Hey kids, history is useful. For example, a lot of Nazis today love to say there is no true Nazi, and that they can’t ever be called one credibly, while they plainly do everything they think that a Nazi would.
The accusations against Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino have merit not least of all from the costume history perspective. This is what a Nazi would and did wear.
Undeniable Nazi cosplay by a U.S. official. DHS chose black-and-white for their propaganda, not by accident. They are promoting a 1930s newsreel look with Nazi-adjacent “WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED” overlay typography to complete the visual grammar.
While no single element exclusively says Nazi costume, the curated combination of elements is unmistakable visual quotation of the SS officer aesthetics. If it wears a kilt, it’s well on its way to being a Scotsman. When seeing a red bearded heavy man with a loud brogue tossing a caber, while in a kilt, if you can’t admit a true Scotsman at some point, you’ve failed 101 logic.
Bovino is displaying an obvious Nazi costume.
We aren’t talking accidental resemblance, because achieving this specific silhouette requires very deliberate tailoring choices that reference very particular historical moment. This is not a generic “military coat.” He even boasts how this unique costuming was less scrutinized under Biden, deploying a Nazi tactic to blame others for failing to stop a rise of Nazism sooner.
It’s actually worse than that, rhetorically, because Bovino went from quietly attending a ceremony in his costume, as if nervously dog whistling, to flaunting himself prominently. He pivoted under Trump to widely spreading DHS propaganda videos of the coat with “WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED” Nazi overlays, while leading masked stormtroopers through American cities. The false equivalence of obscure quiet hidden acts with his recent loud violent “Blackshirt” propaganda is actually more damning evidence against Bovino.
Let’s examine the costume uniqueness precisely, like how it might have appeared under 1940s sedition charges.
He flaunts a military-style greatcoat (Mantel) with the characteristic long length, wide shoulders, and dramatic cut associated with German officer coats of the 1930s-40s.
It features the out-of-style double-breasted closure with prominent metal buttons. It’s so dated, that Nazi SS officer greatcoats featured this exact configuration, typically with silver buttons against black wool.
The exaggerated lapel width is also out-of-style and an absurd-looking detail. It matches the theatrical styling of Nazi officer dress uniforms, designed by SS officer Karl Diebitsch to project absurdist authority and oversized intimidation. The coats literally were designed by the SS themselves, for Hugo Boss’ slaves to produce.
The black trench coat has been associated with mass shooters in America not by coincidence. The Nazi SS had specifically adopted black as their signature color (1932-1939), making black military-cut greatcoats particularly loaded as power projection garment by aspirational terrorists threatening democracy.
This coat’s overall gestalt is a high collar, cinched waist, flared skirt below, which conveys the exact SS officer profile.
Black and white isn’t the only reference. Here is what Bovino looks like in color.
Bovino in October 2025 threw this gesture, the kind of thing banned in many countries yet always called ambiguous in America. Source: Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images
Bovino was the only person among over a dozen federal agents invading Minneapolis while wearing a boxy greatcoat and scarf. Everyone else appeared in standard paramilitary tactical gear, as if a scene from Reagan’s shock troops committing crimes against humanity in Guatemala, Chad, Indonesia or Somalia. The costume of evil isn’t needed. But Bovino chose to propagandize it as Nazi stormtrooper operations through American neighborhoods, after ICE agents executed a 37-year-old mother of three.
Bovino then celebrated the execution by saying “Hats off to that ICE agent. I’m glad he made it out alive. I’m glad he’s with his family” invoking a Nazi hats off to Sippenhaft doctrine of family only for enforcers, orphans for anyone resisting.
The man wears Nazi shaped costume, throws a Nazi shaped salute, leads Nazi shaped paramilitary operations through American cities, celebrates Nazi shaped extrajudicial killing, for a Nazi shaped administration whose DHS account engages with self-identified Nazi sympathizers.
The huge Microsoft encryption mushroom cloud in the news isn’t a surprise, yet it still hurts to watch.
Microsoft just seized the dubious award for being the only major platform that enterprise customers can NOT trust.
Bikini Atoll, 1946: U.S. officials assured displaced residents the nuclear tests posed no long-term danger and they could return home soon. The atoll remains uninhabitable eight decades later—a testament to the gap between institutional safety claims and empirical reality.
The only real moat of Microsoft, giving their main customers a safe island if you will, was that it represented enterprise values. The CEO has completely bombed this, within a decade, especially the past five years.
