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Friday afternoon in Düsseldorf, the man named Alexander Dobrindt stood next to Herbert Reul and issued his usual label:

Klimaextremismus. Einzeltäter.

Dobrindt added that a final assessment was not yet possible, and then he delivered one anyway to emphasize how little he bothers to think. The burden then falls on everyone else to prove his accusation wrong, since he offers nothing to prove it right.

That’s a classic bad-faith move, the kind Sartre described in 1946, writing about French anti-semites: assert freely, because you never intended to be bound by your own words.

Three days earlier roughly twenty home-built rockets had been staked into the ground around the substation at Jänschwalde, wired to carry conductive cable into the lines. One flew and shorted a line. Bergheim the same night, same method, blocks at Niederaußem knocked offline. Dormagen on Thursday, launchers found before they fired. Weisweiler and Eschweiler being combed on Friday. The suspect was on foot somewhere near the Hambacher Forst. His truck had been stormed. His flat had been searched and sprengstoffverdächtige Gegenstände carried out of it. Reul told the public the man posed no danger.

Reul also said something Dobrindt did not. When someone signs a letter, that does not make him the responsible party. The NRW minister who actually runs the manhunt left the question open. The federal minister who runs the Verfassungsschutz closed it in a hurry.

The Record

This Dobrindt habit shows a pattern, and Germans need to talk about it sooner rather than later. Every row below is documented, most of it by his own ministry.

Event	Dobrindt’s move
2013 to 2017. Federal transport and digital minister, 50 Mbit/s for all by 2018 promised	Fail. Backed copper vectoring over fiber, disbursed under 2% of allocated broadband funds, Germany sank to the bottom of European fiber rankings
Jun 2025. Verfassungsschutzbericht 2024 press conference	Inflate. Announced violence-oriented left extremists “rise significantly” to 11,200. Prior year: 11,200. The chart in his hand showed flat bars
Jun 2025. Same press conference, slides	Inflate. Right-wing potential charted on a 0 to 60,000 axis, left-wing potential on a 0 to 40,000 axis, so Dobrindt presented 2.7% growth as if it should be read as 25% growth instead
Jun 2025. Same report, preface	Erase. Faeser’s 2023 finding that right-wing extremism is the greatest extremist threat deleted, while right-wing potential rose 25% to 50,250 and right-wing violent crime rose 47%. Left-wing violence fell 26.8%. No justification given
Sep 2025. BfV, BKA, BND and BAMAD joint warning on Russian Wegwerf-Agenten recruited online for arson against energy, rail, transport and logistics	Erase. His own agencies named the commissioning state and the target list. His public attribution for attacks on that target list stayed on the left
Sep 2025. Johannisthal, two pylons, ~50,000 households dark for 60 hours	Rule. Left-extremist within the hour, Vulkangruppe accepted as domestic. Fifteen years under that banner, zero convictions
Jan 2026. Lichterfelde cable bridge, ~45,000 households without heat in a freeze	Rule. Told ZDF there were “no indications” of Russia before the investigation concluded
Jan 2026. Same case, response	Aim. Announced expanded surveillance of the linksextreme Szene only, vowed to “hit back” at left extremists
Jun 2026. Reutlingen substation, ~30,000 without power, three burn points, cut fence	Rule. Anonymous Sicherheitskreise fed “links” to dpa within hours while the police at the lectern said every direction was open, technical fault included
Jul 2026. Verfassungsschutzbericht 2025 press release	Inflate. Cited the January Berlin fires as proof of “the perfidious methods of violent left extremists”. The case had a claim letter and an open investigation. He counted it as evidence. Same release: right-wing potential up another 17% to 58,700, violent right-wing potential 15,600 against 11,600 on the left
Jul 2026. BMI 691-page Referentenentwurf	Aim. Federal counterintelligence powers pointed at domestic political groups, powers asserted first, threat validation and review treated as friction
Jul 2026. CSD Tiergarten van attack, 25 July	Fail. Attacker well known to authorities, attack preventable
Sep 2026. Jänschwalde, Bergheim, Dormagen, suspect at large	Rule. Named “Klimaextremismus” on day three while the investigation still listed foreign state involvement as an open direction

Four infrastructure attacks in twelve months?

Four verdicts before evidence.

Every verdict pointed the same way without evidence, and some with evidence against the early verdict.

What Friday Did Not Explain

Set the man’s letter aside for a moment and look at the operation. The authorities themselves told the taz that Jänschwalde required considerable technical know-how and several days of preparation at the site. Then the same method appeared 550 kilometers away in Bergheim the same night, then Dormagen two days later, with police deployments in Sachsen near Spremberg and a false alarm in Niedersachsen.

