The Texas Floods Were a Preview of What’s to Come | How the New Generation of Neo-Nazis Is Organizing Itself | The Next Battlefield: Securing America’s Digital Infrastructure | Experts Predict AI Will Lead to the Extinction of Humanity, and more

How the New Generation of Neo-Nazis Is Organizing Itself  (Luisa Gehring, Amadeu Antonio Stiftung)
Right-wing extremist youth groups are currently experiencing an increase in popularity rarely seen in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. However, the development of a broader following consisting of children, adolescents and young adults is by no means accompanied by a moderation of positions and actions. Young neo-Nazis disrupt CSDs, attack political opponents and carry out attacks on youth centers, queer bars and alternative housing projects. They show solidarity with right-wing extremists and sometimes present themselves on social media with their real names, without masks, but with the Reich flag, white power gestures, on hikes and martial arts training sessions. The images are bursting with right-wing extremist self-empowerment and the staging of strength.

Far-Right Extremists Using Games Platforms to Radicalize Teenagers, Report Warns  (Libby Brooks, Guardian)
Far-right extremists are using livestream gaming platforms to target and radicalize teenage players, a report has warned. The new research, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, reveals how a range of extremist groups and individuals use platforms that allow users to chat and livestream while playing video games to recruit and radicalize vulnerable users, mainly young males.

Musk, a Social Media Powerhouse, Boosts Fortunes of Hard-Right Figures in Europe  (Erika Kinetz and Aaron Kessler, AP)
Hard-right commentators, politicians and activists in Europe have uncovered a secret to expanding their influence: engaging with Elon Musk. Take the German politician from a party whose own domestic intelligence agency has designated as extremist. Her daily audience on X surged from 230,000 to 2.2 million on days Musk interacted with her posts. She went on to lead her party to its best-ever electoral showing.

A New Satanic Neo-Nazi Group Is Recruiting Children as Young as 12  (Michael Corech, Vice)
At the start of this year, residents woke up to find troubling graffiti sprayed across several locations in the Bad Herrenalb district of southwestern Germany. Alongside the names of well-known extremist networks like No Lives Matter (NLM) and 764, there was the moniker of a new group: Milikolosskrieg, a neo-Nazi organization that has emerged in the last year. The person behind the graffiti shared the press coverage it generated in a closed group on the messaging app Signal, to the applause of other members of Milikolosskrieg, which translates into English as “military war.”

“They Apologize for the Notification, Not for Platforming Nazis:” Substack Under Fire for Promoting Radical Content  (Konstancija Gasaitytė, Cybernews)
Joshua Fisher-Birch, a terrorism analyst, has been monitoring Substack’s significance for groups such as neo-Nazis to spread their propaganda, reports Ars Technica. His findings reveal that Substack has been seen as a platform on which content is less likely to be removed compared with other platforms. However, he believes the platform will continue to tolerate such content, reminding us of its failure to follow “limited community guidelines” in 2024. During that time, a white supremacist blog urged violence against Jewish people, which was reported by the Counter Extremism Project (CEP).

Gore and Violent Extremism  (Ali Fisher and Arthur Bradley, Vox Pol)
Gore-related websites enable the hosting and sharing of illegal videos, including those produced by proscribed terrorist entities. The websites are numerous, free to access, provide no user or child safety features, and have seen a growth in visitor numbers in recent years due to ongoing conflicts. Most gore-related websites offer download and social media share functionality allowing for graphic content, including 1000s showing terrorist violence, to be shared across social media.

Between Security and Strategy: Considerations for the Terrorist Designation of the Muslim Brotherhood  (Mahmut Cengiz, HSToday)
The Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational political and religious movement, has come back into focus in U.S. political discussions. This renewed attention follows the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas—an organization widely seen as the Brotherhood’s affiliate in Gaza—which have increased scrutiny of the group’s international activities and ideological influence. The debate intensified after an incident on June 2, 2025, where Mohamed Sabry Soliman targeted a group of Jewish individuals in Colorado with incendiary devices. Investigations later showed that Soliman had publicly supported the Muslim Brotherhood on social media. Amid growing concerns regarding the Muslim Brotherhood’s potential links to violent extremism, the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act of 2025 was introduced on July 16, 2025. The proposed legislation seeks to establish a formal process for designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under U.S. law.  This article critically examines the group’s history and ideological roots, considering the potential impacts—both advantages and limitations—of such a designation.

THE LONG VIEW

America Is Slashing Its Climate Research (Economist)
Hear no science, see no science, speak no science.

Donald Trump’s War on Climate Science Has Staggering Implications  (Economist)
Even a policy of “drill, baby, drill” would imply more climate research, not its evisceration.

We Fact-Checked the Trump Administration’s Climate Report  (Shannon Osaka, Anusha Mathur, Evan Halper and Jake Spring, Washington Post)
The Energy Department released a report this week promising a “critical review” of climate science, coinciding with the Environmental Protection Agency’s move to end climate regulation across the federal government.
But scientists say the report, drafted by researchers known for questioning mainstream climate science, is riddled with errors and cherry-picked data.
“They cherrypick data points that suit their narratives and exclude the vast majority of the scientific literature that does not,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the climate research lead at the payment company Stripe, whose work was cited in the new report, said in a text message. “This gives a terribly skewed view of the underlying climate science.”

