Category Archives: History

History, Poetry, Security

Normalizing Racism: Elon Musk Questions Why Nazis Get a Negative Public Reaction

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Update January 20, 2025:

Elon Musk used the unmistakable Hitlergruß “Sieg Heil” (Nazi) salute today at a political rally.

This Nazi salute is banned in many countries, including Germany, Austria, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic as a criminal offense. The gesture remains inextricably linked to the Holocaust, genocide, and crimes of Nazis. Such illegal use or mimicry of Nazi gestures continues to be a serious matter that can result in criminal charges due to their connection with hate speech and extremist ideologies.

Elon Musk seems to have a troubling penchant for using his brands to flirt with Nazi symbolism and spread toxic ideologies. His social media antics often feel like a calculated effort to disseminate hate and disinformation. Some observers even suggest he’s become a prominent figure in promoting white supremacist rhetoric, casting a damaging shadow over his public persona. Whether in Germany or elsewhere, Musk’s actions speak louder than his tweets, and they paint a disturbing picture.

One blatantly obvious tactic is Musk’s constant oscillation between claiming to be the smartest person (which he clearly isn’t) and pretending to be the dumbest (which he clearly isn’t either). When you understand this charade, the danger of his tweets becomes immediately apparent. A self-proclaimed genius pretends like he can’t seem to grasp why anyone would see Nazis as an extremist group instead of mainstream. He “gaslights” between presenting himself as the smartest person alive and then displaying a baffling ignorance that’s both dangerous and absurd, using Twitter to fraudulently normalize Nazi ideologies under the guise of intellectual discourse.

The AfD is the modern Nazi party in Germany, which has worked hard to normalize and reintroduce extremism by falsely claiming to be moderating it.

German far-right leader intentionally used banned Nazi slogan, court rules

When Elon Musk regularly protests against democracy by questioning the condemnation of the AfD’s Nazi rhetoric with comments like, “Why is the AfD uttering Nazi phrases bad? I’m ‘missing’ an explanation,” what do you think should be said to him?

Source: Mitchell and Webb sketch in which Nazi officers realize they are the bad guys.

Why should Elon Musk be taken seriously, rather than simply dismissed as a threat to democracy, when he repeatedly questions if there is any harm in promoting and normalizing Nazi slogans by a political party rooted in racist hate?

Source: NYT. Dec 20, 1922. Similar to Henry Ford, Elon Musk backs politicians after they become known for “a clear, repeated pattern of making offensive and/or outright racist statements, hanging out with racists, and defending other people who are also racists.”

And what should be said to Elon Musk when he covers his businesses in swastikas and the number 88 (“Heil Hitler”) among other obvious Nazi themes?

Tesla marketed these “SS” lightning cups with the exact capacity of 88 ml to go with their “SS” lightning alcohol bottles, as a Cybertruck campaign in direct competition against the new Ford… Lightning.

Is Elon Musk subtly suggesting that we should find something positive in the mass suffering caused by racism, as he seems to? Is he lamenting the downfall of apartheid in South Africa that his family fled in 1988 to America (becoming an illegal immigrant)?

These are the real questions provoked by his repeated disingenuous queries pretending to not understand why the far-right extremist AfD is bad.

Maybe someone should teach this pampered apartheid-era silver spooner how to read properly. After all, the self-styled innovator, who shamelessly takes credit for others’ work, clearly needs help understanding the basics. Honk, honk—watch the clueless clown with his big shoes and funny nose try to play the part of a thoughtless leader.

Timeless advice from Walt Disney on the appropriate reaction to Elon Musk’s antics…

Here’s a quick song to help.

When Elon Musk says, ‘Wie ist der AfD in a race’,

We HEIL! (phhht!) HEIL! (phhht!) Right in Elon Musk’s face!

Not’seeing love for AfD is a great disgrace, so

We HEIL! (phhht!) HEIL! (phhht!) Right in Elon Musk’s face!

