Robert Rice “Build a Wall” Reynolds lost his seat in the U.S. Senate and so did Gerald Nye. - Rachel Maddow

The umbrella assertion made by Team B — and the most inflammatory — was that the previous National Intelligence Estimates “substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat.” Soviet military leaders weren’t simply trying to defend their territory and their people; they were readying a First Strike option, and the US intelligence community had missed it. What led to this “grave and dangerous flaw” in threat assessment, according to Team B, was an overreliance on hard technical facts, and a lamentable tendency to downplay “the large body of soft data.” This “soft” data, the ideological leader of Team B, Richard Pipes, would later say, included “his deep knowledge of the Russian soul.

Resorting to its favorite device of stirring up racial prejudices and national hatred, fomenting riots and disorder, the Nazi juggernaut sets the stage for Hitler’s invasion, again on the pretext of restoring order.

Climate disaster has put a spotlight on the need for human society to evolve beyond dependence on petroleum, but our very capacity to decide on that — or anything — remains at risk as long as the industry is still ranging like a ravenous predator on the field of democracy.