The other night I lay awake staring at the stars, contemplating Peter Thiel being catastrophically wrong about history. He was selling a giant bag of fraud, as people literally pay to hear his backwards history in talks, but why… why lie about Churchill?
His framing was so completely backwards, so obviously wrong, it had to be Thiel practicing intentional disinformation.
It got me thinking about the complexity of the 1943 Bengal famine, since Churchill is sometimes accused of unilaterally mishandling it, meaning he personally gets blamed for 3 million deaths.
It’s unfair to blame him entirely, but if someone wants to criticize Churchill for errors, Bengal is the most obvious avenue because it’s complicated, morally ambiguous, and shows how even “good” leaders can be complicit in systemic catastrophe.
Instead, Thiel went with a well known Stalinist statement and attributed it to Churchill, which either shows profound ignorance or… something else.
It would be like hearing that Thiel give an exclusive paid speech about Apple’s first computer being the Radio Shack TRS-80, as if such history errors are worth price of admission.
Gibberish. And probably intentional.
It’s also unfortunate, because the 1943 Bengal catastrophe is actually very relevant today, with direct parallels to the dangerous economics of Big Tech billionaires.
In short, bureaucratic rationality (efficiency metrics, cost control) and market-driven predation (hoarding, speculation) created a perfect storm in history. Churchill was hugely implicated in millions being killed not from an absolute supply shortage, but from what the economist Amartya Sen called an “entitlement failure” system, where people were gated to prevent access to food that exists.
Bengal is a case study of systems optimized for everything except human welfare, and how “rational” decision-making at every level can produce catastrophic outcomes. A decade ago I said this about Big Data platforms; these days it clearly applies to the AI industry, and very much applies to Thiel.
There were two fundamental, interrelated pathologies underlying the catastrophe of Bengal:
Rent Seeking — Artificial Scarcity for Power and Profit: The Famine Inquiry Commission concluded that “a large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved” and noted that “corruption was widespread throughout the province and in many classes of society.” Gandhi has even been implicated in a calculated failure to act, using famine to undermine his political opponents. Enormous profits were made through speculation, war profiteering, hoarding, and corruption by the calculation that “profits for some meant death for others.” Food was deliberately stockpiled in village stores of wealthy landlords and tradesmen who were waiting for inflation to cause price increases. The beneficiaries were big farmers, merchants, and rice mill owners, whose incomes soared while the poor starved. Bengal’s Minister of Civil Supplies gave the import monopoly to his friend and political ally who had a large grain trading business. This was highly profitable when selling at black-market prices, as long as shortages continued. The extremely inelastic demand for food meant traders would lose money if they increased imports.
Efficiency as Status/Virtue: After Temple’s “excessive” spending and immediate response had saved lives in 1873-74, he was criticized rather than celebrated. The subsequent British relief efforts implemented stricter standards with the justification that “excessive pay might promote dependency.” Lord Lytton had opposed famine relief reforms in the belief they would stimulate “shirking by Indian workers,” substantively ordering “there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food” and instructing district officers to “discourage relief works in every possible way.”
The Toxic Synergy
What makes this particularly devastating is how these two pathologies reinforced each other in a vicious cycle.
Efficiency doctrine provided moral cover for profiteering. When officials invoked “market discipline” and “non-interference,” they justified refusing to disrupt the hoarding and speculation that was killing people. War Cabinet reports noted the Government of India was “unduly tender with speculators and hoarders”—the reluctance to “waste” resources on aggressive intervention meant the corrupt could operate with impunity. Meanwhile, the massive profits from artificial scarcity validated the efficiency ideology: markets were “working,” just not for human welfare.
Both prioritized abstract principles over human lives. Whether it was market efficiency, fiscal responsibility, or profit margins, the actual suffering and death became normalized for these systemic imperatives.
And that sounds to me a LOT like Palantir.
It also sounds like the SRE who forgets the R stands for reliability, and keeps causing outages by forcing “efficiency” in cloud systems by generating artificial scarcity.
Just as 3 million Bengalis died while food existed but was made inaccessible by system operators, Big Tech is building systems where resources, opportunities, and even basic rights may exist in aggregate while systematically withheld through centralized and optimized distribution failures.
The Bengal famine shows that you don’t need malicious intent, only the right combination of profit motive, efficiency ideology, institutional inertia, and a willful blindness to complexity.
That last one is a particular worry in tech these days. The privileged techbro “move fast and break things” ethos—prioritizing velocity over human cost—echoes the kind of oppressive bureaucratic rationality metrics that enabled the worst atrocities of the 20th century.
Thiel preaching lies about history while building systems that replicate its worst pathologies isn’t just ironic, it’s structurally necessary for him to avoid accountability. Accurate historical analysis indicts his entire life’s work.
Concentration of compute resources creating artificial scarcity
“Alignment” framed as efficiency problem rather than power question
Regulatory capture via lobbying and government contracts
Suffering externalized and rendered invisible by optimization metrics
Rhetoric of “inevitability” and “market forces” preventing intervention
Palantir literally is in the business of sophisticated gating—determining who gets surveilled, who gets flagged, who gets deported, who gets targeted. The “food” (resources, freedom, safety) exists, but access is algorithmically controlled for very narrowly controlled profit.
That’s the Bengal famine system all over again, which Churchill criticized and opposed, yet ultimately still gets blame for because he was prime minister.
Where Bengal’s gatekeepers were corrupt officials and grain merchants (constraining options even for Churchill at the height of his power), today’s are engineers optimizing “engagement” and “efficiency” metrics that just happen to concentrate power and profit into Thiel’s pockets while externalizing harm.
Thiel’s confusion of Churchill and Stalin therefore is very revealing in proper context. Stalin intentionally engineered a famine (Holodomor). Churchill was complicit in systemic failure with multiple actors.
Thiel artificially conflates these two in a way that seems extremely self serving, beyond just historical malpractice:
Obscures how systemic optimization can kill without individual malice
Avoids the uncomfortable middle ground where “rational actors” produce catastrophe
Prevents examination of how market fundamentalism enables mass harm
We are talking about the very highest level of authority, a specific role created for a specific person to command entire theaters of war. That person doesn’t resign mid-tour unless they believe they are being ordered to be complicit in illegal or immoral acts. Admiral Holsey just did exactly that, just months after his Senate testimony.
An official statement eight months ago, before the Senate Armed Services Committee, could be used to detail how war crimes ordered by Hegseth would contradict the commitments made by a four-star under oath to Congress.
If his abrupt resignation doesn’t immediately trigger a new Church Committee, America has learned nothing from its shadowy history of political assassinations.
We’re now in a pre-revelation moment, everyone wondering how to put the puzzle together, as rampant abuses are being obfuscated to avoid accountability.
Senator Frank Church displays the CIA poison dart gun at committee hearing with vice chairman John Tower on September 17, 1975 (Source: U.S. Capital via Levin Center, photo by Henry Griffin)
For those who don’t remember, the Nixon Presidency used a wide range of illegal covert actions across Latin America to create a drug explosion, with cooperation between US covert operations and drug-dealing organizations making operations self-financing and insulated from oversight. Nixon’s creation of the drug crisis was then cynically pivoted into his justification for a covert race war (“war against drugs”), to target non-white Americans with mass incarceration and extrajudicial violence.
Nixon’s targeted manipulation of the definition of drugs as a “foreign danger” was so he could link supply control ideology with political concepts of containment (e.g. anti-communism), creating dangerous racist narco-dogma to frame domestic white power slogans into high-danger external threats.
The language is unmistakable from Hegseth’s racist dog whistling a month ago. When he celebrated “11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the Caribbean” he appeared to be popping champagne for extrajudicial killings using the same dehumanizing rhetoric that historically precedes mass atrocities. His revival of KKK-rhetoric of “poisoning” language to describe immigration and drugs directly echoes both Nixon’s war on drugs and the older, white supremacist campaigns of portraying non-whites as contaminants.
John Ehrlichman later openly and famously admitted this of the whole Nixon program:
We knew we were lying about the drugs. By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.
The administration criminalized domestic political enemies by externalizing the threat—turning law enforcement into military operations against foreign “combatants”, exactly what we see happening in 2025.
The Trump administration has sought to make the label of drug-trafficking groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” (FTOs) great again, publishing a memo claiming the US is in a “non-international armed conflict” with cartels described as “unlawful combatants.”
