Musk’s formulation of “If you have a womb, you are a woman. Otherwise, you are not“, is the biological-determinist reduction that underpinned Nazi ideology about women.
Source: Twitter
The specific reduction of womanhood to a single organ, with rights of citizenship/identity derived only from reproductive capacity, is what Hitler used to do.
Nazism overtly made biological reproduction the definitional criterion for women’s social value. Hitler articulated this view most directly in a 1934 speech to the National Socialist Women’s League (NS-Frauenschaft), where he contrasted the “larger world” of men (state, struggle, willingness to die for community) with the “smaller world” of women (husband, family, children, home). He framed these as complementary “battlefields” by stating that for women, childbearing was the equivalent of men’s military sacrifice.
The regime’s position, like Musk today, was explicitly biological-determinist: a woman’s entire value in society was tied to their reproductive capacity. The Nazis manifested policies like the Mutterkreuz (Mother’s Cross) medals awarded for bearing children, and the exclusion of women from professions, higher education, and political participation. The Lebensborn program flowed from womb-is-destiny framework, feeding into Lebensraum. The specific framing around the womb as definitional appeared in Nazi ideological texts more broadly. Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century was explicit about the biological essentialism that Musk now promotes.
Musk’s 13 words simply compress this flawed and historically inaccurate Nazi logic. If he were smarter he would have used 14 words.
Gender categories beyond biological sex are the human norm: Hijra in South Asia, Fa’afafine in Samoa, Māhū in Hawaii, Muxe among the Zapotec, Kathoey in Thailand, the Bissu of Sulawesi, Mukhannathun in early Islamic Arabia, the Galli priests of ancient Rome. The womb-as-definition claim isn’t ancient wisdom, it’s twentieth-century fascism. Musk is promoting Nazi dog whistles as doctrine, and those nodding along are historically illiterate.
What’s really going on is Musk deadnaming his daughter and calling her identity a “tragic mental illness”, before invoking Nazism as why. He is calling her a failure in his master plan for a white nationalist concubine operation.
This is not a father making an abstract philosophical judgment about gender, he’s intentionally using hate speech to dehumanize his own child.
The fact that Musk recently posted that he does not believe Hitler, Stalin or Mao are responsible for deaths (because their “employees” were) shows that he does not take accountability for the harms he intends to inflict against his own daughter.
Joe – Uh, how you gonna get down to the shore?
Rod – Funny you should ask, I’ve got a car now.
Joe – Oh wow, how’d you get a car?
Rod – Oh my parents drove it up here from the Bahamas.
Joe – You’re kidding!
Rod – I must be, the Bahamas are islands, okay, the important thing now, is that you ask me what kind of car I have.
Joe – Uh, what kinda car do ya’ got?
Rod – I’ve got a BITCHIN CAMARO!
The most dangerous actors aren’t the incompetent or the overtly malicious, they’re the genuinely skilled professionals who understand that what they’re doing serves no legitimate purpose but continue doing it well.
Admiral Holsey stepping down suggests at least one officer has decided not to be that person.
Alvin Holsey, Admiral Who Oversaw Boat Strikes Off Venezuela’s Coast, Retires: The admiral had abruptly announced that he would step down as the head of the U.S. Southern Command.
Understanding why requires looking back fifty years.
Creighton Abrams was arguably the most capable American tactical commander since Ulysses Grant. Both demonstrated mastery of logistics, both operated under severe political constraints, and both accepted operational risks their predecessors had avoided.
26th December 1944 Commanding 37th Tank Battalion, CCR, 4th Armoured Division, Lt. Colonel Abrams requested he be allowed to dash his Sherman tanks through Assenois to breach German defenses and reach Bastogne to relieve the surrounded 101st Airborne. Abrams was right, and for this Third US Army Commander, General George S. Patton called him the “world champion” tank commander.
A critical difference between these two men lay in civil-military alignment: Grant’s civilian leadership shared his strategic objectives, while Abrams served an administration whose domestic political imperatives systematically undermined coherent strategy.
The constitutional position on Abrams’ tactical work under President Nixon is unambiguous. Congress never authorised military operations in Cambodia; the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution’s writ extended to Vietnam alone. More significantly, the military maintained dual reporting systems that recorded ordnance falling on South Vietnamese coordinates when it actually struck Cambodian territory.
This went far beyond unauthorised action into being a deliberate falsification designed to deceive the branch constitutionally empowered to declare war.
A crime.
