I did Model UN a little bit in high school and always felt that there was something off about it. The real UN is, of course, hopelessly boring, so to liven up the ersatz version of it, you have to introduce a few rogue elements—you need a dose of fanaticism (I remember our team trying to claim that Suriname, which we represented, was majorly invested in trying to curb genocide in Darfur) and you have to be a bit opportunistic: you’re being taught the lawyerly skills of being able to argue any position, no matter how noxious, with equal conviction. And then at the upper levels of Model UN, a bit of backstabbing helps as well—the real art to a conference is to develop a coalition and then to sell out that coalition so you get all the credit.

Yes, there definitely is a dark side to Model UN, but it didn’t seem like that big of a deal until the delegate from hell, Nick Fuentes, showed up in the national discourse and seemed to take the whole country in a new, and much twerpier, direction.

In an interview on Patrick Bet-David’s podcast PBD, Fuentes made it clear that this pretty much exactly is his origin story. He was more or less fully formed as an annoying right-wing contrarian by the time he got to high school and had his insufferability down pat—“When I was in Model UN, I was one of the best guys on the team, I would win first place every week,” Fuentes recalled. But the Model UN club faculty advisor gave him John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy to read and that gave young delegate Fuentes a new and exciting element to add to his right-wing portfolio beyond just the usual diet of Breitbart News and Prager University.

And, like any debater finding a master theory of the case, Fuentes was quick to realize what he had in his hands. As a way to be provocative, anti-Semitism is hard to beat, and—as anti-Semites have realized for a long, long time—anti-Semitism has a cozy way of explaining just about everything. By the time the terrible child had reached college, he was carving out an anti-Semitic niche for himself within the alt-right movement—which led to his ostracism from leaders of the movement—but with his interview with Tucker Carlson in October, this new brand of anti-Semitism, workshopped for years on Fuentes’ “America First” show, seemed to jump the gate and enter the mainstream.

If we try to understand Fuentes and what he represents, this seems to be the place to start, even if the white nationalist sentiments are maybe baked in a layer deeper. In the same PBD interview, here is how he explained it: “It’s important to impress upon you and maybe everybody where I grew up. It’s like this pocket of America that never changed. It’s a baseball town. Everybody’s white. Everybody’s obsessed with baseball … Take a trip down to Western Springs, Illinois, you’ll see what I mean. It’s like the land that time forgot.”

But Fuentes seemed to quickly recognize that an advocacy of baseball would only take him so far, and, once he’d hit on praising Hitler and discussing world Jewry—and breaking the cordon sanitaire that American politics as a whole had towards anti-Semitism—then the sky was the limit as far as provocation was concerned. And there really was very little, it turned out, that couldn’t be explained through anti-Semitism. On his show, he argued that JFK was killed because he had opposed Israel’s nuclear weapons program—or maybe it was that JFK was killed because he had tried to get the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to register as a foreign agent, or maybe it was both, but, anyway, it was pretty definitely the Jews. “So this is an occupied nation,” Fuentes continued, describing the United States as “a vassal of Israel.”

It is a note that we haven’t heard on a mass scale in American politics in quite some time, but it’s also not a new story—“it’s maybe old ideas presented in a new way,” as Fuentes said on PBD. And to put the right lens on Fuentes it may be worth doing a short refresher on modern anti-Semitism.

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Historians tend to divide anti-Semitism into different parts. There’s a hoary old tradition of Christian anti-Semitism with blood libels and Christian children baked into matzah mix and a pogrom whenever things got a little slow in your village, and that sort of thing. By the late 19th century, the “Jewish Question” that had so bedeviled earlier generations seemed to have resolved itself—Jews had full citizenship in all German states by 1871 and Christian anti-Semitism seemed to be on the wane, together with a general decline in religiosity. At which point an entirely new anti-Semitism suddenly sprouted up. Wilhelm Marr, “the patriarch of anti-Semitism,” published The Victory of Judaism Over Germandom in 1879 and founded The League of Anti-Semites the same year, with a doctrine of blood-based “anti-Semitism” replacing the earlier religion-based “anti-Judaism.” Marr himself at the end of his life would distance himself from anti-Semitism and conclude that, really, it was the greater force of the Industrial Revolution that had generated social upheaval in Germany. And that’s been the general academic understanding of what the new anti-Semitism really entailed—it was a disgruntlement with modernity and with cosmopolitanism, with Jews serving as a scapegoat.