Brandenburg’s interior minister Jan Redmann said after the second attack it could be a coordinated assault on the energy supply and announced a security center. The CDU’s own interior spokesman Alexander Throm said on Wednesday the clustering of attacks right before the Landtagswahlen in Sachsen-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin was extremely conspicuous and the goal was clearly to unsettle the population.

The taz reached the obvious conclusion on Wednesday: the pattern argued against the Vulkangruppe and for state commissioning (Russia, duh). The name never fit for what it claimed, and I have explained in detail how it has all the hallmarks of Russia, but taz still got there on operational grounds alone

Then on Friday a 48-year-old from Gevelsberg appeared, and Dobrindt had his Einzeltäter.

Here is what the archive of the last twelve months says about that. In September 2025 four federal agencies, two of them under Dobrindt, published a template.

Russian services recruit untrained locals through messenger apps, pay them small sums, hand them a task and a cover story, and let them be caught.

The recruit often never learns who paid. The February 2025 Be Greener operation was the proof of concept on German soil: more than 270 vehicles vandalized by FSB-recruited hands, framed as climate activism, timed to an election. False-flag environmentalism has already been run in Germany, in the open, and attributed by German investigators.

Hello, is this thing on?

A lone climate actor and a disposable recruit handed a climate cover story write identical letters. Both include the ideology. Both include the method. This one included the Klarname and the home address, which a cell protects and an asset gets exposed. The letter described the rockets in detail, which is what a cell hides and a seeding operation publishes. None of that proves a handler. All of it means the discriminator is the arrest and the phone.

Dobrindt ruled before either existed.

The timing sits on top. Within days of Dobrindt and Wadephul standing at a podium to formally attribute the Leipzig airport drone to Russia, the grid was hit in two Länder. Dobrindt can say Russia when the target is a Ukrainian An-124 and a provider’s cell-tower logs hold him accountable (curses, foiled by evidence). When the target is a German coal plant, suddenly a basic standard of proof disappears.

Copperhead

Germans have a name for this minister from his last job. Münchhausen of broadband. As federal transport and digital minister he promised 50 Mbit/s for everyone by 2018, disbursed under two percent of the money, and backed Deutsche Telekom’s vectoring, which squeezed more signal out of the existing copper instead of laying glass.

Germany finished at the bottom of Europe on fiber, because of how Dobrindt assessed risk. He literally ran the country into far greater risk.

Every engineer in the country told him copper was the wrong answer. It was the answer that protected someone other than the public, so he fumbled and lost the ball, and called that his analysis. Imagine the Nationalelf (German national team) with a player constantly kicking the ball into his own goal and then pointing at a backwards scoreboard for a pay raise.

That decision rule did not change when the portfolio did. Threat attribution is infrastructure risk management with a different unit of measure. The left is copper. It is the incumbent narrative of his party, the one that keeps CSU voters from drifting to a party further right, the one that costs nothing to say and requires no response from the federal government beyond a press conference and a surveillance expansion. Russia is fiber. It is expensive, it is the correct answer, and saying it out loud obliges a state to act.

Now look at what runs on the fiber he declined to build. Substation monitoring. Drone detection at Leipzig, which failed, and the Funkzellenabfrage that had to substitute for it afterward. The KRITIS-Dachgesetz that Reul was defending on ZDF the same week. The 360-Grad-Sicherheitszentrum Redmann promised Brandenburg. All of it is telemetry, and telemetry travels on the network Dobrindt starved for four years so that copper wouldn’t be upgraded.

Let me get technical for a minute, because I need Germans to understand what Russia gets from Dobrindt’s fiber delay. It’s specific and it matters.

Copper is simple metal, which means a simple clamp can tap into it without a break and without a trace. This is old craft the Russians know well. From 1971 the US Navy kept an inductive pod on a Soviet copper cable in the Sea of Okhotsk for a decade, no cut, no loss, nothing Moscow could measure, and it ended only because a traitor took money to expose the American methods. Fiber runs on light a network can meter, so a tap is something different the operator can detect, while a silent copper clamp has no fiber equivalent.

What it means is Dobrindt’s infrastructure vectoring decision was far worse than just forcing Germany to stew in slow and vulnerable copper. Telekom’s own count for the Nahbereich build alone is over 30,000 powered, unattended cabinets exposed to adversaries who walk the public pavement, converting light back to copper behind a standard industry key. A passive fiber network would have put no powered electronics on the street at all, only unpowered splitter cabinets with nothing in them that a cheap Russian clamp can read.

