It is noteworthy to acknowledge historical aspects related to Elon Musk’s grandfather, who expressed support for Hitler during World War II.

[Musk’s grandfather was] leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. During World War II, the Canadian government banned the group, declaring it a risk to national security. Haldeman’s involvement with Technocracy continued, though, and he was arrested and convicted of three charges relating to it. Once he got to South Africa, he added Black Africans to his list of rhetorical targets.

During World War II, being associated with a hate group labeled as a “risk to national security” in Canada carries significant historical implications. Subsequently, Musk’s grandfather moved to South Africa, playing a role in the formation of the racially discriminatory Apartheid state. Moreover, reports suggest that Musk’s wealthy father leveraged the existing racism for unfair financial and political gains.

Musk has said that he bought Twitter to halt the advance of a “woke mind virus” spreading online. His grandfather wrote his tracts to raise an alarm about what he called “mind control,” on the radio and television, where “an unconditional propaganda warfare is carried on against the White man.”

Similarly, in the case of Peter Thiel, his parents reportedly served under Hitler before seeking refuge in South Africa to evade accountability for being Nazis and to benefit from the Apartheid system.

After the end of Apartheid in the mid-1990s, both Musk and Thiel immigrated to the United States, where they pursued success by engaging in an unregulated technology sector building payment exchange and digital financial systems. Here’s how their startup was self-described.

…the equivalent of a Swiss bank account in your pocket… governments can’t stop their citizens from moving money out of the country.

And here’s why that dog-whistle signaled so strongly, from two individuals with a history of benefiting from gains acquired under South African Apartheid and Nazi Germany, drawing attention from and for renegade white men.

Switzerland was the favorite haven for Nazi bank accounts and safe deposit boxes, which often contained property plundered from Jews. Swiss banks did a lucrative business with the German Reichsbank and with individual Nazi officials. Symbolically, even the royalties from Hitler’s Mein Kampf were deposited in a Swiss bank account. […] Right up until the end of the war, Switzerland laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen assets, including gold taken from the central banks of German-occupied Europe. At the war’s end Switzerland successfully resisted Allied calls to restitute these funds…

Why did Switzerland resist government calls to return stolen money to the victims, and instead send this money outside its borders? Allegedly the pivot was because after Switzerland was forced to stop being Hitler’s helper they fled into propping up investments in Apartheid.

…a Swiss research group published a study showing that Switzerland was a leading investor, financing loans, trade credits and public bonds for the cash-short apartheid regime.

It is important to approach these accounts of history with careful attention to accuracy and precision, revealing how Musk and Thiel came into their positions, recognizing the implications of wealth and power accumulation within systems of racist privilege.

In the present day, South Africa has raised serious concerns about perceived inequities in business practices at SpaceX, asserting the company is being unfair to historically disadvantaged groups within the country.

On August 14th 2023, South Africa banned the import of Starlink kits. South Africa’s telecommunications regulator has demanded that a local Internet Service Provider (ISP) stop acquiring, distributing and facilitating the sale of any Starlink products in South Africa, that will in any form provide satellite access to Starlink services.

The ban is due to a legal requirement imposed by the Electronics Communications Act (ECA). This act mandates that historically disadvantaged groups (HDGs) must own 30% of a company before it can get the necessary telecoms licences to operate a broadband service locally.

HDGs include black people, youth, women, and people with disabilities. Since Starlink has not met this requirement it could not get the necessary telecommunications licenses to operate.

Simply put, SpaceX did not achieve the government requirements that had been established to protect historically disadvantaged groups. It seems clear why Elon Musk, let alone his family, would never really try:

Related

• August 20, 2014: SpaceX Workers Launch 3rd Suit, Allege Racist Policies
• June 20, 2020: Elon Musk’s Juneteenth Problem at SpaceX and Tesla
• November 14, 2021: Former SpaceX engineer accuses company of racial discrimination
• November 20, 2022: SpaceX accused of age discrimination by former employee
• August 24, 2023: Justice Department Sues SpaceX for Discriminating Against Asylees and Refugees in Hiring
• October 6, 2023: SpaceX sued for discrimination, again. Female former engineer alleges systemic pay discrimination against women and minorities
• November 10, 2023: At SpaceX, worker injuries soar… [due to the] chaotic workplace where often under-trained and overtired staff routinely skipped basic safety
• November 20, 2023: International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Condemns SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Endorsement of Antisemitic and Racist Propaganda

Two quick examples.

First example, I feed ChatGPT a prompt from some very well known articles in 2015. Here I put a literal headline into the prompt.

