After he enlisted in the U.S. Air National Guard in September 2019, Teixeira also feared that his own racist and violent statements would jeopardize his chances of getting a security clearance. “He was worried something from Discord would come up during his interview,” said the friend, who met him when the application was still pending. Teixeira changed his online handle to an innocuous version of his surname and became “less active” in the community for a time, the friend added, in an effort not to create more incriminating evidence.

But Teixeira already had an offline record that arguably should have raised concerns for the officials who approved his security clearance. In March 2018, Teixeira was suspended from his high school “when a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” according to a Justice Department filing last month that argued Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges under the Espionage Act stemming from his alleged leaks.

Teixeira’s close friend, who knew him after he had graduated high school, said he had confessed to wanting to take a gun to school and carry out a shooting.

“He had told me multiple times about when he was younger, his desire to shoot up his school,” the friend said. “He hated his school.”

“To my knowledge, he never hurt anyone physically, but he absolutely talked about it pretty often,” the friend added. Other friends confirmed Teixeira talked about attacking his school, but they said they didn’t take his threats seriously.

The YouTuber added that Discord deleted the civil-discussion channel on April 24 after “multiple members” received notices from the company.

Teixeira’s gaming and political cultures overlapped, the friend observed. “Once you start getting into the more niche video games, a lot of those communities are much more conservative. I think he found a small place where his views got echoed back to him and made them worse.”

The Post obtained previously unpublished screenshots from the server and recordings of members playing games together. Racist and antisemitic language flowed through the community, as did hostility for gay and transgender people, whom Teixeira deemed “degenerate.” The line between sarcasm and genuine belief became increasingly blurred. On video calls, users held up a finger, jokingly imitating members of ISIS. In their rooms were flags associated with Christian nationalism and white power.

Friends may not have taken seriously Teixeira’s threats against his high school. But he voiced approval of some shooters, particularly when they targeted people of different races and faiths. Teixeira was especially impressed by a gunman’s rampage at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, which left 51 people dead and 4o injured. “He was very happy that those people died,” the friend said, because they were Muslim. The shooter live-streamed his massacre as though he were in a video game.

“He was very against gun control. And so he would talk about wanting to kill ATF agents or when ATF agents would show up to his house, like theoretically preparing your house so that they would die in some strange trap.”

In arguing that Teixeira should remain in jail while he faces charges, federal prosecutors pointed to his threats of violence in high school. But among online communities whose members hold “more extremist conservative views,” the friend said, “it’s really common to joke about killing government agents like that, so it never seemed worrying to me.”

this does not justify the atrocities committed by Hamas, which in any case has never countenanced any possibility for a peace treaty with Israel and has done everything in its power to sabotage the Oslo peace process.

irrespective of how much blame one ascribes to Israel, this does not explain the dysfunction of the state.

He has repeatedly preferred his personal interests over the national interest and has built his career on dividing the nation against itself. He has appointed people to key positions based on loyalty more than qualifications, took credit for every success while never taking responsibility for failures, and seemed to give little importance to either telling or hearing the truth.

The real explanation for Israel’s dysfunction is populism rather than any alleged immorality. For many years, Israel has been governed by a populist strongman, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a public-relations genius but an incompetent prime minister

The coalition Netanyahu established in December 2022 has been by far the worst. It is an alliance of messianic zealots and shameless opportunists, who ignored Israel’s many problems — including the deteriorating security situation — and focused instead on grabbing unlimited power for themselves. In pursuit of this goal, they adopted extremely divisive policies, spread outrageous conspiracy theories about state institutions that oppose their policies, and labeled the country’s serving elites as “deep state” traitors.

the way populism corroded the Israeli state should serve as a warning to other democracies all over the world.

There is much to criticize about Israel’s past behavior. The past cannot be changed, but hopefully once victory over Hamas is secured, Israelis will not only hold our current government to account, but will also abandon populist conspiracies and messianic fantasies — and make an honest effort to realize Israel’s founding ideals of democracy at home and peace abroad.

But that changes for publicly-funded universities when speech veers into targeted harassment that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”

The legal commentator David Lat explained further, writing: “If I repeatedly send antisemitic emails and texts to a single Jewish student, that is far more likely to constitute harassment than if I set up an antisemitic website available to the entire world.”