Experts Predict AI Will Lead to the Extinction of Humanity  (Leighton Woodhouse, The Times)
Truly super-intelligent bots could wipe us off the face of the Earth, says a Nobel prizewinner and others —who predict machines will match humans in as little as a year.

Why the United States Should Not Fear a Space Pearl Harbor  (Lawfare / RAND)
In the early 2000s, U.S. defense analysts sounded the alarm (PDF) about a potential “Space Pearl Harbor.” They warned that the U.S. military was becoming increasingly dependent on a small number of vulnerable satellites that would become tempting targets during a crisis or conflict. Those fears grew exponentially after China’s landmark demonstration in 2007 of a direct-ascent anti-satellite (DA-ASAT) missile that destroyed a Chinese weather satellite. Some analysts have argued in the years since that satellites are becoming a liability rather than an asset, potentially even “the American military’s Achilles heel.” Policymakers have warned that a Space Pearl Harbor risks leaving U.S. forces “deaf, dumb, blind, and impotent.”
These fears have significant implications. If the United States depends heavily on satellites that it cannot defend effectively, that raises fundamental questions about its grand strategy and ability to defend allies and partners in the Pacific. If China believes that counterspace attacks could paralyze the U.S. military, that could fuel crisis instability by incentivizing China to strike first.
Fortunately, the magnitude of the challenge remains more manageable than pessimists fear. 

America Should Assume the Worst About AI  (Matan Chorev and Joel Predd, Foreign Affairs)
How to plan for a tech-driven geopolitical crisis.

The Texas Floods Were a Preview of What’s to Come  (Tik Root, Wired)
Mounting evidence shows no US state is safe from the flooding that ravaged Texas’ Kerr Country.

Could AI Tilt the Outcome of Elections?  (Economist)
New research shows it is being used for good and ill.

MORE PICKS

Not With a Bang, but With a Truth Social Post  (Tom Nichols, The Atlantic)
The president is rattling a nuclear saber as a distraction.
Donald Trump, beset by a week of bad news, has decided to rattle the most dangerous saber of all. In a post today on his Truth Social site, the president claimed that in response to recent remarks by former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, he has “ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions.”
Medvedev is a man with little actual power in Russia, but he has become Russia’s top internet troll, regularly threatening America and its allies. No one takes him seriously, even in his own country.
The problem is not that Trump is going to spark a nuclear crisis with a post about two submarines—at least not this time. The much more worrisome issue is that the president of the United States thinks it is acceptable to use ballistic-missile submarines like toys, objects to be waved around when he wants to distract the public or deflect from bad news, or merely because some Russian official has annoyed him.
Trump’s nuclear threats are reckless. (I would call them “silly,” but that is too small a word when the commander in chief even alludes to nuclear arms.)
Nuclear-missile submarines are not toys. No one understood this better than Trump’s predecessors, the 11 presidents who have been the only other people in American history with the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. They treated any declarations about nuclear weapons with utter gravity and sobriety. They avoided even mentioning such things unless they were articulating a carefully planned policy and communicating it to allies and enemies alike. 
Trump, however, has now discarded all of these red lines. He has initiated a new era in which the chief executive can use threats regarding the most powerful weapons on Earth to salve his ego and improve his political fortunes. Once upon a time, America was governed by serious people. No longer.

The Next Battlefield: Securing America’s Digital Infrastructure  (Mira Ricardel, National Interest)
By combining their expertise, resources, and global reach, HPE and Juniper Networks can help challenge Huawei head-on with more advanced and secure capabilities.

It’s Time for the Semiconductor Industry to Step Up  (Andrew Kidd, Bruce Schneier, and Celine Lee, National Interest)
Semiconductor firms have a lot to learn from America’s banks; investing in compliance is the price of entry in a critical industry.

Radioactive Wasp Nests Found Near Nuclear Storage Site in South Carolina  (Andrew Jeong, Washington Post)
One of the nests found near the Savannah River Site had a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations, according to a federal report.