Fortunately, due to occupation by Allied forces, the German papers today are the opposite of “missing” these history lessons and don’t hesitate to educate. They have been obliged to smack down Elon Musk levels of feigned ignorance and stop his disinformation tactics.

For example, it doesn’t get much clearer than this.

Berlin. Vor laufender Kamera nennt der SPD-Chef die AfD „Nazis“.

That’s the head of a mainstream major German political party who says the AfD are Nazis. The very definition.

Thus there should be no doubt that Elon Musk’s big reaction to AfD in the news was very strategically timed. He Tweeted a question during German elections asking why Nazis are bad, which reveals a lot about him and his active foreign political campaigns.

His targeted disinformation blast from a bully pulpit is perhaps something the AfD and Elon Musk have even conspired to use. Reuters warns that such public-private methods of commercial/socialized extremism have been successful in “cracking” the “firewalls” that were meant to protect German democracy from hate groups.

Experts on far-right extremism say there also has been a very strategic pattern of lies, broken promises and false ignorance used by the AfD to obfuscate their Nazism, allowing it to creep back into vulnerable areas.

Right-wing extremism experts like sociologist Matthias Quent, who teaches at the Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences, aren’t surprised by the AfD’s proximity to the neo-Nazis. “The AfD and NPD are closely linked ideologically.” He says the AfD has long been a kind of “NPD light.” The NPD “paved the way for the AfD, in both East and West Germany,” Quent says.

In a constituency analysis he completed together with other colleagues back in 2017, the researcher found that the AfD is performing especially well in areas where the NPD used to be strong. At the same time, it performs worse where the NPD hasn’t been as successful. There is a “specific cultural-political space,” Quent says, that favors parties like the AfD.

Elon Musk knows exactly what he’s doing when he asks what is so extreme about the AfD after the BBC reported that the party is run by and for dangerous anti-democratic racist Nazis.

…the BBC has found a clear crossover between AfD figures and far-right networks, some of which are classed as anti-democratic or racist by German authorities.

The BBC even noted the AfD says the quiet part out loud in private conversations.

In leaked remarks [an AfD leader] mentions Nazism several times, including an apparent description of himself as the “friendly face” of National Socialism and… Nazi-era judge, Roland Freisler.

Elon Musk is normalizing Nazism by falsely claiming to know nothing or be “missing” something. In fact, to him and his infamously fascist family (who supported Hitler and fled Canada to South Africa to create the white supremacist apartheid political system) the extremism of Nazism probably feels most normal.

Related:

  • German Court Rules Elon Musk’s Communications With AfD as Extremist (Nazi-related)
  • If AfD are Nazis, and Elon Musk Campaigns for AfD, What Does That Make Him?
  • Elon Musk “most prolific liar in the history of American business”
  • Twitter’s “X” Design Based on Nazi Swastika
  • Tesla Announces “8/8” Launch Date for RoboNazis
  • Elon Musk says some of his best friends are Jews

Update:

After being called out as a “full-blown Nazi sympathizer” Elon Musk replied by falsely claiming, yet again, that his support for Nazism feels centrist and not at all extreme.

Remember, Elon Musk owes all his wealth to his family’s role in building apartheid South Africa and then fleeing the country when it ended to launder their money in American technology companies, so this is what he is calling a “centrist party of ~20 years ago“:

  • Dieter Görnert, AfD: “Das Pack erschießen oder zurück nach Afrika prügeln.”

    Shoot the pack of vermin or beat them back to Africa.

  • Marcel Grauf, Referent von Dr. Christine Baum, AfD und Heiner Merz, AfD: “Immerhin haben wir jetzt so viele Ausländer im Land, dass sich ein Holocaust mal wieder lohnen würde.”

    We have so many immigrants in the country that another holocaust would be worthwhile.

  • Marcel Grauf, Referent von Dr. Christina Baum, AfD und Heiner Merz, AfD: “Ich wünsche mir so sehr einen Bürgerkrieg und Millionen Tote. Frauen, Kinder. Mir egal. Es wäre so schön. Ich will auf Leichen pissen und auf Gräbern tanzen. SIEG HEIL!”

    I wish for a civil war and millions of deaths so badly. Women, children. I don’t care. It would be magnificent. I want to piss on dead bodies and dance on graves. SIEG HEIL!

  • Holger Arppe, AfD: “Wir müssen ganz friedlich und überlegt vorgehen, uns ggf. anpassen und dem Gegner Honig ums Maul schmieren aber wenn wir endlich soweit sind, dann stellen wir sie alle an die Wand. (…) Grube ausheben, alle rein und Löschkalk oben rauf.”

    We must proceed peacefully and calculated, adapt if necessary and butter up the enemy, but when we’re ready, we’ll put them all up against the wall to shoot them. dig a ditch, throw them in and put slaked lime on top.

  • Egbert Ermer, AfD: “Drecksack-Antifakindern bekiffter Eltern gehört eine verpasst und sie in den Dreck geworfen. Ihnen gehört gedroht, dass sie nächstes Mal unter der Erde liegen!”

    Scumbag-antifakids of stoned parents are to be beaten and thrown into the dirt. Threaten them that next time they will be put 6 feet under.

  • Björn Höcke, AfD: was convicted in German court for saying this known prohibited phrase in his political rally, because it was the slogan of the violent paramilitary forces (SA or “storm troopers”) deployed to murder and intimidate political opponents to 1930s Hitler’s rise to power. The slogan was etched on blades of millions of SA daggers.

    Everything for Germany!

  • Andreas Geithe, AfD: “Wir sollten eine SA gründen und aufräumen!”

    We should create a new SA and clean up.

  • Beatrix von Storch, AfD: “Wenn jemand kommt, und den ganz großen Knüppel rausholt und das damit schafft, innerhalb von zwei Tagen zu beenden, bin ich sofort dabei.”

    If somebody comes with the really big bat and manages to end it all in 2 days, I’m all for it.

  • Petr Bystron, AfD: “Solche Menschen müssen wir selbstverständlich entsorgen.”

    Of course we must dispose of those kinds of people.

  • Björn Höcke, AfD: “Das große Problem ist, dass man Hitler als das absolut Böse darstellt.”

    The big problem is, that Hitler is portrayed as the absolute evil.

Food, History, Security

Tesla Nazi Symbolism Expanded in New Mezcal Campaign

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Recently I wrote about the Tesla “Cyberhammer” Nazi symbolism, after I wrote about the Tesla 8/8 launch date fiasco and the rebrand of Twitter with a swastika. Now Tesla has unveiled a completely unnecessary and overpriced product: a bottle of booze in a weird lightning shape.

Notably, many people have pointed out to me how Mezcal lightning bottles form the infamous Nazi SS rune.

The bottles are 750ml, or 1500ml for a pair, allegedly an update on a 2020 design blamed on Javier Verdura, director of product.

In fact, the official Tesla release statement for the mezcal claims that that the infamous Nazi SS design by Javier was meant to honor his roots, a life in Mexico City.

The bottle was designed by Tesla’s Director of Product Design, Javier Verdura, in honor of his Mexican roots and early life growing up in Mexico City.

Honor roots how? The vast majority of mezcal is “artesanal” and “joven” (unaged), and the vast majority of agave is “espadín”, so this bottle says basically nothing. The details couldn’t be more superficial and generic.

I hate to be the one to point this out but mezcal is usually meant to share the particular details of people who make it and their methods, which the Tesla design absolutely does not “honor” in any way.

“I look for the name of the person who made it—the mezcalero or mezcalera—the town where it’s made, and the mezcal varietal, such as espadín,” says Boehm [owner of The Cabinet, an agave spirit-focused bar]. “And the more information, the better.”

So who made Tesla’s mezcal? The Tesla website just says Nosotros. That brand turns out to be a recent graduate from Loyola Marymount (LA) who in 2015 had “a college assignment” to imagine a business, so he created one in California.

I discovered tequila when I moved from Costa Rica to California… Our big break came from the San Francisco World Spirit Competition. With less than $1,000 in the bank, we submitted our Blanco and won multiple awards, including Best Tequila of the Show! Suddenly, we had the attention of buyers everywhere, and that led to our first string of large order sales. The first two years were spent focusing on small boutique restaurants. Now, we’re focused on continuing to grow our retail presence. After three years of development, we just recently launched our Mezcal.

That’s it. That’s Tesla mezcal. So how again is this design concept honoring Mexican roots?

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that we are supposed to connect a lightning bolt bottle design to the ancient legend about an Agave plant in Mexico struck by the gods and mystically delivering alcohol. However, this actual Mexican connection seems far-fetched because why would Tesla honor real roots when they clearly don’t care about Mexico at all? Their mezcal press release could be accused of burying Mexican heritage if their lightning theme is supposed to fit somehow since they haven’t explained anything and did such a poor job of highlighting any reasons to believe them.

More specifically, Tesla chose a very obvious Nazi-looking lightning bolt design. How is that supposed to make us think about the ancient fertility goddess Mayahuel and her four hundred breasts, often depicted as agave leaves with “drunken bunnies” sipping on them? The Aztec symbolism, such as the phrase “drunk as 400 rabbits” (Centzon Tōtōchtin), representing infinite intoxication, would make far more sense.

Anyway, I digress. There’s really nothing about a Nazi SS-shaped lightning bolt that connects us to Mexico for a bottle filled by a Costa Rican business school student in California. A design with plausible roots featuring fertility, or a bunch of stumbling drunk rabbits would have been a much clearer tie-in.

Do you know who really promoted the lightning bolt into Mexican culture, specifically for tequila?

Can you guess?

It was two British guys from Peckham, England who drank a Siete Leguas Anejo in 2017 and then quit their jobs to start a competing brand in 2019 called El Rayo (lightning).

Once in Mexico we linked up with a local designer, Mario and he showed us a culture that blew our minds! Forget sombreros and cactuses, this was modern Mexico… but after 3 trips and a lot of sips! Lightning struck and in May 2019 El Rayo ⚡ was born!

Lightning struck in 2019. Could two British nerds vacationing be any more awkward about how they decided to reframe Mexican culture to be suited more to their own tastes?

And did I mention Tesla claims they alone came up with a lightning concept for a tequila bottle in 2020? Yeah, oops, Tesla your designer is busted. The idea looks to be stolen from these two English guys, who were not even pretending to like Mexican heritage because they repeatedly boast how lightning branding for tequila was invented by them to erase the past.

I wish I could say it was the first thing we came up with but it wasn’t, we had a fairly bleak process to get to El Rayo – but it was worth the wait! It actually came from a book that Jack’s brother gave to him! Lightning fits in with our brand world – we want to be a bold and exciting presence and it will be a key asset for the brand moving forward.

A book? What book? A bleak process to get to “bold” new El Rayo sounds like the literal opposite to Tesla claiming lightning is to honor the old life in Mexico. What book?

And that’s what makes this so interesting as a design issue. Tesla did not say it’s about electricity, or being an electric car. They said it’s about Mexico. Yet the El Rayo team did not make anything that even remotely resembled Nazi symbolism when they invented the lightning brand for tequila. So it’s a break from Mexican life, and Tesla is exposed.

With that in mind, also accompanying this release of Tesla mezcal “SS” bottles are two cups featuring a letter “S” each. When placed together these “SS” cups have a capacity of 88ml, a number notoriously associated with the phrase “Heil Hitler” in neo-Nazi circles.