As a result, what we’ve seen on campus is a mixture of protected antisemitic (as well as anti-Islamic) speech and prohibited harassment.

So if the university presidents were largely (though clumsily) correct about the legal balance, why the outrage?

For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.

The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students

Moreover, each of the schools represented at the hearing has its own checkered past on free speech. Harvard is the worst-rated school for free expression in America

So even if the presidents’ lawyerly answers were correct, it’s more than fair to ask, where was this commitment to free expression in the past?

That said, some of the responses to campus outrages have been just as distressing as the hypocrisy shown by the school presidents

Universities have censored conservatives? Then censor progressives too. Declare the extreme slogans of pro-Palestinian protesters to be harassment, and pursue them vigorously. Give them the same treatment you’ve given other groups who hold offensive views

But that’s the wrong answer. It’s doubling down on the problem.

At the same time, however, it would be wrong to carry on as if there isn’t a need for fundamental change. The rule cannot be that Jews must endure free speech at its most painful, while favored campus constituencies enjoy the warmth of college administrators and the protection of campus speech codes. The status quo is intolerable.

The best, clearest plan for reform I’ve seen comes from Harvard’s own Steven Pinker, a psychologis

He writes that campuses should enact “clear and coherent” free speech policies. They should adopt a posture of “institutional neutrality” on public controversy. (“Universities are forums, not protagonists.”) They should end “heckler’s vetoes, building takeovers, classroom invasions, intimidations, blockades, assaults.”

But reform can’t be confined to policies. It also has to apply to cultures. As Pinker notes, that means disempowering a diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus that is itself all too often an engine of censorship and extreme political bias

Most importantly, universities need to take affirmative steps to embrace greater viewpoint diversity. Ideological monocultures breed groupthink, intolerance and oppression.

Universities must absorb the fundamental truth that the best answer to bad speech is better speech, not censorship

do not protect students from speech. Let them grow up and engage with even the most vile of ideas. The answer to campus hypocrisy isn’t more censorship. It’s true liberty. Without that liberty, the hypocrisy will reign for decades more.

The attorneys from the Federal Public Ministry say the time has come for Brazilian institutions to account for their role in slavery. They’ve called on Banco do Brasil to commit to some form of reparations.

The attorneys on Friday gave Banco do Brasil 15 days to publicly acknowledge its role in slavery and the slave trade and present plans for some form of reparations.

The bank does not deny its ties to slavery but has argued that it should not be held responsible for the sins of a society. It says it did not commit any crimes and should not be liable for the actions of those who worked for or funded the bank

Brazilians, particularly elites descended from European settlers, have historically preferred to think of their country as free of racism. “A racial democracy,” they boasted, where people could marry independent of skin color and race was defined less rigidly than in the United States.

That story, historians say, has largely obscured the primacy of slavery in Brazil’s genesis — and its enduring impact. Brazil imported around 5 million enslaved Africans — far more than any other country — accounting for roughly 40 percent of the entire trade

Nearly twice as many enslaved people were brought through a single wharf in Rio de Janeiro than arrived in all of the United States. It was the last country in the Americas, in 1888, to abolish slavery.

“Bring together capital that has found itself displaced from illicit trade and converge it into a center where the productive forces of the country could be fed,” Irineu Evangelista de Sousa, who reopened the bank, wrote in his autobiography. “This was the idea that came into my head.”

Banco do Brasil, which in 2023 reported $380.3 billion in assets and $5.8 billion in profits, according to Forbes. Chartered in 1808 by Portuguese King Dom João, the bank drew its foundational capital from taxes the crown imposed on sea trade, much of which involved slavery. The wealthy Rio elite — many of whom trafficked in enslaved Africans — were invited by the crown to finance the bank.

When the trade was outlawed in 1831, the bank’s ties to slavery didn’t diminish, historians and government attorneys say — they intensified. The bank closed for two decades but reopened in 1853 for the purpose of accumulating ill-gotten wealth, prosecutors and historians allege, most of it from the international slave trade.