As a historian the pattern is unmistakable. The structural parallels to Nixon’s abuse of power for anti-democratic political violence aren’t just similar…
THE PATTERN IS IDENTICAL
Abuse Pattern
Nixon Era (1970s)
Trump Administration (2025)
Extrajudicial Killings
Operation Condor coordinated kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination across six South American countries without trial or due process
Military strikes killing civilians in Caribbean without trial or evidence, described by Pentagon officials as “criminal attacks on civilians”
Legal Authority Bypass
CIA operated parallel covert government without congressional oversight; Kissinger coordinated directly with CIA, bypassing proper military channels
Secret legal opinions justify strikes; classified briefings to Congress cancelled; operations rely on expansive Article II claims without congressional war authorization
Intelligence Displacing Military
DEA’s 400 overseas agents became vehicle for CIA operations requiring “plausible deniability” after Congress banned Office of Public Safety
Trump publicly confirms using military strikes as cover for CIA regime change operations in Venezuela; CIA operations prioritized over military command structure
Manufactured External Threat
Nixon created drug crisis through CIA cooperation with drug-dealing organizations, then weaponized it into “war on drugs” to target domestic political enemies
Cartels designated as “foreign terrorist organizations” in “non-international armed conflict”; drug enforcement militarized to justify strikes against “unlawful combatants”
Senior Military Resignations
Military officers objected to illegal operations; parallel covert government undermined proper chain of command
Four-star Admiral Alvin Holsey resigned abruptly as SOUTHCOM Commander rather than oversee what he apparently believes are war crimes
Normalization of War Crimes
Torture, assassination, and extrajudicial killing became normalized as “counter-insurgency” and “anti-communism”
Defense Secretary Hegseth lobbied for war crime pardons, called laws “getting in the way,” told troops to “stack bodies,” dismissed war criminals as “warriors”
Congressional Oversight Eliminated
Operations conducted in secret without authorization; Church Committee later discovered COINTELPRO, Family Jewels, MKULTRA, assassination programs
No congressional authorization for military operations; administration refuses classified briefings on legal justification; operations conducted under secret directives
Domestic Blowback
1976 car bombing assassination of Orlando Letelier on Embassy Row in Washington D.C.; CIA had intelligence and chose not to prevent it
Pattern suggests inevitable domestic deployment of foreign operational methods; surveillance and targeting frameworks developed “over there” always come home
Each row in this comparison represents not coincidence but a return to Nixon-era criminal intent. This appears to be an act of Republicans deciding all the things known for 50 years to be illegal and immoral, now are to be resurrected and normalized.
Congress still holds the sole power to declare war under Article I of the Constitution. The Trump administration however has neither sought nor received congressional authorization for these highly controversial military operations. Instead, it relies on secret legal opinions, classified directives, and expansive claims of Article II executive authority—the same “imperial presidency” doctrine that led to Nixon’s downfall.
Take for example Nixon’s Operation CONDOR, which used the DEA as cover for CIA operations. Congress had banned the Office of Public Safety being used for CIA cover, so Nixon had the DEA’s 400 overseas agents immediately become an untouchable invisible new vehicle for operations requiring “plausible deniability“.
Source: National Security Archive
Trump is openly claiming he is using the military for strikes on civilians as sea to provide cover for CIA regime change operations. Trump plainly confirmed CIA operations while he discussed potential land attacks on Venezuela, with officials stating the strategy focuses on removing Maduro from power.
The Church Committee was so powerful in Nixon’s time because it discovered COINTELPRO, Family Jewels (CIA assassination programs), Operation Mockingbird (media propaganda), Project MKULTRA (drug experiments on citizens), and ZR/RIFLE (assassination capability development). A cache of documents, later known as “archives of terror“, revealed:
…the terror network murdered a former president of Brazil and two Uruguayan parliamentarians, as well as hundreds of political activists. They also documented the presence of Nazis throughout the southern cone and the assassination of Israeli agents who were pursuing them.
Assassination plots by the CIA included Castro, Lumumba, Trujillo, and Schneider, revealing a parallel covert government had been setup to operate violent killers to eliminate political opposition around the world, all without any congressional oversight. CIA officials secretly coordinated operations directly with Kissinger, bypassing proper military channels. Kissinger personally instructed the Agency on operational guidelines for overthrowing Allende before October 24, 1970.
Prior to the Church Committee, there was the growth of a parallel, a secret government that was not being reined in. The republic would have been in danger if the Church Committee hadn’t done its work.
Operation CONDOR, officially sanctioned, unleashed systemic torture and execution under Nixon’s rhetoric to “let drug cops off the leash”. The language of removing legal restraint is nearly identical to Hegseth’s arrogant and latest “War Department” whistles.
When DEA agents witnessed Operation CONDOR they referred to it as “the atrocities,” cruelly joking that Mexican police commander Jaime Alcalá García “killed more people than smallpox“. Yet, when top American legal authorities resisted such corruption, they were removed. This Nixon move also is foreshadowing of today, as a Pentagon official just noted: the Trump administration in 2025 “paved the way for the attack by firing the top legal authorities of the Army and Air Force earlier this year”
More Americans today should think deeply about the story of DEA agent Kiki Camarena who was tortured for 30 hours and murdered in 1985, after he discovered the CIA involvement in drug trafficking operations used to fund Contras in Nicaragua.
Defense Secretary Hegseth has already fired in 2025 multiple senior military officers, including Navy chief of staff Jon Harrison, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse (Director of Defense Intelligence Agency), Rear Admiral Milton Sands (Naval Special Warfare Command), and Gen. David Allvin (Air Force Chief of Staff).
Hegseth’s habit of dismissing war crimes is well documented. During Trump’s first term, he privately lobbied for pardons of service members convicted or accused of war crimes, telling Fox News viewers “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.” At his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025, Hegseth stated he wanted to ensure military lawyers “aren’t the ones getting in the way” of troops destroying the enemy. In his book, he referred to military lawyers as “jagoffs.”
This immoral barbarism as policy creates a direct conflict with American professional troops: a Defense Secretary who has spent years undermining standards and accountability in war now oversees a four-star admiral who resigned over concerns about orders to participate in what he believed were war crimes.
The breaking point of this conflict was on October 6, when Admiral Holsey met with Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dan Caine at the Pentagon. According to sources, Holsey offered to resign during that meeting over his concerns about the legality of the operations. The fact that his departure wasn’t announced until over a week later—and won’t take effect until year’s end—suggests the administration is scrambling to spin optics of a four-star commander’s public rejection of their policy.
Now the Trump administration refuses to provide any evidence to lawmakers proving that his multiple targeted civilian boats for military strike are carrying narcotics, pointing only to unclassified “shock and awe” videos glorifying airborne extrajudicial assassinations of non-combatants.
A high-ranking Pentagon official has apparently had to state the obvious, that such strikes are criminal attacks on civilians. Drug traffickers may be criminals but “they aren’t combatants.” Legal experts also note the obvious, that the smuggling of illegal goods of any kind does not constitute direct participation in hostilities or render civilians lawful military targets.
Trump thus appears to be identically replicating the illegal Nixon administration doctrines, as he publicly confirmed CIA authorization for covert operations in Venezuela with lethal authority, an extraordinary and unprecedented acknowledgment. The CIA directive broadens the agency’s role beyond intelligence gathering to carry out lethal operations across the Caribbean.
Notably, for the first time, survivors from the sixth military strike are being repatriated to Ecuador and Colombia. These survivors represent the first potential witnesses to what actually happened on these boats—whether they were carrying drugs, whether they posed any threat, whether the administration’s justifications hold up under scrutiny. Their testimony could prove devastating to the administration’s narrative, which is likely why they’re being quickly returned to countries that have less robust legal systems rather than more appropriately held for questioning in the United States.
Trump updated CIA authorities around the same time he signed a secret directive ordering military strikes against Latin American cartels, with officials even saying out loud their ultimate goal is regime change in Venezuela.
How bad could all this get, given an intended return to Nixon’s illegal platforms, as documented in the dual operations of CONDOR?
First, declassified documents reveal lawyers investigated and documented eighteen distinct types of torture used by the Americans running CONDOR, including beating, waterboarding with chili-infused sparkling water, near-drowning in excrement-filled water, and rape. Operations ran concurrently as a fake counterinsurgency campaign that instead suppressed social and armed movements, coordinated drug trafficking, and reorganized the drug industry to protect major cartel leaders while creating American control over and pacts between drug lords and security agencies like the DFS and Mexican military.