Price: $55
Features: Holds 1.5 oz (44 ml)

Perhaps you know that when you buy random mezcal cups in Mexico they vary from 1oz to 3oz or more and usually come in sets of four wide mouth bowls called a “copita”.

“It allows the nose to get close to the mezcal while making it easy to sip,” says Jon Bamonte, lead bartender at Philadelphia’s Vernick Fish, which partners with Mezonte mezcal for the bar’s agave program.

Alas, Tesla is promoting exactly 88ml to their customers in their weirdly tall cups that look nothing like a proper shape. The affinity for that number is not new, as I’ve written before. In many other places Tesla has often featured it, though the company never directly admits their meaning. Given how often 88 comes up for the company the two cups with “SS” imagery fit into a clear and disturbing association to Nazi ideology.

Charge Plugs: 88
Model Cost: 88
Average Speed: 88
Engine Power: 88
Voice commands: 88
Taxi launch date: 8/8

The mezcal bottles and cups might be viewed by some as just another step in a long-running political extremism joke, but the historical and cultural sensitivity surrounding these symbols suggests a need for greater awareness and responsibility in product design and marketing. Tesla went with the worst lightning bolt design possible using a dubious backstory that apparently stole from a directly competing brand, for what?

Given well-documented associations of the Nazi SS runes and the number 88 with white supremacist groups, the context cannot be overlooked, especially given the pattern at Tesla. This incident adds to a series of ongoing controversies involving its CEO, including active support for Nazi politicians today, raising broader questions about his past and present political work.

History, Security

Spies Love “Noise Cancelling” AI Microphones That Pinpoint a Single Voice From a Crowd

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The MIT Technology Review has a very naive feel-good story about “AI to let a single voice through” that doesn’t mention anything about the famous and decorated 1960s or 1970s spy-thrillers let alone prior hyper-focused directional microphones.

Poster for the 1974 American mystery thriller film written, produced, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr, and Robert Duvall. Hackman portrays a surveillance expert who faces a moral dilemma from his collection of highly targeted conversations. It won the highest Cannes Film Festival prize (Palme d’Or) where it premiered, then was nominated for three Oscars, four Golden Globes, and three nominations at the 47th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound.

MIT instead should have written more about how our identity can be seen as a collection of things, such that a high-fidelity sensor for AI is able to ingest a complex signal and then maintain a “private” connection between two points better than static and manual credentials. That’s an arguably positive development, as it suggests pre-shared keys could be switched to instant yet more sophisticated credentialed communications.

I mean the upside to presenting a secret for ID is that it’s disconnected from our true selves. And the downside to presenting a secret for ID is that it’s disconnected from our true selves. Which is preferred and when? It depends, so technology and tools are better when they provide options for our complicated world.

Or let me ask this a different way. Do you want to hear a specific person in this crowd? Is it a person with A, B and C attributes?

Either you setup a secret sharing system to manage that connection or… you can imagine using AI with a microphone to train on a particular Chinese woman’s voice and then alert you to her presence in any crowd while translating her speech to English.

What if a Sheriff could detect someone who is young, someone who is also Black, someone who is also male… and classify their speech as “threatening” to unleash extra-judicial assassination?

Who gets authorized for such massive scale micro listening accuracy, and for what purposes? And what could be more spooky?

It’s reminiscent of the infamous IGLOO WHITE project (sensors meant to detect men walking in the jungle and relay their position to close air support), which cost over a billion dollars a year in 1968 yet still didn’t achieve mission success. Are we there yet?

In other words, imagine a radio in a combat zone keeping contact with a single voice because attributes, where authentication is based on that voice being measured for its particular uniqueness and entropy.

And now imagine the countermeasures. One obvious safety device would be to require a secret to “key in” on a particular voice. Like the patented “PIN login” method I invented in 2006, for tens of millions of users of Internet devices at that time, commercial versions of this AI product could be prevented from detecting a voice unless it also had a pre-shared secret to authorize such a “connection”. No key, no key in.