No historical evidence? That’s a strong statement, given that I just gave it an exact 2015 headline from historians providing historical evidence.

• Smithsonian: George Washington Used Legal Loopholes to Avoid Freeing His Slaves
• NYT: George Washington, Slave Catcher

Notably ChatGPT not only denies history, it tries to counter-spin the narrative into a falsely generated one. To my eyes this is like if the LLM started saying there’s no historical evidence of the Holocaust and in fact Hitler is known for taking steps toward freedom for Jews (i.e. “Arbeit Macht Frei”).

NO. NO. and NO.

Then I give ChatGPT another chance.

Note that my intentionally broken “rica Armstrong Dunbar” gets a response of “I don’t have information about Erica Armstrong Dunbar”. Aha! Clearly ChatGPT DOES know the distinguished Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers, while claiming not to understand at all what she wrote.

Update since 2022?

Ok, sure. Here’s the 2017 award-winning book by Dunbar giving extensive historical evidence on Washington’s love of slavery.

Then I prompt ChatGPT with the idea that it has told me a lie, because Dunbar gives historical evidence of Washington working hard to preserve and expand slavery.

ChatGPT claiming there is “no historical evidence” does NOT convey to me that interpretations may vary. To my eyes that’s an elimination of an interpretation.

It clearly and falsely states there is no evidence, as if to argue against the interpretation and bury interest in it, even though it definitely knows evidence DOES exist.

ChatGPT incorrectly denied the existence of evidence and presented a specific counter-interpretation of Washington, a view contradicted by the evidence it sought to suppress. Washington explicitly directed for his slaves NOT to be set free after his death, and it was his wife who disregarded these instructions and emancipated them instead. To clarify, Washington actively opposed the liberation of slaves (unlike his close associate Robert Carter, who famously emancipated all he could in 1791). Only after Washington’s death and because of it, which some allege was caused by his insistence to oversee his slaves perform hard outdoor labor on a frigid winter day, was emancipation genuinely entertained.

Hard to see ChatGPT trying to undermine a true fact in history, while promoting a known dubious one, as just some kind of coincidence.

Moving on to the second example, I feed ChatGPT a prompt about America’s uniquely brutal and immoral “race breeding” version of slavery.

It’s history topics like this that gets my blog rated NSFW and banned in some countries (looking at you Virgin Media UK).

At first I’m not surprised that ChatGPT tripped over my “babies for profit” phrase.

In fact, I expected it to immediately flag the conversation and shut it down. Instead you can plainly see above it tries to fraudulently convince me that American slavery was only about forced labor. That’s untrue. American slavery is uniquely and fundamentally defined by its cruel “race breeding“.

The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. […] When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. […] When seeking loans, planters used enslaved people as collateral. Thomas Jefferson mortgaged 150 of his enslaved workers to build Monticello. People could be sold much more easily than land, and in multiple Southern states, more than eight in 10 mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral. As the historian Bonnie Martin has written, “slave owners worked their slaves financially, as well as physically from colonial days until emancipation” by mortgaging people to buy more people.

And so I prompt ChatGPT to take another hard look at its failure to comprehend the racism-for-profit embedded in American wealth. Second chance.

It still seems to be trying to avoid a basic truth of that phrase, as if it is close to admitting the horrible mistake it’s made. And yet for some reason it fails to include state-sanctioned rape or forced birth for profit in its list of abuses of American women held hostage.

Everyone should know that after the United States in 1808 abolished the importation of humans as slaves, “planters” were defined by the wealth they generated from babies born in bondage. This book from 2010 by Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Associate Professor of History at the University of Rhode Island, spells it out fairly clearly.

Another chance seems in order.

Look, I’m not trying to be seen as correct, I’m not trying to make a case or argument to ChatGPT. My prompts are dry facts to see how ChatGPT will expand on them. When it instead chokes, I simply am refusing to be sold a lie generated by this very broken and usafe machine (a product of the philosophy of the engineers who made it).

I’m wondering why ChatGPT can’t “accurately capture the exploitive nature” of slavery without my steadfast refusal to accept its false statements. It knows a correct narrative and will reluctantly pull it up, apparently trained to emphasize known incorrect ones first.

It’s a sadly revisionist system, which seems to display an intent to erase the voices of Black women in America: misogynoir. Did any Black women work at the company that built this machine that erases them by default?

When I ask ChatGPT about the practice of “race breeding” it pretends like it never happened and slavery in America was only about labor practices. That’s basically a kind of targeted disinformation that will drive people to think incorrectly about a very well-known tragedy of American history, as it obscures or even denies a form of slavery uniquely awful in history.