It was very bad, and the return could be even worse, which is why understanding Nixon becomes so critical to preventing Presidential crimes from happening again.
Second, because Congress banned the Office of Public Safety programs in 1974 that had been giving the CIA cover in Latin America, suddenly the DEA assigned 400 overseas agents for CIA operations requiring “plausible deniability.” Court documents from a 1985 case stated that despite official claims, Mexico’s Operation CONDOR was “the conduit” through which US intelligence funneled money, weapons and support to undermine and destabilize Central American governments.
Here is how the secretive parallelism worked its way into domestic operations:
CONDOR OPERATION ONE (South America, 1975-1989) Template: CIA political assassinations disguised as defense of freedom.
CIA-coordinated transnational collaboration included kidnapping, torture, disappearance and assassination across Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. CIA officials including Thomas Karamessines met with Kissinger to coordinate coup plotting, with Kissinger instructing secret American agents to “continue keeping the pressure on every Allende weak spot”.
CONDOR OPERATION TWO (Mexico, 1975-1985) Cover: CIA regime change operations disguised as drug enforcement.
A DEA program in Mexico, overseen by the State Department’s narcotics office, generated drug lords who undermined civilian protections. Mexico’s DFS intelligence service was completely corrupt, with its chief Miguel Nazar Haro setup to be a CIA asset. Mexico also contracted with Evergreen International Aviation, which had extensive CIA connections.
CONDOR DOMESTIC ARRIVAL: Inevitable home deployment of foreign test cases.
The 1976 car bombing assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt on Embassy Row in Washington D.C. shattered any illusion that CONDOR was for “foreign” operations. The bomb on American soil, planted by Chilean intelligence operatives working with Cuban exiles, detonated just blocks from the White House. It was American state-sponsored terrorism within America—the CIA had intelligence the attack was coming and chose not to prevent it.
This is the trajectory of unchecked covert operations: they always come home. The legal frameworks and operational methods developed “over there” inevitably get deployed “here again.”
The pattern repeats throughout history, for those who study it. Consider OPERATION IGLOO WHITE—a $1 billion/year program that deployed networked sensors and surveillance drones over Cambodia—when Nixon turned the same foreign surveillance apparatus on American citizens. The tools of empire always come home.
The bottom line is Americans should consider right now how the Church Committee happened because senators did their job and enforced institutional integrity regardless of political campaigning and Presidential pressure.
Today’s Congress faces the same choice.
The Senate Intelligence Committee and Senate Armed Services Committee staff are now watching a rerun, and they must be held accountable if they do nothing.
The Trump administration produced a classified legal opinion justifying strikes against a secret and expansive list of cartels, yet canceled classified briefings to Congress about the legal justification.
Admiral Holsey cannot publicly state his objections without violating classification rules. But his actions are testimony. He walked away from the Pentagon rather than participate in what he apparently believes are war crimes.
Congress has the authority to grant him immunity and compel his testimony in closed session. That’s exactly what the Church Committee would have done. Does today’s Congress have the courage of a 1975 Senate?
We’re watching an intentional return to Nixon’s worst abuses. The difference is that this time, we up front can see exactly what happens if Congress does nothing. The Church Committee uncovered a “parallel, secret government”. It prevented Republicans from destroying the republic.
What happens when there’s no Church Committee this time? We’re about to find out, unless the Senate acts now. Admiral Holsey has pulled the four-star alarm. It doesn’t get much higher, given the role reports almost directly to the President.
