This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Elections have consequences. Florida’s governor has decided to root out wrong-think at one of Florida’s public colleges, and his harebrained meddling will likely harm the school, but he has every right to do it.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking March 2023 cover story: We’ve lost the plot. Montana’s Black mayor

Florida’s Soviet Commissars

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.

Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”

As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.

Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.

But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.

Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so. In fact, Florida could decide tomorrow to amend its own constitution and abolish state universities entirely. There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.

But something more important is going on here. At this point in any discussion of college education, we are all supposed to acknowledge that colleges have, in fact, become ridiculously liberal. There’s some truth to that charge; I included some stories of campus boobery when I wrote about the role of colleges in America some years back. And only a few weeks ago, I joined the many people blasting Hamline University for going off the rails and violating basic principles of academic freedom while infantilizing and overprotecting students.

Fine, so stipulated: Many colleges do silly things and have silly professors saying silly things.

But the Sovietization of the New College isn’t about any of that. Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.

GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.

It doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing to realize that those four years tracked with the rise of Donald Trump and a movement whose populist catechism includes seething anger at “the elites,” a class that no longer means “people with money and power”—after all, Republicans have gobs of both—but rather “those bookish snobs who look down on our True Real-American Values.” The Republican message, aided by the usual hypocrites in the right-wing entertainment ecosystem (such as Tucker Carlson, a prep-school product who told kids to drop out of college but asked Hunter Biden for help getting his own son into Georgetown), is that colleges are grabbing red-blooded American kids and replacing them with Woke Communist Pod People.

This is a completely bizarre line of attack: It posits that a graduate student making a pittance grading exams is more “elite” than a rich restaurant owner. But it works like a charm, in part because how Americans measure their success (and their relative status) has shifted from the simple metric of wealth to less tangible characteristics about education and lifestyle. Our national culture, for both better and worse, has arguably become more of a monoculture, even in rural areas. And many Americans, now living in a hyperconnected world, are more aware of cultural differences and the criticism of others. Those self-defined “real Americans” partake in that same overall national culture, of course, but they nonetheless engage in harsh judgment of their fellow citizens that is at least as venomous as what they imagine is being directed by “the elites” back at them.

Which brings us back to DeSantis—a graduate, he would apparently like you to forget, of Harvard and Yale. DeSantis is now a “populist,” much like Trump (Penn), Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard), Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard and the Ferengi  Diplomatic Academy). He has tasked Rufo (Georgetown and Harvard) to “remake” a school meant for the sons and daughters of Florida’s taxpayers not so that he can offer more opportunity to the people of his state, but so that he can run for president as just one of the regular folks whom reporters flock to interview in diners across the mountains and plains of a great nation.

Look, I live in New England surrounded by excellent public and private institutions, and I candidly admit that I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools. If Florida parents really don’t want Ron DeSantis appointing ideological commissars to annoy deans and department chairs, then they should head to the ballot box and fix it. But in the meantime, faux populists, the opportunists and hucksters who infest the modern GOP, are going to undermine education for the people who need it the most: the youngsters who rely on public education. And that’s a tragedy that will extend far beyond whatever becomes of the careers of Ron DeSantis or Christopher Rufo.

Related:

How Ivy League elites turned against democracy The professors silenced by Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation

Today’s News

A sixth Memphis police officer has been suspended from the force during the investigation of Tyre Nichols’s death. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is starting to present evidence to a grand jury in its criminal investigation into Donald Trump. The evidence focuses on Trump’s role in paying hush money to an adult-film star during his 2016 campaign. The Ukrainian air force warned that it would not be able to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles, should Russia obtain them.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf collects reader perspectives on how to improve policing. Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn attend a party with a very specific heart- and belly-warming theme. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how coffee became capitalism’s favorite drug.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman during HBO Films Pre Golden Globes Party Inside Coverage at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California (Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic / Getty)

The Luxury Dilemma

By Xochitl Gonzalez

Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.

As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses. I used to go there in the 2000s, back when I was a wedding planner. It was like a celebrity safari; stars would walk by, within arm’s reach. You could “do Los Angeles” without ever needing to move. I never could have afforded a room there, but I knew by reputation that at night it offered entertainment of a different sort: luxury and licentiousness and debauchery, unbounded by any rules.

In more recent years, I’ve returned to Los Angeles in a different career—as a screenwriter traveling on someone else’s dime. Naturally, I didn’t want to just take meetings at the Chateau; I wanted to stay there, to be a fly on the wall where the wild things were. Only I couldn’t.

I was told, in early 2021, that the hotel was not taking any new bookings.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

SNL is excelling in one particular way. Photos: the snow monkeys of Nagano Dear Therapist: Can I cut my mom off from my children if she won’t seek therapy?

Culture Break

Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård sit together in "Infinity Pool" (Neon Films)

Read. “Poem Beginning With a Sentence From My Last Will & Testament,” by Donald Platt.

“Lucy, when I die, / I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes / of Virginia Beach.”

Watch. Infinity Pool, in theaters, is a gory, existential horror film with a premise deliciously nasty enough to keep you invested—even if it can’t quite keep up with its initial hook.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I usually take this final word in the Daily to direct you toward something fun or interesting, often derived from my admittedly oddball taste in pop culture. Today, I’m going to ask for your indulgence as I offer you something that I wrote yesterday in our Ideas section.

Some years ago, I wrote about the young losers and misfits among us who suddenly explode and commit mass murder. Even before the recent shootings in California (which actually are outliers in the general pattern of attacks by younger men), I’d decided to revisit this question. I wanted to think more about why America—and, yes, other nations as well—has produced so many lost young men who turn to performative and spectacular acts of murder or terrorism. I think the growth of narcissism is one of the answers, but I discuss it all at more length in this article, which I cannot say is pleasant reading but, I hope, offers a path toward more productive discussions about how to prevent such tragedies.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Kevin McCarthy has begun his job as speaker by servicing the demands of the most extreme—and weirdest—members who supported him, thus handing the People’s House to the Clown Caucus.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Kanye West, Sam Bankman-Fried, and the cult of not reading A Hollywood armorer on the Rust shooting charges The coffee alternative Americans just can’t get behind

The Ringmaster

Now controlled by its most unhinged members, the Republican Party has returned to power in the People’s House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the ringmaster of this circus, is happily paying off his debts by engaging in petty payback, conjuring up inane committees, threatening to crash the U.S. economy, and protecting a walking monument to fraud named George Santos, who may or may not actually be named “George Santos.”

In the enduring words of Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

Politics, in Washington or anywhere else, is about deals. No one should have expected McCarthy to make his way to the gavel without signing a few ugly promissory notes along the way. Sometimes, friends are betrayed and enemies are elevated; an important project can end up taking a back seat to a boondoggle. Just ask Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, who got pushed out of the chairmanship of Ways and Means in favor of Jason Smith of Missouri, a choice preferred by the MAGA caucus. “You fucked me,” he reportedly said to at McCarthy on the floor of the House. “I know it was you, you whipped against me.” Buchanan, a source on the House floor told Tara Palmeri at Puck, was so angry that the speaker’s security people were about to step in. (McCarthy’s office denies that this happened.)

It’s one thing to pay political debts, even the kind that McCarthy accepted despite their steep and humiliating vig. It’s another to hand off control of crucial issues to a claque of clowns who have no idea what they’re doing and are willing to harm the national security of the United States as long as it suits their political purposes.

Let us leave aside the removal of Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee. The republic will not rise or fall based on such things, and if McCarthy wants to engage in snippy stoogery to ingratiate himself with the MAGA caucus and soothe Donald Trump’s hurt feelings, it is within his power to do so. In his letter to Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the speaker claimed his decision was all about “integrity.” This is not just the death of irony; it is a North Korean–style, firing-squad-by-anti-aircraft-gun execution of irony. Worse, McCarthy even has the right to channel, as he did, Joseph McCarthy, and smear Swalwell by alluding to derogatory information that the FBI supposedly has about him. It might not be honorable or professional, but he can do it.

McCarthy’s shuffle of the Intelligence Committee pales in comparison to the creation of two new committees, both of which were part of the Filene’s Basement clearance of the new speaker’s political soul. One of them, on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, is a continuation of the Republican assault on science that predated Trump but reached new heights with the former president’s disjointed gibbering about bleach injections. The committee will include the conspiracy theorist and McCarthy’s new best friend Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ronny Jackson of Texas, the former White House physician who assured us in 2018 that Trump only weighed 239 pounds and was in astoundingly good health.

The COVID committee is unlikely to move the needle (if you’ll pardon the expression) on public health. No one’s mind will be changed if Jackson and Tucker Carlson bloviate to each other about things neither of them really believes. Most of the damage from such a committee will likely be concentrated among the vaccine refusers, who already seem determined to get sick and die to make a political point.

The “weaponization” committee is worse, and likely to do far more damage to the United States, because it is starting from the premise that the machinery of the United States government—law enforcement, the intelligence community, and federal agencies—has been turned against the average American citizen. Jim Jordan, who stands out even in this GOP for his partisan recklessness, will serve as chair. The committee will include members whom I think of as the “You-Know-Better-Than-This Caucus”: people with top-flight educations and enough experience to know that Jordan is a crank, but who nevertheless will support attacks on American institutions if that’s what it takes to avoid being sent back home to live among their constituents. Two standouts here are Thomas Massie (an MIT graduate who apparently majored in alchemy and astrology), and the ever-reliable Elise Stefanik (Harvard), whose political hemoglobin is now composed of equal parts cynicism and antifreeze.

The committee will include other monuments to probity, such as Chip Roy; Dan Bishop, who has claimed that the 2020 election was rigged; Harriet Hageman, the woman who defeated Liz Cheney in Wyoming; and Kat Cammack of Florida, who alleged that Democrats were drinking on the House floor during the speakership fight. All of them will have access to highly sensitive information from across the U.S. government.

Jordan and his posse are styling themselves as a new Church Committee, the 1975 investigation into the Cold War misdeeds of American intelligence organizations headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church. This dishonors Church, whose committee uncovered genuinely shocking abuses by agencies that had for too long escaped oversight during the early days of the struggle with the Soviet Union. Church himself was a patriot, unlike some of the charlatans on this new committee, but even Church’s investigation did at least some damage with its revelations, and some of the reforms (especially the move away from relying on human intelligence) undertaken later based in part on its findings were unwise. In any case, his fame was short-lived: He was defeated for reelection in 1980 and died in 1984. (Full disclosure: I spoke at a conference held in Church’s honor many years ago and met with his widow.)

The Church Committee was, in its day, a necessary walk across the hot coals for Americans who had invested too much power and trust in the executive branch. I suspect that the Jordan committee will not look to uncover abuses, but rather to portray any government actions that it does not like as abuses, especially the investigations into Trump. It will be the Church Committee turned on its head, as members of Congress seek to protect a lawless president by destroying the agencies that stand between our democracy and his ambitions.

Kevin McCarthy will be fine with all of it, as long as he gets to wear the top hat and red tails while indulging in the fantasy that he is in control of the clowns and wild animals, and not the other way around.

Related:

Speaker in name only Why Kevin McCarthy can’t lose George Santos

Today’s News

President Joe Biden announced that he would send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, and Germany announced that it would send an initial shipment of 14 Leopard 2 tanks. The arraignment of the suspect in the Half Moon Bay, California, mass shooting was postponed until Feb. 16. School officials were warned on three separate occasions that a 6-year-old who later shot his first-grade teacher in Virginia had a gun or had made threats, according to an attorney for the teacher.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Public outrage hasn’t improved policing, Conor Friedersdorf argues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Getty; The Atlantic

Why the French Want to Stop Working

By Pamela Druckerman

If you want to understand why the French overwhelmingly oppose raising their official retirement age from 62 to 64, you could start by looking at last week’s enormous street protest in Paris.

“Retirement before arthritis” read one handwritten sign. “Leave us time to live before we die” said another. One elderly protester was dressed ironically as “a banker” with a black top hat, bow tie, and cigar—like the Mr. Monopoly mascot of the board game. “It’s the end of the beans!” he exclaimed to the crowd, using a popular expression to mean that pension reform is the last straw.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

An Asian American grief Why are toy commercials still like this?

Culture Break

Neon Films

Read. Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death, by Nick Lane, explains why life may be exceedingly rare in our universe.

Or pick up another one of these seven books that will make you smarter.

Watch. Saint Omer, in theaters, turns a true crime into a complicated elegy.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

The Church Committee revealed outrages (including assassination plots) that today might seem like they were taken from bad spy-movie scripts. But such things were deadly serious business, as the United States moved from World War II into the Cold War determined to do whatever it took to defeat Soviet communism. For decades, Americans romanticized spies and spying as glamorous and exciting, but in reality, espionage was a nasty business. Our British cousins knew this better than we did, which is why British spy fiction was always grittier than its American counterpart. (The James Bond novels are pretty dour, sometimes even sadistic; Hollywood cleaned them up.)

But just because we lost our innocence about spying doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy the culture it produced back in the day. In that spirit, let me recommend to you Secret Agent, an offering on a wonderful, listener-supported San Francisco–based internet radio station called SomaFM. There are plenty of great channels on SomaFM—I especially like Left Coast 70s, which is just what it sounds like—but Secret Agent is a lot of fun, a mixture of 1960s lounge and light jazz, soundtracks, and other tidbits, with the occasional line from 007 and other spies spliced in here and there. It’s a nice throwback to the days when espionage was cool, and it’s great music for working or a get-together over martinis, which should be shaken and … well, you know.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

There's a European capital whose crowning glory is a flying saucer that stands higher than the Statue of Liberty -- but this sci-fi city isn't troubling anyone's list of the continent's most visited destinations.

After occupying Kherson for eight months and pledging to keep it forever, Russia’s army abandoned the city in southern Ukraine in November and retreated south and east across the Dnipro River. With them, Russian soldiers took truckloads of cultural treasures looted from the region’s museums.

Most of Kherson’s art collection, which is worth millions of dollars, has ended up on the nearby Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014; there, the director of a local gallery confirmed to Radio Free Europe’s Ukrainian service that the stolen art was “in storage” in his museum. But thousands of pieces from Kherson’s folklore museum, including ancient artifacts from the Scythians, Sarmatians, Goths, and Greeks—peoples who settled the area near the Black and Azov Seas centuries before the Russian empire—have disappeared without a trace, as have hundreds of valuable books from the city’s science library.

The Ukrainian archivists and curators who are busy trying to account for their losses compare Russia’s art theft to that of the Nazis, who looted Kherson’s museums during the nearly three years of German occupation, from 1941 to 1944. If anything, they say, this time is worse—not least because they feel betrayed: by the Russians, yes, but more so by informers and collaborators within their own ranks. “Russians told us they were our brothers,” Kherson Art Museum’s longtime director, Alina Dotsenko, told me when I interviewed her in Kyiv. But more hurtful was that “our own colleagues helped the looters to rob our museums”—even if, for every instance of collaboration, there was also an opposite act of courageous resistance by someone who worked to frustrate the enemy’s plans and save items and records from the collections.

[Read: Celebrations as Ukraine retakes Kherson]

Nevertheless, when Dotsenko entered the pillaged archives on November 11, soon after Kherson’s liberation, her heart stopped. “At least 10,000 works out of more than 14,000 art pieces were gone,” she said.

At first, after Russian invaders had captured the city in early March, Dotsenko and her loyal manager, Hanna Skrypka, managed to protect the collection. They told Russian officials that it had all been removed from Kherson during renovation work. The museum’s walls were indeed covered in scaffolding, but in fact the art had been taken down and stored in the building’s basement. The precious silver and gold frames of ancient icons in the collection were locked in a safe, for which Skrypka had the key.

The ruse worked for almost three months, and Dotsenko, Skrypka, and their like-minded colleagues began to hope that the Russians would never discover their subterfuge. But they were betrayed. Two former employees informed the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) that the art was still inside the building, Dotsenko explained.

On May 5, Russian prosecutors summoned Dotsenko for interrogation. “They said they would teach me to respect the new Russian power, which was going to stay in Kherson for good,” Dotsenko told me. “So rather than wait to be arrested, I left for Odesa and took the entire digital archive of our art with me, hidden on my body.”

After she fled, Russian authorities appointed a new director, Natalia Desyatova, who was reportedly a former singer at a local café, and, as both Dotsenko and Skrypka told me, made the remaining museum workers promise in writing that they would not communicate with the collection managers and workers who’d remained loyal to Ukraine and left the museum. But even then, the head of the museum’s book archives, an elderly woman named Galina Aksyutina, took a personal risk and smuggled out a valuable 1840 first edition of Kobzar, a collection of poems by one of Ukraine’s most beloved writers, Taras Shevchenko. The Russian guards, presumably not suspecting anything so daring from an old woman, neglected to search her.

[Read: ‘I just wanted the whole thing to be over’]

A similar drama played out at the science library. “In the first days of the occupation, we tried to hide the most valuable books in the basement,” Nadezhda Korotun, the library’s director, told me. “But armed FSB officers came to our library several times a week. They demanded we find and show them detailed maps of Kherson and the region, and they broke locked doors.” Korotun also encouraged her employees to take home as many rare, old books as they could and try to smuggle them out of the occupation zone. This was a dangerous enterprise because the Russian military was searching vehicles at every checkpoint on the road from Kherson to Odesa.

When Ukrainian forces were moving to retake Kherson in late October, the organized looting began, Skrypka told me. Desyatova told Skrypka to come into work on November 1. The moment she stepped into the museum, she regretted it. The building was full of Russians. Two armed Chechens in uniform said they were FSB officers. “They looked as if they had killed a lot of people,” Skrypka told me. “My skin froze under their stare.”

Over the next 48 hours, Skrypka was effectively held captive. Desyatova ordered her to type up a list of the art being taken for an official from Moscow who introduced himself as a representative of the Russian Ministry of Culture. “Even the collaborators working at the museum asked him to stop at 8,000, but he insisted,” Skrypka told me. “He said his bosses would be mad at him if he did not take enough.” The looters forced her to open the safe with the treasured silver and golden icon frames and emptied it. Powerless to prevent the pillaging, she resolved to at least be a witness—“I decided to be the eyes and ears,” she said.

The Museum of Fine Arts, as it was originally called, opened in 1912, displaying works by the major Ukrainian and Russian artists of the day, including Vasily Perov, Mykola Pymonenko, Vasily Polenov, Ivan Aivazovsky, Ivan Shishkin, and Ilya Repin. During the Nazi occupation, the city’s archaeological and art collections both were looted, and it took years for Kherson’s museums to track down the stolen items—even then, they could only “partly recover” the prewar collections, Dotsenko told me.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine pulled off a masterstroke]

But then, in the late 1960s, the art museum had a stroke of luck—if a morally murky one. A passionate art collector named Maria Kornilovskaya, who lived in Leningrad, decided to donate hundreds of paintings to the collection in her birthplace of Kherson. The way Kornilovskaya had built up her art collection was questionable to say the least, a form of looting itself—though she had preserved the work of dozens of world-famous artists that might otherwise have been destroyed during the Second World War.

Kornilovskaya covertly collected her masterpieces from the homes of people who’d been killed, many of them by starvation, during the 1941–44 siege of Leningrad, and she hid the paintings in her apartment. Art collectors offered her good deals, but Kornilovskaya preferred to go hungry herself rather than sell any of her treasures. In all, Kherson received more than 500 paintings through Kornilovskaya.

In 1978, the city’s art collection moved into a new home, a graceful 19th-century building with a tall tower in one corner. Over the following decades, the art museum expanded its collection with thousands of paintings from dozens of countries, as well as sculptures, graphics, and decorative work.

Moscow’s order to loot art from Ukraine did not surprise the 82-year-old art historian Dmytro Gorbachev. In 1938, he told me, Moscow took some of the historical mosaics from Kyiv’s St. Michael’s Monastery and installed them in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery. “Twenty-five years later,” he said, “I requested that Moscow return the borrowed mosaics to Kyiv and I received the most humiliating answer: They claimed it was their property.

“Russians treat Ukraine’s art as their own but, sorry, since the U.S.S.R. fell apart, everything on our land has been ours, so this is theft,” Gorbachev went on. “And they won’t be able to prove that any of this art is their property at an art auction.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Western aid to Ukraine is still not enough]

Several days before they cleaned out the art museum, the Russians were emptying the shelves and cases of the Museum of Local Lore across the street. Before the war, the folklore collection comprised more than 180,000 items, including at least 8,000 coins from the pre-Christian era that had been found in the area. “When I entered the museum together with the Security Service of Ukraine on November 17, I saw broken displays, ruined expositions,” the museum’s director, Olga Goncharova, told me. “The looters clearly had nothing to do with culture; they were barbarians.”

A historian and scientist, Goncharova has spent four decades researching at the museum. Her specialty is the World War II period, and when the Russian invasion began, she was busy cataloging Soviet soldiers’ letters home. She told me how, in March, a passerby on the street had yelled a warning to her: “Russian tanks are coming!” “How strange, I thought,” she said, reflecting on the moment in 1944 she had just been immersed in, when Soviet tanks had liberated Kherson from Nazi occupation. “Once upon a time, it was the happiest news.”

Grieving the looted collection, including the ancient Scythian gold, Goncharova mused on how this land had changed hands so many times over the centuries. She could not say what the stolen artifacts were worth. “Some things are priceless,” she told me. And yet, the very history she has studied—of the destruction wrought by armies moving back and forth across the country, always followed by the painstaking business of recording the past and restoring its cultural treasures—gives her renewed hope.

