In a recent national security group discussion I was asked what Americans can expect of a regime that sees itself in an existential war. It reminded me how too few people study history, and that most (if not all) security professionals entering the workforce these days look at the Cold War as prehistoric, like when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
With that in mind, some members of Congress have just this week launched 1960s-sounding baseless attacks claiming “communism” in children’s programming commonly known as Sesame Street.
Committee chair Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republican members accused the networks of brainwashing viewers and children with a “communist” agenda…
Was a brontosaurus elected into office? Do not underestimate the return of a Nixon, or a McCarthy, given how clear it is that their false “agenda” saws never really entirely went away.
Who’s really the bad guy here?
So, what can we expect a bunch of old salted nuts in government to do next, the return of ghosts long past? What happens when an unstable genius decries communism around every corner or under every rock? What happens to the violently superstitious when a Black man crosses their path?
Cultural battles are always going to be a messy target, of course. Our expectations must look towards the even more dramatic and dangerous resource competition fights related to technological superiority.
I say people should plan for the future based on what’s happened in the past, to paraphrase Churchill warning early that Hitler was a threat. If members of Congress act like it’s 1960 again then let’s look at what American hawks were up to back then, a decade before they had to face the music (thanks to Senator Church and President Carter).
To be fair, I’m talking about looking back at the shadows of the Cold War. A disturbing pattern aligns from certain “accidents” across the global chessboard of 1960-1961, not saying we have evidence sufficient to claim proof. These are shadows by design, because we’re talking about the worst days of the CIA, after all.
First: February 1960, Adriano Olivetti dies suddenly from a heart attack on a train to Switzerland. The visionary Italian industrialist had just purchased Underwood in America and was developing the world’s first transistorized computer, with plans to potentially share technology with Communist nations.
The move to contact Russia and China has to be seen as a political miscalculation of major proportions on Adriano’s part. If he still thought that Allen Dulles and the CIA were kindly disposed toward him and his ideas, he was deluding himself. After the abysmal showing of Comunità in the 1958 elections, Adriano Olivetti went from being a possible ally to a Socialist whose party had allied itself with the Communists. That loss of influence could well have led to a series of well-coordinated and highly sophisticated efforts to stop him and his company in its tracks. Whatever the cost.
Second: January 1961, Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected Prime Minister, is assassinated. Declassified documents have revealed CIA “involvement” in Belgians ruthlessly killing him, motivated to block Soviet influence in resource-rich Congo, home to uranium and other strategic minerals.
Third: September 1961, UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane “mysteriously” crashes (shot down) in Northern Rhodesia while on a Congo peace mission. Evidence suggests it was not an accident, as the U.S. continues to block investigations.
Fourth: November 1961, Mario Tchou, head of Olivetti’s groundbreaking electronics lab, dies in a suspicious car crash. He had been planning meetings with Chinese officials about computer technology. Secrest again:
The accident is reminiscent of a similar, so-called accident involving a truck that took the life of a famous American general. This was, for many years, also judged to have been the fault of his driver. The case is the death of General George Patton at the end of World War II in December 1945. Like Adriano Olivetti and Mario Tchou, General Patton had formidable enemies.
Resource Control as a Parallel
These targeted killings reflected the same facets of American war planning applied in two different battlefields.
Physical resources in Africa were demanded by Western powers. America was determined to maintain control of Congo’s vast reserves of uranium, copper, and cobalt by any means necessary. Mining was seen as critical for weapons and industrial dominance. Lumumba was perceived to threaten this access; Hammarskjöld threatened the narrative. The French even deposed the Congo’s next leader when he dared to suggest European military control over the country wasn’t wanted by them.
Technological resources arguably, and far less controversially, faced a similar fate. Olivetti’s breakthrough computing technology represented a different kind of strategic resource. Its potential transfer to Communist nations would have undermined American technological superiority at a pivotal moment in the computer revolution. Secrest concludes:
The problem is as valid today as it was during the height of the Cold War, and for the same reason. Of China’s theft of intellectual property, The Economist recently observed that what is at issue are ‘the core information technologies. They are the basis for the manufacture, networking and destructive power of advanced weapons systems.’ A country with the most sophisticated solutions establishes ‘an unassailable advantage.’
By 1964, Olivetti’s electronics division had been dismantled through an engineered and artificial financial crisis. It had hallmarks of the Western-aligned leadership installed in mineral-rich African nations.