The Germans look like technologically backward fools. They should have deployed a passive fiber network for many reasons, not least of all because incumbents being incumbents means the country is mis-aligned with basic national security requiring technology changes. You don’t go into a “grey zone” hybrid war with Russia by leaving everyone exposed.

Dobrindt drove a hard line to keep the medium that taps silently with the worst possible architecture, multiplying the exposed areas to break privacy. His failure to deploy the fiber, undermining national security, has turned now into a growing failure on everything that runs on the delayed fiber.

American had a word for this kind of politician during the Slaveholder Rebellion.

Copperheads.

They were the politicians who wore the Union’s colors, sat in Union legislatures, and spent their time insisting the real enemy was abolitionists ending slavery, despite an enemy actually shooting at them in the field to preserve and expand slavery.

It’s the English word for a snake that strikes without any rattle, and also because of the copper coin some of them wore as a badge. Like how Dobrindt keeps showing up in the headlines, they were loyal to their right-wing backward-thinking party, and yet tried to say that meant loyalty to the country. The Copperheads were defenders of an old order, refusing to admit the threat had changed, and they cost their country dearly.

A minister who looked at copper and glass and chose copper? Come on. Who looked at 11,200 violent left extremists one year and 11,200 the next and called that a significant rise. Are you kidding me? The guy who looked at Roman naming conventions, Russian grammar, and a GRU contractor called Vulkan and couldn’t figure out Vulkangruppe is about as German as a bear speaking Russian? Who looked at twenty rockets across two Länder, a suspect on the run, and an open foreign-state line of inquiry, and saw a single climate activist? Jeezus. How is this guy still in office? Have the Germans no shame? Wait, I think we know that answer.

Reul said a name on the letter does not make that one man responsible. The name on the ministry should.

Germany’s war was lost by December 1941. And yet, Hitler refused to stop killing, sending millions to death. Who and how? Finding the answer is the lesson.

The Wehrmacht had infamously stalled at Moscow, the United States had entered, and the economic arithmetic that Adam Tooze later laid out in The Wages of Destruction was clearly settled.

The “myth” of Rommel is a perfect example of the moment. Montgomery had broken him by November 1942, and he was flown out of Tunisia in March 1943 with Operation Torch closing fast, wiping up Nazis. The arrogant, impatient German general was outsmarted and outclassed, losing badly. Ye, for two more years he was used as a Nazi propaganda asset, until the regime demanded he commit suicide and staged his state funeral as killed by enemy wounds.

What followed for three and a half years was a regime that could no longer win against the Allies, so it instead punched down like a bully who fixated on people who could not fight back. Sound familiar?

Europe-wide extermination was on the table by December 9, 1931, when the Münchener Post printed the Nazi party’s leaked plan for the Jews and its own word for the end state, Endlösung. The Nazis answered by destroying the paper and sending its reporters to Dachau. Historians who date the “decision” to autumn 1941, at the peak of “perceived victory” propaganda, are dating the moment the regime believed it could carry out what it had already published.

The rapid scaling of it came with the reality of imminent defeat.

Wannsee in January 1942 became the genocide organization moment, which today extremist right-wing Germans call “remigration”; a term the AfD party hopes can MAGA them into power. By 1943 trains were running full to Sobibor and Treblinka while the Wehrmacht complained it lacked rolling stock for the front. In fact, by March 1944 Hitler marched into and occupied Hungary, his own ally, to “remigrate” 437,000 Jews to Auschwitz in eight weeks. When the Hungarian leader Horthy tried to surrender to the Soviets in October, Hitler had his son kidnapped, deposed him, installed the Arrow Cross. The Hungarian fascists under German orders kept mass murder going, shot thousands into the Danube and marched tens of thousands toward Austria.

The front continued begging, pleading for Hitler to fight the war yet every one of his preferred operations was putting trains, guards, fuel and administrative capacity into punching down on the helpless. The Reich focus on the defenseless came as the only target Nazis could reliably hit.

A Nazi pattern is to disrupt any existing authority to claim victim status, calling themselves unfairly hated, and use that to become more and more hated as a means to gain authority. Aggression is underlying the doctrine, to spray at targets until empty, then turn on whoever is nearby and weakest when the magazine runs dry.