Every C-level who reads the news today about safety of their stored data has to answer to their board tomorrow: why are we still running Windows?
Get rid of it.
DO NOT delay.
The infamous Ireland encryption case, that we all spilled so much ink about five years ago, was a decision point.
…Microsoft was told by the US government to hand over data in Ireland. Had Microsoft built a private-key solution, linked to the national identity of users, they could have demonstrated an actual lack of access to that data. Instead you find Microsoft boasting to the public that state boundaries have been erased, your data moves with you wherever you go, while telling the US government that data in Ireland can’t be accessed.
Microsoft said back then they fought for privacy. The evidence however reveals Microsoft built a lock where they personally kept a copy of every key for them to use without transparency.
I warned about this back then, and unfortunately I’m right. They sold borderless access to users while claiming territorial limits to courts. The architecture was secretly designed to serve Microsoft’s interests, not corporate or anyone else’s privacy. Ireland was theater. Guam is the reveal.
Five years and the Brad Smith stage lipstick rubbed off, exposing a monster CEO that no corporation should be buying anything from anymore. As I asked three years ago:
Nadella’s hidden persona pushes a cut-throat culture of blood-curdling calls to jump into thoughtless action regardless of societal cost. A wolf in lamb’s clothing. So, will Microsoft’s Mister Hyde manifest in changes noticable to the public?
The investigators would have lacked what force of conviction in Guam without the keys? I suspect Brad Smith could have threaded this needle, maybe. He would have laid out some kind of ethical rules and order, maybe. Holding a key is dangerous. Immanuel Kant would have said you don’t give keys to the barbarians; you must lie. Instead, Microsoft did the exact opposite and went public with their data leaking Mister Hyde.
To be clear, I’m an old hat at encryption and digital forensics. I’m an advocate and practitioner of complex key management systems designed to serve lawful purposes. In 2019 I delivered field-level key management into one of the most popular databases, which I had initiated and championed in 2017. And I’ve also been known to defend Microsoft, despite hating them in almost every way for four decades. But this Guam news goes beyond the pale for me, and proves the Samaritan exceptions of Brad Smith were never the rule in Redmond.
The keys likely never were needed in Guam. The keys instead are a political statement about divisiveness and authority. Balance evaporated into propaganda, the kind that Microsoft probably thinks curries favor with the American dictator.
Being a long-time designer and practitioner of emergency exits for worker safety (e.g. avoiding horrible tragedy in Switzerland on New Year’s Eve), to me this is like reading how a construction company kept keys to give out on their authority, which coincides with their political corruption aims.
That’s neither proper design or operation of emergency exits. It’s not invalidation of the exits, it’s condemnation of the builder. It’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and Facebook levels of immorality. Ugh.
Microsoft blew it.
Boom.
They took a dangerous design that had the power of undermining their entire value proposition, like a nuclear warhead never meant to be used, and they just punched a giant self-destruct button, presumably as their proof of loyalty to a dictator.
Matt Green, renowned expert of cryptography (different from social science of key management, but adjacent), told Forbes:
If Apple can do it, if Google can do it, then Microsoft can do it. Microsoft is the only company that’s not doing this.
An ICE forensic expert in early 2025 court documents said they need encryption vendors to hand over keys:
…does not possess the forensic tools to break into devices encrypted with Microsoft BitLocker, or any other style of encryption.
Let me explain the gap between “just do it” and “just do it”, given they are exact opposite expectations. It’s all about the long-known political economy of enterprise software, creating small authority within larger authority. I mean here’s why it’s not a surprise failure, just a huge disappointment.
Apple and Google were built and marketed under libertarian values for radical user authority. Individuals are expected to hold absolute sovereignty, tied to themselves and no one else. Your device, your data, your keys, answering to no one ever (Steve Jobs infamously refused to register a license plate for his cars, Larry Page would rather exile himself to a deserted island than pay a tax). That’s the extreme individualist consumer model, ideologically committed to the “übermensch” who uses tools in opposition and against any other hierarchy.
Enterprises were wisely reluctant to adopt such consumer-only flat hierarchy devices because of obvious misalignment. The whole point of the enterprise is how an organization has leadership that holds mutually respected authority over its individuals.
Microsoft monetized the business of non-state hierarchy. That was the product. Exchange, Domains, SharePoint, Active Directory, Group Policies were all proprietary implementations of standards built on the assumption that any organization of any size wants to pay for trusted group controls. Admins and “master keys” developed as the whole point, with all the baggage of that phrase, while “golden keys” were a clear danger. The exec team can see everything, while role-based staff get limited and revokable grants. The enterprise entity, not the subjects, was the primary Microsoft customer (direct consumer focused products fizzled and failed repeatably).
Enterprise customers wanted governance with a known “master”, a parental-like authority structure. They paid for it. Microsoft delivered it. And it made corporations more legal, more aligned with safety in group contexts, not less.
…a user quit and held onto a company owned Windows laptop for several months. Upon getting it back, that user had either swapped the SSD or reimaged the drive to be used for other purposes. While attempting to do forensics on the drive, I was running into Bitlocker being an issue. The underlying issue is that we have all the key IDs and recovery keys in Entra, but this one did not match…
Who owns the hardware and software? Who owns the data? Who owns the keys?
The betrayal isn’t that Microsoft built hierarchical key systems, which remain a foundation of ethics in business. The betrayal is that Microsoft violated the balance, pierced the boundary instead of honoring it for the enterprise. The keys that were supposed to serve organizational authority far too easily serve someone outside the organization. The enterprise naturally sits between the individual and the state. The NGO even more so. Does your Church run on Windows? Uh oh.
Did the CEO of Microsoft think he could curry political favor by blowing away the balance? What’s the real trigger for such a key release? Apple and Google, by never building balance for hierarchy in the first place, accidentally ended up being more trustworthy by being extremist and less caring. They didn’t betray any enterprise authority because they never claimed to serve it properly. Anti-group is still anti-group, but what now for groups that don’t want to be so far out and anti-group?
Microsoft failed harder than Apple or Google ever did, by advertising they could deliver balance while delivering the exact opposite.
Goodbye Windows.
If you aren’t migrating keys out of Microsoft’s surrendered hands and removing their OS within the next 60 days, scrubbing Windows out of everything, you’re about as cooked as the Bikini Islanders who were told the mushroom cloud wasn’t anything to worry about.
The Microsoft radiation danger in your systems isn’t compatible with market values.
Trump appears identical to Panamanian authoritarian Manuel Noriega in many ways, including physical appearance.
Trump lashed out at Canada, sounding like a syphilitic lunatic, ranting about healthy trade deals with China.
…China, who will “eat them up” within the first year!
Two days earlier at Davos, Trump explained: “Sometimes you need a dictator!”
His warning about China is especially notable, because Trump just ordered the Pentagon to lower preparedness for China.
The Defense Department said in an influential strategy document published Friday that the U.S. military’s top focus is no longer on China but instead the homeland and Western Hemisphere. […] “…concrete interests first. Previous administrations squandered our military advantages and the lives, goodwill, and resources of our people in grandiose nation-building projects and self-congratulatory pledges to uphold cloud-castle abstractions like the rules-based international order,” the report says.
Trump warning Canada that China will “eat them up”, while simultaneously downgrading China as a military priority, creates an incoherent threat narrative unless the actual target is invasion of Canada itself.
The German dictatorship did not mean ‘law and order.’ The Third Reich lived in a state of permanent improvisation: the ‘movement’ once in power was robbed of its targets and instead extended its dynamic into the chaos of rival governmental authorities.
Note that it’s not America First, because it’s “concrete interests first”, which is another layer of disinformation. This elevates racism, greed, corruption, and graft as “concrete” for coin-operated use of Trump’s military force against rivals regardless of any laws. The Pentagon is being told to prepare to go to war with America… first.
All the breathless Monroe Doctrine references also fit into the disinformation. The Doctrine is a “cloud-castle” abstraction, a discredited imperial sphere-of-influence theory from 1823, and therefore can’t be used as his precedent.
Canada’s UN Ambassador Bob Rae called Trump policy what it really is, a “protection racket.”
In other words, Trump is threatened not by China, but by Canada escaping his protection racket through China. He’s angry at Canada because China proves he is weak, while telling everyone China doesn’t matter. It’s a “grab’em by the pussy” doctrine of punching down to feel tall, where might makes wrong and tries to get away with it.
Monroe wouldn’t allow it.
Trump fraudulently appropriates Monroe language to justify invasion of neighbors while explicitly doing the opposite of Monroe, by avoiding confrontation with the outside power. He’s laying the groundwork for invasion of Canada on the pretense of avoiding war with China, while claiming China is the reason for invading Canada.
That’s not Monroe, because that’s… Hitler’s method of disinformation and improvisation.