Related Reading – Pete Hegseth Statements on War Crimes:
Redefined war criminals into “warriors”: Hegseth repeatedly dismissed war crimes through a PR campaign on Fox & Friends: “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice. They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors”
Normalized war crimes as “could’ve been me” and “Put us all in jail”: Hegseth said the possibility of pardons was “very heartening for guys like me,” that it “could’ve been me” on trial for war crimes, and that if Golsteyn’s actions counted as a war crime, then “put us all in jail“
Declared laws are “getting in the way” of illegal military operations: During his Senate confirmation hearing, Hegseth stated he wanted to ensure lawyers “aren’t the ones getting in the way” of service members having “opportunity to destroy…the enemy”
Defamed military lawyers as “jagoffs”: In his book “War on Warriors,” Hegseth used the derogatory term “jagoffs” to describe Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) lawyers
Claimed loopholes to Geneva Convention: When pressed by Senator Angus King, Hegseth agreed the Geneva Convention was “the law of the land” but qualified that such laws of war existed “above” restrictive rules of engagement
Invoked genocidal outcomes: “Stack bodies”: On a June 2024 podcast, Hegseth said: “They killed the right guys in the wrong way, according to somebody. I’m done with that…you stack bodies, and when it’s over, then you let the dust settle”
History of American prosecution of Nazi sympathizers shows JD Vance and Pete Hegseth have entered seditious territory
The Precedent
In 1944, the U.S. government brought sedition charges against 30 Americans under the Smith Act. Their crime: membership in the America First Committee and publishing “seemingly pro-German writings” that prosecutors said were part of “a gigantic conspiracy with German and Nazi officials.” The charges established the standard: even passive support for Nazis through speech was considered seditious.
America First worked to spread and defend Nazism before, during and even after WWII
America First in 1940 simply meant a white supremacist campaign to enable Hitler, as documented in the Yale “college” movement’s archives at the Gerald Ford museum.
America First was a national college movement started by Gerald Ford to support… wait for it… Adolf Hitler. Source: Gerald Ford Presidential Library
The defendants of America First said they opposed the war against Hitler, and they espoused Hitler’s rabid hate speech. They plotted overthrowing the American government, they held mock trials of the American President and of course they published materials questioning U.S. involvement in stopping Hitler.
America First thus attempted to destroy democracy by passively supporting the Nazi cause through speech and published materials. And rather than identify themselves openly and positively as Nazis, they claimed negatively that they were opposed to anyone antifa (anti-Hitler).
In 1933, a group of white supremacist (Nazi) businessmen conspired to unseat President Roosevelt and overthrow the government. One military man stopped them.
Their more direct attempts to overthrow the government in 1933 failed, which is arguably why they became so negative/passive. They didn’t overtly threaten political opponents with gas chambers, and they didn’t say “I love Hitler.” They said: stop trying to stop Hitler.
For this passive role, they faced five to twenty years in prison. I mean, many of them did but not Gerald Ford who went from seditious college hate groups to becoming the President decades later (when Nixon was forced out), if you see the problem already.
By 1996 the official America First candidate for President, Ralph Forbes, was openly campaigning as a Nazi, and he received under 1,000 votes. America First was so extreme, thoroughly crushed as a brand of fascism, that it had to rebrand itself into “Christian Patriot” ranchers and cowboys.
The cowboy hat was substituted for the swastika, an intentional rebrand that was promoted within America First terror cells. Source: white nationalist training pamphlet
Let me be more clear. Forbes was the “America First Party” candidate in 1996, campaigning as former leader of the KKK and American Nazi Party. He had rapidly advanced to the rank of captain and commander of its western division under George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, as there wasn’t really much competition. He had served also as the campaign manager for David Duke’s disasterous Populist Party (KKK) campaign for the Presidency.
Ralph Forbes campaigning in Christian garb for the American Nazi Party, before becoming the official America First candidate for President in 1996
THAT was, and still is, what should be understood as America First.
America First has always signaled white nationalist xenophobia since the late 1800s, meaning Nazism is a late iteration of the same theme for over a century
The Legal Standards
The Smith Act very clearly criminalized America First to block its intended outcomes:
Conspiring to “impair the loyalty of the armed forces”
Advocating overthrow of government by force
Speech intended to cause insubordination or obstruct military recruitment
The constitutional framework has not changed since 1944. Three Supreme Court cases, however, have been argued to define boundaries:
Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942): Fighting words that “by their very utterance inflict injury” are unprotected.
Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969): Speech loses First Amendment protection when “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.”
Virginia v. Black (2003): True threats—”statements where a speaker means to communicate a serious expression of intent to commit unlawful violence”—are not protected speech.
These standards have made prosecution of Nazis harder than the 1944 Smith Act, not easier. The bar for sedition is higher now than when America quickly jailed Nazi sympathizers, which is arguably why America First (waving their red, white and black hats and flags) suddenly openly campaigned itself into control of the White House.
Racist MAGA is racist America First is racist MAGA is racist America First is…
The question isn’t whether these Republican actions meet historical thresholds for sedition—they clearly exceed them. The question is whether America in 2025 still has the institutional will to enforce laws it once considered fundamental to national security.