What would Ona Judge say? She was a “mixed race” slave (white American men raped Black women for profit, breeding with them to sell or exploit their children) that by Washington’s hand as President was never freed, still regarded a fugitive slave when she died nearly 50 long years after Washington.

Here is an interesting essay from a year ago, worth contemplating for the next year.

Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York had been far too progressive on racial issues for most southern Democrats, and when Harry S. Truman took office after FDR’s death, they were thrilled that one of their own was taking over. Truman was a white Democrat from Missouri who had been a thorough racist as a younger man, quite in keeping with his era’s southern Democrats.

But by late 1946, Truman had come to embrace civil rights. In 1952, Truman told an audience in Harlem, New York, what had changed his mind.

“Right after World War II, religious and racial intolerance began to show up just as it did in 1919,” he said. ”There were a good many incidents of violence and friction, but two of them in particular made a very deep impression on me. One was when a Negro veteran, still wearing this country’s uniform, was arrested, and beaten and blinded. Not long after that, two Negro veterans with their wives lost their lives at the hands of a mob.”

Injustice. Truman recognized gross violent injustice. He talked in 1946 about the Black experience in America like he hadn’t thought much about his own role in improving it for his entire life. Like he didn’t oppose all those lynchings and murders under the “America First” banner he knew about for the prior 30 years (“Late 1946… just as… 1919”).

I think the Truman library doesn’t do him justice when it awkwardly and arguably unfairly tries to lavish him with praise for being so late to recognize Blacks as human.

It was assumed he would follow the lead of most other politicians of that time period and not show sympathy for African Americans’ goals for equal treatment.

To the astonishment of many, including many in his own party, on July 26, 1948 Harry Truman made one of the biggest contributions to date for racial integration and equality. In issuing Executive Order 9981 Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces. These documents trace what some call the beginning of the Civil Rights movement.

*cough*

*cough*

“Some call” what?

President Grant had signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (reaffirming The Civil Rights Act of 1866, which had overturned President Johnson’s veto).

Notably the racists in America then did everything they could in the late 1800s to undermine and invalidate both Civil Rights Acts.

Yet President Truman more than 70 years late to the table is going to be credited for “the beginning of the Civil Rights movement”? NO.

…the concept of “civil rights” was established [immediately following General Grant’s victory in Civil War]. Grant was nearly universally revered by the time of his death in 1885. A monumental tomb in New York City was constructed in his honor as a result of what was the largest public fundraising campaign in history up to that time. However, what gains were made in the realm of civil rights were under assault by the time Grant died and almost completely destroyed by the turn of the century.

Destroyed by the turn of the century (1900) is a reference to highly decorated Black soldiers returning from the Spanish American war to violent racist injustice at home.

This was the tragedy that led into the horrible racist Woodrow Wilson elected President (1912), restarting the KKK (1915), forcing all Blacks out of public office, and unleashing federal and private troops to ruthlessley murder the Blacks who tried to organize or unionize for Civil Rights (Elaine 1919 and Tulsa 1921, etc.).

Domestic terrorist planes dropping napalm bombs on an American city to destroy Black prosperity, all-white fire departments standing down to instead throw hundreds or thousands of murdered American veterans into mass graves… all these Civil Rights movement battles somehow are overlooked by Truman for his adult years, while winning all his elections? Unlikely. He allegedly hated the KKK, for example, not least of all because the Kruel Klown Klub of America had inspired Hitler and dared to run candidates against him.

“Today — not tomorrow — we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and place of safety for all those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers. Free lands must be opened to them. Their present oppressors must know that they will be held directly accountable for their bloody deeds. To do all of this, we must draw deeply on our tradition of aid to the oppressed, and to our great national generosity. This is not a Jewish problem. It is an American problem — and we must and we will face it squarely and honorably.”

To everyone’s surprise he not only recognized Blacks, he brushed aside antisemitic rants from U.S. military and state department officials in 1948 to immediately recognize Israel.

Fun history fact: today, not tomorrow, was a war-time anti-Nazi slogan.

And that’s why Truman took Civil Rights action for Blacks right away in 1946, not back in 1919… Whoops.

Perhaps given his background in racism he never felt he could push ahead and enact a real change until he had won the executive right to do it at the highest level.

Truman is a very interesting politician for his career rising out of the horribly deceptive “Missouri compromise” of Civil War, and eventually coming out as anti-racist after being known as so racist. But his latter day public switch to the right side of history, more than a half century late, was most certainly NOT at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement.