When Donald Trump announced his abrupt seizure of the Kennedy Center this week, installing himself as chairman and replacing the board of trustees with his followers, many viewed it as a tangent to his usual chaotic news pump cycles.

Until a week ago, it was unthinkable that the president of the United States would take direct control of the nonpartisan Kennedy Center for the Arts, fire board members not deemed personally loyal to him, replace them with members of his inner circle and install a widely disliked political operative with little experience in the arts as interim director. But now the thought has been thought,

However, for those who study how cultural institutions weather political storms, the warning signs of totalitarianism are unmistakable.

Cultural venues are like the canaries in coal mines – their health tells us about the air we’re all about to breathe. The Kennedy Center’s transformation follows a disturbingly familiar playbook: administrative changes first, cultural shifts later.

The immediate cancellation of “Finn,” a children’s musical about a shark exploring identity, wasn’t by accident. Youth programming often takes the first hit when institutions begin to change – reshape the future by controlling what children see.

The exodus of artists speaks volumes. Issa Rae cancelled her sold-out show. Shonda Rhimes resigned as treasurer. Ben Folds stepped down from the National Symphony Orchestra. Renée Fleming departed her artistic adviser role. These are a vote of no confidence from America’s cultural leaders. They see the dying canary up close and are wise to flee, to warn others of what’s coming.

History teaches us that institutional capture starts quietly. It begins with board changes, programming “reviews,” and administrative restructuring, with early censorship. By the time the dictatorship rolls, the infrastructure for cultural control is already in place.

The Kennedy Center transformation isn’t following the playbook of outright suppression – it’s following the more subtle playbook of institutional realignment into autocracy.

Trump’s statement that “it’s not going to be woke” might sound like classic McCarthyist rhetoric echoing Nazi Germany. But when coupled with administrative seizure of one of America’s premier cultural institutions, it signals something far more ominous than even “black ball” tactics: the beginning of total national programmatic control over artistic expression.

And by that I mean hate speech is being normalized again. It’s like Trump will say to the board “they wanted to convince people that lead in water is bad, so we’re going to say lead in water is good. Same thing, right?!”

The question isn’t about whether state driven control and censorship is coming – it’s here already. The question is who will stop the spread to other cultural institutions. Who will heed the warning, before Trump air becomes toxic to everyone.

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When the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in 1975, they began their horrific “efficiency” campaign with a simple act: they emptied the cities. Within hours, professionals, intellectuals, and technical experts were marched out of their offices, given minutes to gather their belongings.

The forced evacuation of the Cambodian capital, sending 2 million people streaming into the countryside, was “an astonishing spectacle,” Schanberg acknowledged.

“A once-throbbing city became an echo chamber of silent streets lined with abandoned cars and gaping, empty shops,” he reported after making it out of Phnom Penh to Bangkok three weeks later. “Streetlights burned eerily for a population that was no longer there.”

The goal went far beyond political control – it was systematic destruction of technical and administrative capacity. History tells the rest. Over 2 million dead, many unaccounted for in the “killing fields” of mass genocide, labeled as “efficiency”.

…foreigners were later trucked to the Thai border and expelled. With their departure, Cambodia lost virtually the only outside witnesses to the horrors that were beginning in the country the Khmer Rouge would call “Democratic Kampuchea.”

Today’s events in Washington, with federal employees given 30 minutes to clear their desks, nuclear security experts terminated via Teams calls, and entire agencies effectively shuttered, bear disturbing parallels to these historical moments of state capacity destruction for racist aims.

This isn’t just another political purge of industrial-age planning – it’s something more technically sophisticated and potentially more devastating due to Elon Musk’s reckless applications of artificial intelligence operated by teenagers.

The targeting of nuclear security administration staff particularly echoes one of history’s most dangerous patterns in totalitarianism.

When the Khmer Rouge emptied Cambodia’s technical institutions, when Iran’s Cultural Revolution purged its universities, when Stalin’s “Engineers’ Affair” decimated Soviet technical expertise, the goal went far beyond the ideological cleansing rhetoric of “anti-woke” or “anti-DEI” – it was the destruction of the entire state’s ability to function at a technical level.

It was denial of state level protection of their populations, to enable targeted humanitarian crimes.