“Brazil has never had a problem romanticizing its memory of slavery,” said Luciana Brito, a historian at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia. “It likes to remember slavery as a means of producing a beautiful people, of one nation, as though it was a necessary evil.”

The openness with which he spoke of the scheme, historians say, betrays the extent to which the crime of slavery was normalized in elite Brazilian society.

Under pressure from the United Kingdom, Brazil begrudgingly signed on to an international campaign to abolish the international slave trade in 1831. But it did little to enforce it. More than 700,000 enslaved Africans were trafficked into the country until a more restrictive law was passed in 1850.

But that story, and so many others, was virtually unknown to Brazilians, said Thiago Campos, a historian at the Federal Fluminense University. So a group of historians began discussing earlier this year how to start a broader conversation.

Fourteen historians wrote a letter this autumn to government attorneys outlining what they knew of Banco do Brasil’s history and asking for a national debate on the matter. The attorneys with the Federal Public Ministry, who represent Brazilians in cases involving individual or social rights, took it even further: They called for reparations.

“Unfortunately, Brazil is very behind on this discussion,” he said. “I believe it will be likely that as we progress with this case, others will come forward, and we’ll have more discussion on this topic. It’s an important moment to put this on the national agenda.”

Any endocrinologist or other physician who rejects this approach is alleged to be endangering the health and even the life of his patients.

Research shows that some 80% of children with “gender dysphoria” eventually come to terms with their sex without surgical or pharmaceutical intervention

But are these patients really “transgender”

Multiple studies have found that most kids who are confused or distressed about their sex end up realizing they’re gay—nearly two-thirds in a 2021 study of boys

This makes sense: Gay kids often don’t conform to traditional sex roles. But gender ideology holds that feminine boys and masculine girls may be “born in the wrong body.”

In this light, “gender-affirming care” looks a lot like conversion therapy.

Now it takes the form of rendering teenagers sterile and sexually dysfunctional for life.

linicians from the main U.K. transgender service referred to prescribing puberty blockers as “transing the gay away”—a play on the description of old-fashioned conversion-therapy as “praying the gay away.” A clinician who resigned from the U.K. service accused it of “institutional homophobia.” Clinicians at the service had a “dark joke” that “there would be no gay people left at the rate Gids”—the Gender Identity Service—“was going.”

Consistent with conversion therapy, physicians are telling young gays and lesbians that something is wrong with them, based on a regressive view of what it is to be male or female

The resulting interventions often create lifelong medical problems, both physical and mental. Contrary to advocates’ claims, there’s no evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries reduce the risk of suicide.

Children who take this road face a lifetime of pain, infertility and anguish

society has been told that accepting transgender identity is the same as accepting gays and lesbians. But it isn’t. Even well-intentioned acceptance of transgender identity disproportionately harms them

First, few people are more eager to take advantage of free speech rights than people who possess deep moral convictions. When you watch a furious campus debate, the last thing you think is, “Watch the relativists fight.” The combatants possess burning convictions

Second, humility isn’t relativism, and even people who believe that absolute truth exists should possess enough humility to recognize they don’t know all that truth.

Third, prudent people know that they will not always rule. This is the most pragmatic case for free speech.

One of my favorite expressions of American pluralism comes from my friend Barry Corey, president of Biola University, an evangelical college in California. He advocates a life lived with a “firm center and soft edges.” The firm center is the “commitment to that which is true,” and for a Christian that means God’s truth. Soft edges, on the other hand, “means hospitality and kindness, especially toward those we don’t think like, or vote like, or believe like.”

American free speech doctrine represents a legal version of that marvelous moral rule. The First Amendment protects our firm center. It’s what ensures our ability to walk into the public square, express our convictions and challenge our nation’s moral and political norms. Does anyone for a moment think that Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, was a moral relativist? Yet he’s also the author of one of the most powerful arguments in support of free speech in American history.

At the same time, we protect the free speech of others and thereby manifest “hospitality and kindness.” We declare to our opponents that they are equal citizens of our Republic, possessing the same dignity and liberty that we possess ourselves.