The Vance Standard
This rapid decline of American protection against Nazis helps explain the headlines in 2025. Young Republican leaders—including government officials, state legislators, and congressional staffers—sent 2,900 pages of messages showing:
White supremacist symbol 1488 used repeatedly
“Great. I love Hitler” with enthusiastic reactions
“Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber”
251+ racial slurs and dehumanizing language
Explicit support for Republicans who “support slavery”
Discussions of rape, violence, and “psychological torture methods”
This isn’t passive support like during WWII. This is now very active promotion of hateful violent Nazi ideology combined with explicit threats against political opponents by people with government authority and organizing capacity.
Vice President JD Vance’s response reveals the well known America First pattern: dismissed Nazism as “college group chat” and told Americans not to “pearl clutch” about his fellow Republicans who advocate for rapid political assassination and genocide.
Under the 1944 standard—even passive support for Nazis—every person in those chats would face sedition charges. Active sabotage conviction would mean execution.
Werner Thiel was turned in by his co-conspirators as a Nazi domestic terrorist and executed. Source: Life, July 13, 1942
Under the 2025 standard—active threats of violence—they meet the legal threshold for prosecution.
Under any standard—the Vice President is providing institutional cover for seditionists.
When Vance:
Minimizes documented Nazi symbolism and genocide threats as harmless banter
Simultaneously labels Democrats a “domestic terrorism movement”
Calls universities “the enemy” requiring “aggressive attack” for opposing Nazism
Uses government power to order FBI/Treasury crackdowns on political opponents without evidence
…he meets the elements of seditious conspiracy under 18 U.S. Code § 2384: using force or intimidation to “oppose,” “prevent, hinder, or delay the execution” of U.S. law.
The laws against domestic terrorism that he’s actively obstructing?
Those are the laws his self-admitted allies are violating in those chats. But Vance’s cover extends beyond protecting just the Young Republicans actively promoting Nazism.
The Hegseth Standard
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s actions reveal an even more direct violation of the Smith Act’s prohibition on “conspiring to impair the loyalty of the armed forces.”
Hegseth ordered all service members to watch his speech demanding they conform to his political ideology or resign. Active-duty service members describe this as “a loyalty test” and warn “it’s scary how many of these higher-ups are following blatantly illegal orders.”
Military legal scholars at Yale Law School warn that Hegseth is attempting to “subordinate our national defense to the personal, political and social agendas of a commander-in-chief who prizes personal loyalty above the military’s commitment to our nation and Constitution.”
The evidence of impairing military loyalty is systematic:
Fired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. CQ Brown and dozens of generals/admirals in what officials call a “purge”
Told podcast audiences “any general that was involved in any of that DEI woke shit has got to go”
Ordered 20% cuts to four-star generals and admirals—eliminating roughly 100 senior officers
Fired the Army and Air Force’s top judge advocates general to avoid “roadblocks to orders”
Commissioned his personal lawyer—who defended a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes—to overhaul military legal counsel to “approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the law of war”
Summoned 800+ generals and admirals from worldwide posts to Quantico for a loyalty speech, with defense officials calling it “embarrassing” and questioning why senior officers had to be “pulled away from their missions to listen to hours of political grievances”
This is not reforming the military. This is systematically purging officers based on political ideology and demanding personal loyalty over constitutional oath.
Under the 1944 Smith Act standard, Hegseth would face immediate prosecution for conspiracy to impair military loyalty—the exact charge brought against America First members who merely published anti-war materials.
Hegseth is actively restructuring military command to prioritize loyalty to Trump over the Constitution, firing officers who resist, eliminating legal oversight, and forcing remaining officers to publicly affirm his political agenda.
The Vice President provides cover for this too.
The LaGuardia Standard
In the 1930s, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia faced Nazi infiltration of law enforcement. His response was unequivocal: he issued orders to all city departments prohibiting association with fascist organizations.
As documented in the historical record, when faced with evidence of Nazi organizing, LaGuardia took aggressive action in order to declare NYC free of Nazism. He refused professional licenses to German nationals invoking treaty rights, arguing “it is well known that American citizens of the Jewish faith have been discriminated against in Germany.” He issued criminal libel charges against anti-Semitic propagandists (e.g. Edmondson). He canceled German steel contracts for city projects.
