In case you ever had doubts about a TV show that featured a car decorated with inflammatory domestic terrorism propaganda (celebrating the blood-thirsty treasonous “monster” General Lee and the Confederate battle flag)… here is the guy on December 20 who became famous only by being paid to promote that car:

Lynching. Plain to see.

Here’s how Lincoln described such sentiments back in 1838.

Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.

Lynching sentiments defined much of the pre and post-Civil War periods, where horrible people sounding like this Schneider guy went about demanding hangings as a means for censoring and murdering huge numbers of Americans they disagreed with.

“[The organized terror movement after Civil War] stock-in-trade was violence – intimidation and violence. People were beaten, people were flogged, people were lynched, people were shot. People’s homes were raided, they were dragged outdoors and flogged in the streets.”

And, he says, the violence often included “truly horrifying sadism”.

“It liberated the absolute worst impulses among” its members, Bordewich says, adding: “You can see this in today’s terrorist movements in other parts of the world – al-Qaida, IS. These are the organizations the Klan should be compared to. We think of terrorism today as something happening in other countries. It happened here in the 1870s.”

Intimidation and violence. They hung John Brown, they cancelled and assassinated Elijah Lovejoy, and then they lost a Civil War, before going right back to more lynchings.

That’s the real thread, that is the problem the tweet represents, as if some in America (e.g. Speaker of the House) still haven’t given up affinity for the centuries long nativist “America First” Klan threat to democracy expressed as… lynchings.

Let’s go back and ask again why did a TV show in America decide to center itself around a “monster” like General Lee and blast his treasonous, toxic Confederate hate symbol into everyone’s eyeballs as massive scale?

Ask also what kind of actor signs up to animate a mechanized General Lee as if it doesn’t mean exactly what everyone must recognize as divisive and cruel, including General Lee himself (given he asked that nobody use his name or image like this)?

It was propaganda of the worst kind. A racist mysoginyst “rebellion” designed as subtle saccharin to undermine democracy, while repudiating their own acts as both innocent and above the law.

According to the researchers, this experiment demonstrated that just seeing the Confederate flag, even subliminally, made White participants less likely to vote for a Black person. […] In their report, published in the journal Political Psychology, the research team concluded that just being exposed to the Confederate flag triggers racially biased attitudes, even among Whites who are not consciously prejudiced. Clearly, even if the Confederate flag is a symbol of pride for those who honor it, it also carries a message of racial bias that can affect people at an unconscious level.

Defenders of the show will trot out people who say they loved watching it, enjoyed seeing a fun and helpful side to some racist whites, as if to boast how successfully fascist propaganda on widespread TV could run without detection. It’s like saying “did you see the show where the Nazi in uniform held the door open for someone, cracked jokes and rescued a kitten from a tree?”

This stuff shouldn’t be hard to dismiss as fluff obscuring reality, as a new Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest” explores.

The movie you see observes the mundane day-to-day lives of a well-off German family. Over and over, the father, Rudolf (played by Christian Friedel), goes to and from work; the mother, Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller), tends to her garden; and their children, a rambunctious bunch, play with their toys. In the movie you hear, however, there’s intermittent gunfire, bursts of screams, and an ever-present industrial cacophony. Along with snatches of dialogue and glimpses of details—the costuming, the barbed wire, the smoke—the film makes clear what’s going on: Rudolf is Rudolf Höss, the real-life longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and this is a portrait of how he and his Nazi family actually lived, going about their days adjacent to the death camp he ran.

And you’ll never guess what this anti-democratic “rebel” actor said next, as if he forgot to put his pointy white hood on before claiming nothing to see here or claiming to be invisible.

“Seriously, folks?,” Schneider said in a statement to Deadline. “I said no such thing. Despite headlines claiming otherwise, I absolutely did not call for an act of violence or threaten a U.S. president.”

Absolutely did not? That seems very confident for something that is so easily proven to be the opposite.

This gaslighting attempt is so sloppy it seems based in delusion. Perhaps it stems from decades of being drunk with privilege and power, profiting heavily from the glorification and promotion of General Lee’s domestic terrorism for so long, enjoying zero accountability.

General Lee was quite clearly a weak leader, and even more a treasonous monster of the worst cruelty, who led a Civil War to expand state-sanctioned rape of black women. His monuments have been proven to be directly correlated with lynchings, erected by racist mobs in the 1920s to threaten any American families and governments who dared to desire the protection of law and order.

His name is a threat, whether on street signs or schools; a precursor and warning to racist violence. Robert E. Lee, like an Osama bin Laden Avenue or Timothy McVeigh Park is the detestable name of terrorism.

Now the actor known best for gladly celebrating and spreading this evil monster’s racist hate, using a “fun loving” TV show for personal profit, has been caught on Twitter more clearly than ever doing what he always did.

Accountability finally?

Is it any wonder lynching was top of mind for the actor when he disagreed with anyone? Is him driving around waving a Confederate flag, which stands for lynching, really that different than him saying he stands for lynching? In this Twitter case he directed his words towards the President, but it’s not like the “Dukes of Hazard” hadn’t consciously preserved racist lynching sentiment the whole time on multiple communication channels from underwear to children toys.

“Nazis” chose a very cynical and dangerous “getürk” name for themselves, which The Atlantic in March 1932 plainly explained to American readers (who then headed to the polls to elect Franklin D. Roosevelt their President).

…[Hitler] reorganized in 1926 as the National Socialist German Laborers Party of to day.

This new party Nazi, or Fascist, it is commonly called is ‘National’ because Hitler’s fundamental ideal is nationalism. It is ‘Socialist’ (in Hitler’s own meaning of the word) because he saw that the people would have to be made comfortable before they would listen to his gospel. It is ‘German’ because his national aspirations are for Germans only. It is a ‘Laborers’ party because Hitler intended to appeal particularly to the laboring masses.