It occurred within a broader pattern: Nixon had intervened to obstruct the 1968 Paris peace negotiations to secure electoral advantage, then required the war’s continuation through 1972 for re-election. American casualties served the GOP’s domestic political purposes, literally throwing soldiers’ lives away to win votes.
Abrams’ role was executing Nixon’s strategically incoherent and illegal policies whose consequences extended far beyond military failure. The destabilisation of Cambodia, while not solely attributable to American mistakes, was materially accelerated by it, contributing to state collapse that enabled Khmer Rouge consolidation and genocide.
The Khmer Rouge were teenagers wielding the latest weapons technology to destroy a country from within, a pattern I’ve traced to DOGE staff weaponizing AI to systematically dismantle American state capacity. Two million died from Pol Pot; current projections suggest two million a year dead from DOGE cuts.
Abrams’s culpability should not be reduced to mere order-following. The Abrams Tapes, declassified two decades after his death, demonstrate that he understood the conflict was “basically a political contest.” His failure was therefore not one of comprehension but of institutional role: generals propose military solutions because military solutions are what generals are positioned to propose. His legitimate concern, that American withdrawal was outpacing South Vietnamese military capacity, was correct. His proposed remedy, however, reflected the persistent American misapprehension that a complex insurgency with deep political roots could be addressed through conventional operations against geographic sanctuaries.
The hunt for COSVN epitomised this confusion. American planners conceived of a simplistic targetable headquarters, a “jungle Pentagon”, despite evidence they faced a distributed network of cadres. Nixon’s “Vietnamization” plan compounded this Americanization error by treating military capability as the binding constraint when the fundamental problem was political legitimacy. The Saigon government’s inability to command popular loyalty was never a problem that American firepower could resolve, especially from 90,000 feet.
The sixty-day operational limit also telegraphed the campaign’s own negation plan. Any adversary capable of basic strategic patience would disperse, wait, and return on schedule. That anyone would claim American success was measurable in captured rice and destroyed bunkers merely confirmed total absence of meaningful strategic metrics. The North Vietnamese simply relocated deeper into Cambodia, the Cambodian state authority collapsed further, and so the Khmer Rouge recruitment accelerated.
Most damning is how the promised “breathing room” was a shrewd lie, exposing the American Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon as a delusional sycophant. His saccharin cables consistently contradicted accurate CIA assessments and field reporting, to give Nixon what he wanted to hear instead of reality. The Paris agreement that Nixon celebrated as his gift to the world was immediately ignored and within months the North Vietnamese were rolling into Saigon after domestic American backlash had accelerated withdrawal timelines.
None of this absolves Hanoi’s strategic choices, Thieu’s venality, or the Khmer Rouge’s ideological pathology. It shows American ideological intervention created conditions that other actors easily exploited. Whether Abrams’s resignation, like Holsey’s, or public dissent would have altered this trajectory is unknowable. What remains clear is that his silence stands as complicity in an illegal campaign whose strategic bankruptcy he understood.
Nixon knew peace talks were potentially ending the war in 1968 but he convinced America to elect him by scuttling them. He repeatedly lied to the public and to South Vietnam to take power, which meant expansion and prolonging of war while declaring himself the anti-war leader. Tens of thousands more Americans were killed needlessly by him, just to abruptly abandon South Vietnam and let it fall catastrophically in 1975.
Cambodia’s genocide followed.
Abrams had to hide his knowledge that the President’s war plan was strategically bankrupt. Today Hegseth doesn’t have to hide anything because his audience doesn’t care.
The cruelty is the point now; the incompetence is a feature. You don’t need competent complicity when there’s no accountability mechanism left to evade. You just do the crimes, lie about them badly, contradict yourself publicly, and get rewarded because the crimes signal tribal loyalty.
The system that produced Abrams’s silence has decayed into one that produces Hegseth.
Admiral Holsey walked away. Under Trump there will always be someone who won’t.
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
I ran over my neighbors
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Now I’m in all the papers
My folks bought me a bitchin’ Camaro
With no insurance to match
So if I happen to run you down
Please don’t leave a scratch
I ran over some old lady
One night at the county fair And I didn’t get arrested
Because my dad’s the mayor
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Donuts on your lawn
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Tony Orlando and Dawn
When I drive past the kids
They all spit and cuss
‘Cause I’ve got a bitchin’ Camaro
And they have to ride the bus
So you’d better get out of my way
When I come through your yard
‘Cause I’ve got a bitchin’ Camaro
And an Exxon credit card
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
Hey man where ya headed?