According to the art museum, of the 13 employees it had before the war, seven ended up collaborating with Russian occupiers to help loot it. “We can confirm that six out of seven of our former museum workers have left Kherson for Crimea … and one of them is still in Kherson,” Dotsenko told me. The former acting director, Desyatova, was among those who left Kherson with the retreating Russians, and is now a suspect in the Ukrainian police’s investigations.

But the circumstances around the city’s cultural inheritance and its betrayal are a microcosm of the reckoning taking place across the territory that Ukraine has recaptured from the Russian invaders: As early as mid-August, the police reported some 1,200 criminal investigations of collaboration. Meanwhile, the work of trying to recover some of the collection—as curators in Kherson first did decades ago—has begun anew.

“We’re getting calls of support from all over the world, and we feel optimistic,” Goncharova said. “Our art collections will grow again—and, in a way, the place feels more pure now, after all the traitors and looters have gone.”

On the morning of December 5, 2022, a large explosion occurred at Engels Air Base, about 500 miles southeast of Moscow. The airfield is one of the two principal bases in Russia that host long-range strategic bombers. TU-160 Blackjacks have been taking off from Engels for the past 10 months, carrying cruise missiles and firing them at cities in Ukraine. The explosion was caused by a Ukrainian drone, and it reportedly damaged two TU-95 Bears, enormous turbo-prop bombers that have been a symbol of the Kremlin’s airpower since the early 1950s. Most of the reporting on the drone attack focused on the boldness of it, the failure of Russian air defenses, and the impact on Russian morale. But the attack had a broader significance that went largely unnoticed.

About four miles from the runway at Engels where the explosion occurred, a pair of underground bunkers is likely to contain nuclear warheads, with a capacity to store hundreds of them. Blackjacks and Bears were designed during the Cold War for nuclear strikes on NATO countries, and they still play that role in Russian war plans. The drone attack on Engels was a milestone in military history: the world’s first aerial assault on a nuclear base. There was little chance of a nuclear detonation, even from a direct hit on the heavily fortified bunkers. Nevertheless, the presence of nuclear warheads at a base routinely used by Russian bombers for attacks on Ukraine is a reminder of how dangerous this war remains. On December 26, Engels was struck by another Ukrainian drone, which killed three servicemen.

The invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied from the outset by Russian threats to use nuclear weapons. A few days after the war began, President Vladimir Putin complained that “NATO countries are making aggressive statements about our country” and warned that, as a result, Russia’s nuclear forces would be moved to “a special regime of combat duty.” No apparent change in operational readiness followed that warning. But in state-controlled news media, the almost-daily threats to use nuclear weapons have become central to Russian propaganda, seeking to inspire fear in NATO countries, discourage NATO forces from entering the war, and limit the supply of military assistance to Ukraine.

[Eric Schlosser: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]

This Russian propaganda has been amplified and endorsed by an unusual assortment of people in the United States, including the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs. The propaganda absolves Russia, blames the United States for the war, and has four main tenets: first, that a long-standing American effort to bring Ukraine into NATO poses a grave threat to Russian security. Second, that American shipments of weapons to Ukraine have prolonged the fighting and caused needless suffering among civilians. Third, that American support for Ukraine is just a pretext for seeking the destruction of Russia. And, finally, that American policies could soon prove responsible for causing an all-out nuclear war.

Those arguments are based on lies. They are being spread to justify Russia’s unprecedented use of nuclear blackmail to seize territory from a neighboring state. Concerns about a possible nuclear exchange have thus far deterred the United States and NATO from providing Ukraine with the tanks, aircraft, and long-range missiles that might change the course of the war. If nuclear threats or the actual use of nuclear weapons leads to the defeat of Ukraine, Russia may use them to coerce other states. Tactics once considered immoral and unthinkable might become commonplace. Nuclear weapons would no longer be regarded solely as a deterrent of last resort; the nine countries that possess them would gain even greater influence; countries that lack them would seek to obtain them; and the global risk of devastating wars would increase exponentially.

That is why the greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory in Ukraine.

Russia has about 6,000 nuclear weapons, more than any other country, and for years Putin has portrayed them as a source of national pride. His warnings about their possible use during the war in Ukraine have been coy and often contradictory. “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened,” Putin said in September, “we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people—this is not a bluff.” His vow to rely on nuclear weapons only as a defensive measure conveys an underlying threat: An attempt to regain Ukrainian land annexed by Russia and deemed by Putin to be part of “our country” might prompt a nuclear response. He also asserted that the United States and NATO are the ones engaging in “nuclear blackmail,” and that “those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the weathervane can turn and point towards them.” In October, he claimed that Ukraine was planning to launch a nuclear strike on itself—by detonating a warhead filled with radioactive waste—as part of a false-flag operation to make Russia seem responsible. In December, Putin said that the risk of a nuclear war was increasing but suggested once again that the real danger did not come from Russia. “We have not gone crazy,” he said. “We are aware what nuclear weapons are … We are not going to brandish these weapons like a razor, running around the world.”

Although Putin’s comments have been subtle and open to multiple interpretations, the propaganda outlets that he controls have been neither. For almost a year, they have continually threatened and celebrated the possibility of nuclear war. This division of labor allows Putin to appear statesmanlike while his underlings stoke fear and normalize the idea of using nuclear weapons to commit the mass murder of civilians. Julia Davis, a columnist for The Daily Beast, and Francis Scarr, a BBC correspondent, have performed an immense public service: supplying translations of the vicious, apocalyptic, often unhinged rants that have become the norm on Russian television. “Either we lose in Ukraine, or the Third World War starts,” Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of Russia Today and a close ally of Putin’s, said in April. “I think World War III is more realistic, knowing us, knowing our leader … That all this will end with a nuclear strike seems more probable to me.” At various times, Simonyan has discussed nuclear attacks on Ukraine, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, arguing that death would be better than succumbing to “the monstrous organism known as the collective Western world.”

Vladimir Solovyov, another popular broadcaster who is close to Putin, routinely expresses a preference for nuclear annihilation over a Russian defeat. The invitation of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, to the White House and the U.S. Capitol in December made Solovyov especially angry. “We’ll either win, or humanity will cease to exist, because the Lord won’t stand for the triumph of warriors of the Antichrist,” he said, repeating the new propaganda line that Ukrainians aren’t just Nazis; they’re satanists. “We are Russians. God is with us,” he concluded. Despite his professed hatred for ungodly Western decadence, before the invasion of Ukraine Solovyov owned villas overlooking Lake Como, in Italy.

Russia’s popular culture is now marked by a level of nuclear fanaticism previously associated with North Korea. Nothing like it existed during the Cold War. At a November rally, staged with Kremlin approval, demonstrators marched through the streets of central Moscow, led by a mock-up of an RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, and sang the Queen song “We Will Rock You” with new lyrics calling for the destruction of Washington, D.C. Denis Maidenov, a popular singer-songwriter who serves in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Parliament, released a slick music video on December 17 featuring a military choir, footage of the Sarmat, and adulatory lyrics about the missile’s prowess: “It’ll scatter our enemies into dust in an instant / It’s ready to carry out the sentence … For the Sarmat there’s only pleasure / To trouble NATO’s dreams!”