Canada now logically calls China “more predictable” than the US, a better leader and partner. That is because Trump’s anti-Monroe “concrete interests” formulation is a doctrine of no doctrines. It means decisions are case-by-case based on dictator whimsy, with no predictable rules, by Trump design. Everything is always defined only by one man, who takes everything only for himself and his closest sycophants.
Carl Schmitt’s “decisionism” (being promoted now by Peter Thiel) provides the Nazi theoretical framework that Trump is actually using: the sovereign is whoever decides the exception, and all law flows from that decision rather than constraining it. The basis of Nazism was racial ideology, like Trump’s MAGA as described by Fuentes, and Thiel’s decisionism is the operational method.
Trump’s territorial expansion therefore predictably follows Hitler, exactly: manufacture threat narratives about one actor (Bolshevism, encirclement) while the actual targets were neighbors (Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland). The threat is faked to prevent the target from defending itself. “Protecting ethnic Germans” became the universal pretext for invasion and resource extraction that could be applied anywhere regardless of facts.
Rapid deflation of American power is as obvious as the fall of Nazism, since nobody likes Hitler doctrine but Nazis. Trump obsesses about invading countries to corrupt and pillage them, such as Canada along with Greenland, Panama and Venezuela, and offers absolutely nothing in return if you disagree. His new Pentagon document will soon classify those who disobey him as his primary threat.
The Pentagon is already operationalizing the improvisation. The Joint Chiefs just convened an unprecedented meeting of all 34 Western Hemisphere military leaders for February 11. Meanwhile, U.S. forces continue war crimes, murdering more than 120 civilians in 35 attacks since September, framed as a “drug war”. The false pretense is just for expansion of a military dictatorship over the entire hemisphere.
This “technocracy technate” map from the 1930s illustrates the organizational ambition behind the Pentagon meeting—hemispheric consolidation under authoritarian control. Elon Musk’s Canadian grandfather promoted this vision until he was arrested as an enemy of the state for basically being a Nazi.
Elon Musk’s antisemitic “Technocrat” politician grandfather was arrested in Canada. He fled after WWII to help create Apartheid South Africa, where Elon’s father called them Nazis.
This inevitably will bring global alignment with the EU and China for protection from the lunatic dictator Trump. Already, people around the world describe America as operating on the level of Iran or North Korea. Reporters Without Borders just released a report warning Trump’s “increasingly authoritarian tactics could eventually descend to” the levels of “ruthless dictators” like Daniel Ortega and Vladimir Putin.
Noriega was recruited by the CIA in the 1950s, killed American political opponents 1970-1980s and became de facto ruler of Panama from 1983 to 1989. Then the former head of the CIA ordered him assassinated. After Delta Force failed over a dozen times to kill him, he was convinced to surrender for a show trial, and died in jail.
Trump literally said at Davos on January 21:
Usually they say, ‘He’s a horrible dictator-type person,’ I’m a dictator. But sometimes you need a dictator!
This came two days before his rant against Canada and the Pentagon priority shifting to focus on Canada. He’s not being accused of something, he has announced it.
Historian protip: late-stage syphilis is associated with erratic behavior of dictators like Hitler, Mussolini and Latin American “strongmen”.
The UK system wasn’t designed for a world where the registered keeper wants to absorb unlimited convictions without meaningful consequence.
Enter Tesla, which obviously treats a £1,000 privacy fine while speeding dangerously as a privilege tax, or even a marketing event to promote their brand of lawlessness. If you lease the Swasticar through Tesla Financial Services and are recorded speeding, the company absorbs the fine and you do it again and again and again. That’s clearly worth something to drivers who would otherwise face points accumulation and potential disqualification.
Tesla has targeted (or created) a structural loophole where corporate liability substitutes for individual accountability. It blows right past a system that assumes registered keepers would identify drivers in order to avoid consequences.
To be fair, Tesla told the courts that they blame websites and “2nd class post” for their failure to respond. Yes, we are to believe that eighteen cases to multiple police forces all were lost in the mail. Is that a stunt to propose privatizing mail to be… opened and inspected by xAI for political interference and “intelligence” monetization? Maybe Elon Musk soon will propose replacing British Post with his racist robots. But I digress.
The £20,686 fine against Tesla averages roughly £1,150 per incident. One driver was clocked at 100mph on public roads. Another accumulated enough speeding offenses for license disqualification. Tesla enabled and then shielded these criminal drivers, without consequences, and pled guilty.
Expect it in the next marketing campaign. The Swasticar delivers.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
