“Elon Musk said that X, his social media platform, could have saved Jews from the Holocaust after visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on Monday,” The Forward reports.

Said Musk: “One of the first things the Nazis did when they came in is they shut down all the press and any means of conveying information.”

“Dramatic, newly released video shot by a Jan. 6 rioter shows the confrontation between two Republican members of Congress and Capitol rioters trying to breach the main door into the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. The videos show rioters staring down the barrels of guns through broken glass as they tried to force their way inside,” NBC News reports.

Said one rioter: “We’re coming in one way or another. They can only kill so many of us.”

At one point, as the video is pointed directly at a gun-wielding officer, a rioter shouts: “Fucking pedophiles! We know about your pedophilia!”

Nate Cohn: “Harry Truman was the only president besides Joe Biden to oversee an economy with inflation over 7 percent while unemployment stayed under 4 percent and G.D.P. growth kept climbing. Voters weren’t overjoyed then, either. Instead, they saw Mr. Truman as incompetent, feared another depression and doubted their economic future, even though they were at the dawn of postwar economic prosperity.”

“Normalcy was just beginning to arrive in 1948, when Mr. Truman won re-election… If something similar is almost at hand, it can’t come soon enough for Mr. Biden.”

Nikki Haley was asked last night by a voter about the reason for the Civil War and she didn’t mention slavery in her response.

Of course, the AP notes that South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession — the 1860 proclamation by the state government outlining its reasons for seceding from the Union — mentions slavery in its opening sentence.

Playbook: “You can complexify it all you want, but any answer rooted in reality must acknowledge that the correct answer is: slavery. It was the cornerstone upon which the Confederacy was built. States’ rights? Yes, inasmuch as states wanted the right to allow human beings to be owned as property. (We can’t believe we need to say this in 2023.)”

“They got drunk, painted themselves like Indians and pushed tea bags into the Boston Harbor, which we in Rhode Island think is pretty weak tea compared to blowing up the goddamn boat and shooting its captain. But you know, all those Massachusetts people went on to become president and run Harvard… So they told their story, and their story, and their story.”

— Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), quoted by the Washington Post, arguing that Rhode Island’s 1772 attack on the HMS Gaspee was more important than the 1773 Boston Tea Party.

Smithsonian Magazine: “Contrary to popular belief, the 1773 protest opposed a tax break, not a tax hike. And it didn’t immediately unify the colonies against the British.”

Politico: “Among a small but influential group of young conservative activists and intellectuals, ‘Tricky Dick’ is making a quiet — but notable — comeback. Long condemned by both Democrats and Republicans as the ‘crook’ that he infamously swore not to be, Nixon is reemerging in some conservative circles as a paragon of populist power, a noble warrior who was unjustly consigned to the black list of American history.”

“Across the right-of-center media sphere, examples of Nixonmania abound. Online, popular conservative activists are studying the history of Nixon’s presidency as a ‘blueprint for counter-revolution’ in the 21st century. In the pages of small conservative magazines, readers can meet the ‘New Nixonians’ who are studying up on Nixon’s foreign policy prowess. On TikTok, users can scroll through meme-ified homages to Nixon. And in the weirdest (and most irony laden) corners of the internet, Nixon stans are even swooning over the former president’s swarthy good looks.”

The Texas Historic Commission was pressured into removing books about slavery from the gifts shops of two slave plantation historic sites it oversees, Texas Monthly reports.

Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, has died, CNBC reports.

O’Connor was 93 years old.

Ben Rhodes: “Mr. Kissinger lived half of his life after he left government. He blazed what has become a bipartisan trail of ex-officials building lucrative consulting businesses while trading on global contacts. For decades, he was a coveted guest at gatherings of statesmen and tycoons, perhaps because he could always provide an intellectual framework for why some people are powerful and justified in wielding power.”

“He wrote a shelf of books, many of which polished his own reputation as an oracle of global affairs; after all, history is written by men like Henry Kissinger, not by the victims of superpower bombing campaigns, including children in Laos, who continue to be killed by the unexploded bombs that litter their country.”

Spencer Ackerman: Henry Kissinger, war criminal beloved by America’s ruling class, finally dies.

“Henry Kissinger, a scholar, statesman and celebrity diplomat who wielded unparalleled power over U.S. foreign policy throughout the administrations of Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald Ford, and who for decades afterward, as a consultant and writer, proffered opinions that shaped global politics and business, died Nov. 29 at his home in Connecticut,” the Washington Post reports.

“As the only person ever to be White House national security adviser and secretary of state at the same time, he exercised a control over U.S. foreign policy that has rarely been equaled by anyone who was not president.”

New York Times: “His face was pale and gaunt, his legs were wrapped in a blanket, and his eyes never seemed to make contact with the family members huddled around him. But on Tuesday, Jimmy Carter was there, in the front row of a church in Atlanta, just a few feet from the coffin holding Rosalynn Carter, his wife of 77 years…”

“That he would make such a trek in his condition was, to some, shocking — and, to his family, worrisome.”

“And yet, it was also very true to form: a display of the tenacity, bordering on stubbornness, that has been a defining characteristic of Mr. Carter, the longest-living president in U.S. history.”

“In any other circumstance it would have been a shocking sight. But it was only fitting that in her death Rosalynn Carter, the pioneering woman who turned the role of first lady into a job, did one final thing no one else has been able to do this year: lure Melania Trump out of Mar-a-Lago and back into the public eye. Not only that, but she created a situation in which Mrs. Trump was seated right next to Michelle Obama,” the New York Times reports.

“Mrs. Trump has eschewed almost every major event since leaving the White House in January 2021, including her husband’s several court appearances (the rare exception being his November 2022 announcement that he was once again running for president). But on Tuesday, as is custom, she joined the three other living former first ladies — Mrs. Obama, Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush — as well as Jill Biden, the current first lady, at the Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church in Atlanta, for Mrs. Carter’s memorial service.”

“Take it seriously… This is what authoritarians do. This is what fascists do.”

— Presidential historian Michael Beschloss, quoted by the HuffPost, on Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

A.B. Stoddard: “My father had a story to tell that no one wanted to hear. He was repeatedly warned not to, even by the White House. But he wouldn’t retreat until he had dragged President Reagan, and the whole country, through the simulation of nuclear war.”

“Forty years ago last night, 100 million viewers (out of roughly 234 million Americans) tuned in to The Day After on ABC, making it the most-watched movie in television history. The Nielsen ratings showed that 62 percent of TVs in use on the night of Sunday, November 20, 1983 were tuned in to the movie. And nearly every American had heard about it.”