Dean Blundell says he just walked Thompson’s 1941 “Who Goes Nazi?” through Bavaria. My reading is that he has cast the cabinet well: Vance the humiliated intellectual, Miller the same without charm, Hegseth the spoiled son in costume. But then Blundell flubs Thompson’s famous line, that nice people never go Nazi. BRZZZZT. Wrong. Her real test was a code, that anything inside that says no becomes the enemy of Nazis. The Dutch clerks who shipped mountains of gold to Hitler and their registries to murder 75% of their neighbors who were Jews were all… nice by Nazi standards. Dachau was opened in 1933 specially to dispose of anyone declared rude: union men, journalists, priests.

Bullies clear the room of the rude, the refusers, then cite the polite survivors as consent.

On August 21 Hegseth’s Pentagon fired the editor of Stars and Stripes for insubordination after he called censorship a red line, four months after removing the ombudsman Congress installed to keep brass out of the newsroom. The paper that prints the plan gets shut first. Shocking but true fact, I have found zero Germans today who say they have heard of Münchener Post, or why Hitler called it a poison kitchen (Giftküche) and sent the publishers to concentration camps.

Pete’s purged Pentagon has performed the first two Nazi platform procedures in Iran: no fire discipline coupled to “max lethality”, resulting in a depleted magazine.

The third procedure is on the domestic side, and it was prepared before the Iran war. It was clearly Nazi doctrine as well, in preparation for the punching down that comes next.

In 2025 the administration sent 7,000 troops into American cities over the objections of their governors, put active duty Marines into Los Angeles during the immigration crackdown, and told the generals at Quantico that American cities were the training ground.

A federal court entered judgment that the Los Angeles deployment of 4,000 Guard and 700 Marines violated the Posse Comitatus Act: troops making arrests, running traffic, controlling crowds. The targets were immigrants and protesters in cities the President lost.

I grew up studying Posse Comitatus as a bipartisan, but especially right-wing extremist, bright line. America was said to never, ever cross it, because that would be tyranny time. The other bright line was said to be construction of massive camps, like the permitting of “processing” (data center) facilities. Yet Trump has killed both those canaries so fast it’s like the shock of a Nepalese glacial tsunami hitting Americans right about now.

The obvious hurdle is the November election. Trump said on May 12 he would not rule out troops at polling places. Hegseth, asked in April whether he would follow an order to seize ballots, called the question a “gotcha hypothetical”.

It’s not a hard question, yet no tab Pete struggled to answer. Federal law since 1865 bars armed federal forces at the polls except to repel armed enemies of the United States, an exception no president invoked even during two world wars.

On August 18 Senator Slotkin asked Hegseth and General Caine for one written sentence: no troops at the polls, no seizure of election material. Caine signed. He wrote that the Joint Force has no plans to send federal military personnel or federalized Guard to polling places, no plans to seize ballots or machines, and that he has neither received nor anticipates any unlawful order.

Hegseth has not answered. Because he’s no tab.

The generals who earned the tabs he never attempted call him No Tab Pete for a reason. The nickname is about a course he did not take. And it’s about to mean something far worse, based on his lies and a sentence he will not sign.

Jason Meller wrote a security rulebook. I read it. He is in direct violation of it.

As CEO of Kolide, Meller published honest.security and reduced it to five tenets on December 8, 2020. The first: “The values your organization stands behind should be well-represented in your security program.” That’s politics at work. The third holds that trust is demonstrated through informed consent and transparency. The fifth holds that people make rational decisions about risk when they are educated and honestly motivated. Then 1Password, whose 2021 round was joined personally by Shopify’s Tobi Lütke and Harley Finkelstein, the executives who platformed Nazi merchandise and seated David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) on their board, bought Kolide in February 2024, made Meller VP of Product, and still publishes the document as the guiding principles of its Device Trust product.

Houston, we have a problem.

DHH published his infamous Nazi screed called “As I remember London” on September 15, 2025. The post mourns a London no longer full of “native” British and approves a right-wing Tommy Robinson march promoting white supremacy.

Meller answered the criticism of DHH on September 26, 2025 with a photo of a child in a dance costume, back turned to the camera, at the edge of a lifeless/closed private pool. With that he boasted he became a multi-millionaire thanks to Rails, DHH, and the company DHH keeps: “Let’s ignore the noise and keep building.”

He posted it as a director of the Rails Foundation, which DHH chairs. 1Password had taken a board seat in 2024 and Meller filled it with such questionable “values”. Again, this was the guy who wrote a rulebook saying work is political, where trust is earned.