What makes the current American situation uniquely concerning is its precision in elimination of anyone capable of basic science and engineering (ethical professionals). The exemption of Defense and Homeland Security while gutting nuclear safety administration, health agencies, and oversight mechanisms suggests a peculiar understanding of how modern state capacity functions. This isn’t the blunt instrument of the Khmer Rouge pushing all the educated adults out of power into mass graves – it’s more akin to a targeted virus designed to destroy specific institutional capabilities of morality while leaving immoral others in position to enact harms.

The focus on probationary employees is particularly telling. In any technical institution, these newer employees represent not just current capacity but all future capability. They are the carriers of institutional knowledge to the next generation, the bridge between current expertise and future capability. By targeting them specifically, while maintaining more senior staff, a knowledge transfer gap is blasted into foundations that can take generations (or even foreign intervention and occupation) to repair.

Consider the nuclear security apparatus. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the sudden disruption of career pipelines and knowledge transfer systems created nuclear security vulnerabilities that persisted for decades. Today’s cuts to America’s nuclear security administration – 300 out of 1,800 staff – represent an eerily similar disruption of expertise continuity. It’s almost as if someone bitter about the Soviet collapse is ordering it to be done to America. This isn’t just about current capacity; it’s about ending future capability to maintain stability and order.

The use of modern technology to implement extremist war-like cuts adds the most disturbing dimension. Mass Teams calls, pre-recorded messages, 30-minute evacuation notices – these aren’t just methods of termination, they’re information warfare techniques of weaponized demoralization designed to break institutional cohesion.

When the Khmer Rouge marched people out of Phnom Penh, public humiliation was the point. Today’s digital equivalents by a vengeful apartheid South African serve the same purpose: to make American public service appear unstable, unreliable, and undesirable as a career.

This is the end game. Putin’s revenge for the Soviet collapse. Musk’s revenge for apartheid South Africa’s fall. Thiel’s dreams of Nazi Germany’s return. America’s enemies haven’t just gained insider access through Trump – they’ve purchased driving licenses for systematic revenge, achieving what John Birch only dreamed about.

The targeting of oversight mechanisms – inspectors general, ethics offices, regulatory agencies – mirrors another historical pattern. When authoritarian systems consolidate power, they often begin by dismantling the state’s self-monitoring capabilities.

But again, the American version shows a chilling understanding of the modern state function and how to make it the worst version. By targeting specific oversight mechanisms while leaving others intact, it creates an appearance of continuity while gutting actual oversight capacity.

The historical pattern of systematic attacks on state capacity says damage will persists long after any political changes. It is unlikely to lead to another free election, given overt comments by Musk that indicate the country is now run by him, as his personal bureaucracy that’s ending all opposition to racism.

When Cambodia finally emerged from the Khmer Rouge period, when Iran attempted to rebuild its technical institutions, when post-Soviet states tried to reconstitute their technical expertise, they discovered that some capabilities can’t be rebuilt easily. Knowledge gaps, broken career pipelines, destroyed institutional memory – these were vulnerabilities exploited to persist for generations.

Simple to see, this isn’t just another chapter in American political conflict – it’s a self-destructive campaign to fundamentally alter the state’s technical and administrative capacity. The combination of targeting critical technical expertise, disrupting knowledge transfer systems, and dismantling oversight mechanisms, all while maintaining an appearance of normal government function, represents a new AI-driven state capacity suicide.

When Musk destroys technical expertise, when Musk breaks knowledge transfer systems, when Musk dismantles oversight mechanisms, he create institutional vulnerabilities for Trump’s brand of failure to haunt him for decades. The sophistication of the current approach, combining historical techniques of state capacity destruction with modern technology and targeted precision, suggests we may be witnessing something unprecedented in the history of democratic governance – the systematic dismantling of state capacity from within by it’s most avowed enemies.

And so, today in 2025, as federal workers are given 30 minutes to clear their desks and nuclear security experts are terminated via Teams calls, the intellectual giant Walter Benjamin’s warning about fascism echoes with eerie precision. His analysis of how a Trump-like regime operates reads like a prophecy written for this moment:

Benjamin insisted that in their “mysticism of war” “what developed here, first in the guise of the World War volunteer and then in the mercenary of the postwar era, is in fact the dependable fascist class warrior. And what these authors mean by nation is a ruling class supported by this caste, a ruling class—accountable to no one, and least of all to itself, enthroned on high.

The parallel is useful to today’s federal workers caught between forces of fraudulent “efficiency” and ideological purge. Unlike Benjamin, who saw no escape at an obscure Spanish border surrounded by fascists, today’s experts must find ways to preserve and protect their knowledge and expertise even when driven from institutions and persecuted for disloyalty to a dictator.