What were some notable attributes of the deceptively named National Socialist German Laborers Party, as revealed in 1932 reporting?

One, an inability to share risk, distrust in all credit handling he didn’t run; Hitler described trust in any financial systems as a devastating loss of his own absolute control.

Hitler fears the banks and all newfangled ideas for controlling credit. He objects to stock companies and stresses the value of personal ownership. In short, he believes in the ruthless subordination of economic interests and economic leaders to racial and national considerations.

Two, the subjugation of truth to whatever political or economic aims Hitler cooked up as lies, to shape and curate public sentiment with propaganda, meant to stoke faith in his latest messaging (saturated with “social” fantasies and false fears).

In Hitler’s mind the word ‘propaganda’ seems to bear no relation whatever to truth. The mass of mankind is an instrument to be played upon, nothing more. Propaganda is a means of making people believe what is for the moment effective in moving them to do what he wishes. No moral considerations are involved. His mind is in the herd stage, and he is as grossly material in his politics as Freud in his psychology. Utterly contemptuous of the intelligence of the people, he seems quite to ignore the unwholesome aftereffects of a diet of lies. He is deliberately building upon the weakness of the mass mind, and in this he proves himself a genuine demagogue — honest, no doubt, in believing that what he does is for the general good, demagogue just the same.

That reminds me of a certain doctored photograph.

It is noteworthy to acknowledge historical aspects related to Elon Musk’s grandfather, who expressed support for Hitler during World War II.

[Musk’s grandfather was] leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. During World War II, the Canadian government banned the group, declaring it a risk to national security. Haldeman’s involvement with Technocracy continued, though, and he was arrested and convicted of three charges relating to it. Once he got to South Africa, he added Black Africans to his list of rhetorical targets.

During World War II, being associated with a hate group labeled as a “risk to national security” in Canada carries significant historical implications. Subsequently, Musk’s grandfather moved to South Africa, playing a role in the formation of the racially discriminatory Apartheid state. Moreover, reports suggest that Musk’s wealthy father leveraged the existing racism for unfair financial and political gains.

Musk has said that he bought Twitter to halt the advance of a “woke mind virus” spreading online. His grandfather wrote his tracts to raise an alarm about what he called “mind control,” on the radio and television, where “an unconditional propaganda warfare is carried on against the White man.”

Similarly, in the case of Peter Thiel, his parents reportedly served under Hitler before seeking refuge in South Africa to evade accountability for being Nazis and to benefit from the Apartheid system.

After the end of Apartheid in the mid-1990s, both Musk and Thiel immigrated to the United States, where they pursued success by engaging in an unregulated technology sector building payment exchange and digital financial systems. Here’s how their startup was self-described.

…the equivalent of a Swiss bank account in your pocket… governments can’t stop their citizens from moving money out of the country.

And here’s why that dog-whistle signaled so strongly, from two individuals with a history of benefiting from gains acquired under South African Apartheid and Nazi Germany, drawing attention from and for renegade white men.

Switzerland was the favorite haven for Nazi bank accounts and safe deposit boxes, which often contained property plundered from Jews. Swiss banks did a lucrative business with the German Reichsbank and with individual Nazi officials. Symbolically, even the royalties from Hitler’s Mein Kampf were deposited in a Swiss bank account. […] Right up until the end of the war, Switzerland laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen assets, including gold taken from the central banks of German-occupied Europe. At the war’s end Switzerland successfully resisted Allied calls to restitute these funds…

Why did Switzerland resist government calls to return stolen money to the victims, and instead send this money outside its borders? Allegedly the pivot was because after Switzerland was forced to stop being Hitler’s helper they fled into propping up investments in Apartheid.

…a Swiss research group published a study showing that Switzerland was a leading investor, financing loans, trade credits and public bonds for the cash-short apartheid regime.

It is important to approach these accounts of history with careful attention to accuracy and precision, revealing how Musk and Thiel came into their positions, recognizing the implications of wealth and power accumulation within systems of racist privilege.

In the present day, South Africa has raised serious concerns about perceived inequities in business practices at SpaceX, asserting the company is being unfair to historically disadvantaged groups within the country.

On August 14th 2023, South Africa banned the import of Starlink kits. South Africa’s telecommunications regulator has demanded that a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) stop acquiring, distributing and facilitating the sale of any Starlink products in South Africa, that will in any form provide satellite access to Starlink services.

The ban is due to a legal requirement imposed by the Electronics Communications Act (ECA). This act mandates that historically disadvantaged groups (HDGs) must own 30% of a company before it can get the necessary telecoms licences to operate a broadband service locally.

HDGs include black people, youth, women, and people with disabilities. Since Starlink has not met this requirement it could not get the necessary telecommunications licenses to operate.

Simply put, SpaceX did not achieve the government requirements that had been established to protect historically disadvantaged groups. It seems clear why Elon Musk, let alone his family, would never really try:

Related

• August 20, 2014: SpaceX Workers Launch 3rd Suit, Allege Racist Policies
• June 20, 2020: Elon Musk’s Juneteenth Problem at SpaceX and Tesla
• November 14, 2021: Former SpaceX engineer accuses company of racial discrimination
• November 20, 2022: SpaceX accused of age discrimination by former employee
• August 24, 2023: Justice Department Sues SpaceX for Discriminating Against Asylees and Refugees in Hiring
• October 6, 2023: SpaceX sued for discrimination, again. Female former engineer alleges systemic pay discrimination against women and minorities
• November 10, 2023: At SpaceX, worker injuries soar… [due to the] chaotic workplace where often under-trained and overtired staff routinely skipped basic safety
• November 20, 2023: International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Condemns SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Endorsement of Antisemitic and Racist Propaganda