The English writer Hilaire Belloc, no mean anti-Semite himself, would observe at a quieter moment, “the European so misunderstands the Jew that he imputes to him powers which neither he nor any other poor mortal can ever exercise.” But in the heat of politics it was often hard to remember that. The changes of modernity were so sweeping that it helped to reduce the scale of it by bringing things down to a more manageable cast of the Rothschilds and Syndicate and the Elders of Zion.

The sense of crisis that beset rapidly-industrializing nations in the 19th century has its parallels in our time. The longing for agriculture seems to have been replaced by nostalgia for baseball and barbecue in a small town. The understanding is that a solidly American way of life has been sold out by globalism—by foreign wars, foreign investments, and ever-escalating national debt. In another video, a rant against Ben Shapiro, Fuentes laid out his general complaint in a way that, I suspect, resonated with some enormous number of listeners: “Our country is broke. Our future is mortgaged. We’re debt slaves to the government and Black Rock.” If Trump built his movement around a rejection of outsourcing and the deindustrialization of the heartland, he never entirely spelled out who was responsible. Fuentes, however, does—and it’s a familiar formula. It’s the bankers, and the bankers are Jewish. And to that, he adds a new element. The anti-Semites of an earlier era didn’t have Israel to kick around, but Fuentes does. Here, for instance, is his theory of how the Iraq War came about:

Because [Kennedy] tried to make sure that Israel just like all the other countries did not nuclearize because we’re against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and they killed him for it. And that set in motion something that eventually led to 9/11, the biggest attack on our soil in history, and then that set in motion the biggest strategic disaster in the history of the United States, which is the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror and the present situation we find ourselves in in the Middle East. Are you starting to get it now?

How well it all fits together! How many factors—corporate pursuit of profits, bipartisan excitement about new markets in the ‘90s, warmongering generated largely by the Republican Party after 9/11—fade out of the equation, and all that’s left to explain fifty years of economic and foreign policy is Israel, AIPAC, the cunning Jews, and the simple baseball-loving volk of the Chicago suburbs being led along as if on a string.

But to get to this time-honored position, you have to get around a certain national consensus—in a word, you have to get around V-E Day and the last real moment of national unity, which happened to be an international war fought and won against the worst-ever enemy of the Jews. It’s a real obstacle, and when Trump dreams of “making America great again” he often seems to be dreaming explicitly of this time—Bannon brought close to tears whenever he watches 12 O’Clock High, Trump looking to surround himself with the “central casting” version of a mid-20th century style national security apparatus.

But Fuentes has been willing to work past all of this. His strategy here is to studiously downplay the importance of Nazism. The “Hitler apologetic” clips of Fuentes are what have gotten the most play around the web, so it can be a little hard to follow how his understanding of Nazism fits into his overall scheme. Here is how he puts it in one of his videos: “To the extent that we make jokes about Hitler … it is basically to treat this in a sacrilegious way, it is to blaspheme this religion, it is to destroy the sacred cow, the idol of the Holocaust.”

In other words: “shut up Jews.” The argument—and this hearkens back to the pre-war “genteel anti-Semitism” that had a way of overlooking or excusing Hitler’s racial laws—is that the Holocaust is a glorified form of victimhood politics. As Fuentes explicitly puts it, “I’m trying to get to a point where Hitler is like every other leader.” And Fuentes would very much like to replace that point of mid-20th century anti-Nazi unity with something different—a “heritage conservatism” that reaches back to 19th century nativist strains and that views all immigration as an assault on an ethnicity-based national identity. If that makes it sound like Jewishness is incidental to Fuentes’ vision, though, it’s not—and a great deal of airtime on his show is taken up with his pushing back against right-wing critics who want him to tone down his anti-Semitism. “‘Hey well, we’re gonna moderate on the Hitler stuff, right?’ he imagines an interlocutor saying to him, to which Fuentes responds, “and it’s like no, I’m not.’” It really is important for him to get around the nostalgia for the post-World War II consensus and to substitute a vision from a much earlier era of a white ethnostate.

