Two stories today, ostensibly unrelated, turn out to be the same trick in different costumes.

In Ecuador, men dressed as police showed up and killed the brother of a jailed drug lord. Not corrupt police, mind: men disguised as police, borrowing the uniform because a badge opens doors a criminal record can’t. Last month it was Nigeria, where someone rented office space inside the federal government headquarters, invented an agency out of nothing, got it a budget line, and pulled roughly $700,000 out of the treasury before anyone asked what the agency actually did. Different continents, wildly different scales of ambition, same underlying move: the appearance of state authority is often cheaper to fake than the real thing, and once you’re wearing it, almost nobody checks.

That should bother you more than it usually does, precisely because it works. Every functioning institution runs on people not questioning the letterhead, the badge, the office door with the right seal on it, because verification is expensive and trust is free. Most of us spend our whole lives never once testing whether the uniform in front of us is real.

Smaller thing, before I go: Lindsey Graham’s last trip abroad was to Kyiv, three days before an aortic tear killed him. He was probably the loudest American voice insisting the world take Ukraine’s war and Iran’s threats personally, on the record, in person. Whatever you think of the argument, one fewer person making it this particular week is not nothing.

Sources read for this entry