Different continents, different resources, same playbook of asserting violent control through civilian assassinations to destroy targets of America’s most extreme politicians.
Hegseth’s statement about being “clean on OPSEC” while simultaneously sharing sensitive military plans in an unsecured commercial app with an unvetted group that included a journalist shows a profound disconnect from reality.
1215ET: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)
1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)
1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)
1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)
1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.
MORE TO FOLLOW (per timeline) We are currently clean on OPSEC
Godspeed to our Warriors.
What’s particularly troubling is the contradiction between:
Claiming to value operational security
While completely failing to implement even basic security measures
The fact that detailed military strike plans were shared so casually, and that no one noticed an unauthorized participant for days, suggests either a complete lack of understanding about security protocols or a dangerous indifference to them, or both.
This kind of detachment from factual reality can be extremely dangerous in military contexts where lives depend on proper security procedures. History offers clear reminders of the consequences of OPSEC failures.
In 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion collapsed partly because operational security was compromised—Cuban intelligence had detected preparations for the invasion, allowing Castro to mobilize and position his forces before the exiles even landed. The operation that was supposed to appear covert had become an open secret, with details appearing in newspapers like The New York Times days before the invasion.
Source: NYT
The impatient and sloppy approach demonstrated by Hegseth is especially concerning coming from senior defense leadership who should understand these historical lessons about the importance of protecting sensitive operational information.
It raises serious questions about competence and whether there’s a culture of saying the right words about security while ignoring the actual implementation of security measures.
In 2018, a Twitter exchange about fire involving Tesla’s CEO raised questions about appropriate messaging around public safety concerns.
Source: “Parked Teslas Keep Catching on Fire Randomly, And There’s No Recall In Sight. A roundup of every spontaneous Tesla fire shows the company’s response is stuck on Autopilot.” The Drive, June 2019
His tweet should have immediately raised DoJ concerns about the messaging around fire safety.
Perhaps this rhetoric established a pattern where Tesla fires were normalized, even celebrated by the CEO, setting the stage for what has come since then.
March 22, 2025 yet another Tesla burst into fire suddenly. Hundreds of these cars have burned, and data trackers suggest well over 100 people have died.
Finally, after years and years of Tesla fires, the Justice.gov website has a powerful statement out today that they are cracking down on Tesla “arsonists”.
…face the full force of the law for [those who] set fire to Tesla cars and charging stations.
The sudden concern with fire naturally got me curious about the frequency of fires recorded for Tesla, prior to the DoJ saying they have seen enough. As my wise old ethics professor Gunderson once said to me:
Outcomes of injuries and deaths are indeed what matter most to real justice, regardless of cause. Whether fires result from external arson or internal design flaws, the harm to people is the same.
According to the site tesla-fire.com tracking the data, Tesla has blown well beyond the Ford Pinto with a shocking 83 fire deaths by the end of 2023. The reliability of using tesla-fire.com is that it’s a collection of local qualitative news in a quantitative ledger, perhaps the highest integrity of any dataset possible.
We’re not talking reports of property damage alone, although those have apparently been bad.
Walmart sues Tesla for negligence after solar panels catch fire at 7 stores. […] As of November 2018, at least seven Walmart stores, including in Denton, Maryland and Beavercreek, Ohio, had experienced fires due to Tesla’s solar systems, according to the lawsuit. One of the fires happened months after the system was de-energized, Walmart said.
The stores were at risk of burning down, and while the news reported no injuries or deaths it still went to court. Notably in March 2018 Tesla CEO tweeted that everything is better with fire and then in November 2018 Walmart sued Tesla for multiple fires related to Tesla equipment.
Giant Tesla fires destroying things are bad, for sure. But we must really talk about the fact that there have been over 100 deaths related to Tesla fires, and apparently there’s no end in sight!
Tesla Fire Deaths Analysis
After the Tesla CEO tweeted in very prescriptive tone that he thought of fire as “better“, I noted he suddenly in 2025 switched into a passive observer tone, as if watching the world from a driver’s seat without grabbing the wheel:
“I can’t walk past a TV without seeing a Tesla on fire,” said Musk.
Remember that 2018 wasn’t just a single Tweet promoting fire. Elon Musk at the same time deceptively branded a flamethrower as “Not a Flamethrower” and sold tens of thousands of them. Of course there is no established connection between one product and another promoted by the same CEO, but perhaps you can see reason for concern here:
After two days locked up in an Italian prison, American Max Craddock was finally able to make his case to a judge. “It’s not a weapon of war,” his lawyer told the investigating magistrate. “It’s a toy they sell to children.” Craddock had been arrested in the Sardinian port city of Olbia in June 2018 after trying to board a private party bus with a collectible flamethrower from Elon Musk… […] More than 1,000 flamethrower purchasers abroad have had their devices confiscated by customs officers or local police, with many facing fines and weapons charges. In the U.S., the flamethrowers have been implicated in at least one local and one federal criminal investigation. There have also been at least three occasions in which the Boring Company devices have been featured in weapons hauls seized from suspected drug dealers. The upshot: What Musk and his army of fans thought was just another of his money-spinning larks is having real-world consequences for people and countries not in on the joke.
The TechCrunch article highlights how the marketing of certain highly flammable products as jokes can still have serious legal and safety repercussions for consumers. The ideas stated about a flamethrower and harms from fire are in fact no joke.
“We are told that various countries would ban shipping of it, that they would ban flamethrowers,” Musk told Rogan in 2018. “So, to solve this problem for all of the customs agencies, we labelled it, ‘Not a Flamethrower.’ “
According to the CEO of Tesla, a product he knew had been classified as a highly dangerous flamethrower (and therefore illegal) in many countries had its name changed by him to evade global safety laws that were meant to prevent harm from fires.
The juxtaposition between the CEO’s tweet that “everything is better with fire” and the subsequent marketing of products like “Not a Flamethrower” raises questions about his overall concerns and messaging around fire safety since 2018. These public statements and product decisions beg nearly a decade of data of who really is to be held responsible for safety from many, many Tesla fires.
Is he not going to take some heat? Even if he has been asleep at the wheel this whole time, while the Tesla fire incident and fatality rate steadily increased, where does the responsibility go?
If a CEO sleeps at the wheel as his entire car company crashes and bursts into flames, after his cars burst into flames, is he to blame?
I still remember when Ford was investigated for just 27 deaths from Pinto fires. That’s three times less than the Tesla over the same period.
Ford Pinto Fatalities: 27
Tesla Fire Fatalities: 83
Ratio (Tesla/Pinto): 3.1x
Pinto Time Period: 1971-1980 (10 years)
Tesla Time Period: 2013-2023 (11 years)
Note the data set ends before 2024 so we’re not including the many Tesla fires happening more recently.
Total Fire Incidents
232
Total Fatalities
83
Incidents with Fatalities
58
% Fatal Incidents
25.0%
For example, about a year ago nine Tesla fires were recorded just in one night in Berlin, Germany. NINE fires in 24 hours! Did you see it plastered all over the news as headlines? No. It’s not in this data set.
“Neun Autos gehen in Berlin in Flammen auf!” Source: BZ
And over the past year there have been many, many other parked Tesla combusting at dealerships, multiple vehicles destroyed suddenly. These also are not in the data.
A Tesla dealer in Georgia saw their Cybertruck burst into flames December 31st, 2024. Source: WSBTV
To make a finer point about this Cybertruck fire on December 31, everyone was talking about the Las Vegas political protest and self-immolation by a Green Beret. Nobody but very local news mentioned the other Cybertruck on fire at the same time, burning in a Tesla dealer parking lot.
Beyond the property damage being so common through 2024, there were many people killed in Tesla fires such as Georgia (2), Canada (4), Wisconsin (5), France (4), California (3), Korea (1)… we see there were at least 102 deaths if taking just a quick look at local news, where many blame the Tesla door design for death.
Teslas notoriously “veer” uncontrollably and crash. Design defects (e.g. Pinto doors) trap occupants and burn them to death as horrified witnesses and emergency responders watch helplessly. Source: VoCoFM, Korea, 2024
The DoJ focus on investigating damage to electric vehicles should evaluate incidents based on factual evidence, and prioritize cases involving loss of life.
Observations:
Tesla fire fatalities (83) occurred at a rate 3.1 times higher than the Ford Pinto (27), which was known for public outcry, major recall and safety investigation that changed the industry
A sharp increase in fatalities began in 2021, with 65 deaths (78% of total) occurring from 2021-2023
2023 had the highest number of fatalities at 29, indicating the issue may be worsening over time
About 25% of all Tesla fire incidents involve fatalities, a significant safety concern
The data suggests structural or systemic safety issues that may require DOJ attention
All of that is so awful, it deserves a closer look to understand plausible causes of Tesla fires.