The question isn’t whether to fight tyranny but how to ensure that technical knowledge and ethical expertise survive Musk’s fail-faster assault on state capacity. History shows that while fascists can swiftly seize institutions and undermine democracy, they cannot destroy knowledge itself unless its bearers surrender it. Benjamin correctly diagnosed the causes, while incorrectly choosing a tragic surrender to his despair. Let his fatal mistake in judging the moment to quit (he killed himself when blocked, yet would have been fine and survived 24 hours earlier or later) be an inspiration to fight, and fight, and fight for another day.

Remember also that by December 1978 the Vietnamese military had been given orders to roll into Phnom Penh and put an end to deadly and destructive “efficiency” of the Khmer Rouge.

Cambodia was an unpopular war for Vietnam, said Carlyle Thayer, an expert on Vietnam and emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra. “The Vietnamese military had been trained and experienced in overthrowing an occupying power and all of a sudden, the shoe was on the other foot. They had to invade Cambodia and occupy it, and succeed in setting up a government and engineer a withdrawal.”

Who will roll into DC and put an end to the pain of Elon Musk? The historical pattern of systematic state capacity destruction has shown consistent elements across different contexts, all which make it harder to recover the longer we delay:

• Technical expertise elimination through targeted removal of professionals and experts
• Systematic disruption of institutional knowledge transfer between generations
• Dismantling of oversight mechanisms while maintaining facade of functionality
• Deployment of public humiliation tactics to demoralize and deter future public service

These patterns serve as clear reminders that the destruction of state capacity often follows recognizable templates, even as the specific technologies and methods evolve. History demonstrates that while such expertise can be swiftly dismantled, its reconstruction requires sustained effort and institutional memory – resources that become scarcer with each wave of technical brain drain driven by men like Elon Musk.

His Cybertruck turned out 17X more dangerous than a Ford Pinto for a very simple reason. Expect America to become less and less safe with him anywhere near the wheel, as I’ve warned here since at least 2016.

This is obviously some of the worst engineering in history if not the absolute worst. A car designed to fail.

In the peculiar annals of interwar intelligence, few episodes better illustrate the intersection of human frailty and state security than the evolution of Soviet encryption between the world wars. The story involves poetry, vodka, and one of cryptography’s most colorful characters – Ernst Fetterlein, the former Czarist chief cryptanalyst who walked across the Finnish border during the Revolution to join British intelligence.

The Soviets’ cryptographic journey from 1920-1928 showcases a remarkable evolution. They began with surprisingly basic columnar transposition[1] of Russian plaintext, moved to dinomic substitution[2] before transposition[3] in late 1920, then progressed through increasingly complex systems. One of these systems fell to British cryptanalysts from a simple literary connection. When Fetterlein couldn’t figure out the keys using Russian letters, Tiltman discovered they were actually from an obscure out-of-print pocket edition of poems by George Wither, a prolific 17th-century English poet. Tiltman noted:

I do not remember the method of indicating keys, but I know it was simple and that, after finding the source book, we were in a position to decrypt DELEGAT messages as soon as the intercepts reached us.

By 1928, the Soviets finally adopted one-time pads (OTP), using two specific formats where messages over 1100 figures had to be split into parts. The pads were used “boustrophedon” style (from ancient Greek, meaning like an ox turning while plowing), and critically, operators were officially permitted to use each pad twice but no more. This policy had been built into their procedures from the beginning in 1928, not as a wartime compromise as long believed:

275-figure pad (11 lines × 5 groups of 5 figures) for messages up to 550 figures:

12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →
54321 54321 54321 54321 54321  ←
12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →
54321 54321 54321 54321 54321  ←
12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →
54321 54321 54321 54321 54321  ←
12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →
54321 54321 54321 54321 54321  ←
12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →
54321 54321 54321 54321 54321  ←
12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →

550-figure pad (11 lines × 10 groups of 5 figures) for longer messages:

12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →
54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321  ←
12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →
54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321  ←
12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →
54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321  ←
12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →
54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321  ←
12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →
54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321 54321  ←
12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345 12345  →

This brings us to the rather spectacular case of cipher clerks Kotlov and Serafimowich in 1926 Kabul. Serafimowich’s frequent hangovers led to so many encryption errors that Moscow mandated all messages be signed by the encrypting clerk. This well-intentioned administrative solution spectacularly backfired – the signatures provided British analysts with precisely the known-plaintext material they needed. When Serafimowich himself later decrypted orders for his own recall to Moscow over questionable papers, he fled to the British Embassy but was turned away. As Brigadier Tiltman notes in his recently declassified papers, he was “never heard of again.”