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: What Trump and Musk don’t get about Russia’s nuclear threats]

As well as encouraging public reverence for nuclear weapons, Putin has promoted the worship of such weapons within Russia’s military. In a deeply unsettling book, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy (2019), Dimitry Adamsky, a professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University, in Israel, describes Putin’s multiyear effort to spread the mystical teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church among the personnel who handle nuclear weapons, as a means of fostering patriotism, discipline, and obedience. “Each leg of the nuclear triad has its patron saint,” Adamsky notes, “and their icons hang on the walls of the consecrated headquarters and command posts.” Putin’s linkage of Russian Orthodoxy with Russian nuclear strategy helps legitimize plans to slaughter the nation’s enemies. In 2018, Putin declared that Russia would not start a nuclear war against NATO but would ultimately win if one began: “We as martyrs would go to paradise, while they will simply perish because they won’t even have time to repent their sins.”

Getty; Anthony Gerace

According to Kremlin propaganda, the expansion of NATO poses a serious military threat that justifies both the modernization of Russia’s nuclear arsenal and the invasion of Ukraine. When the Soviet Union came apart, in December 1991, NATO was composed of 16 member states. Today it has 30—almost half of them former Soviet allies or republics—and two more states, Sweden and Finland, are awaiting final approval for membership. The psychological impact upon the Kremlin of new lines on the map, shifting alliances, and the loss of empire is understandable. But the argument that, for the past three decades, NATO has been expanding in order to attack or invade Russia is absurd.

[Anne Applebaum: Fear of nuclear war has warped the West’s Ukraine strategy]

During the autumn of 1991, as the Soviet Union neared collapse, President George H. W. Bush sought to reduce the danger of nuclear war and assure Moscow that NATO was a purely defensive alliance. Bush declared that the United States would not only remove all of its short-range, ground-launched nuclear weapons from Europe but would bring them back to the United States and destroy them. These “tactical” weapons were intended for use on the battlefield. In addition, Bush promised that all nuclear weapons would be removed from American warships and attack submarines. These major reductions would be made unilaterally by the United States, without any requirement that Moscow do the same. The Bush administration announced further unilateral cuts to NATO’s nuclear arsenal a few months later. One scholar has called President Bush’s efforts to reassure Moscow “the most sweeping nuclear arms reductions in history.”

In 1991, NATO forces had more than 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons. Today NATO has about 100, all of them gravity bombs that would take many hours, if not days, to be fitted into aircraft. Although the Kremlin promised in 1991 to make similar cuts, it never did. Today Russia has about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, a great many of them recently modernized and carried by cruise missiles.

The reductions in NATO’s conventional forces since the end of the Cold War have been even more dramatic. In 1990, the United States had about 5,000 tanks based in Germany. Today it has none. The last 22 American tanks were withdrawn from Germany in 2013. The German army had more than 7,000 tanks at the end of the Cold War; today it has about 225—hardly a fearsome invading force. (Russia has already lost perhaps 10 times that number of tanks in Ukraine.) Although the Baltic States are members of NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia pose even less of a threat to Russia. Their armies don’t possess a single tank.

NATO countries have not been secretly plotting for decades to invade and destroy Russia. On the contrary, they have provided Russia with trillions of dollars in direct investment, technology transfers, and payments for oil, gas, and other natural resources. Thanks mainly to expanded trade with the West, Russia now has a large middle class for the first time in its history, and average monthly income has increased since 1992 from about $25 to $1,206. But Kremlin policies have also created in Russia the world’s most unequal economy, with some 500 oligarchs controlling more wealth than the total assets of about 99 percent of the adult population there. Russia’s renewed imperial ambitions and glorification of nuclear weapons are useful to the Kremlin as a distraction from persistent economic hardships. According to a 2018 study by Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, about one-fifth of the nation’s households still lack indoor plumbing. About one-quarter don’t have indoor toilets. In rural areas of Russia, things are even worse: Perhaps two-thirds of the households lack indoor toilets and about half still must use outhouses.

After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, warned that nuclear weapons were “not too hard to make” and “very cheap if anyone wants to make them.” Oppenheimer feared that many countries might build them and that nuclear warfare would endanger the future of humanity. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy worried that the following decade might see the emergence of as many as 15 to 25 countries with nuclear weapons. In a nationally televised speech, he said:  “I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world.”

With strong support from the United States and the Soviet Union, the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was introduced in 1968 and took effect two years later.  The NPT has been signed by 191 countries. The treaty allows five of them—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France—to possess nuclear weapons. But it also requires those five to pursue full nuclear disarmament. In return for access to peaceful nuclear energy, the NPT’s other signatories have agreed not to obtain nuclear weapons. Three countries (India, Pakistan, North Korea) have openly built nuclear weapons in defiance of the treaty’s spirit; one has covertly done so (Israel); four have surrendered their nuclear weapons (South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine)l; and 15 have started, then discontinued, nuclear-weapons programs.  Through some extraordinary mix of skillful diplomacy and sheer luck, the worst fears of Oppenheimer and Kennedy have not yet come to pass.  All of that could swiftly change, however, if nuclear threats, attacks, or blackmail enable Russia to gain any benefit from invading Ukraine.

Japan has tons of bomb-grade plutonium, left over from its atomic-energy program, and could build a small nuclear arsenal within a year. South Korea could do the same in perhaps two years, and on January 11, its president raised the possibility that his country might need to “possess its own nukes.” Japan and South Korea now face nuclear threats from North Korea and China. More than 70 percent of South Koreans think their country should obtain nuclear weapons, and Japan has decided to double the size of its military budget. Taiwan could have its own nuclear weapons within a few years of deciding to build them. Saudi Arabia could also obtain them quickly. At a conference in Abu Dhabi this December, the Saudi foreign minister made clear that “if Iran gets an operational nuclear weapon, all bets are off.” And if Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons, Turkey, Egypt, and Algeria might build them soon too.

On a number of occasions during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came perilously close to a nuclear conflict that neither side wanted—a conflict that could have killed hundreds of millions of people. It is remarkable that no city has been destroyed by an atomic blast since Nagasaki in 1945. The spread of nuclear weapons to more countries, amid today’s rising nationalism and bitter ethnic hatreds, would no doubt increase the likelihood of mushroom clouds rising over the rubble of cities.

[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian Empire must die]

A Russian defeat in Ukraine would strengthen the nonproliferation treaty. Ukrainian success on the battlefield has been achieved with conventional weapons aimed at military targets—not with nuclear weapons causing mass civilian casualties. If the nation possessing the most nuclear weapons in the world is unable to gain victory, the importance of having nuclear weapons will be greatly diminished. And the need to abolish nuclear weapons will be even more obvious. Theories of nuclear deterrence are based on the behavior of rational actors; they offer little protection against leaders who are delusional, suicidal, or religious fanatics. The threat of nuclear annihilation will never vanish until the day when nuclear weapons are stigmatized and abolished.

You don’t have to look far from Russia to find a clear-eyed view of Putin’s intentions. While isolationists and academic socialists in the United States blame the invasion of Ukraine on America’s hegemonic desire for NATO expansion, the social-democratic government of Finland holds a different view. The Finns have a unique, firsthand perspective on Russian imperialism and colonialism. Finland was ruled by Sweden until 1809, when it was conquered by Russia and became part of the Russian empire. Efforts to “Russify” the Finns proved unsuccessful, a strong national identity emerged, and Finland gained independence in 1917. “The Great Patriotic War,” as World War II is called in Russia, began not with the Soviet Union heroically leading the fight against Nazi Germany but with the Kremlin supplying oil to Hitler’s war machine and the Red Army invading Poland and then Finland. Despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, the Finns imposed heavy casualties on the Soviets, gained international support, and managed to end the conflict retaining almost all of their territory. Finland remained neutral during the Cold War and built up a formidable army purely for self-defense. It can now mobilize about 1 million soldiers and reservists—nearly one-fifth of the population.

