OUR PICKSU.S. Makes Exit from the WHO Complete | The Organic Industrial Base and the Risks of Competing Against Ourselves | Teenagers Are Pushing Himmler’s Favorite Myth, and more

Emerging Evidence Provides Basis for Opening Investigation of ICE Agent Who Killed Renee Good  (Julia Gegenheimer, Just Security)
The Justice Department’s refusal to investigate ICE Agent Jonathan Ross’s killing of Renee Good breaks with decades of DOJ civil-rights practice and standards.

Teenagers Are Pushing Himmler’s Favorite Myth  (Ali Breland, The Atlantic)
Heinrich Himmler and other Third Reich occultists in the 1930s latched onto the strange idea that the Aryan race was not the product of evolution but descended from semidivine beings who left the heavens and established a secret civilization on Earth, possibly beneath Central Asia. Himmler, the head of the SS, was so enthralled by the possibility of what he considered celestial proof of the superiority of the white race that he provided funding for an SS expedition to Tibet in 1938 in the hope of locating his utopia, according to Black Sun, a 2001 history of Nazi occultism by the British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.
Almost a century later, this idea of a lost Aryan civilization, called Agartha, has caught on again, this time with teenagers posting memes online. If you’re older than 25, you likely missed it.
Before Christmas, the White House shared a Department of Homeland Security meme that has many of the attributes of the Agartha phenomenon but with a festive theme: Santa in front of a subterranean snowy workshop with Earth’s core in the background, overlaid with the text Christmas After Mass Deportations. Jon Lewis, a researcher at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism who has written about neo-Nazism, told me he saw the image as a clear reference to online Agartha content.

Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education  (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic)
Joan Brugge has worked for nearly 50 years as a cancer scientist, studying the earliest signs that someone might become sick. Then the Trump administration canceled her lab’s funding. The administration’s attacks on medicine, culture, and education—which include verbal threats and funding cuts—are about more than just budgeting and bravado. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. She argues that this effort is part of a larger autocratic project to maintain power.

Keep AI Testing Defense-Worthy  (Matteo Pistillo, Lawfare)
In defense and intelligence, AI testing and evaluation should adapt to prevent national security threats arising from AI misalignment.