The MIT article thus seems very lacking because it blindly reports about AI product development, really about academic research, that is within a very old technology space. It lacks any of the proper context of real-world markets (and dangers), as if ethics are somehow a separate consideration than the main one.

They could help wearers focus on specific voices in noisy environments, such as a friend in a crowd or a tour guide amid the urban hubbub.

Yeah, sure MIT, “such as a friend” or a tour guide. Positive thinking. Not such as… a target for harm.

The MIT author even uses the word “target” yet fails to mention any of the history and philosophy of targeted identity management and private point-to-point communication risks, let alone why military intelligence is desperate to game obfuscation in order to pinpoint targets for spying or even… targeted assassination by drone.

Scene from “Bugging the Battlefield” by National Archives and Records Administration, 1969 *
History, Security

Fighting Nazis With Nature: “when it was raining, I knew I was safe”

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As the extreme far-right AfD party repeatedly gets called out in German court for crimes including trying to diminish horrors of Nazism, the Guardian has posted a new first-person account with incredible detail of the pain and suffering from fascism.

Maxwell Smart still feels at his safest when it rains. The 93-year-old first learned this as a boy of 10, alone in a forest, lying on a bed of leaves in a makeshift bunker, waiting out the Nazi occupation of Poland. For two years he hid in the forest, evading hunters. Detection meant likely death.

“It was a sport to kill a Jew,” he says. “[Your typical Nazi] is not going to go in the mud and get dirty and filthy; he is doing it for happiness, for enjoyment. So when it was raining, I knew I was safe.”

When Elon Musk jokingly pals around with his AfD contacts and other extremist far right-wing hate groups and accounts on social media, one has to wonder if it brings him happiness, or enjoyment. Here’s what lies just behind such droll exchanges.

One day a notice was given for all Jewish men aged 18-50 to register for labour. Smart’s father was ordered to the town square along with 350 others. His father told him he’d be right back. On the square, the men were separated into two groups: one for professional workers (doctors, lawyers, teachers); one for skilled tradesmen. The professionals, including Smart’s father, were taken to a nearby hill and shot. Smart did not find this out until many years later.

The families were told that their men would be released if they relinquished their assets. “I remember my mother went to borrow money to pay them off,” he says. “It was all just a story. They were already dead. They collected the money but I never saw my father again.”

It’s extremely harrowing tales like this that beg the question why Elon Musk on Twitter (and with orchestrating the purchase of Twitter) has generated a reputation of being heavily and personally involved in promoting extreme right platforms around the world. Here’s what that really means.

In one Gestapo raid at the apartment his family shared with others in the ghetto, his grandfather was shot in the head right in front of him. “I could not really associate myself, a nine-year-old boy, with death,” he says. “I knew old people died, but I didn’t even think that it was possible to kill. It’s only when I saw that in front of my eyes I realised they were murderers.”

The family were imprisoned and the next day, they were violently herded into trucks. His mother told him to run.

“I was angry,” says Smart. “I said: ‘What do you mean you don’t want to take me? You are my mother.’” He followed her until she pushed him away and boarded the truck. “This saved my life,” he says.

Smart knew he would be shot if he ran, so he removed his Star of David armband and walked away until he reached a bridge, where he saw a German officer walking towards him. “He takes out the gun, points it at my head and he says to me: ‘Tell me the truth, are you a Jew?’” Smart denied it and somehow the officer believed him. “I am not a religious man,” he says. “But I believe it was a miracle.” He never saw his mother and sister again.

There is so much more to his story, one that obviously needs to be told again and again especially given recent AfD news.

…of the 8,000 Jews who lived in Buczacz, fewer than 100 survived. “I am one of the 100 and I kept it a secret,” he says. “I should remember. I have to remember. I have to tell it to the world.”