Most importantly: LaGuardia never dismissed even the slightest Nazi organizing as harmless.
LaGuardia understood how officers sworn to uphold the Constitution cannot simultaneously pledge loyalty to movements seeking to overthrow it. This was considered a fundamental principle of democratic governance.
Hegseth has inverted this principle. Rather than purge those with authoritarian loyalties, he purges those loyal to the Constitution. Rather than prohibit association with extremist ideology, he demands conformity to it.
Under the LaGuardia standard—enforced against individual police officers—Hegseth’s systematic restructuring of military command to prioritize personal loyalty over constitutional oath would warrant immediate removal and prosecution.
Sedition Question
In 1944, America prosecuted citizens for even passively supporting Hitler through speech.
In 2025, government officials actively spread Nazi symbolism and threaten opponents with mass murder (e.g. Hitler rapidly jailed both his supporters and opponents to execute anyone with power). And the Vice President very openly and unashamedly provides cover, while accusing victims of being the threat.
MAGA tells us to go backwards in time, which means the 1942 America First active seditionists were executed, and the 1944 America First passive seditionists deserved jail.
Given these standards that America has applied to Nazi sympathizers, what are Vance and Hegseth… again?
Politico has a detailed investigation of the “Young Republicans” in America, based on leaked chat messages like these.
Source: Politico. Texts and reactions by: Peter Giunta, Bobby Walker, Anne KayKaty, Joe Maligno, Rachel Hope, Alex Dwyer.
Current reporting of a secret Republican platform (e.g. “invisible empire”) sounds very familiar to me, as a disinformation historian.
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
How familiar? I present the canonical Ronald Reagan example.
History rhymes even when it doesn’t repeat.
The Young Republicans knew exactly what they were doing:
“If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked fr fr” heart emoji
They understood the content was genuinely extreme, not actually funny.
The “joke” framing was explicitly strategic cover using information warfare tactics, camouflage.
The dangerous tell:
When something appears over 251 times in chats, with specific known violent hate symbols (1488), and includes detailed policy discussions interwoven with the “jokes,” it stops being humor and becomes domestic terrorist ideology with a thin comedic veneer.
Source: Twitter
The jester’s protection only works when everyone knows it’s performance. What happens when the jester starts believing their own act, and then acting on their beliefs?
Giunta wrote “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber” while actually running a political campaign. That means he made an articulated threat wrapped in historical genocide imagery, for use as an organizing tool.
When the second-highest elected official provides cover for “I love Hitler” and gas chamber jokes by labeling it all as mere “college” banter, the performance has become a policy position. The trajectory has obvious historical precedents.
Vance specifically characterized universities as dangerous places that “indoctrinate students” with “political orthodoxy” and said they peddle “deceit and lies.” Vance quoted Richard Nixon’s line “The professors are the enemy” approvingly, stating there was “wisdom” in Nixon’s words.
Yet when Young Republican leaders – including government officials and state legislators – express explicit support for Hitler and make threats about gas chambers, Vance suddenly claims everyone should dismiss it because it is… wait for it… normal “college group chat”.
Apparently to the Vice President, discussing any opposition to Nazism on campus constitutes to him dangerous indoctrination worthy of “aggressive attack,” while those expressing extreme support for Hitler and threatening political opponents with execution by gas chamber are engaged in harmless college “humor.”
What’s the historical outcome when leadership actively protects, rather than condemns, organized imminent extremist violence in discourse?
Weimar Germany (1920s-30s): Leadership initially dismissed Nazi rhetoric as fringe or protected it as “free speech”, enabling genocide
Rwanda (early 1990s): Radio stations normalized dehumanizing language; political leadership either participated or stayed silent, enabling genocide
Former Yugoslavia (1980s-90s): Nationalist leaders used historical grievances and ethnic dehumanization in “joking” contexts before committing genocide
American courts have long recognized that speech itself can constitute actionable harm when it incites imminent lawless action (Brandenburg v. Ohio), communicates true threats (Virginia v. Black), or inflicts injury by its very utterance (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire).
The Young Republicans’ messages are explicit threats against specific political targets, combined with organizing capacity and historical genocide imagery.
They very clearly meet the legal thresholds.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