That’s the key to making pluralism work. Enforced conformity is a recipe for violent conflict, regardless of whether the demand is made from the right, left or middle

The defense of liberty, meanwhile, makes diversity sustainable. It allows individuals and communities of differing convictions to flourish across those differences

Treating them all equally under the law isn’t relativism. It’s justice, and justice is a fundamental moral obligation of the state.

To me, that letter wasn’t just an invitation to a fancy summer program—it was an invitation into an educational world that I thought would change my life.

it wasn’t the differences between us that posed the biggest challenge to our unity; it was the constant reminders from above of those differences, all the ways we were hierarchically organized or comparatively privileged or fundamentally limited in our views. We were challenged to transcend those limitations and build the foundations of a community, but for that you need good faith, which was in short supply.

The other problem was that TASP lacked all the mechanisms of a functioning democracy. We had been cherry-picked to represent diversity, but actually the point was for all of us to arrive at the same conclusions—men talked too much, the world was fraught with microaggressions, dodgeball was bad, and eggs were worse. There was no framework for disagreement, no space for ideological detours, no home for structural challenges to the so-called intentional community we lived in.

Nobody wanted to deal with the key annoyance of democracy—learning to tolerate our differences.

It’s only now that I recognize that the truth of this statement—after all, what 17-year-old knows what’s best for them—served to justify the anti-democratic reality of a space contemptuous of every experience except for those of “oppressed groups,” as determined by the factota. It is equally alarming to see that the so-called leaders of my teenage years are now actively remaking a space once devoted to self-exploration and communal understanding in their own intellectual self-image, as a place where questioning and self-determination are being eliminated in favor of received truth.

In 2022, the Telluride Association announced that they were discontinuing TASP and expanding TASS, the equivalent program for sophomores, into a program with two focus areas—“Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies.”

Students would no longer live all together, like we did, according to Nunn’s vision. Instead, the “Critical Black Studies” community would live and study separately, creating an entirely Black space. Afternoons and evenings were no longer reserved for things like Nerf wars or eating entire jars of sprinkles, which were the activities that allowed our diverse group to come together, and which I remember much more vividly than all my seminar readings combined. Instead, the students would participate in anti-racism workshops created by the factota. It was this new program that became the “anti-racist Hell” that Vincent Lloyd lamented in his article.

It was easy for me to sympathize with Lloyd, who spent his summer battling with one factota, Keisha, who found him “triggering” and his readings “insufficiently radical,” was frustrated by his insistence on unspooling complex racial ideas in the slow seminar format rather than holding straightforward lectures, and frequently intervened when his discussions caused TASPers “harm.”

By the end of his tenure, he was summoned into an empty classroom by the students, who read their allegations about his behavior—and demands that he change his teaching—from sheets of paper. Every word coming out of their mouths was clearly pulled from conversations with Keisha. A white girl referred to her factota in her remarks: “Keisha speaks for me. She says everything I think better than I ever could.”

I remember being an eager-to-please high schooler on the first day of TASP, sitting in a circle with big aspirations but very little knowledge of the world, wanting so badly to be accepted in an elite space I assumed would give me all the answers, if I could only absorb the guiding principle: You don’t know what’s best for you.

My mom dropped me off at the local Panera, where the interviewer was already sitting in a booth reading a novel when I arrived. He was an older professor who still conducted interviews because he’d had such a transformative experience at TASP. He explained that he came to the seminar as a committed far-left radical, but he struck up an unlikely friendship with a staunch conservative and William F. Buckley devotee, with whom he disagreed about, and argued fervently over, everything. Proudly, he told me that the two men remained friends to this day.

The final rule was relayed by Carlos. With a stern look on his face, he explained that while these rules might seem daunting, all the factota had done this before, and there was one mantra in particular that guided them through their time. The girl next to me opened a notebook and poised her pen eagerly over the page. “During your six weeks here, you should always remember … you don’t know what’s best for you.” He intoned this mantra with such gravitas that the room briefly fell into silence.

TASPers were tasked with governing ourselves through nightly house meetings, bylaw votes, and a complex web of committees regulating everything from kitchen duty to leisure. Our community would be “semi-monastic,” meaning that we were “strongly, strongly encouraged” to limit our contact with the outside world in favor of “turning inward” and “engaging in communal reflection.” To ensure that we learned as much as possible from our peers, there was a ban on “exclusive relationships” of all platonic shades, which would be enforced through assigned seating, periodic roommate switches, minimum group-outing sizes, and good-old-fashioned cockblocking.