Sauli Niinisto, the president of Finland, maintained a cordial relationship with Putin until recently, speaking with him more than 40 times in person or over the phone during the past decade. And Finland long served as a discreet intermediary between the White House and the Kremlin. But the invasion of Ukraine shattered any illusion that Russia could be a trustworthy neighbor. Finland’s break from its tradition of neutrality and its application to join NATO mark a radical turn in the nation’s history. And it has more military significance than Ukraine’s potential membership in NATO. Russia and Finland share a border that’s almost 800 miles long. St. Petersburg is closer to the Finnish border than it is to Moscow. Finland’s membership in NATO will help the alliance dominate the Baltic Sea, threaten Russia’s crucial nuclear bases on the Kola Peninsula, and transform the strategic balance in the Arctic. And yet Russia hasn’t described Finland’s desire to join NATO as an existential threat that merits nuclear annihilation. The Finns know the Russians too well to be intimidated by that bluff.

A proper conclusion of the war in Ukraine will require many complex issues to be resolved: war crimes, reparations, prisoner-of-war exchanges, the return of children kidnapped by Russia. The Ukrainian government, not the United States or NATO, will have to decide how to proceed. But the basis of a just settlement is simple. When a reporter asked Sanna Marin, the prime minister of Finland, whether Russia should be given an “off-ramp” to avoid its humiliation and prevent nuclear war, she didn’t fully understand the question at first. The term “off-ramp” seemed unfamiliar to Marin. A way out of the conflict, the reporter explained. “A way out of the conflict?” Marin asked. “The way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine. That’s the way out of the conflict. Thank you.” Then she turned, smiled, and walked away.

The war in Ukraine began trending toward the defenders soon after Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24. In the summer and fall of last year, Ukraine rapidly recaptured territory that Russia had seized in the war’s early days. Yet the relative stability of the front line in recent weeks has fueled fresh suggestions that Russia may soon go on the offensive again. Many analysts were hypnotized a year ago by what they saw as Russia’s overwhelming firepower, modern weapons, and effective planning and leadership. Although the Ukrainians almost immediately proved far more formidable than nearly anyone had anticipated, lulls in the war play to the expectation that Russia will soon start massing its supposed great reserves and recover the situation on the battlefield. The underlying assumption is that Ukraine has little hope of ultimate triumph over a fully mobilized Russia. In this account, the longer the war goes on, and the more rounds of forced conscription that Vladimir Putin and his military impose on the Russian population, the more decisive Russia’s supposed advantages will be.

In reality, the logistical, planning, and organizational failures that stalled Russia’s advance and allowed Ukraine to recapture territory are likely to keep occurring. As long as its NATO partners keep increasing their support, Ukraine is well positioned to win the war.

[Anne Applebaum: The brutal alternate world in which the U.S. abandoned Ukraine]

Russia’s strategy relies on the mobilization of lots of soldiers. But the sheer size of an army is not in itself a decisive factor in modern war and has not been for some time. Russia’s new soldiers, who up to this point have resisted every attempt to get them to volunteer but also lacked the motivation to flee their country to avoid conscription, are poor raw material for an army. To do substantial damage to an enemy force, soldiers must be properly trained—which takes a minimum of six months and normally requires about a year. Russia’s new army will have no time to practice maneuvers together before being thrown into action.

Crucially, all of these new trainees also need to be given modern new equipment. Quality can be decisive. During World War II, rival armies were constantly improving their weapons systems. But far from upgrading its equipment and expanding production, Russia seems incapable of reversing more than a fraction of the damage it has suffered in the past 11 months.

According to an independent estimate based on photographic evidence, Russia has lost at least 1,600 tanks; the Ukrainian military claims to have captured, destroyed, or otherwise incapacitated 3,100. Before the war, the annual production of frontline equipment was surprisingly small. For example, it made a little more than 200 main battle tanks a year from 2014 to 2021. Now, because of sanctions restricting Russia’s technology imports, plus the inefficiencies endemic in the Russian military supply chain, the country seems unlikely even to maintain its prewar production rate, so Moscow will have to take more and more equipment out of storage. Ukrainian officials believe that even the best Russian units now in action, including elite airborne troops, are receiving poor equipment. Some Russian soldiers are being transported in vehicles that are decades old, including Soviet-era BMP-1 armored personnel carriers. This materiel is certainly less effective than the frontline equipment that the Russian army had at its disposal on February 24.

In short, Russia is not gathering its strength in a powerful new army. It is assembling an inferior version of the force with which it started the war.

Although Ukraine has suffered substantial military losses and absorbed a series of attacks on civilian targets, its defensive capabilities keep improving. Only 11 months ago, many of the most pessimistic analysts were saying the Ukrainian army should receive no heavy weapons, because it stood no chance against the mighty Russians. Ukraine’s friends limited much of their aid to smaller, handheld systems. Basically all of Ukraine’s artillery and armor, for instance, were legacy Soviet designs.

But because Russian barbarity has shocked the West into action, and because Ukraine’s military successes proved that advanced weaponry would not go to waste, its forces have steadily received more NATO-standard equipment. First came long-range artillery systems, including French CAESAR self-propelled howitzers and American High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS). Next came the promise of a major boost to Ukraine’s air-defense capabilities, via National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems and Patriot missile systems. (Training for Ukrainian forces on the latter equipment is expected to begin soon.) In the past several days, Western governments that had previously been wary of provoking Russian escalation by offering too much advanced equipment have crossed an important threshold. Ukraine may soon be receiving high-tech armored personnel carriers and apparently even main battle tanks, including German-built Leopards and British-built Challenger IIs.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: What Zelensky needs from Washington]

Many NATO leaders now believe not only that Ukraine can outlast the Russian invaders but also that it must. Anything but a complete Ukrainian victory will offer some validation for depraved Russian fighting tactics. It would encourage Putin to test the resolve of other nations that share borders with Russia or were once under Soviet domination. In recent days Norway, Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia have all promised continued support for Ukraine. These donors do not believe that NATO membership alone will protect them from Russian military interference; their security now hinges on Putin’s Russia being vanquished.

This kind of pressure should hopefully persuade the Biden administration to let Ukraine have the final pieces of military technology that it needs to force the Russians out. These include advanced vehicles to provide increased mobility as well as the kinds of long-range artillery systems that will allow it to hit Russian forces anywhere in occupied Ukraine. This might eventually include ATACMS guided missiles, which extend the effective range of HIMARS equipment and would allow Ukraine to sever supply chains through large parts of Russian-occupied territory.

In almost every category of equipment, the Ukrainian army is significantly stronger today than it was in February, and it will keep getting stronger. About 20,000 Ukrainian personnel have now completed advanced training in NATO countries, according to a Ukrainian state news agency, and thousands more will do the same in 2023.

In the coming months, the war could become horrifically bloody if Russian generals continue to send large numbers of poorly trained soldiers into combat. Still, Ukraine has most of the advantages that typically decide a war. Its forces will be better trained, better led, and, with the West’s help, far better armed. And most Ukrainians’ determination is likely to remain strong, in part because they don’t have any choice but to win.

