Category Archives: History

Historiography of Operation Cowboy, April 1945

Operation Cowboy timing in WWII is damning, when you look at the calendar:

  • April 23, 1945: Flossenbürg concentration camp liberated by Patton’s Third Army. Most of the prisoners were sent out on death marches throughout Bavaria as Allied troops approached. American soldiers found only 1,500 survivors amid mass graves; 30,000 had died there and many more in the marches to prevent their liberation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed April 9, 1945, just two weeks before Patton rolled up.
  • April 28, 1945: Operation Cowboy launches for Patton to rush ahead and liberate a Nazi veterinarian center with 600 captured Russian horses, alongside aristocratic breeds, before the Soviets would.
  • April 29, 1945: The 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions and the 20th Armored Division of the US Army liberate approximately 32,000 prisoners at Dachau, far fewer than the 67,000 registered there just three days before.

The same Army, the same week.

One order under Patton got a romantic mission name, a special task force authorization, all the artillery barrages it needed to clear a path, and the unprecedented decision to arm surrendered Wehrmacht soldiers. It’s been repackaged ever since as a feel-good story of liberation from Nazism.

The other efforts were… happening.

Why the delta? Patton’s postwar diary entries about Jewish displaced persons are notorious. He described humans in subhuman terms, complained about having to allocate resources to concentration camps, and compared survivors unfavorably to the Germans he was occupying. If only they had been aristocratic horses instead. Patton even came away from death camps wanting to rearm Germany almost immediately, which is damning on its own.

Not a show horse. Eugen Plappert, ca. 1930, with his many athletic medals. Imprisoned in Flossenbürg under 1938 Nazi “preventive detention,” he was told in 1942 by the SS they were sending him to a country estate for health. It was a lie, they killed him with gas on May 12.

Operation Cowboy wasn’t an aberration or exception, as it was perfectly consistent with Patton’s worldview of who and what mattered.

  • Aristocratic horses? European civilization worth a rush to preserve.
  • Wehrmacht officers? Professionals to work with.
  • Death camp survivors? A logistics problem.

The tell is in what gets reported by Military.com as “beautiful”:

We were so tired of death and destruction, we wanted to do something beautiful.

They were surrounded by death and destruction that week. They chose which rescue operation would be counted as “beautiful.”

Historiography in Plain Sight

This story gets retold as heartwarming.

Military.com now runs it as holiday content. Disney made a bizarre movie called Miracle of the White Stallions (1963).

The feel-good framing launders what is being revealed about genocide and what Patton considered worth saving; command attention and priority signaling matter.

Stills from Disney’s 1963 movie: the Habsburg aristocratic pageantry worth preserving (top) and the “sympathetic” enemy general in uniform with Nazi eagle (bottom). The film is not currently available on Disney+.

Military.com notably tells us Patton approved horse rescue “immediately” with “Get them. Make it fast.” The urgency for hundreds of aristocratic show horses is documented. The urgency for tens of thousands of human prisoners was not.

“Special prisoner barracks. Drawing from memory by Colonel Hans M. Lunding, head of the Danish intelligence service and cellmate of Admiral Canaris.” Source: dietrich-bonhoeffer.net

2025 Blackout: Waymo Shit on San Francisco Because That Was Always the Plan

Digital Manure Is the Point of Technocratic Debauchery

On Saturday, December 20, the infamously unreliable PG&E infrastructure again failed to prevent a fire, and a third of San Francisco was left in darkness.

Traffic lights didn’t light. The city’s Department of Emergency Management naturally urged restraint, asking everyone to stay home so emergency responders could be unfettered.

Instead, across the city, Waymo’s fleet of 800 to 1,000 robotaxis blocked streets by doing the exact opposite: stopping in intersections, impeding buses, and according to city officials, delaying fire department response to the substation blaze itself and a second fire in Chinatown.

Waymo logic was to make the disaster worse, and become another disaster itself, as if massive PG&E failures aren’t a known and expected annual pain in California.

…Waymo vehicles didn’t pull over to the side of the road or seek out a parking space. Nor did they treat intersections as four-way stops, as a human would have. Instead, they just … sat there with their hazard lights on, like a student driver freezing up before their big parallel-parking test. Several Waymo vehicles got stuck in the middle of a busy intersection, causing a traffic jam. Another robotaxi blocked a city bus.

The company then dropped a disinformation bomb from the corporate blog three days later.

Waymo described itself as “the world’s most trusted driver” in the aftermath of being completely untrustworthy. It tried to distract readers how it “successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals.” That would be like saying only look at all the cats and dogs it hasn’t murdered yet. Finally, Waymo promised that it was “undaunted”, in a post explaining why it just manually pulled its entire fleet off the streets. Sounds daunted to me.