Discerning observers will note that doing what “necessity indicates” is a mandate dependent entirely on the values and whims of its executioners. In the case of TASP, necessity apparently indicated living in accordance with not only the Nunnian ideals but also the standards of our factota, most of whom couldn’t yet legally drink but had absolute moral authority over who could take up space, who could express their politics, and who deserved to be there at all. TASP was their world; we were just figuring out how to live in it.

The factota had various tactics to combat these relationships, from sober one-on-one interventions to interrupting group hangs to, notably, a roommate-switch halfway through the program because people were getting too close. This switch was aimed in no small part at Mark, who had been paired with a fellow sporty private-school guy in a cavernous room on the second floor. They bonded instantly, and their room would house all kinds of semi-exclusive hangs, from playlist-making to the occasional horny game of “Never Have I Ever.”

Accordingly, the factota disapproved of our friendship. Kaitlyn felt strongest about limiting his presence in my life and often pulled me aside to warn me against Mark, deeming his influence to be restrictive. She’d accost me to relay a supposedly insufferable remark he’d made during seminar or shoot me pointed stares whenever someone mentioned male entitlement during a house meeting, ignoring my protests that I found it difficult to distance myself from a naturally occurring friendship, and in fact enjoyed chatting with someone so different from myself. Wasn’t that supposed to be the point of TASP, anyway?

Instead, she made it a personal project to interrupt our conversations, wedge herself in between us at dinner, and skew our committee assignments so we couldn’t so much as wash dishes at the same time.

As a white guy studying classics at a high school with a five-figure price tag, Mark regularly landed in the crosshairs of our Sunday night conversations, receiving frequent reminders to “check his privilege” when he cited too much rarefied literature in class conversations and to “cede his time” to minorities or women during house discussions.

Many of New Zealand’s more traditionally minded scientists, however, see the spiritual and moral aspects of mātauranga as contradictory to conventional science, which is supposed to be value-neutral and limited to knowledge that can be empirically proven.

Kendall Clements, a marine biologist who signed the letter, said they were not trying to disrespect mātauranga, but to emphasize the differences between it and conventional science.

“In trying to probe that difference, we may collectively come to a better understanding of a solution than if we drew on a single body of knowledge in isolation,” he said.

Some alleged that the letter was an example of white supremacy. Waikaremoana Waitoki, the president of the New Zealand Psychological Society, denounced the letter’s “racist tropes” and “moral panic.”

The situation became more tense after the polarizing British biologist Richard Dawkins denounced the Royal Society’s investigation and described mātauranga as “not science and not true.”

For Te Arawa, the melding of mātauranga with conventional science has proved successful. Amid the weedy jungle in Lake Rotomā’s shallows, an enormous clearing has emerged.

“We’ve essentially created new mātauranga,” Mr. O’Neill said before carefully tucking his dreadlocks beneath the cap of his wet suit and slipping into the lake. “And we’re going to use it to finish the last of the lake weed off.”

‘even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.’"

The original lawsuit was brought by a group of 35 Navy SEALs and other Navy Special Warfare personnel. A lower court had granted a preliminary injunction to block the Pentagon from enforcing its vaccination policy.

his case is one of dozens discovered by reporters appearing to show Credit Suisse opened or maintained accounts for clients who had serious convictions that might be expected to show up in due diligence checks. There are other instances in which Credit Suisse may have taken quick action after red flags emerged, but the case nonetheless shows that dubious clients have been attracted to the bank.

Like every other bank in the world, Credit Suisse professes to have stringent control mechanisms to carry out extensive due diligence on its customers to “ensure that the highest standards of conduct are upheld”. In banking parlance, such controls are called know-your-client or KYC checks.

A 2017 leaked report commissioned by Switzerland’s financial regulator shed some light on the bank’s internal procedures at that time. Clients would face intensified scrutiny when flagged as a politically exposed person from a high-risk country, or a person involved in a high-risk activity such as gambling, weapons trading, financial services or mining, the report said.

Such controls might be expected to prevent a bank from opening accounts for clients such as Rodoljub Radulović, a Serbian securities fraudster indicted in 2001 by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. However, the leaked data identifies him as the co-signatory of two Credit Suisse company accounts. The first was opened in 2005, the year after the SEC had secured a default judgment against Radulović for running a pump-and-dump scheme.

One of Radulović’s company accounts held 3.4m CHF (£2.2m) before they closed in 2010. He was recently given a 10-year prison sentence by a court in Belgrade for his role trafficking cocaine from South America for the organised crime boss Darko Šarić.

Due diligence is not only for new clients. Banks are required to continually reassess existing customers. The 2017 report said Credit Suisse screened customers at least every three years and as often as once a year for the riskiest clients. Lawyers for Credit Suisse told the Guardian these periodic reviews were introduced “more than 15 years ago”, meaning it was continually running due diligence on existing clients from 2007.

The bank might, therefore, have been expected to have discovered that its German client Eduard Seidel was convicted of bribery in 2008. Seidel was an employee of Siemens. As the multinational’s lead in Nigeria, he oversaw a campaign of industrial-scale bribery to secure lucrative contracts for his employer by funnelling cash to corrupt Nigerian politicians.

After German authorities raided the Munich headquarters of Siemens in 2006, Seidel immediately confessed his role in the bribery scheme, though he said he had never stolen from the company or appropriated its slush funds. His involvement in the corruption led to his name being entered into the Thomson Reuters World-Check database in 2007.

However, the leaked Credit Suisse data shows his accounts were left open until at least well into the last decade. At one point after he left Siemens, one account was worth 54m CHF (£24m). Seidel’s lawyer declined to say whether the accounts were his. He said his client had addressed all outstanding matters relating to his bribery offences and wished to move on with his life.

The lawyer did not respond to repeated invitations to explain the source of the 54m CHF. Siemens said it did not know about the money and that its review of its own cashflows shed no light on the account.

A representative for Sederholm said Credit Suisse never froze his accounts and did not close them until 2013 when he was unable to provide due diligence material. Asked why Sederholm needed a Swiss account, they said that he was living in Thailand when it was opened, adding: “Can you please tell me if you would prefer to put your money in a Thai or Swiss bank?”

One client, Stefan Sederholm, a Swedish computer technician who opened an account with Credit Suisse in 2008, was able to keep it open for two-and-a-half years after his widely reported conviction for human trafficking in the Philippines, for which he was given a life sentence.

Swiss banks have cultivated their trusted reputation since as far back as 1713, when the Great Council of Geneva prohibited bankers from revealing details about the fortunes being deposited by European aristocrats. Switzerland soon became a tax haven for many of the world’s elites and its bankers nurtured a “duty of absolute silence” about their clients affairs.

The custom was enshrined in statute in 1934 with the introduction of Switzerland’s banking secrecy law, which criminalised the disclosure of client banking information to foreign authorities. Within decades, wealthy clients from all over the world were flocking to Swiss banks. Sometimes, that meant clients with something to hide.

One former Credit Suisse employee at the time alleges there was a deeply ingrained culture in Swiss banking of looking the other way when it came to problematic clients. “The bank’s compliance departments [were] masters of plausible deniability,” they told a reporter from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, one of the coordinators of the Suisse secrets project. “Never write anything down that could expose an account that is non-compliant and never ask a question you do not want to know the answer to.”

The 2000s was also a decade in which foreign regulators and tax authorities became increasingly frustrated at their inability to penetrate the Swiss financial system. That changed in 2007, when the UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld voluntarily approached US authorities with information about how the bank was helping thousands of wealthy Americans evade tax with secret accounts.

Birkenfeld was viewed as a traitor in Switzerland, where banking whistleblowers are often held in contempt. However, a wide-ranging US Senate investigation later uncovered the aggressive tactics used by UBS and Credit Suisse, the latter of which was found to have sent bankers to high-end events to recruit clients, courted a potential customer with free gold, and in one case even delivered sensitive bank statements hidden in the pages of a Sports Illustrated magazine.

The revelations sent shock waves through Switzerland’s financial sector and enraged the US, which pressured Switzerland into unilaterally disclosing which of its taxpayers had secret Swiss accounts from 2014. That same year, Switzerland reluctantly signed up to the international convention on the automatic exchange of banking Information.

By adopting the so-called common reporting standard (CRS) for sharing tax data, Switzerland in effect agreed that its banks would in the future exchange information about their clients with tax authorities in foreign countries. They started doing so in 2018.

Membership of the global exchange system is often cited by Switzerland’s banking industry as a turning point. “There is no longer Swiss bank client confidentiality for clients abroad,” the Swiss Bankers Association told the Guardian. “We are transparent, there is nothing to hide in Switzerland.”

Switzerland’s almost 90-year-old banking secrecy law, however, remains in force – and was recently broadened. The Tax Justice Network estimates that countries around the world collectively lose $21bn (£15.4bn) each year in tax revenues because of Switzerland. Many of those countries will be poorer nations that have not signed up to the CRS data exchange.

More than 90 countries, most of which are in the developing world, remain in the dark when their wealthy taxpayers hide their money in Swiss accounts.

This inequity in the system was cited by the whistleblower behind the leaked data, who said the CRS system “imposes a disproportionate financial and infrastructural burden on developing nations, perpetuating their exclusion from the system in the foreseeable future”.

“This situation enables corruption and starves developing countries of much-needed tax revenue. These countries are the ones that therefore suffer most from Switzerland’s reverse-Robin-Hood stunt,” they said.

“I am aware that having an offshore Swiss bank account does not necessarily imply tax evasion or any other financial crime,” they said. “However, it is likely that a significant number of these accounts were opened with the sole purpose of hiding their holder’s wealth from fiscal institutions and/or avoiding the payment of taxes on capital gains.”

The plan includes production of a graphic propaganda video that would show staged explosions and would use corpses and actors depicting grieving mourners, according to the official, who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity.The plan, which was revealed in declassified intelligence shared with Ukrainian officials and European allies in recent days, is the latest allegation by the U.S. and Britain that Russia is plotting to use a false pretext to go to war against Ukraine.

He reiterated Turkey’s commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Meanwhile, Putin met with Argentinian President Alberto Fernandez in Moscow and then spoke by phone to Macron, who had a call Wednesday night with U.S. President Joe Biden. Macron then spoke with Zelenskyy.

The NATO chief said Russian forces in Belarus are likely to rise to 30,000, including special forces, supported by fighter jets and missiles.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian confirmed Thursday that Paris is sending troop reinforcements to Romania under NATO command, as part of France’s commitment to the alliance and its member states in Eastern Europe.

He did not say how many French soldiers will be deployed. The announcement came a day after the U.S. said it was moving troops stationed in Germany to Romania.

Ukraine’s defense minister is urging calm, saying the likelihood of a Russian invasion was “low.”Oleksii Reznikov said the threat of attack has loomed over the country since 2014, the year Russia seized Crimea, but he added: “There are no grounds for panic, fear, flight or packing of bags.”The minister said there are about 115,000 Russian troops near Ukraine’s border, including those deployed to Belarus for war games, but he said no battle groups have been detected along Ukraine’s border with Belarus. He also reiterated earlier assurances that Kyiv doesn’t plan to attack rebel-held areas in the war-torn east of Ukraine or Crimea — something the Kremlin has accused Kyiv of plotting.

An ice hockey fan, Putin will also attend Friday’s opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.His talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday will be their first face-to-face since 2019 and will help cement a strong personal relationship that has been a key factor behind a growing partnership between the two former Communist rivals.

Women planning to join the Aurat Marches, as they are called — Urdu for “women’s march” — have faced countless threats of murder and rape, along with accusations that they receive Western funding as part of a plot to promote obscenity in Pakistan.

Last year, opposition peaked when Islamist groups demonstrated in major cities, accusing the marchers of using blasphemous slogans — a crime punishable by death in Pakistan, accusations of which have provoked lynchings and murders.

The first Aurat March was organized by a small group of women in the port city of Karachi, who hoped to draw attention to the violence, inequality and other challenges faced by women across the country.

“We had held discussions and mobilized women in various communities, collected funds by small contributions from individuals, and wrote a manifesto to articulate demands related to women’s bodily rights to the government and Pakistani society,” Ms. Kermani said.

“Younger feminists who were inspired by a series of global women’s marches took their rage against violence, moral policing and lack of bodily or sexual choices for women and marginalized genders to the streets,” s

“My body, my choice,” and performed an Urdu version of a Chilean protest song, “A Rapist in Your Path,” that assails rape culture and victim-shaming.

the protesters had even highlighted L.G.B.T.Q. rights, a bold move in Pakistan.

Some Islamist parties responded to the marches’ growing popularity by organizing their own “modesty march.” In 2020, conservatives filed court petitions in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the Aurat Marches.

A newspaper published a front-page story that referred to the marchers as prostitutes.

“If the government allows the march, we will use a baton to stop it.”

“Save our daughters.”

“As a minority, we feel increasingly insecure,” Mrs. Masih said. “At the workplace, we fear anyone can harm us on the false allegations of blasphemy, and at our homes, we fear that our daughters could be kidnapped and converted to Islam

They campaigned against the physically intrusive “virginity tests” often inflicted on women who bring accusations of rape, and a court in the northern city of Lahore banned them last year. The government has also passed a measure allowing the chemical castration of convicted rapists, another demand of the marchers.

“We were and are scared, but we know that without putting ourselves in such a dangerous situation we cannot bring change,” Ms. Kermani said.

ALL THREE REPORTS INCLUDE quintessentially Trumpian scenes, consistent in their depictions of the former president’s methods, and very much in keeping with numerous journalistic accounts of how he sought to manipulate people, rules and institutions.

The three investigations tell different stories, but the misdeeds all run together, more overlapping than sequential

Still, each investigation offers a slightly different theory of Trump. In the Mueller report, Trump and his aides come across as the gang that can’t cheat straight — too haphazard to effectively coordinate with a foreign government, too ignorant of campaign finance laws to purposely violate them, often comically naïve about the gravity of their plight.

The Ukraine report, by contrast, regards Trump as more strategic than chaotic, and it does not wallow in the netherworld between the president’s personal benefit and his public service. “The president placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security,”

All three reports show Trump deploying the mechanisms of government for political gain.

The Mueller report argues that viewing the president’s “acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.” The Ukraine report shows that the conversation that Trump described as “a perfect call” was not the ask; it was the confirmation. When Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Zelensky and his aides had already been notified of what was coming. The Ukraine scandal was never about a single call, just as the Jan. 6 report was not about a single day.

The Jan. 6 report takes seriously the admonition to view the president’s actions collectively, not individually; the phrase “multipart plan” appears throughout the report, with Trump as the architect.

Even more so than the Ukraine report, the Jan. 6 report repeatedly emphasizes how Trump knew, well, everything

There is no room here for the plausible deniability that the Mueller report entertained, for the notion that Trump didn’t know better, or that, in the immortal words of Attorney General William P. Barr when he creatively interpreted the Mueller report to exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice, that the president was “frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.”

This alleged sincerity underscored the president’s “noncorrupt motives,” as Barr put it. In the Jan. 6 report, any case for Trumpian sincerity is eviscerated in a six-page chart in the executive summary, which catalogs the many times the president was informed of the facts of the election yet continued to lie about them. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told top Department of Justice officials in late December 2020, the report says.

Just announce an investigation into the Bidens. Just say the 2020 election was rigged. Trump’s most corrupt action is always the corruption of reality.

The studious restraint of the Mueller report came in for much criticism once the special counsel failed to deliver a dagger to the heart of the Trump presidency and once the document was so easily miscast by interested parties

for all its diffidence, there is power in the document’s understated prose, in its methodical collection of evidence, in its unwillingness to overstep its bounds while investigating a president who knew few bounds himself.

The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports came at a time when Trump’s misconduct was better understood, when Mueller-like restraint was less in fashion and when those attempting to hold the chief executive accountable grasped every tool at hand. For all their passion and bluntness, they encountered their own constraints, limits that are probably inherent to the form