Tesla Fire Cause Analysis
Tesla vehicles have experienced a significant number of electrical-related fire incidents not related to crashes, with a clear pattern of spontaneous combustion and fires occurring while parked.
Anyone familiar with ICE car fires would recognize this immediately. The second-leading cause of ICE fires is the electrical system. A car without petroleum fuel means electrical fires will be front and center like they have always been, and any design defect would result in a rapid increase in fire incidents and danger.
The data for Tesla suggests potential electrical issues that merit thorough investigation, drawing parallels to how the Pinto’s fuel tank design eventually received deep scrutiny.
In other words, Tesla will have significantly higher rates of fire than an ICE vehicle (susceptible to electrical fires itself) because the Tesla has such fundamental safety design flaws.
61 incidents (26% of all Tesla fires) appear to be electrical in nature rather than crash-related
Spontaneous combustion was mentioned in 25 incidents
20 incidents occurred while vehicles were parked and not charging
10 incidents happened during charging
13 incidents took place in garages
Looking Ahead: The Future of Tesla Fires
Our analysis shows a disturbing trajectory, whether we use conservative or aggressive modeling:
Historical data from 2013-2023 used for projections into 2024-2026. Linear projection reaches ~65 incidents by 2026, and exponential projection reaches ~95 incidents by 2026. Source: tesla-fire.com
From “everything is better with fire” in 2018 to “I can’t walk past a TV without seeing a Tesla on fire” in 2025, we’ve witnessed a shift in public statements by the CEO of Tesla over time. What hasn’t changed is how justice is inconsistently applied to different people facing responsibility.
U.S. Supreme Court in 2025 ruled people responsible for environmental safety aren’t responsible because… America!
When a CEO promotes a culture that normalizes and even celebrates fire, then produces vehicles with documented electrical fire risks, it’s cruelly labeled a “joke”, or declared a “necessary” deadly path to achieve some desired future state of business. However, when someone allegedly takes direct action against those same vehicles to stop harms, they’re instead branded “arsonists” who will face “the full force of the law.”
The contradiction raises questions about the consistent application of legal standards across different contexts. Consider, for instance, if the Finnish justice system had prosecuted its citizens for arson when they used Molotov cocktails to defend against Soviets deploying tanks. Imagine Finnish citizens being told they must accept that Soviet tank manufacturers were merely delivering “futuristic assets,” and that Finnish casualties should be viewed as an unfortunate “price of doing business.” Such a comparison highlights the troubling inconsistency in how we judge resistance to very real and present existential threats versus protecting even the most extreme corporate abuses of society.
The Russian “Bread Basket” bombs of WWII were named for Molotov. The “Molotov cocktails” were thus the cynical name by the Finns. They violently resisted being told by Soviet authorities to normalize and accept fire-bombs of cluster munitions (very similar to how Tesla are made from clusters of chemical batteries) exploding in civilian areas followed by invading tanks (very similar to Cybertrucks).
In a world of corporate power hiding within carefully crafted messaging and legal maneuvering, traditional balanced analysis becomes inadequate. Elon Musk repeatedly sued a well known and highly respected car expert on the BBC for daring to review a Tesla accurately on exactly what it was: unreliable and unsafe.
The first model he reviewed broke down after just 55 miles when the brakes failed and the second overheated. Musk was deeply embarrassed by the verdict and swiftly launched a lawsuit over it. […] “I said it was unreliable, which it was; that it was ridiculously expensive, which it was; and that because it weighed more than most moons, it didn’t handle very well. Which it didn’t. Musk was very angry about this and sued us for defamation…. He lost the case, and the appeal, and he’s never really got over it.”
The stark reality of subsequent Tesla fires—and at least 100 lives lost—demands communication that matches the gravity of the situation, against aggressive legal intimidation and threats by Tesla. When a CEO can casually tweet “Everything’s better with fire” while selling products branded to evade regulations, and simultaneously oversee a company whose vehicles are linked to numerous fire incidents, conventional discourse fails us.