The ironies are irresistible, as evidence of cognitive dissonance driving their groundless rhetoric, but the deeper story is why their technology exists, who it serves, and what its presence on public streets reveals about political corruption in California.

Big Tech’s Prancing Princes

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, aristocratic carriages were an unfortunate and toxic fixture of European cities. The overly large and heavy boxes moved unaccountably through streets built and maintained by public taxation and peasant labor. They spread manure for public workers or the conscripted poor to chase and clean. When the elites ran over pedestrians, which happened regularly, there was no legal recourse. Commoners stepped in fear and bore costs, as the privileged passed without paying.

The carriage was far more than transportation. It was the physical assertion of hierarchy in public spaces. Its externalities of the manure, the danger, the congestion, and the noise were all pushed out to be absorbed by everyone else. Its benefits accrued to one among many.

The term “car” is rooted in this ideology of inconvenience to others as status, where overpriced cages for the few consume public space with wasteful and harmful outcomes to the many.

The urban carriage (car) concept, of exclusive wasted public space, is as absurd as it looks and operates.

Waymo’s cars are a mistake in history pulled forward, to function identically to the worst carriages. They move through streets built and maintained by public funds. When they fail, when they kill, emergency responders and traffic police manage the consequences. When they impede ambulances and fire trucks, the costs are measured in delayed response times and lives lost. The company operates under regulatory protection from a captured state agency, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which forced corporate control and expansion into public spaces over the unanimous objection of public servants including San Francisco’s fire chief, city attorney, and transportation officials.

The parallel is not metaphorical.

It is structural.

Algorithms That Can’t Predict Probable Disasters Should Be Accountable for Causing Disasters

Waymo’s blog post falsely tries to spin PG&E disaster as “a unique challenge for autonomous technology.”

Unique? A power outage in California?

This is false.

It’s so false, it makes Waymo look like they can’t be trusted with automation, let alone operations.

Imagine Waymo saying they see stop signs and moisture as unique challenges. Yeah, Tesla has literally failed at both of those “challenges”, to give you an idea of how clueless the tech “elites” are these days.

Mountain View Police stopped a driverless car in 2015 for being too slow. Google engineers publicly excused themselves by announcing they had not read the state traffic laws. A year later the same car became stuck in a roundabout. Again, the best and brightest engineers at Google, fresh out of Berkeley, claimed they were simply ignorant of traffic laws and history.

Power outages in California are not unique or rare. They are a heavily documented and often recurring feature of the state’s privatized infrastructure. Enron very cruelly, as you may remember, intentionally caused brownouts in California in order to artificially raise prices and spike profits. Silicon Valley veterans build disaster recovery plans around outages, due to recurring events like this, which absolutely forecast PG&E failures. It’s engineering 101.

In October 2019, PG&E cancelled power to over three million Californians in a cynically titled “Public Safety Power Shutoff”. This is the equivalent of someone telling you to pull the power plug on your computer if you are worried about malware. The utility has conducted such shutoffs every year since, as a means of delaying and avoiding basic safety upgrades to infrastructure. A federal judge overseeing PG&E’s criminal probation explained the situation with candor that isn’t even shocking anymore:

…cheated on maintenance of its grid—to the point that the grid became unsafe to operate during our annual high winds.

A year later, with this environmental reality of annual outages in full view, Waymo opened operations in San Francisco. It received approval for commercial service in August 2023. In that time, the company boasted that it accumulated what it calls “100 million miles of fully autonomous driving experience.”

Uh-huh. It created a calculator that could do 2+2=4 around 100 million times. But apparently the engineers never thought about subtraction. Outcomes are different than just measuring outputs.

When the lights went out, in an event that happens so regularly in California it’s become normal, the vehicles froze, requiring human remote confirmation to navigate dark traffic signals.

Dare I ask if Waymo ever considered an earthquake as a possibility in the state famous for its earthquakes and… power outages?

The company describes its baseline confirmation requirements as if it made “an abundance of caution during our early deployment.”

Anyone can now plainly see that, after seven years, such a disinformation phrase strains all credulity. What it reveals is Waymo is deploying an ivory tower system designed for a few gilded elites expecting idealized infrastructure, which doesn’t exist in the state where it operates.

Waymo Benefits, But Who Pays

Waymo is as unprofitable as a San Francisco cheese store in December.

“PG&E fucked us,” Lovett said. “We’re not talking about 120 bucks worth of cheese, dude. We’re talking about anywhere between 12 and 15 grand in sales that I’m not getting back.”

Bank of America estimates Waymo burned $1.5 billion in 2024 against a revenue stream of $50 to $75 million. Alphabet’s “Other Bets” segment reported losses of $1.12 billion in Q3 2024 alone across all their gambling with public safety. The company is valued at $45 billion because of investor confidence in privatisation and monopolization of public mobility (rent seeking streets, taxation without representation), and not current earnings.

The beneficiaries are no mystery: Alphabet shareholders, venture capital, the 2,500 employees at Waymo, and well-heeled lazy riders seeking exclusion and novelty.

The payers are equally clear: emergency responders forced to deal with stalled vehicles, taxpayers who fund infrastructure and regulatory agencies, other road users stuck in gridlock, and potential victims of delayed emergency response.

This is like the days of the giant double-decker empty idling Google Bus parked at public bus stops blocking transit and delaying city workers, because… Google execs DGAF about the public.

Google buses throughout the 2010s regularly blocked public stops and bike lanes, creating transit denial of service. The company pitched the system to staff as a velvet roped shelter from participation in community, similar to their infamous cafeterias.

Research on Big Tech privatization of streets as harmful to the public is unambiguous. Fire damage doubles every 30-60 seconds per NFPA research on active suppression delay. For cardiac emergencies, each minute of delayed response translates to significant additional hospital costs and measurable increases in mortality.

During Saturday’s blackout, Waymo vehicles contributed to delays at two active fires and created gridlock that impeded bus transit for hours. It’s the Google Bus denial of service disaster all over again, yet hundreds of times worse because a distributed denial of service.

No penalty has been assessed yet. The CPUC, which regulates both PG&E and Waymo, responded by saying it has “staff looking into both incidents.” Water is apparently wet. The agency has a history of “looking” that doesn’t look good. It is most known for unanimously waiving a $200 million fine against PG&E in 2020 for electrical equipment failures linked to fires that killed more than 100 people.

Waymo could murder a hundred people in the streets and no one would be surprised if the CPUC said hopes and prayers, looking into it, ad nauseam.

Reverse Exclusion

Traditional exclusion takes the form of barriers. It would be a control that says you cannot enter a space, access a service, or participate in an opportunity. Reverse exclusion operates, well, in reverse. It is the imposition of externalities onto public spaces that cannot be escaped.

Before California’s 1998 bar smoking ban, 74% of San Francisco bartenders had respiratory symptoms of wheezing, coughing, and shortness of breath from being forced to inhale secondhand smoke for 28 hours a week. They couldn’t opt out. The smoke wasn’t their choice. The JAMA study that documented this found symptoms resolved in 59% of workers within weeks of the ban taking effect. The externality was measurable, the harm was real, and the workers had no escape until the government intervened.

Waymo operates the same structure of harm. You can decline to patronize an elite restaurant. You cannot opt out of the surveillance conducted by Waymo mapping every neighborhood, and all the objects around it, for private profit. You cannot choose to have a fire truck not blocked by a Waymo. At this point expect Waymo radar to start looking inside of homes, moving beyond cameras already recording everything outside 24 hours a day.

Waymo claims there is a mobility problem it wants to fix. This is misdirection.

San Francisco is tiny and has BART, Muni, buses, bike lanes, and walkable neighborhoods. A walk across the entire city is a reality, honored for decades by events that do exactly that. The population most likely to use Waymo are outsiders who work in tech, visiting tourists who don’t walk where they come from, and affluent residents who want exclusivity of a carriage experience. The city already has abundant transportation options that would deliver far more than Waymo can for less cost. What Waymo provides is not mobility but class conflict, imposing an ability to move through the city without employing human labor, without negotiating social interaction, without participating in inherently shared efficiency experience of urban spaces.

The royal carriage served a similar function of class conflict. It was never an efficient or safe way to move through a city. It was the physical demonstration of superiority, displaying who mattered and who didn’t.

CPUC Legalized Negligent Homicide

The truth is the technology is not a transportation product. It is a class technology that externalizes harms for its users by privatizing spaces and removing accountability.

Its function was never to move people efficiently or safely since trams and buses do that far better for lower cost. Its function is to assert elitism into physical spaces to redistribute power, extract data from public commons, establish monopoly position for future rent extraction, normalize corporate sovereignty over democratic governance, and transfer huge risk from private capital into public infrastructure.

It’s a ruse. Waymo is murder.

The CPUC approved Waymo’s expansion over explicit warnings from San Francisco officials that the vehicles “drove over fire hoses, interfered with active emergency scenes, and otherwise impeded first responders more than 50 times” as of August 2023. The agency imposed no requirements to track, report, avoid, or limit such incidents.

The captured corrupted CPUC simply approved unsafe expansion against the public interest and moved on.

The structure is the same one that allowed nobles to deposit loads of manure on public streets while commoners cleaned, if they didn’t die from being run over. Privatized benefits, socialized costs, and institutional arrangements that prevent accountability.

In the 1890s, major cities faced a “horse manure crisis” as the predictable consequence of a transportation system designed to serve elite mobility at public expense. The crisis could have easily been solved by regulating carriages and building public waste infrastructure (e.g. Golden Gate Park is literally horse manure from San Francisco dumped onto the huge empty Ocean Beach neighborhood). Instead it was switched to automobiles, which created far more unsafe externalities: highways intentionally built through Black neighborhoods to destroy prosperity, pedestrian deaths, pollution, congestion from suburban isolation.

Waymo is marketed falsely against human error, when it is the biggest example of human error. It delivers opaque surveillance, regulatory capture, emergency response interference, and reduced quality of life due to physical assertion of tech supremacy (externality) into public space.

The royal carriage existed because it demonstrated hierarchy. The ride share system (e.g. “hackers”) that evolved from it by the 1800s was so toxic it forced evolution of street lights to maintain public safety. The frozen Waymo blocking a fire truck isn’t a bug. It’s the mistake in history rising again, a flawed system returning when it shouldn’t: elite mobility, public costs, zero accountability.

Notice to Public Carriages

On Monday, Supervisor Bilal Mahmood called for a hearing into Waymo’s blackout failures. Mayor Daniel Lurie disclosed that he had personally called a Waymo executive on Saturday demanding the company remove its vehicles from the streets. That’s the right call.

Waymo’s roadmap for 2026 includes expansion of harms to more freeways, airports, and cities across the United States.

This post was written during the 5:00AM widespread PG&E power outages of Thursday, December 25, 2025.

…we are now estimating to have power on by Dec 26 11:00PM.

Source: PG&E

Stephen Miller Calls For His Own Detention and Deportation

Stephen Miller, the grandson of refugees who fled Russian xenophobia, is now the chief architect of a xenophobia policy built on the explicit premise that certain peoples are permanently unassimilable.

By his own logic, it was a mistake for his family to be allowed into the United States, and he himself should be jailed immediately. The White House deputy chief of staff is pushing the same framework that means his own family should be deported.

“Miller’s thoughts are ‘things that he digs from history’ and that he doesn’t have much of a ‘perspective of the world we live in today.'” Source: Independent

Not Hyperbole

It is the direct application of Miller’s stated beliefs to his own ancestry. He just laid out his ideological framework with the clarity of 1930s Nazi Germany. Speaking on Fox News about immigrants he hates the most, perhaps himself, he declared:

With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful. You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.

It would not be an exaggeration to call Stephen Miller a race-baiting extremist who more than a couple states would consider a national security threat, given the hate rhetoric he pushes. On social media, he elaborated:

This is the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.

Again, it is as if he is begging to repeat the history that would have led to his arrest and the arrest of his entire family. He is recreating the conditions, the terrors, of his family’s broken homeland. Who will stop him?

Earlier, Miller praised the Immigration Act of 1924, which established strict national-origin quotas designed to preserve the racial composition of the United States. He described the period following that Act as “the cauldron through which a unified shared national identity was formed.”

These are not casual remarks.

This is a coherent ideological framework that origin determines destiny. Certain peoples carry their origins with them across generations. They cannot transform. They will inevitably “recreate” what they fled.

Blut und Boden

The Nazi German phrase for Miller’s ideology is Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil).

The phrase was popularized by Richard Walther Darré, Hitler’s Minister of Food and Agriculture, in 1930s racist diatribes.

Notably, Darré was born in Argentina to a half-German mother, then headed to King’s College in London to become fluent in four languages as the cosmopolitan product of international commerce. Yet he espoused hatred of his own Christianity for its “teaching of the equality of men before God,” claiming it had “deprived the Teutonic nobility of its moral foundations.” He immigrated to Germany to champion the ideology that, by its own logic, should have excluded him and killed him.

For example, in 1933 he issued the Hereditary Farm Law, which stated only those who could prove “pure” bloodline since 1800 would be allowed to own a farm. He did this to declare an abrupt end to inflation and also to declare residents of urban areas as tainted, yet his own policies then caused food prices to spike and a mass migration to cities.

Sound familiar?

The core false premise of Darré, Hitler, and now Miller is that ethnicity is determined by descent (“blood”) and is inextricably linked to territory (“soil”).

Certain peoples are said to be anchored to certain lands. Others are then declared the foreign elements, by some random applied concept like skin color or hair style, that can never truly integrate, no matter how many generations pass.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines Miller’s adopted ideology simply:

Blood referred to the goal of a “racially pure” Aryan people. Soil invoked a mystical vision of the special relationship between the Germanic people and their land. It was also a tool to justify land seizures in eastern Europe and the forced expulsion of local populations.

The ideology is used for two purposes. First, ethnic minorities (e.g. Miller) are classified permanent outsiders who threaten national “purity”. Second, moral justification is cooked into a removal doctrine.

The Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust notes the destination for Miller, by Miller’s own words:

This definition precluded Jews from ever becoming Germans because they lacked pure blood and roots in the soil because of their Semitic origins. Using the metaphor of the parasite, the Nazis depicted the Jews as a foreign element that insidiously attacked the nation’s immune system.

Miller’s formulation is the exact pattern repeating: immigrants of “failed states” will “recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Miller is an immigrant from failed Russia recreating Russia.

No magic transformation occurs.

To him the problem is in his own blood.

The structural logic is identical.

However, Miller is gambling that he can trick people into believing the target population has changed and he is now “white” enough to be the Nazi.

Glosser Family of Antopol

Stephen Miller was born in 1985 in Santa Monica, California. His mother, Miriam, was the daughter of immigrants named Glosser.

Wolf Lieb Glotzer immigrated to New York, January 7, 1903, aboard the German ship S.S. Moltke. He fled from Antopol (today Belarus) due to state-sanctioned mass violence against his family that swept through Russia in the early 1900s. They were targeted for being outsiders in their own country.

Wolf Lieb lost everything when he fled the failing state. He lost his ability to speak the language. He lost all his money. He lost his ability to apply his skills. He even lost his name, as it was written Glosser instead.

Every metric Stephen Miller now uses to evaluate immigrants would have failed his own family, making himself a person who should be excluded from America.

The Glosser family settled into Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The sons of Wolf founded Glosser Brothers Department Store, a common role for immigrants, which became a community institution. They practiced Jewish concepts of justice and charity, despite becoming Americans. Leaving bags of groceries on the doorsteps of the needy during the Depression, long before they had achieved financial security themselves, was an example of how their imported culture helped their new country.

Stephen Miller’s grandmother, Ruth Glosser, documented his family history in a 47-page manuscript she titled “A Precious Legacy.”

The misery, fear and economic deprivation of their earlier years were forever etched into their psyche. As a result, almost from the time of their arrival in the United States, and long before they had achieved financial stability they were already “giving something back.” They had been on the receiving end of charity. And they never forgot this.

Stephen Miller Can’t Remember

Miller explicitly praises the xenophobic and hateful Immigration Act of 1924 as creating conditions for national unity.

Even surface level examination reveals that Miller apparently has long aspired to grab control of the oppressor’s grip… to commit suicide.

Elon Musk has been a frequent promoter of an AfD (Nazi) Party in Germany, which generates widespread disgust and protests such as this graffiti outside the Tesla factory.

The 1924 Act established national-origin quotas designed to freeze the ethnic composition of the United States as it existed in 1890—before the great wave of Southern and Eastern European immigration that brought “dark skin” people like Jews, Italians, Poles, and Greeks to American shores. The explicit purpose was racial exclusion based on skin color definitions of that time.

Yes, Italians and Greeks coming to America were literally declared non-white and therefore subjected to racist discrimination.

The xenophobic law was championed by eugenicists who testified before Congress about the biological inferiority of “undesirable” groups that included Miller’s family. Representative Albert Johnson, the bill’s primary sponsor, pushed a “Nordic” racial theory of white supremacy. The House Committee on Immigration consulted extensively with the Eugenics Research Association to make America as racist as possible.

Senator David Reed, the bill’s Senate sponsor who sounded back then a lot like Elon Musk today, explained its purpose plainly: the law would preserve “the racial preponderance of the basic strain of our population” and prevent “mongrelizing”.

The law immediately plummeted Jewish immigration, which had averaged over 100,000 per year before World War I, to a tiny trickle. This meant when Hitler rose to power in Germany, on a blueprint he copied from America, when the persecution of Jews intensified, when millions desperately sought refuge from Nazism, the American door strategically and cruelly had been slammed shut.

The State Department, citing the quota system, worked overtime to prevent safety for Jews in danger. The St. Louis, carrying over 900 refugees in 1939, was denied entry and returned to Europe. Over a quarter of its passengers were murdered instead of becoming American.

This is the deadly law that Stephen Miller now openly celebrates, as if to call for a time machine that can remove himself from existence.

This bloodstained racist “cauldron” of exclusion is what he invokes as the method through which “a unified shared national identity was formed.”

Had that law been in effect when Miller’s family arrived in 1903, he would have been detained and deported or worse. Stephen Miller would not be American, or perhaps even alive.

Stephen Should Cry Uncle

Dr. David Glosser, a retired neuropsychologist, has publicly repudiated his nephew. In a 2018 essay titled “Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle,” Glosser wrote:

If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out.

He continued:

I would encourage Stephen to ask himself if the chanting, torch-bearing Nazis of Charlottesville, whose support his boss seems to court so cavalierly, do not envision a similar fate for him.

This is not rhetorical flourish.

At Charlottesville in 2017, white nationalists marched with tiki torches chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us.”

They articulated death for Miller, the same ideology Miller now promotes from the White House. His Jewish ancestry exempts him from nothing. The slave who serves the master is still the slave.

Glosser understood what his nephew apparently does not:

My nephew and I must both reflect long and hard on one awful truth. If in the early 20th century the USA had built a wall against poor desperate ignorant immigrants of a different religion, like the Glossers, all of us would have gone up the crematoria chimneys with the other six million kinsmen whom we can never know.

More and more relatives seem willing to call out Miller’s hypocrisy.

Even Stephen Miller’s cousin is against his deportation policies she says would have stopped their family coming to US. “He’s trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from,” said Alisa Kasmer

Throwing Down the Ladder by Which They Rose, Thomas Nast, 1870, for Harper’s Weekly, New York. The “Know-Nothing Party” attempts to deny immigrants entry into the United States. The hypocrisy of descendants of immigrants denying citizenship to new immigrants is still a relevant biting political cartoon over 100 years later.

A Parvenu Bargain

Miller is not the first privileged descendant of immigrants who seeks entrance and acceptance from anti-immigrants by demonstrating he can be the even worse bully. Hannah Arendt wrote about this phenomenon in terms of Nazis. She set the distinction between the pariah and the parvenu.

The pariah accepts outsider status and finds solidarity with other outcasts. The parvenu seeks admission to domination by proving they alone are “not like those other ones.” They become zealous enforcers of hierarchies, more extreme than those born into privilege, precisely because their position is so precarious.

History provides clear examples of how this turns out the same over and over. The Association of German National Jews (Verband nationaldeutscher Juden), founded in 1921, supported Hitler and the Nazi Party. They attacked “Eastern Jews” as unassimilable, demanded restrictions on Jewish immigration to Germany, and proclaimed their German nationalism as proof of their belonging.

The Nazis used them and dissolved them in 1935. Their leader, Max Naumann, was briefly sent to a concentration camp. Their collaboration bought them nothing but ridicule for enabling their own loss. The logic of blood and soil does make short work of useful collaborators, disposing of them quickly.

Stephen Miller’s family has been in America for over 120 years. Unlike being stuck in the past like him, they built businesses, served in the military, contributed to their communities. By every measure of assimilation, Miller’s family succeeded while he did not.

Miller’s own ideology now holds that their assimilation is impossible, while his alone somehow is complete. He claims falsely that only the other immigrants and their descendants “recreate the conditions of their broken homelands” across generations, by being the one who does exactly that.

If Miller cannot escape his Russian state-sanctioned oppressor origins, as he cynically positions himself as the most hateful and racist orator in the world, neither can anyone else. If generations of Russian-Americans carry their murderous Russian state with them forever, the Glossers are the problem and Miller has to go.

The Logic

Miller’s stated beliefs reveal his ancestors came from a “failed state” characterized by poverty, state violence, and political repression.

They arrived with nothing, unable to speak English, unable to use their skills. They were a religious and ethnic minority that faced widespread discrimination in America—”No Jews” signs in hotels and employment ads were common through the mid-20th century.

Miller’s logic is they should have “recreated the conditions” of their origin instead of becoming settled and successful. But they did not follow his logic. Instead they built businesses, educated their children, contributed to civic life, practiced charity. By every empirical measure, they integrated successfully. As did millions of other Jewish immigrants. As do immigrants from everywhere and anywhere, as extensive research demonstrates—showing that children of immigrants outperform on education and economic mobility, becoming the success of the country they enter.

But Miller is trying to use himself to prove himself right. By being a failure he is trying to argue everyone else is the failure. This ideology is fake empiricism. It is fear and hate dispensed as mysticism. Blood and soil. Origin as destiny. And by that ideology, the Miller himself is the biggest mistake—just like his Jewish ancestors of Europe were a mistake to Nazis.

Miller is clearly trying to be as “know nothing” as possible. He is a man of assumptions and shortcuts, gambling that he can exempt himself from the machinery he is building. He believes that his assumed fiction of whiteness, his assumed fiction of Christianity (by marriage), his assumed fictional position within the power structure (by appointment) all provides him protection from persecution under his own words.

He positions himself as the gatekeeper who rewrites the rules arbitrarily to say which immigrants are acceptable and which are not, to pleasure himself. Yet the Charlottesville marchers clearly had Miller in mind when they made lists of who to kill next. The ideology he tries to wrap himself in as camouflage has no escape clauses for collaborators. They are the ones seen as the most deserving of murder under Nazism because they betrayed their own. If “blood” determines destiny he only digs a closer and deeper grave for himself with every embrace of racist oppressors.

History Rebukes Miller

The Association of German National Jews thought pivoting loyalty to their threats would protect them from threats.

It did not.

The Jews of Hungary thought their integration into their threats protected them from threats. In 1944, in a matter of weeks, over 400,000 were deported to be murdered in Auschwitz.

The lesson is of course Miller will personally face consequences because the ideology he promotes will kill him. The other lesson is that the blood and soil ideology, once empowered, is far more than a threat to just Miller because it is the machinery of mass murder.

Today’s target is someone Miller says doesn’t look like him. Miller uses his hatred of non-whites to argue immigrants will “recreate the conditions of their broken homelands.”

Tomorrow’s target will be determined by similar false logic of hate for political convenience. The genocidal ideology is infinitely flexible about who constitutes the threat, because it’s little more than power to turn fear into race based genocide. It is inflexible only about the solution: exclusion, removal, and then “purification” with mass graves to dispose of the evidence.

Stephen Miller’s family fled the Russians because of the ideology that Miller recreates. His family that didn’t flee were murdered. He acts like this history is forgotten, like he can repeat the worst mistakes, and that he won’t end up in the same place that history predicts. His grandmother documented it. His uncle has publicly reminded him.

He is calling for his own deportation.

He is building the machinery of his own exclusion.

He is articulating the ideology that would have sent his family “up the crematoria chimneys.”

Stephen Miller’s 2003 yearbook photo to emphasize his Santa Monica privileged life, dressed as a dude rancher. The January 3, 1919 eugenics quote denies that he or his family belong in America. The desperate inversion is the point. He’s claiming a role his own ancestry supposedly disqualifies him from. Source: New Republic

This is not a complicated strategy.

After Hitler committed suicide, Darré was convicted at Nuremberg and sent to jail. He drank himself to death not long after being released.

This is simple collaboration.

History is unambiguous about how collaboration ends.

We were strangers once. And we are commanded to never forget.

The Not So Secret Origin of Bowser in Super Mario Brothers

For forty years, gamers have treated Bowser’s name origin as if an unsolved mystery.

The official line from Nintendo is that it’s “unconfirmed.” Wikipedia likes to rest on “multiple competing theories.” The gaming press periodically revisits the question, shrugs, and moves on.

They’ve all been looking in the wrong direction.

Instead, in plain sight, the name has been confirmed not by Nintendo but by the people who actively avoided the name.

Hating on Korea

Mario’s nemesis in Japanese has always been called Kuppa, named by Shigeru Miyamoto after gukbap, a Korean rice soup dish. Miyamoto reportedly also considered naming him after yukhoe (raw beef) and bibimbap. The man liked references to Korean food as villainous.

When Super Mario Bros. was localized for the American market in 1985, someone at Nintendo of America decided that slights directed at Korea like “Kuppa” wouldn’t work for Americans. They needed another name for a villain, the fire-breathing turtle-dragon.

They chose “Bowser.”

Apparently, nobody wrote down why. Nobody filed a memo we can cite. The decision was made by a small team. Nintendo of America had roughly 35 employees at the time, no formal localization department, and was operating out of Redmond, Washington while frantically trying to launch the NES into a market still traumatized by the 1983 video game crash.

The Obvious Pop Villain

In 1985, if you were an American in your twenties working in entertainment-adjacent industries, there was a very specific cultural reference sitting in your mental inventory for “tough guy with a funny name.”

Bowzer.

Jon “Bowzer” Bauman was the breakout star of Sha Na Na, the nostalgia doo-wop group that had been inescapable in American pop culture:

  • Woodstock, 1969 (immortalized in the documentary)
  • The movie Grease, 1978 (massive hit)
  • The Sha Na Na TV variety show, 1977-1981 (syndicated for years after)

Bowzer’s whole act was a villain persona with the muscle shirt, the slicked-back hair, the theatrical sneer. The comedy he created was in the contrast: an intimidating figure performing sincere 1950s love ballads. The tough guy who sings love songs. The cruel kindness jokes, like saying he was told by his manager he’s not very nice, so he’s trying to prove him wrong by asking everyone to send get well cards to his hospital room.

Jon “Bowzer” Bauman

The spelling difference is notable. Localization teams routinely adjust spellings to avoid trademark issues or to make names feel more “natural” in the target language. Bowzer becomes Bowser.

The Negative Proof

Here’s where it gets interesting.

In 1993, Hollywood produced the infamous live-action Super Mario Bros. movie. Dennis Hopper played the villain. But in the film, he’s called “President Koopa” and never Bowser.

Why?

In an interview, screenwriter Parker Bennett explained the decision. They didn’t use “Bowser” because, and this is the key clue, it immediately brought to mind “the ’50s Sha Na Na guy.”

Boom.

This wasn’t research. This wasn’t something they had to look up. The association was reflexive. Instant. Obvious.

The filmmakers in 1993 knew exactly where the name came from. It was so obvious to them that they actively avoided it, worried the comedic association would undermine their (inexplicably serious) film.

Bowser no longer was cool, no longer was pop. A generation had passed.

If it was obvious to Hollywood screenwriters in 1993, it was obvious to Nintendo of America in 1985. The difference is that in 1985, someone saw the connection as a feature rather than a bug. A tough villain name with existing cultural resonance? Perfect. Ship it.

The Dismissal

I see some historians dismissed the Sha Na Na theory partly because “the trend of naming Mario characters after musicians hadn’t started yet.” This is terrible reasoning.

Conventions don’t emerge from nowhere. They start with individual decisions that later become patterns.

We know exactly how Nintendo of America’s localization worked in this era because we have documented cases from just a few years later. When Super Mario Bros. 3 was localized in 1990, a product analyst named Dayvv Brooks was tasked with naming Bowser’s seven children, the Koopalings.
Brooks, a former Tower Records employee and DJ, immediately reached for musicians:

  • Ludwig von Koopa (Beethoven)
  • Roy Koopa (Roy Orbison)
  • Wendy O. Koopa (Wendy O. Williams)
  • Iggy Koopa (Iggy Pop)
  • Lemmy Koopa (Lemmy Kilmister)
  • Morton Koopa Jr. (Morton Downey Jr.)

We only know this because someone tracked Brooks down in 2015 and asked him. He didn’t file a memo in 1990. There was no documentation. The knowledge existed only in his memory until a journalist finally thought to ask the right question.

Brooks wasn’t at Nintendo in 1985. But the method he used of reaching for pop culture references that “just fit”, clearly was part of how NoA approached localization. The Koopalings weren’t an innovation. They were a continuation.

Who Are You Going to Call?

The leading candidate is Howard Phillips.

Phillips was NoA’s fifth employee, starting in 1981 as a warehouse manager. By 1985, he had evolved into the company’s key liaison between Japanese developers and the American market. His job was explicitly to advise on what would resonate with US audiences — including, according to documented sources, advising on “the renaming of characters.”

Phillips was born in 1958. In 1985, he was 27 years old — exactly the demographic for whom Sha Na Na’s Bowzer would have been a vivid cultural reference. He was also, by all accounts, deeply immersed in pop culture and an avid consumer of entertainment media.

Has anyone ever directly asked Howard Phillips: “Did you name Bowser? Were you thinking of Sha Na Na?”

Phillips is still active. He does interviews about Nintendo history. He’s been asked about the NES launch, about Nintendo Power, about his role in rejecting the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 as too difficult for American audiences. He’s been asked about almost everything.

So? Bowser?

The Bowser is Bowzer

Here’s the most beautiful part.

Over forty years, Bowser evolved from a one-dimensional fire-breathing villain into the comedy shtick of a 1970s Bowzer:

  • The bumbling dad who genuinely loves kids
  • The hopeless romantic pining for his girl
  • The adversary who holds grudging respect
  • The antagonist whose menace is increasingly played for comedy

And in 2023, the apotheosis: Jack Black voicing Bowser in the Super Mario Bros. movie, sitting at a piano, singing a power ballad called “Peaches” about his unrequited love.

Jack Black as Bowser

It’s as Bowzer as Bowser can get.

The tough guy who sings love songs.

Whether or not anyone at Nintendo in 1985 consciously intended the reference, the character arc rhymes perfectly with its namesake. Bowser became Bowzer. The archetype was encoded in the name from the beginning.

If anyone reading this has contact with Howard Phillips, please ask:

“Did you name Bowser after Sha Na Na?”

The answer might finally close a forty-year-old case that was never actually mysterious. We just forgot to ask the right people the right question, to stop believing it is unknowable.