Fast forward to July 12, 2026, DHH published “The will to power will return.” He tries to gin up a “loss” narrative to evoke FUD, claiming the West has lost its will, weak men have made hard times, a hero generation will end the managed decline, and the last such Crisis ended in total war, so do not bet against another. That title is Nietzsche’s phrase fraudulently repackaged by his antisemitic sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche: she made a posthumous compilation cut from his notebooks into a racist doctrine of strength over weakness, which was adopted by the Nazis. It has been treated by scholars as hers rather than the philosopher’s since the Colli-Montinari edition. This isn’t obscure history. Hitler ran PR at her Weimar archive in 1934, photographed at the door taking her hands, and photographed inside contemplating the bust of her brother.

Days later DHH published the word remigration, Martin Sellner’s Potsdam term for forced deportation of settled populations, documented here at the time, because it’s Nazi propaganda worth identifying as such.

On July 21, 2026, DHH doubled-down on all this Nazism with “Wolves, sheep, and gypsies.” He describes Romani people in Copenhagen parks beside a wolf population and states the remedy for one is shooting and the remedy for the other is deportation. Make no mistake. DHH pushes the dehumanization of an ethnic group in preparation for its removal on force of death. It is the rhetoric that preceded the Porajmos. DHH then complained publicly when Claude refused to translate his Nazi propaganda into Italian.

On August 31, 2026, DHH named 1Password a Distinguished Corporate Patron of his Omacom Foundation, $100,000 a year for three years, in a quid pro quo he described the same afternoon as proof open source need not be a “commune.”

“Commune” is the Nazi dog-whistle of being anti-communist, the antisemitic project from the start: it’s how the NSDAP fused Jews and the labor movement into being their “one” enemy of “Jewish Bolshevism”. Rosenberg’s 1936 Nuremberg speech made the equation explicit. Seven weeks after the will-to-power essay, DHH spoke of a commune as his enemy on the day he took 1Password’s money.

1Password is the first corporate patron he does not own, and the independence ends there. Lütke, on 1Password’s cap table since 2021, pledged $1 million on August 21. His portfolio company followed in ten days. The quid was the default install slot 1Password had held since Omakub. DHH thanked Meller by name for leading it.

Meller had already explained the bond the evening before: DHH pitched him one-on-one for two hours, and he switched to Mac for Rails and DHH seventeen years ago and is switching platforms again for him now.

Then he called DHH’s past year a masterclass in “force of will”. Nine days before the deportation post, DHH’s own headline had announced the return of the “will to power”, the phrase identified above. Meller’s words echo the DHH Nazi title, seven weeks on.

On August 31 Meller produced the metric that became the company’s defense: Omarchy is the third largest Linux distribution among active 1Password users and first on weekends. DHH called it crazy. A fan called it his cocaine energy. You know, weekend stuff.

When employees and customers objected, this data point was cited. CEO David Faugno told staff the money goes to a foundation and not a person (e.g. to a NSDAP not to Hitler himself), that 1Password rejects DHH’s exclusionary views without offering proof, and that Omarchy is a top Linux platform for its users. Cofounder Roustem Karimov, in a Slack message obtained by The Verge, accused objecting staff of trying to setup a moral monopoly and ostracizing colleagues by rejecting Nazism.

Now back to those tenets.

Tenet one. Values the organization stands behind, represented in the security program. The CEO says the company rejects DHH’s views, yet show us where. The VP of Product funds them, celebrates them, and sits on a board DHH chairs. One of those is the value the organization stands behind. The money identifies which.

Tenet three. Trust through informed consent and transparency. The pledge was announced by DHH, on DHH’s platform, with the objections handled afterward in private Slack. Employees learned of the affiliation the way everyone else did. Consent was never sought. Transparency arrived through a leak.

Tenet five. People make rational decisions when educated and honestly motivated. The employees and customers who objected read the two posts and decided. Meller’s word for that decision in 2025 was noise. Karimov’s word in 2026 was moral monopoly. The doctrine says respect the informed decision. The practice says discredit it.

Meller’s method is the same on both dates. He never engages the text. He recodes the objection as noise or as shots taken, then answers with a number: his net worth in 2025, weekend install counts in 2026. Honest Security was written against exactly that move. Its whole argument is that a security team which answers human objections with telemetry has already lost.

Every director of the Rails Foundation, every patron of Omacom, and every executive at 1Password now owns Nazi propaganda.

But Meller is different from everyone, because that guy owns them twice. He brokered the money and he wrote a standard that says Meller can’t be trusted.