The rhetorical approach used here isn’t about inflaming emotions on their own, and about instead piercing the veil of gamified corporate normalization that would have us accept potentially predictable deaths as inevitable “disruption” rather than obvious tragedies. When a plane crashes does the manufacturer say “but how many miles are flown and how many planes are in the air”? No, we treat the deaths as they are, a death toll that should not have happened because we have the technology and regulations to prevent them. Sometimes only direct language can cut through layers of deflection to expose the contradictions between a company’s public persona and the consequences of its actions. In the face of cavalier attitudes toward public safety, measured tones become complicity.
This post reveals there has been a long-running fundamental ethical contradiction that allows assaults on public safety to be ignored in a very curated and specific way. Corporate decisions that may lead to dozens of deaths have been allowed to play as business as usual, while direct actions against those corporations—even those motivated by safety concerns to reduce or stop harm—are criminalized with extreme prejudice.
…the Bisbee Deportation. On July 12, 1917, roughly 1,200 copper miners, who’d been striking for better wages and safer working conditions, were rounded up at gunpoint, some by their own relatives, and sent via cattle car to the New Mexican desert, where they were left to die. […] 1897 Lattimer massacre saw Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German miners killed by being shot in the back; a sheriff decided to end a labor protest by murdering the protesters.
The Truth as Necessary for Justice
Back to the point my ethics professor made that “outcomes of injuries and deaths are indeed what matter most to real justice, regardless of cause”, people who have died in Tesla-related fires aren’t less dead because their deaths came from Tesla treating fire as a “joke”.
When the CEO himself acknowledges he’s seeing Tesla fires on TV, while the DoJ apparently focuses on prosecuting alleged arsonists instead of that CEO overseeing a decade of unexplained escalating fires, it presents what appears to be an imbalance in how accountability is distributed.
The contrast between casual social media messaging about fire and the serious consequences threatened for vehicle fires deserves critical examination. When companies treat fire risks so lightly in public communications, they may directly undermine the prosecution of the real-world safety issues by them and others. And there’s nothing “better” about that.
The conflation between individual responsibilities and individual actions isn’t accidental in this analysis—it’s precisely the point. As long as we treat them differently when the outcome (death) is the same, we should examine how we assess responsibility for tragedy across related yet different contexts.
America is adrift from a rise of “Fisters”, that is to say “America Fisters“.
An “Aryan fist” is used by white supremacists such as neo-Nazis globally and the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. For example, the right-wing terrorist mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik saluted with a raised fist in court in Oslo in 2012.
What does the angry rhetoric of the hateful nativist “America First” platform coupled with a raised fist mean?
The return of the “America First” ideology—a nativist hate group of the 1800s, better known as the KKK—has abruptly created a federal leadership vacuum swarming with raised fists. The contemporary usage has once again raised concerns about its inherently nationalist rhetoric. Critics argue that the slogan implicitly positions some Americans as more authentically “American” than others, intentionally weaponizing the labels of African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, Muslim American… anything that would acknowledge both a race, religion or cultural heritage with an American identity. Framing of “America” having to be first, then labeling non-whites of America as always second, drives historical hierarchies to deny America embracing the truth of multicultural composition.
As their always divisive rhetoric gains ground like it’s 1836 again (eve of Andrew Jackson’s moral and economic collapse sending America into depression and then Civil War), we’re witnessing the same destructive patterns that periodically threaten American unity. Over a century after General Grant destroyed them on the battle field, and next destroyed them at the voting booth as President Grant, we can clearly see Trump is bringing the KKK back.
President Grant’s tomb says it plainly for all to see. Shut down the America First (KKK) mob rule (yet again) or they will inflict violent injustices upon everyone.
But there’s a modern counterforce hidden in plain sight, which should be familiar to most people today—Fred Rogers. Not just the digestible Daniel Tiger most remember spun out of his era of troubled times, but also the deeply principled American hero as community-builder detailed in Michael Long’s “Peaceful Neighbor.” Rogers wasn’t creating mere entertainment; he was using entertainment as a vessel to offer a clear superior outcome.
“Only people who take the time to see our work can begin to understand the depth of it.” This is the invitation of Peaceful Neighbor, to see and understand Rogers’s convictions and their expression through his program. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it turns out, is far from sappy, sentimental, and shallow; it’s a sharp political response to a civil and political society poised to kill.
While the old white supremacist nativists exploit fear of the other and destroy anything diverting from their fictional vision of self, Rogers long ago demonstrated how to build genuine connection across necessary and fruitful differences.