Yet even with these procedural vulnerabilities, Tiltman’s documents reveal something surprising – British cryptanalysts “were hardly able to read anything at all except in the case of one or two very stereotyped proforma messages.” The theoretical strength of the one-time pad still made decryption extremely difficult, even when used twice.

The ramifications would echo through cryptographic history. Operation Venona’s later success in breaking these reused pads became one of cryptanalysis’s first major computer applications, ultimately exposing Soviet agents like Blunt and Cairncross.

Over 100 Security Service (MI5) files are being released today [14 January 2025] covering a wide range of subjects and individuals. Most notably, the files offer fresh perspectives on notorious members of the Cambridge Five spy ring, namely Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby and John Cairncross.

The “two-time pad” problem may have helped shape modern information theory itself. Claude Shannon’s groundbreaking post-war papers establishing the mathematical foundations of cryptography likely drew inspiration from the practical challenge of quantifying exactly why a one-time pad was secure but a two-time pad catastrophically weak.

The serious implications for modern national security systems remain stark: mathematical perfection means little without robust operational security. The Soviets’ experience shows how administrative decisions and human reliability issues can compromise even theoretically unbreakable systems. Their requirement for cipher clerks to sign their work, like artists initialing a canvas, transformed a personnel management solution into a critical cryptographic vulnerability.

As we consider contemporary challenges in vetting national security roles, this history serves as a pointed reminder: institutional failures to properly handle personnel reliability issues can cascade into catastrophic failures. Though the specific technologies have changed, the fundamental challenge remains: a security system is only as strong as its human operators and the procedures governing them.

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The Soviet Union’s cryptographic evolution through the 1920s demonstrates a typical progression from basic to multi-layered:

[1] Columnar Transposition
A message is written in rows of fixed length to form columns, which are then rearranged using a numeric key. For example, with key “3142” the message “SEND SUPPLIES” becomes:

  3 1 4 2
  S E N D
  S U P P
  L I E S

Reading columns by key order (1,2,3,4) produces: “EUI DPS SSL NPE”

[2] Dinomic Substitution
Plaintext letters are first paired (e.g., SE ND SU PP LI ES) and each pair is then substituted as a unit using a conversion table. This approach conceals single-letter frequency patterns that plague simple substitution. For instance:

- SE → KR
- ND → MY
- etc.

[3] Combined Method
This advanced technique applies both methods sequentially:

1. Applying dinomic substitution
2. Performing columnar transposition

The combination strengthens the encryption in two ways:

• Substitution masks letter frequencies
• Transposition scrambles positional patterns

This progression through increasingly sophisticated encryption methods reveals how deeply British signals intelligence had penetrated Soviet-Afghan diplomatic communications. The radio intercept stations at Cherat (above Peshawar) and Pishin in Baluchistan were particularly focused on monitoring traffic between Moscow-Kabul and Moscow-Tashkent, providing significant advantages in managing regional power dynamics and potentially influencing events covertly (e.g. King Amanullah Khan’s overthrow).

In the fall of 1925 the Government of India sent a column (known as the WANA column) to the northwest frontier to occupy Waziristan to deal with unrest among the northwest tribes, a more stormy situation than usual. Stark, the Russian Ambassador in Afghanistan, sent a cipher telegram to Moscow in which he inquired what joint action was proposed between the Russian and Afghan Governments “in view of the occupation of Waziristan (W Widu Okkupacii Waziristana).” Our interpreter, who was quadriligual in Russian, English, French and German, but not outstandingly literate in any one of them, translated this—”with a view to the occupation of Waziristan.” The intelligence branch of Army Headquarters was in Delhi, and we were in Simla, and there was a day of near crisis in Delhi before someone, realizing that it would take something like six months for Russians and Afghans to join forces over the Hindu Kush, queried the translation back to us.

The WANA column incident perfectly illustrates how signals intelligence capabilities needed to be balanced with practical regional knowledge. While the British intercept stations could successfully capture and decrypt Soviet diplomatic traffic, the true value of this intelligence depended on accurate translation and interpretation by cooler heads. In this case, a simple preposition mistranslation nearly triggered a crisis until those familiar with the Hindu Kush’s geography could provide crucial context about the practical impossibility of rapid Soviet-Afghan military coordination.