Many of Ukraine's tanks are old Soviet models like the T-64 and due to the stresses of war, it's becoming increasingly hard to maintain them.

Many of Ukraine's tanks are old Soviet models like the T-64 and due to the stresses of war, it's becoming increasingly hard to maintain them.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Amid the fight for the House speaker’s gavel, it was easy to forget that George Santos is now actually a member of Congress.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The sports scandal almost nobody is talking about Is defying parents the only ethical alternative? Pope Benedict XVI and the Church after the fall

This Guy

Remember Herschel Walker, the Georgia football star who was a shoo-in for a Senate seat—until the press discovered the children he didn’t acknowledge and the abortions he’d allegedly paid for? The Republican Party decided to tough it out with Walker, but the humiliation was too much for voters in a state that sent Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress, and Walker narrowly lost.

Narrowly. It is amazing to realize that Walker lost by only a few points, when not so long ago, a candidate with his baggage (and inability to speak in coherent sentences) would have simply dropped out of the race. Surely, we’d reached the bottom of what even the most jaded voters would tolerate.

Or so I thought until I started following the improbable tale of George Santos—so far, that does seem to be his name—the weird fabulist who has been elected to the Congress of the United States of America. Almost everything about the life story Santos has told is a lie; likewise, he has not, so far, been able to adequately explain where he got all the money that he poured into his campaign.

As you might expect, this has caused fury in his district, powered a recall movement, and led the national Republicans to act on principle and refuse to seat him in Congress.

I am, of course, kidding. Nothing in that last sentence happened. If George Santos can make stuff up, so can I, but The Atlantic requires that I tell you when I’m joking.

There was a time when congressional candidates generally had to tell at least some of the truth if they were caught lying. Santos is amazing: His double-downs and elisions tumble out effortlessly but pointlessly, even if he does manage to muster a certain amount of boyish charm while stepping on rake after rake. When did his mother die? Well, that depends on what when or die means. Did he work in high finance? Well, not really, but again, it might depend on what high means. Did he go to college? Well, he’s been near a college or two. Close enough. Is he gay or straight, Jewish or Catholic? Did his family die in the Holocaust in Europe? Are they from Brazil, or anywhere in this solar system on our side of the asteroid belt?

You can trip over some fibs in public life, and you can weather a few indiscretions. Normally, however, you cannot survive telling a tale that has more fakery in it than the entire cover story of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, the two fictional Soviet spies in the TV series The Americans. (At least Philip and Elizabeth have real jobs.) I am not saying that George Santos is a spy or a plant. Deep-cover agents are far more competent than Santos is at … well, everything, but especially at lying.

Even one of Santos’s campaign fundraisers tried the Man of Mystery approach, reportedly presenting himself to GOP donors as Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff. This might even be a crime, which is probably why Santos, his lawyers, and everyone else have dummied up and refused to answer any more questions about it. But it is revealing that some guy allegedly impersonated the Republican leader’s chief of staff to raise money and gave it to a serial liar who then got elected to Congress—and that this escapade hasn’t been even more of a story.

Like Walker, Santos himself isn’t really the issue. The problem is a Republican Party that has come to expect its voters to put up with anything rather than lose one vote in Congress. And with rare exceptions, this gamble—that the party faithful are either too polarized, too numb, or too inattentive to care—has paid off. This is why Kevin McCarthy had to fight for his political life against the likes of Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert and Andy Biggs. Worse yet, it’s why he had to count on Taylor Greene and Donald Trump himself as his allies.

Santos, to his credit, sat there quietly and did as he was told during the speakership fight. (There is an accusation that he flashed a white-power sign when he voted, but even if true, that’s not even close to disqualifying in the GOP these days.) But now that most of the drama is over, no one cares that a complete fraud is sitting in the House. If he’s removed from Congress, it will likely be over money, not ethics; both U.S. and New York State officials are looking into his murky finances. It might have been nice to see the voters and a political party stand on principle, but the Republican project of telling us all to just get used to it is proceeding apace.

Related:

How a perfectly normal New York suburb elected a con man Why the Red Wave hit New York

Today’s News

Intense rains have caused flooding in parts of Los Angeles. At least 15 people have died across the state since late December, and tens of thousands of residents have been ordered to evacuate. The Justice Department launched a review into the discovery of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, where Joe Biden had a private office after serving as vice president. On a surprise trip to Ukraine, Germany’s foreign minister confirmed that Berlin will send more weapons to the country.

Evening Read

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty

Twitter Was the Ultimate Cancellation Machine

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Whatever else it is, Twitter is a place where the average person can subject others to their displeasure. They have been mistreated by Southwest Airlines. They have been angered by the comments of a man who sells beans. They have learned, to their horror, that the father of their favorite indie-pop star previously worked for the U.S. State Department. In posting about these things in a venue where the target of scorn might actually see the complaint—along with perhaps millions of other people—the aggrieved may experience some instant relief. If you want accountability on social media, you tweet.

Which raises a weird question: If Twitter withers under Elon Musk, where will we go with our beefs? Even before Musk’s takeover, the platform was supposedly shedding its most valuable users; now many others are expected to leave as the platform becomes glitchier and more toxic.

Twitter has never been perfect, but it has been functional. The options for those seeking justice there exist on a spectrum from the silly to the profound; most are somewhere in the middle.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

All the pretty Republicans A chance for a reset on Venezuela

Culture Break

Geoffrey Short / Universal Pictures

Read. The first three books from Atlantic Editions, our new book imprint: essay collections by Atlantic staff writers Sophie Gilbert and Megan Garber, and senior editor Lenika Cruz.

Watch. M3GAN, in theaters, a zany horror film starring a killer-robot doll that is just what 2023 needs.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

When I was a boy, I loved astronomy. I even had a telescope for a while. I was never very good at using it, and I could really focus only on the moon. But I still remember the thrill of using a lunar map to find the landing sites of the Apollo missions and some of the earlier unmanned probes. I did manage to spot Mars—it was just a fuzzy red disk—but I was (and remain) a science-fiction nerd, and so, after years of watching Star Trek and reading The War of the Worlds, I felt like I was peering into a dangerous mystery.

I am older now, and when I look to the sky, the beauty of the stars is tangled up in questions about eternity that these days, as you might imagine, seem more pressing to me. Perhaps this is why I find myself boyishly excited all over again about the approach of a green comet that last visited Earth some 50,000 years ago. There is something comforting in thinking of the universe as a cozy place where a comet, last seen by Neanderthals, returns to find us a spacefaring species. We spend so much time worrying about our own extinction that it’s a relief to think of ourselves as the descendants of creatures who might well have looked up with the same wonder as I will soon, and the ancestors of beings whose lives we cannot even yet imagine. Fifty thousand years isn’t an eternity, but for me, it’ll do until eternity gets here.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Over the holiday weekend, the Russians fired a wave of missiles at Ukraine—all of which Ukraine claims to have stopped in the first complete defeat of such an attack in this war. Meanwhile, a Ukrainian strike killed scores of Russians at a makeshift military headquarters. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Kevin McCarthy’s loyalty to Trump got him nothing. The Republican majority’s opening debacle You’ll miss gerontocracy when it’s gone. New Year, New Depths

The Russians, according to the Ukrainian government, fired more than 80 weapons (mostly, it seems, Iranian-made drones) at Ukraine since the start of the new year, and the Ukrainians claim they intercepted every one of them. But the attack is more evidence that Russia’s war on Ukraine is, at this point, an attempt to murder civilians and torment the survivors enough to press their government to capitulate. The Russians, of course, have misjudged their enemy: The Ukrainians have no intention of surrendering and are fighting back with great effectiveness. The Russian high command learned this yet again over the holiday weekend, when the Ukrainians scored a direct hit on a makeshift Russian barracks, killing at least 89 soldiers.

