Just a few months ago this average Arkansas guy was praising Hitler, and Trump, as if they were all in the same camp.

…December 2024… he stated that he would “take a bullet for” the president, adding that Trump, 79, doesn’t “make many mistakes and when he does he’ll figure it out and he’ll fix it and I trust him.”

[…]

Outside of fighting, Mitchell is also known for being a proud farmer in Arkansas and for his comments describing Adolf Hitler as a “good guy.”

“I really do think before Hitler got on meth, he was a guy I’d go fishing with,” Mitchell said on the ArkanSanity Podcast in January. “He [Hitler] fought for his country,” he added.

A good guy? What exactly was “good” about Hitler “kicking out the greedy Jews” before 1938 as opposed to after? This framing isn’t just ahistorical ignorance; it’s revealing what is actually admired. It’s apparently normal in Arkansas to say out loud “love that guy Hitler, hate that Jews and gays survived and he didn’t”.

The “Hitler was fine until drugs” narrative is historically nonsensical and morally bankrupt. Hitler’s antisemitism, violent authoritarianism, and territorial ambitions were fully formed in the early 1920s. The Beer Hall Putsch was 1923. Mein Kampf, praising the racism of Henry Ford, was published in 1925. The methodical legal destruction of Weimar democracy was in 1933-1934, the Nuremberg Laws were 1935 and Kristallnacht was 1938… all before documented substance abuse started.

The false “drug cause” narrative serves a specific purpose: it lets “drug war” adherents admire Hitler’s core antisemitic project—the persecution and expulsion of Jews—while falsely externalizing industrial genocide as a drug-induced deviation. This totally fake compartmentalization allows praise for exactly what Hitler set out to do from the beginning, yet blame to be pushed onto substances as “unfortunate excess” in achieving goals.

The Arkansas context matters because it’s not idiosyncratic. This is a regional political culture with deep roots in Lost Cause mythology, where you can venerate Confederate leaders, celebrate “heritage,” and react with fury when called racist.

The same mental infrastructure applies to Hitler: admire the aesthetics of power, the mythology of national revival, the “fighting for his people” narrative, while externalizing the genocide as either propaganda, an unfortunate excess, or a drug-induced deviation from his “true” character. Hitler was an Austrian who took over Germany and murdered millions of his own people. He fought for himself at everyone else’s expense.

We’ve just established this average Arkansas guy praises Hitler and claims that drugs excuse genocide. Now watch what actually breaks his Trump support… Epstein files. Seriously.

“The first thing for me was he didn’t release the Epstein files—they’re even acting like they didn’t exist,” the 31-year-old said [he’s] “not with Donald Trump no more.”

“I don’t support him, I don’t like him, I think he’s a corrupted leader, and it took me a while to come to that conclusion, but I finally am coming to it.”

Still likes Hitler. Suddenly hates Trump. What’s revealing here is the transactional, personality-driven nature of American politics. Hollywood good/bad framing, as documented by “The Act of Killing“, is a dangerous god/devil binary of disinformation that short-circuits actual understanding.

There’s no engagement with ideology, policy, or governance. Hitler becomes “a guy I’d go fishing with” based on totally fraudulent vibes (people who grow up in Arkansas will praise Hitler, make anti-Semitic statements and even decorate their homes with swastikas, yet say they are deeply offended if you dare to accuse them of being Nazis).

There’s a specific strain of white identity politics of America where overtly praising Hitler can coexist with angry offense at being called a Nazi, because in that framing, “Nazi” means a BAD person to them, and they separate that from being a “patriot” who believes in Hitler’s ideology (racist genocide).

They’ve carved out rhetorical space where you can admire Hitler’s “nationalism,” his “fighting for his country,” his “strength,” and even his diet and his preference for roads with no curves, while treating the Holocaust as either exaggerated, incidental, or the result of him “going bad” on drugs.

It’s a Holocaust inversion common in Arkansas mixed with American exceptionalism: we could have that kind of genocidal obsessed strong leader without those genocidal consequences.

Trump thus gets all their support until one specific grievance—the Epstein files—becomes the sudden breaking point. Not family separation, not January 6th, not fraud convictions, not bankruptcy, not the documented pattern of sexual misconduct, not illegal detention, not racism, not ignorance, not authoritarian rhetoric about terminating the Constitution. But this one thing.

This pattern—where support for authoritarian figures is based on parasocial identification rather than principled analysis—makes democratic accountability almost impossible.

Treating politics like drinking buddy tests means vetting based on whether they’ve “gone bad” on a random moral issue, not engaging with what makes authoritarianism dangerous: the systematic concentration of power, the elimination of institutional constraints, and the targeting of vulnerable populations.

The Epstein angle is particularly telling. It suggests he believed Trump would release the files, that this was somehow a litmus test for anti-establishment credibility. But why would someone with Trump’s documented history in those circles, with his public statements about Epstein and young women, with his own allegations—why would that person be the one to expose it? The cognitive dissonance required is extraordinary. Trump lies about everything, hurts everyone, but this… this?

This is the danger of the “good guy gone bad” narrative. It prevents people from recognizing authoritarian projects even as they’re the ones building it.

The hollowness at the core of personality-cult politics is terrifying.

There’s no there, there.

No analysis of how power works, how wealth concentrates, how institutions get captured, how rights get stripped away systematically.

It’s all just vibes, grievances, and the perpetual search for a strong father figure who’ll hurt the “right” people.

This makes the personality cult people complicit in building what they claim to oppose. They’re not recognizing the authoritarian project because they’re helping construct it, while falsely painting themselves as the rebels.

What makes the “Hitler fought for his country” line so historically illiterate is that Hitler was Austrian, took over Germany through a combination of violence and institutional capture, and then destroyed Germany. He didn’t fight for Germany—he fought for a racist imperial vanity project that considered actual Germans expendable. Millions of Germans died because of his decisions. The country was partitioned for half a century. If “fighting for your country” means leaving it occupied, divided, and devastated, then the definition is meaningless.

The Arkansas Lost Cause infrastructure makes the stupidity possible because it’s already normalized this exact cognitive move: venerate leaders who destroyed their own society (the Confederacy lasted four years and left the South devastated), claim they were fighting for “their people” (they were fighting to preserve slavery), externalize the atrocities (slavery wasn’t that bad, or it would have ended anyway, or the North was worse), and react with rage when called out for supporting a violent racist genocidal platform.

It’s the same playbook: Arkansans romanticize the aesthetics, deny the ideology, and externalize all the consequences of their hate-based fantasy.

German public news (DW) recently profiled the expansive Nazi enclaves in Arkansas adorned with swastikas—a regional infrastructure normalizing extreme hate so much that praising Hitler in public offices and on podcasts becomes unremarkable rather than career-ending.

For all the extravagant jewelry and fine dining the ruthless Napoleon loved to shower himself in, his troops basically died as disposable slaves.

Binder says. “We have these paintings in the museums of soldiers in shiny armors, of Napoleon on his horse, fit young men marching into battle.”

“But in the end, when we look at the human remains, we see an entirely different picture,” she says.

It’s a picture of lifelong malnutrition, broken feet from marching too far, too quickly, and bodies riddled with disease.

Napoleon was truly a horrible human. The Grande Armée marched without adequate supply lines because his plan was literally to rape and pillage the land—as if his soldiers could sustain themselves while marching hundreds of miles into hostile territory. When Russia came up empty, hundreds of thousands of his own men starved and froze to death. Meanwhile, his baggage train advanced and retreated with his expansive silver dinnerware and fresh steaks.

Scientists are thus proving a subtext of the well-known disasters, that Napoleon never was building a professional army. He was instead rapidly extracting every ounce possible from expendable human material in a hopeless imperial ambition that couldn’t last.

Authoritarian systems consistently demonstrate this pattern of toxic leadership that treats humans as disposable, while maintaining elaborate fake performances of power and legitimacy to hide their dangerous extraction.

The gap that emerges between the story telling of museum paintings, and the facts from modern bone pathology, isn’t just about artistic license; it’s evidence of horribly corrupted power systematically erasing human cost in projects and logs.

Devastating supply line failure killing his own men wasn’t from logistical incompetence—it was a strategy of “efficiency” coming to bear. The fail faster doctrine of Napoleon, in fact failed faster, to the tune of 400,000 and more of his own soldiers destroyed for… nothing.

Napoleon is still framed falsely as a military genius rather than as mass murderer, someone who burned everything he touched, destroyed human lives at an industrial scale and then “efficiently” lost it all. His “strong man” propaganda continues to work centuries later, which should make us deeply skeptical of how current authoritarian systems (e.g. Trump) present their own real costs.

The great myth of AI is that it will improve over time.

Why?

I get it, as I warned about AI in 2012, people want to believe in magic. A narwhal tusk becomes a unicorn. A dinosaur bone becomes a griffin. All fake, all very profitable and powerful in social control contexts.

What if I told you Tesla has been building an AI system that encodes and amplifies worsening danger, through contempt for rules, safety standards, and other people’s lives?

People want to believe in the “magic” of Tesla, but there’s a sad truth finally coming to the surface. Elon Musk has been promising for ten years AI can make his cars driverless “a year from now”, as if Americans can’t recognize snake oil of the purest form.

Back in 2016 I gave a keynote talk about Tesla’s algorithms being murderous, implicated in the death of Josh Brown. I predicted it would get much worse, but who back then wanted to believe this disinformation historian’s Titanic warnings?

If there’s one lesson to learn from the Titanic tragedy, it’s that designers believed their engineering made safety protocols obsolete. Musk sold the same lie about algorithms. Both turned passengers into unwitting deadly test subjects.

I’ll say it again now, as I said back then despite many objections, Josh Brown wasn’t killed by a malfunction. The ex-SEAL was killed by a robot executing him as it had been trained.

Ten years later and we have copious evidence that Tesla systems in fact get worse over time.

NHTSA says the complaints fall into two distinct scenarios. It has had at least 18 complaints of Tesla FSD ignoring red traffic lights, including one that occurred during a test conducted by Business Insider. In some cases, the Teslas failed to stop, in others they began driving away before the light had changed, and several drivers reported a lack of any warning from the car.

At least six crashes have been reported to the agency under its standing general order, which requires an automaker to inform the regulator of any crash involving a partially automated driving system like FSD (or an autonomous driving system like Waymo’s). And of those six crashes, four resulted in injuries.

The second scenario involves Teslas operating under FSD crossing into oncoming traffic, driving straight in a turning lane, or making a turn from the wrong lane. There have been at least 24 complaints about this behavior, as well as another six reports under the standing general order, and NHTSA also cites articles published by Motor Trend and Forbes that detail such behavior during test drives.

Perhaps this should not be surprising. Last year, we reported on a study conducted by AMCI Testing that revealed both aberrant driving behaviors—ignoring a red light and crossing into oncoming traffic—in 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of testing that required more than 75 human interventions.

Let’s just start with the fact that everyone has been saying garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is a challenge to overcome in AI, since forever.

And by that I mean, even common sense standards should have forced headlines about Tesla being at risk of soaking up billions of garbage data points and producing dangerous garbage as a result. It was highly likely, at face value, to become a lawless killing machine of negative societal value. And yet, its stock price has risen without any regard for this common sense test.

Imagine an industrial farmer announcing he was taking over a known dangerous superfund toxic sludge site to suddenly produce the cleanest corn ever. We should believe the fantasy because why? And to claim that corn will become less deadly the more people eat it and don’t die…? This survivor fallacy of circular nonsense from Tesla is what Wall Street apparently adores. Perhaps because Wall Street itself is a glorified survivor fallacy.

Let me break the actual engineering down, based on the latest reports. The AMCI Testing data (75 interventions in 1,000 miles) provides a quantifiable deterioration rate. That’s a Tesla needing intervention every 13 miles.

Holy shit, that’s BAD. Like REALLY, REALLY BAD. Tesla is garbage BAD.

Human drivers in the US average one police-reported crash every 165,000 miles. Tesla FSD requires human intervention to prevent violations or crashes at a rate roughly 12,000 times higher than human baseline crash rates.

Elon Musk promised investors a 2017 arrival of a product superior to “human performance”, yet in 2025 we see code that is still systematically worse than a drunk teenager.

And, it’s actually even worse than that. Tesla re-releasing a “Mad Max” lawless driving mode in 2025 is effectively a cynical cover up operation, to double-down on deadly failure as normalized outcomes on the road. Mad Max was a killer.

I’ve disagreed with GIGO for as long as I’ve pointed out Tesla will get worse over time. I could explain, but I am not sure a higher bar even matters at this point. There’s no avoiding the fact that the basic GIGO tests show how Tesla was morally bankrupt from day one.

The problem isn’t just that Tesla faced a garbage collection problem, it’s that their entire training paradigm was fundamentally flawed on purpose. They’ve literally been crowdsourcing violations and encoding failures as learned behavior. They have been caught promoting rolling stop signs, they have celebrated cutting lanes tight, and even ingested a tragic pattern of racing to “beat” red lights without intervention.

That means garbage was being relabeled “acceptable driving.” Like picking up an old smelly steak that falls on the floor and serving it anyway as “well done”. Like saying white nationalists are tired of being called Nazis, so now they want to be known only as America First.

This is different from traditional GIGO risks because the garbage is a loophole that allows a systematic bias shift towards more aggressive, rule-breaking, privileged asshole behavior (e.g. Elon Musk’s personal brand).

The system over time was setup to tune towards narrowly defined aggressive drivers, not the safest ones.

What makes this particularly insidious is the feedback loop I identified back in 2016. “Mad Max” mode from 2018 wasn’t just marketing resurfacing in 2025, it’s a legal and technical weapon deployed by the company strategically.

Explicitly offering a “more aggressive” option means Tesla moves the Overton window while creating plausible deniability: “The system did what users wanted.”

This obscures that their baseline behavior was degraded by training on violations, and reframes the failures within a worse option. Disinformation defined.

Musk’s snake oil promises – that Teslas would magically become safer through fleet learning – require people to believe that more data automatically equals better outcomes. Which is like saying more sugar is going to make you happier. It’s only true if you have labeled ground truth, to know how close to diabetes you are. It needs a reward function aligned with actual safety, and the ability to detect and correct for systematic biases.

Tesla has none of these.

They have billions of miles of “damn, I can’t believe Tesla got away with it so far, I’m a gangsta cheating death” which is NOT the same as if its software drove the car legally let alone safely.

Tesla claimed to be doing engineering (testable, falsifiable, improvable) while actually doing testimonials (anecdotal, survivorship-biased, unfalsifiable). “My Tesla didn’t crash” is not data about safety, it’s absence of negative outcome, which is how drunk drivers justify their behavior too… like a teapot orbiting the sun (unfalsifiable claims based on absence of observed harm).