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This, certainly, is confusing to other conservatives, and there was a kind of eye-popping moment during the Carlson interview, which played out pretty much exactly like the church pastor inviting a misbehaving youth into his office expecting to find common ground in Christ’s love only to discover that the lad really had sold his soul to the devil. For professional reasons both Fuentes and Carlson had a great deal at stake in making the interview as genial as possible, and much of it had a kind of bachelorette party feel of forgiving past slights (“I thought you were a Fed!” / “I thought you were a Fed!”) until they stumbled over the real crux of their disagreement. “God created every person as an individual not as a group. No woman gave birth to a community. We hate that thinking, right? Collectivist thinking like that. That’s identity politics. … But we’re not going to be that, right or no?” said Carlson, who, over the course of his many career turns, maybe had lost track of what he actually stood for. Fuentes, though, was quick to set him straight. “You say identity politics like it’s a bad thing. I think identity is a reality.”

In their eagerness to be friendly, Carlson and Fuentes tried once again to strenuously agree with each other, but they had come across maybe the deepest divide of all—the question of how moral responsibility is assessed—and, coincidentally or not, it echoed the deep divide within 19th century anti-Semitism. For Carlson, steeped in a Judeo-Christian tradition, morality is ultimately individual and a matter of one’s actions. For Fuentes, it is identitarian and a question in the end of blood—a person could act in certain ways based only on their heredity. A divide much along these lines became particularly poisonous when the old Christian anti-Semitism, which emphasized conversion for Jews, gave way to another blood-based form of anti-Semitism where even conversion to Christianity couldn’t obviate the fundamental stain. For historians of anti-Semitism, it was that ultra-nationalist view that represented a truly virulent turn in anti-Semitism’s history, and in our time we have been treated to seeing it articulated right under the eyes of the befuddled Carlson.

There is much blame to go around for this dark turn in the discourse. Attempts to censor Fuentes—he has been kicked off just about every possible social media platform and at one point was on a TSA no-fly list—seem not to have worked and succeeded only in making him something of a martyr. The bro-ish, edgelord tendencies of the internet have given cover, through various forms of threadbare irony, to his toxic ideology. The left takes the lion’s share of the blame for bringing identity into the forefront of political discourse, along with its evident implication that groups are to blame for the actions of anyone in their group and that guilt can never entirely be washed away. And then people like Carlson guilelessly bring the abhorrent ideology closer to the mainstream and in so doing launder it for mass consumption.

And now here we are. Whatever else we might have disagreed on in our politics, it used to be that we could agree on this: Hitler bad; Holocaust bad; defeating Hitler good. Now, lots of people aren’t so sure. Populists and demagogues have throughout history discovered the explanatory power of anti-Semitism, and now the world’s worst Model UNer has as well, and in almost exactly the same form that Wilhelm Marr stumbled across back in 1880. The usual question with Fuentes—of whether he’s sincere in his anti-Semitism, or basically kidding—doesn’t matter. Anti-Semitism tends always to be an opportunistic mode of thought—like a favorite hat that can be taken off and put back on but that is always deployable when some really tidy explanation is called for for some vexing societal problem. Cognizant of where it can lead to, the West, with startling unanimity, has imposed a kind of public moratorium on anti-Semitism for the last 75 years, but the cynical will sooner or later find their way to it, as Fuentes did somewhere in the doldrums of some high school Model UN conference and then spent the next decade milking it for all it was worth. It really was nice to have a break from this particular strand of politics for as long as we did, but no longer. In a major way, anti-Semitism has reentered our discourse and, now, all bets are off.

Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

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UChicago is set to close the $375 million sale of its Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) to Morningstar, a Chicago-based investment firm, by the end of 2025. The sale, announced on September 23, comes as the University’s finances have been under increasing strain, but CRSP’s chair said the decision was unrelated to broader financial issues in an interview with the Maroon.

CRSP, founded at UChicago in 1960 and known in the financial sector as the first database of historical stock market data, currently provides data for hundreds of subscribers internationally and maintains its own stock indexes linked to $3 trillion in assets. The Center generates nearly $55 million in revenue annually.

CRSP data helped inform the work of Booth professor Eugene Fama (M.B.A. ‘63, Ph.D. ‘64), who won a Nobel Prize in 2013.

The University ran a budget deficit of roughly $288 million in fiscal year (FY) 2024—a figure that has substantially increased since 2022. It also carries a higher ratio of debt relative to its endowment than many of its peers. The University announced an effort to cut $100 million in spending over the coming years, with pauses in admissions to Ph.D. and master’s programs between 2026 and 2027, reductions in the hiring rate of tenure-track faculty, the postponing of capital projects, and more.

The sale has attracted scrutiny from observers in the University community and the press, with speculation that the deal represents an attempt to alleviate short-term financial pressures.

“To spend a lot of money, you could borrow or you could spend your savings—the University of Chicago has actually been doing both,” said Classics professor Clifford Ando, who has written extensively about the University’s finances. “We’re in a financially very, very precarious situation, so we need cash… I think the sale of CRSP should be compared to the sudden effort we made in 2016 and 2017 to sell an enormous number of buildings, also to solve a liquidity problem.”

“It’s very hard for me to think of a justification for sale that doesn’t arise from profound weakness,” Ando continued. “If you’re strong, you don’t sell assets like that. And, in particular, you don’t sell assets like that to your patrons.”

But Madhav Rajan, dean of the Booth School of Business and chair of CRSP’s Board of Directors, told the Maroon that the sale is in the best interest of CRSP and Booth, and that the University’s finances had no bearing on the decision.

“The [University’s finances and CRSP] have nothing to do with each other,” Rajan said. “We have a fiduciary board which has to do what’s right for CRSP… We never went out to try to sell it—that was never even in the cards, but we had somebody who had an interest in it.”

Rajan said the prospect of a sale only came about when another firm indicated interest in acquiring CRSP around 18 months ago, and the process was conducted by CRSP leadership with no input from the University’s Board other than to approve the sale.

Some coverage has described the sale of CRSP—which Forbes called “one of [UChicago’s] most valuable research centers”—as embarrassing to the University. Rajan rejected those characterizations.

“If this was the CRSP from 50 years ago, [it] would be different,” Rajan said. But “that affiliation has faded over time… We don’t really think we’re losing anything. I’ve gotten [almost] zero reaction from alumni as [to] anything negative about this transaction.”

Booth will place sale proceeds into “some form of long-term investment” that would generate more than CRSP produces for the University now, Rajan said. “I think right off the bat, [profits would] be more than what we were getting from CRSP on an annual basis, which is why the deal makes sense for us.”

Rajan also said the sale will benefit CRSP, as ownership by a commercial firm will allow it to expand its services to a wider audience while benefiting from more commercial resources. “There’s only so much we can do as a not-for-profit.”

CRSP had already reorganized to become a limited liability company legally separate from Booth in 2020 to offer more competitive compensation, Rajan said.

The University hired an investment bank and an external lawyer to conduct a “completely transparent process done by people who had an interest in maximizing the money,” Rajan said. Multiple firms expressed interest and were approached to acquire CRSP, and “at the end, Morningstar continued to be interested after they did all their due diligence.”

Founded by alumnus Joe Mansueto (A.B.’78, M.B.A.’80) in 1984, Morningstar is an investment research firm that provides clients with data tools and portfolio management support. His wife, Rika (A.B. ’91), currently serves on the University’s Board of Trustees, and the Mansueto Library is named after the couple.

Though an agreement has been reached, the sale is not expected to be finalized until the end of 2025.

UChicago researchers will retain free access to CRSP databases for the next seven years, after which the University will have to pay to gain access, Rajan said.

“I think CRSP has done a lot for the University, but it’s also time that it’s owned by somebody commercially who can give it the real investment that it needs to get to the next level,” Rajan said. “The intention very much is that they will continue… to support the research community.”

I’m not saying this will definitely happen, but I think we could be on the cusp of a significant shift in Windows market share for consumer computers. It is not going to drop to 2% in a year or anything, but I feel like a few pieces are coming together that could move the needle in a way we have not seen in several decades. There are three things on my mind .

Number one is that Microsoft just does not feel like a consumer tech company at all anymore. Yes, they have always been much more corporate than the likes of Apple or Google, but it really shows in the last few years as they seem to only have energy for AI and web services. If you are not a customer who is a major business or a developer creating the next AI-powered app, Microsoft does not seem to care about you.

I just do not see excitement there. The only thing of note they have added to Windows in the last five years is Copilot, and I have yet to meet a normal human being who enjoys using it. And all the Windows 11 changes seem to have just gone over about as well as a lead balloon. I just do not think they care at all about Windows with consumers.

The second thing is the affordable MacBook rumored to be coming out in 2026. This will be a meaningfully cheaper MacBook that people can purchase at price points that many Windows computers have been hovering around for many years. Considering Apple’s focus on consumers first and a price point that can get more people in the door, it seems like that could move the needle.

The third thing is gamers. Gamers use Windows largely because they have to, not because they are passionate about it. Maybe they were passionate about it in the 90s, but any passion has gone away. Now it is just the operating system they use to launch Steam. In early 2026, Valve is going to release the Steam Machine after a few years of success with the Steam Deck. We will see how they do there, but what they are doing is releasing a machine that runs Windows games on Linux. And it runs them really well. The Steam Deck has proven that over the last few years. If someone can package up a version of Linux that is optimized for gamers, then I think there is a meaningful number of PC gamers who would happily run that on their computer instead.

I do not know if this is going to happen. It is always easy to be cynical and suggest everything will stay the same, and I understand that markets of this size take a long time to change. However, it just feels like there are some things happening right now that are going to move the needle, and I am excited to see what happens.

With ardent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the country’s top health official, a federal webpage that previously laid out the ample evidence refuting the misinformation that vaccines cause autism was abruptly replaced Wednesday with an anti-vaccine screed that promotes the false link.

It’s a move that is sure to be celebrated by Kennedy’s fringe anti-vaccine followers, but will only sow more distrust, fear, and confusion among the public, further erode the country’s crumbling vaccination rates, and ultimately lead to more disease, suffering, and deaths from vaccine-preventable infections, particularly among children and the most vulnerable.

On the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website titled “Autism and Vaccines,” the previous top “key point” accurately reported that: “Studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD).”

But, under Kennedy, the top “key point”  is now the erroneous statement: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, did not respond to questions from Ars Technica about the change, including why it appears to be dismissing the substantial number of high-quality studies providing evidence that there is no association between lifesaving immunizations and the neurodevelopmental disorder. It also did not address questions of whether CDC scientists were included in the rewrite.

An emailed response attributed to HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said, “We are updating the CDC’s website to reflect gold standard, evidence-based science.”

The Washington Post reported overnight that five anonymous agency officials said career scientists at the CDC were unaware of the changes prior to the update and were not consulted on the content.

“Intentionally trying to mislead parents”

The newly defaced page claims that “health authorities” have “ignored” data supporting a link between autism and vaccines. The page goes on to cherry-pick a few fringe studies while making aluminum adjuvants a prime suspect for the imagined link.

The “Background” section claims that half of parents of autistic children “believe” vaccines caused their child’s condition. The claim is backed by a study that surveyed 77 parents nearly 20 years ago. The page then goes on to mention federal reviews, most recently from 2021, that point out areas where there’s limited data. The federal reviews are based on studies from the Institute of Medicine, which is the defunct name for the National Academy of Medicine. The National Academies changed the name in 2015; the most recent IOM study referenced on the new CDC site is from 2014.

The page notes that the federal and old IOM reports evaluated the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine and found “a high strength of evidence that there is no association with autism spectrum disorders.” But it then goes on to argue why the “high strength” evidence is actually weak. It then confusingly launches into criticism of aluminum adjuvants, which the MMR vaccine does not contain.

The page singles out diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccines (DTap, Tdap, and Td), which do contain aluminum as an adjuvant. But a high-quality study of 1.2 million children published this year found that exposure to the teeny amounts of aluminum in vaccines had no links to autism or other conditions.

After that study was published, Kennedy—who has no medical or scientific background—demanded it be retracted, as it refuted his beliefs. The journal that published the article, the Annals of Internal Medicine, rejected the demand, finding no faults with the study. Outside health experts and scientists have praised the study as being of high quality and “solid.”

The new CDC page ends with a strange asterisked note explaining why a subhead from the past accurate webpage remained, stating: “Vaccines do not cause autism*.” The note explains that this was left to uphold an agreement between Kennedy and Senator Bill Cassidy, who cast a critical vote to confirm Kennedy as health secretary. HHS did not respond to Ars Technica’s question of how the rest of the page upholds the agreement.

Since the changes to the website came to light late Wednesday, medical and health experts have expressed dismay, anger, and disbelief at the change. In a statement, President of the American Academy of Pediatrics Susan Kressly blasted the CDC’s new page, calling the link “false.”

“Since 1998, independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving over 5.6 million people. The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism. Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents.

We call on the CDC to stop wasting government resources to amplify false claims that sow doubt in one of the best tools we have to keep children healthy and thriving: routine immunizations. The American Academy of Pediatrics stands with members of the autism community who have asked for support in stopping this rumor from spreading any further.”

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The Ukrainian Army is knocking a once-hyped Russian superweapon out of the sky by jamming it with a song and tricking it into thinking it’s in Lima, Peru. The Kremlin once called its Kh-47M2 Kinzhal ballistic missiles “invincible.” Joe Biden said the missile was “almost impossible to stop.” Now Ukrainian electronic warfare experts say they can counter the Kinzhal with some music and a re-direction order.

As winter begins in Ukraine, Russia has ramped up attacks on power and water infrastructure using the hypersonic Kinzhal missile. Russia has come to rely on massive long-range barrages that include drones and missiles. An overnight attack in early October included 496 drones and 53 missiles, including the Kinzhal. Another attack at the end of October involved more than 700 mixed missiles and drones, according to the Ukrainian Air Force.

“Only one type of system in Ukraine was able to intercept those kinds of missiles. It was the Patriot system, which the United States provided to Ukraine. But, because of the limits of those systems and the shortage of ammunition, Ukraine defense are unable to intercept most of those Kijnhals,” a member of Night Watch—a Ukrainian electronic warfare team—told 404 Media. The representative from Night Watch spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to discuss war tactics.

Kinzhals and other guided munitions navigate by communicating with Russian satellites that are part of the GLONASS system, a GPS-style navigation network. Night Watch uses a jamming system called Lima EW to generate a disruption field that prevents anything in the area from communicating with a satellite. Many traditional jamming systems work by blasting receivers on munitions and aircraft with radio noise. Lima does that, but also sends along a digital signal and spoofs navigation signals. It “hacks” the receiver it's communicating with to throw it off course.

Night Watch shared pictures of the downed Kinzhals with 404 Media that showed a missile with a controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA), an active antenna that’s meant to resist jamming and spoofing. “We discovered that this missile had pretty old type of technology,” Night Watch said. “They had the same type of receivers as old Soviet missiles used to have. So there is nothing special, there is nothing new in those types of missiles.”

Night Watch told 404 Media that it used this Lima to take down 19 Kinzhals in the past two weeks. First, it replaces the missile’s satellite navigation signals with the Ukrainian song “Our Father Is Bandera.” 

Any digital noise or random signal would work to jam the navigation system, but Night Watch wanted to use the song because they think it’s funny. “We just send a song…we just make it into binary code, you know, like 010101, and just send it to the Russian navigation system,” Night Watch said. “It’s just kind of a joke. [Bandera] is a Ukrainian nationalist and Russia tries to use this person in their propaganda to say all Ukrainians are Nazis. They always try to scare the Russian people that Ukrainians are, culturally, all the same as Bandera.”

Once the song hits, Night Watch uses Lima to spoof a navigation signal to the missiles and make them think they’re in Lima, Peru. Once the missile’s confused about its location, it attempts to change direction. These missiles are fast—launched from a MiG-31 they can hit speeds of up to Mach 5.7 or more than 4,000 miles per hour—and an object moving that fast doesn’t fare well with sudden changes of direction.

“The airframe cannot withstand the excessive stress and the missile naturally fails,” Night Watch said. “When the Kinzhal missile tried to quickly change navigation, the fuselage of this missile was unable to handle the speed…and, yeah., it was just cut into two parts…the biggest advantage of those missiles, speed, was used against them. So that’s why we have intercepted 19 missiles for the last two weeks.”

Night Watch told 404 Media that Russia is attempting to defeat the Lima system by loading the missiles with more of the old tech. The goal seems to be to use the different receivers to hop frequencies and avoid Lima’s signal. 

“What is Russia trying to do? Increase the amount of receivers on those missiles. They used to have eight receivers and right now they increase it up to 12, but it will not help,” Night Watch said. “The last one we intercepted, they already used 16 receivers. It’s pretty useless, that type of modification.” 

According to Night Watch, countering Lima by increasing the number of receivers on the missile is a profound misunderstanding of its tech. “They think we make the attack on each receiver and as soon as one receiver attacks, they try to swap in another receiver and get a signal from another satellite. But when the missile enters the range of our system, we cover all types of receivers,” they said. “It’s physically impossible to connect with another satellite, but they think that it’s possible. That’s why they started with four receivers and right now it’s 16. I guess in the future we’ll see 24, but it’s pretty useless.”