I write “at least” 89 because that is the number the Russians admit were killed, and therefore it is almost certainly a lie meant to hide larger casualties. Igor Girkin, once a separatist commander in eastern Ukraine, has become a constant critic of Vladmir Putin’s war effort; he claims that the soldiers were bunked in the same building as ammunition, and that the ensuing conflagration killed and wounded “hundreds,” which is likely closer to the truth. Dara Massicot, an analyst at the RAND corporation (and, I’m pleased to note, one of my students when I taught at the Naval War College), told me today that given the “nature of the destruction at that facility, the official Russian numbers are likely significantly undercounting casualties,” and that reports from Russian social-media channels (often more reliable than official communications) suggest that 200 to 300 men could have been lost.

The successful Ukrainian defense and the Russian losses are good news for Ukraine. Every bit of optimism, however, must be tempered by two realities. First, Ukraine remains outnumbered and potentially outgunned by a much larger Russian Federation. The Ukrainians have survived this far through a combination of excellent strategy, the resilience of its people and their leaders, an infusion of highly lethal Western weapons, the courage of the men and women on the front lines, and a mind-boggling amount of Russian incompetence and stupidity.

The second reality, however, is that the Russians don’t really care about losses. They are willing to sacrifice their own men by the truckload. We are all rightly appalled by the damage the Kremlin is willing to inflict on Ukraine and its people in its unprovoked aggression, but Putin’s cruelty extends to his fellow citizens: He is sending untrained, under-provisioned, and poorly armed men to their death literally to try to plug the holes in his lines with human meat—which is what one of their own commanders has reportedly called them. The Russian president hates Ukrainians, but he and his senior officers seem to hate their own men nearly as much.

Meanwhile, on New Year’s Eve—with so many Russian soldiers only hours from being killed in their bunks—Putin’s minions hosted a televised party that defies description. Performers put on cheesy song-and-dance numbers seemingly lifted from 1970s Soviet pop culture while Russian officers (whose gaudy dress uniforms looked like they were stolen from the palace guards of a James Bond villain) looked on with forced smiles. Parts of the telecast looked as if they had been shot elsewhere and then chroma-keyed into the production, adding a shiny gloss of unreality to the whole mess. One of the hosts, decked out in a red velvet tux, even chortled a cartoonishly evil threat into the camera: “Like it or not, Russia is enlarging!”

That’s a pretty daring claim to make while Russian forces are on the defensive and men are being buried in the rubble of their base. The whole event, like so much of what’s broadcast on Russian television now, seemed like a mash-up of a Soviet variety show, the dystopian news and TV ads from Robocop, and the galas for the rich elites from The Hunger Games, with hosts as creepy as, if less polished than, Caesar Flickerman and Effie Trinket.

This tacky, over-the-top Russian decadence is all the more striking when we think back to Putin’s ostensible reasons for launching this war. He and his lieutenants promised to save the Ukrainians from Nazis, and then from the immoral West and its rich overlords and sexual deviants. He would gather his fellow Slavs under the protective wings of the Russian eagle. Instead, Putin and his Kremlin toadies are blowing those same Slavs to pieces while they themselves swan around wearing fantastically expensive designer clothes and jewelry, dancing and laughing it up while they send Russian boys to their doom.

I still do not know how this all ends. Putin’s barbarism means that it is impossible, even once the war is over, for Russia to reenter the ranks of the civilized world. As I said recently in a discussion with Ian Bremmer and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Russia is now a nuclear-armed rogue state with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. I disagreed with President Joe Biden’s gaffe back in March about how Putin “cannot remain in power,” but I understood the frustration that led to Biden’s outburst. Even if Putin is somehow removed, however, why would anyone give a new Russian regime the benefit of the doubt, at least without war-crimes trials of the “leaders” who launched this blood-soaked misadventure?

Ukraine will survive, recover, and be rebuilt with aid from around the world. But Russia, willing to watch its own men burn in their bunkers for the sake of a dictator’s ego, will have a long way to go before it can again lay claim to being part of a community of nations.

Related:

Ukraine unplugged Sudden Russian death syndrome Today’s News Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s new minister of national security, visited a Jerusalem holy site despite condemnation from Arab leadership and threats by Hamas. The former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud and other crimes. Bloggers and other prominent Russian critics criticized Russia’s military operations following Ukraine’s deadly New Year’s Day strike on Russian forces. Dispatches Up For Debate: Conor Friedersdorf shares readers’ predictions for the future of artificial intelligence. Humans Being: Movies need more than reviews, argues Jordan Calhoun in the final edition of his newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read (Gregory Halpern / Magnun)

The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe

By Dacher Keltner

What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world—is often associated with the extraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plain with a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding the tiny finger of a newborn baby. Awe blows us away: It reminds us that there are forces bigger than ourselves, and it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered.

But you don’t need remarkable circumstances to encounter awe. When my colleagues and I asked research participants to track experiences of awe in a daily diary, we found, to our surprise, that people felt it a bit more than two times a week on average. And they found it in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity, a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them back to a first love.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The hidden cost of cheap TVs The greatest tax system in the world The mistakes historians make on television Culture Break (Juana Arias / The Washington Post / Getty)

Read. How to Do Nothing, by the artist Jenny Odell—or choose another of these eight self-help books that are actually helpful.

Listen. Dive into a Broadway cast recording of Company or check out any one of the late composer Stephen Sondheim’s Gen Z–approved musicals about outsiders.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

That bizarre Russian New Year’s Eve party reminded me of the weird alternative universe created in the first Robocop movie. Released in 1987, Robocop envisioned an early 21st-century world (specifically, Detroit) overtaken by urban rot and excessive consumerism. Some of the movie’s predictions, which famously included Detroit declaring bankruptcy, seemed silly in the 1980s but turned out to be a little too on the nose: Detroit went broke in 2013. The movie also foresaw the shimmery shallowness of cable news, which was still a novelty at that time. Peter Weller was terrific in the title role (and I still say this movie should have made him first choice for the role of Batman, which went to Michael Keaton in 1989).

But the fictional ads scattered throughout the film really shine. The “Family Heart Center” invitation to come and check out the new line of artificial hearts is prescient, even if it seems less funny now that we are deluged with pharmaceutical ads (which I think should be outlawed); the ad for the new “6000 SUX” sedan was a stinging tribute to gigantic and inefficient American cars, but it seems quaint in an era when Americans have skipped right over big cars and now prize huge trucks as some sort of personal statement. I am also rather nostalgic for Nukem!, the family game of nuclear-arms racing that ends with the sore loser blowing everyone else up. Very violent, Robocop is not a movie for everyone, but if you can take the bloodshed, there’s a clever critique of late-20th-century America embedded in a darn good science-fiction romp.

— Tom

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.