Donald Trump Shoots the Messenger  (Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic)
Classic authoritarian move: When reality doesn’t go your way, deny reality.
Broadly speaking, Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves come in two flavors. The first is devious plans that help him amass power (say, turning the Departments of Justice and Defense over to lackeys, or using regulatory threats to bully media owners into favorable coverage). The second is foolish impulses that he follows because they make him feel momentarily better.
Firing Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as Trump did via a Truth Social post this afternoon, falls into the second category.
McEntarfer’s unpardonable sin was to oversee the routine release of BLS jobs data. This morning’s report showed that job growth last month fell somewhat short of expectations. The more interesting—and, to Trump, unwelcome—information came in its revisions, which found that previous months had much lower job growth than previous estimates. Economists had been puzzling over the economy’s resilience despite Trump’s imposition of staggering tariffs. Now that we have the revised data, that resilience appears to have largely been a mirage.
Trump’s deeper confusion is his apparent belief that reported job numbers are what matter to him politically. He is obsessed with propaganda and has had phenomenal success manipulating the media and bullying his party into repeating even his most fantastical lies. But, as Biden and Kamala Harris learned the hard way, voters don’t judge the economy on the basis of jobs reports. They judge it on the basis of how they and their community are doing. You can’t fool the public with fake numbers into thinking the economy is better than it is. All fake numbers can do is make it harder for policy makers to steer the economy.
The president’s mad rush to subject the macroeconomic policy makers to the same partisan discipline he has imposed on the power ministries is less a coup than a temper tantrum. He thinks he wants loyalists and hacks running those functions. He might not like what happens when he gets his way.

America Is Remaking Its Disaster-Relief System  (Economist)
The administration hopes to undo perverse incentives.

Bloodied Faces, Sobbing Children: Immigration Officers Smash Car Windows to Speed Up Arrests  (Nicole Foy and McKenzie Funk, Propublica)
We’ve documented nearly 50 incidents of immigration officers shattering car windows to make arrests —a tactic experts say was rarely used before Trump took office. ICE claims its officers use a “minimum amount of force.”

US Space Command Is Preparing for Satellite-on-Satellite Combat  (Economist)
Toward the end of last year a pair of military satellites, one American and the other French, prepared for a delicate orbital minuet. They were about to conduct a so-called rendezvous and proximity operation (RPO)—in which one or more satellites approach another to inspect or manipulate it—near an enemy satellite. They have not said which, but it is not hard to guess. “The French have talked about Russian maneuvers [near French satellites] over the years,” says General Stephen Whiting, speaking at the headquarters of US Space Command in Colorado Springs. “And so…we demonstrated that we could both maneuver satellites near each other and near other countries’ satellites in a way that signaled our ability to operate well together.”
The exercise was so successful, he says, that there are plans to repeat it later this year. It is a milestone: the first time that America has conducted an RPO like this with a country outside the Five Eyes, a spy pact whose members co-operate closely in space, and the first time it was done as a “purpose-built” operation, rather than in response to events. It also embodies America’s new, more muscular approach to space. Space Command was re-established in 2019 during Donald Trump’s first term. In recent years it has focused on building its headquarters and developing staff. Now it is ready. “We now have a combatant command focused on war fighting” in space, says General Whiting.

Trump’s Desperate Move to Quiet the Epstein Scandal  (Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic)
The president tries to distract his followers with revisionist history about the Russia investigation.
Trump’s strategy of promiscuous dissembling often allows his smaller lies to be injected into the country’s political bloodstream as his more extravagant lies draw attention. In this case, his main intention is to change the subject from Epstein to literally anything else. That he is simultaneously managing to inscribe his revisionist history of the 2016 election into the public record is a secondary victory Trump does not deserve.

ICE’s Mind-Bogglingly Massive Blank Check  (Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic)
Congress has appropriated billions with few strings attached, creating a likely windfall for well-connected firms.

ICE Detains Police Officer Even After DHS System Approved Him for Work  (Praveena Somasundaram, Washington Post)
Federal officials arrested a Maine police officer they said overstayed his visa. His department said DHS had earlier verified the officer’s work eligibility.

How NASA Engineered Its Own Decline  (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic)
The agency once projected America’s loftiest ideals. Then it ceded its ambitions to Elon Musk.

Heeding the Risks of Geopolitical Instability in a Race to Artificial General Intelligence  (Karl P. Mueller, RAND)
As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly advances, many AI experts predict that the first state to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can perform a wide range of tasks better than humans will gain huge advantages in military and economic power. If U.S. and Chinese leaders believe that losing the race to AGI would pose a dire threat to their nations, how will they respond if their strategic competitor appears poised to win it? Or, how will they respond if their state successfully develops AGI and then faces challenges to its newly achieved technological dominance?

Masked and Armed Agents Are Arresting People on U.S. Streets as Aggressive Enforcement Ramps Up  (Dafydd Townley, The Conversation)
There are masked men, and some women, on the streets in American cities, sometimes travelling in unmarked cars, often carrying weapons and wearing military-style kit. They have the power to identify, arrest, detain non-citizens and deport undocumented immigrants. They also have the right to interrogate any individual who they believe is not a citizen over their right to remain in the US.

The FBI’s Leaders ‘Have No Idea What They’re Doing’  (Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic)
A casualty of Trump’s purge speaks out.

Golden Dome Could Learn from SDI Politics  (William Courtney, RealClearDefense / RAND)
President Trump has proposed that to “protect our homeland” he would move ahead with a Golden Dome missile defense. The Department of Defense is seeking a hefty budget increase for it next year, but the program is controversial. Missile defense was contentious also in the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan offered a vision to render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” Golden Dome proponents might avoid some of the disputes of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) era.