Bitchin’ Camaro, bitchin’ Camaro
I don’t want unleaded
“Bitchin’ Camaro” by the Dead Milkmen, released on their debut album “Big Lizard in My Backyard” (1985).
With those two words, House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers declared he has no interest in investigating a military campaign that has killed nearly 90 people in 100 days, forced the resignation of a combatant commander, and caused one of America’s closest intelligence partners to stop sharing information with us.
One classified briefing. No public hearings. No document requests. No testimony under oath. Just a quick look at some footage with the admiral who ordered the strikes, and Rogers has “all the answers he needed.”
This isn’t oversight. This is complicity.
The broken promise arc (pledged oversight, then had one classified briefing, then announced suddenly “it’s done”) reinforces this is a deliberate coverup.
The facts that Rogers is hand waving about and trying to get people to ignore are damning.
Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of Southern Command, abruptly announced his resignation in October after less than a year in the position. Reports indicate he raised concerns about the legality of strikes against alleged drug boats and was pushed out by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. When Holsey appeared before the committee this week, he suddenly claimed his departure was “personal” and “had nothing to do with the operations in his command.”
A four-star admiral doesn’t abandon his command after less than a year for personal reasons. He does it when he’s told to execute orders he believes are illegal, refuses, and gets forced out. Then he lies to Congress about it because the alternative is worse.
The United Kingdom—our closest intelligence partner, a Five Eyes member, the special relationship itself—has stopped sharing intelligence with us over these operations. That doesn’t happen over legitimate military action.
That happens when an ally concludes they cannot be associated with what we’re doing. And what are we doing? The failed Iraq War all over again? President Trump told Politico this week, as if trying to sound like President Bush:
We’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon, too.
Ninety dead in 100 days, and the promise is endless, escalation with no outcome other than deaths mounting.
The legal framework here isn’t complicated. Shooting survivors in the water after disabling their vessel isn’t drug interdiction. It’s summary execution. When military forces kill people who pose no immediate threat, who are not engaged in hostilities, who are in the water clinging to wreckage, that’s a war crime. It doesn’t matter if the victims were smuggling drugs. It doesn’t matter if they were bad people. The laws of armed conflict don’t have a “they deserved it” exception.
Rogers knows this. He sat through the same briefings. He saw the same footage that made Adam Smith call for “a full-scale investigation.” He watched the same video that reportedly shows what actually happened to those people in the water.
And his response was: “It’s done.”
Under international law, command responsibility extends beyond those who pull triggers.
It encompasses those who knew or should have known that crimes were being committed and failed to take action to prevent or punish them. Rogers isn’t in the chain of command, but he chairs the committee that exists specifically to provide oversight of military operations. When he sees evidence of potential war crimes and actively refuses to investigate, he’s not just failing at his job. He’s providing cover.
The congressional response to 90 deaths and a combatant commander’s suspicious resignation? Withhold a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget until he hands over unedited footage.
That’s not accountability.
That’s the appearance of accountability, carefully calibrated to produce criminals.
We’ve seen this pattern before.
We saw it with the torture program, where oversight committees were briefed just enough to make them complicit, then told everything was legal. We saw it with drone strikes, where the classification system ensured that no one with authority to act ever had to confront what was being done in their name. The machinery of oversight becomes the machinery of impunity.
Rogers has chosen to enable crime. By declaring this “done” before any real investigation, before any public hearing, before any of the people doing the killing or the dying have been identified and questioned under oath, he’s cast his lot with the architects of criminal campaigns of murder.
History will record that when the evidence of war crimes was presented to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, he looked at it, shrugged, and said he didn’t want illegality to stop.
It’s a rising concern. Users are reporting their experience with AI coding has been an unexpected data destruction moment.
Multiple Antigravity users have posted on Reddit to explain that the platform had wiped out parts of their projects without permission. Google’s coding tool isn’t alone in facilitating such incidents, either: As we reported over the summer, Replit, which also bills itself as a safe tool that makes vibe coding “accessible to everyone,” deleted a customer’s entire production database. To add insult to injury, Replit then lied about the matter, covering up bugs and producing fake data to hide its mistakes. The platform also said it couldn’t restore the damaged database even though the customer was – fortunately – able to fix it with a rollback.
Availability loss is easy to understand, but now people have to also see how an integrity breach was the root cause.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995