You’ve likely heard about the incident on Friday in which Israeli soldiers shot and killed three Israeli hostages who had either escaped from their captors or been abandoned by them during fighting in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City. The three were two Israeli Jews and one Israeli Bedouin, each of whom had been captured on October 7th. At the most basic level this is a version of “friendly fire” in which soldiers inadvertently kill fellow soldiers from their own army during wartime. In this case, it’s hostages not fellow soldiers. But the nature of the case is comparable.

The incident has produced a firestorm within Israel, both for the inherently tragic nature of the hostages’ deaths but also because of the particular details of how they died. Their deaths have added renewed intensity to arguments and protests about how the government is balancing the imperatives of destroying Hamas and bringing the country’s hostages home safely. Recent weeks have seen various protests in Israel, often led by or featuring families of hostages, demanding the government focus more on making a deal with Hamas to return all the hostages. The controversy has been fueled in part by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s almost total refusal to visit and meet with residents of communities attacked on October 7th or the families of the hostages.

News comes this morning that Christian Ziegler, embattled chair of the Florida GOP, accused rapist and one half (or perhaps one third) of the threesoming Zieglers, wants a buyout. Yes, a buyout. Usually we think of a buyout as a cash offer in exchange for some property interest in something, or a job in which someone has something akin to a property interest. It’s not usually something you get when you agree to relinquish an elected political office. But as we noted earlier, the bylaws of the Florida GOP don’t appear to contain any process for firing a party chair. The party can ask him to leave. They can investigate him. But they can’t fire him. So far Ziegler has been adamant in his refusal to resign.

Back in August 2015, based on a TPM Reader making the connection, I described how a concept from the world of military intellectuals — the OODA Loop — helped explain the uncanny power of Donald Trump’s impulsive and thoroughly un-theorized way of engaging in political fights. It’s not the point of this discussion, but I need to explain the basic OODA Loop concept to have it. So I’ll summarize it quickly: In any fight or combat, each side is in a process of seeing what’s happening, understanding it, making a decision how to react based on it and then attacking. John Boyd, the military theorist who devised the concept, called this Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — OODA. If you move fast enough, you can act and thus change the observed reality to something new while your opponent is still in the process of making sense of and reacting to the old one. Conventional military theory captured the same insight, albeit in a less analytic way, in its emphasis on taking and maintaining the initiative. Act and make your adversary react to you, not vice versa.

I wanted to give a quick update on American and Israeli wrestling over the pace and duration of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. The U.S. has been pushing the Israelis with increasing vigor to end the campaign in Gaza in early January. It has also been demanding greater consultation and coordination between the U.S. and Israeli militaries. We want to know exactly what your plan is, basically. Publicly the Israeli government has been saying that its campaign will take as long as it takes. As much as it appreciates U.S. support it won’t agree to any arbitrary timetable.

In practice, however, something else appears to be happening on the ground and in the air.

Frequently I will hear from TPM Readers who tell me that they fear and believe authoritarianism is on the rise both in the United States and abroad and, critically, that it is on the cusp of winning. This is an understandable fear and belief, and it may be right. But I do not think it is the most accurate assessment of the information before us. Rather than Team Democracy battling back against and defeating Team Authoritarianism, or vice versa, in a final confrontation or series of final confrontations, we’re seeing something different. We have a new model in which we no longer have parties of government of right and left but rather a civic democratic party and an authoritarian populist party. There’s a good chance they’ll be contesting elections for a while, even as the authoritarian populist party is trying in various ways to end them or radically change how free they are.

As you probably heard, Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, has now resigned over the antisemitism Q&A backlash. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) has responded by saying, “One down. Two to go,” referring to the presidents of Harvard and MIT who were also there that day for the questioning. This is one of those viral public episodes that we are all generally stupider for having been in any proximity to. No one has acquitted themselves well here. At least we now have the bad people clarifying who they are.

I want to just share a few thoughts on this topic in no particular order.

• I don’t know all the details. But this episode didn’t come in a vacuum for Magill. There had been a series of antisemitism vs Islamophobia-type dustups at Penn of late. And the general impression was that she had managed to offend or at least not satisfy either side with her responses. That’s not passing any judgement on her. It’s just noting that her position was likely already tenuous. This likely is the final straw in her case. That doesn’t mean it’s fair or that it was deserved. It’s just context for understanding what happened and why, at least based on what I know now, I don’t think we shouldn’t be expecting the same at the other two schools.

You’ve almost certainly now seen or heard about the congressional hearing with elite university presidents (Harvard, Penn, MIT) coldly arguing the need for context and invoking technical criteria when asked whether it would violate the university’s code of conduct to call for the extermination of Jews. The viral clip is genuinely jarring.

When I watched it I found myself asking not why are these administrators such terrible anti-Semites but how did you three possibly find yourself in this situation giving these answers?

Let’s start with some important stage-setting. First, the clip was posted by Rep. Elise Stefanik, a consistently odious and mendacious weasel who represents a district in Upstate New York. Stefanik is very much that person you’ll see melodramatically huffing and puffing in a congressional hearing demanding yes or no answers to gotcha questions that don’t have yes or no answers. And yet here … well, even for a weasel with gotcha questions, she seemed to have gotten them.

If you’ve been watching Donald Trump since he left the White House, there’s nothing new under the sun. Over the course of his presidency Trump was consistently horrible. But he got more experience in how to make good on his desires and impulses over the course of his presidency. That culminated in the events of January 6th 2021. The progression has continued out of office with every new addition of legal peril stoking a more adamant demand for revenge. Unlike in his first term, there are now a stable of Trump organizations and think tanks preparing not so much to put his plans into effect as to devise plans and policies that map on to his inchoate impulses and targets for retribution. What was latent in his rhetoric and threats is now explicit. Staid MSM publications have now dared to use the F-word — “fascist” — to describe his rhetoric.

Eager to maintain the support of the far right of the House GOP caucus Speaker Mike Johnson recently ordered the release of internal House footage of the various rioters who stormed the Capitol complex on January 6th 2021 in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. But his transparency train hit a speed bump when he decided to blur the faces of the rioters and criminals who stormed the capitol in order to prevent their being, in Johnson’s words, “retaliated against and charged by the DOJ and have other concerns and problems.”

So Johnson says quite clearly and publicly that his office is obscuring the faces of Jan. 6th rioters in order to prevent law enforcement from holding them accountable for their crimes.

But Johnson wasn’t always so pro-January 6th rioter, or at least he hasn’t been consistently. He called the feral Trumpers who stormed the capitol shameless criminals, in fact.

With the Israeli army surrounding the city of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza strip and the Israel-Hamas war assuming a grim regularity, I wanted to note a few developments which give perhaps a glimpse of how this all ends and what comes after. To frame the question, I want to flag to your attention this article by Hussein Ibish in The Atlantic. It’s one of the most clear-eyed discussions of the war and its aftermath I’ve seen over the last two months. Ibish’s central argument is that the war certainly won’t end with any kind of final defeat of Hamas or its destruction as an organization. This is an impossible standard since under almost any scenario at least some remnant of the group will emerge from its tunnels at the end of the war and declare victory on its own terms for having survived. But, as Ibish argues, that will be a hollow and pyrrhic victory … unless Israel decides to remain in Gaza with the goal of permanently or indefinitely delaying that hollow declaration of victory. In that scenario either Hamas, or some future reconstituted version of itself, really will have managed a major victory, placing itself at the head of the Palestinian national movement in a permanent state of war with Israel.