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Snopes on the Ropes: Hiding Tesla Fire Deaths in Plain Disinformation

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How a “Fact-Checker” Helps Tesla Play the Same Statistical Shell Game That Let Ford Hide Pinto Deaths

In the 1970s, Ford tried to normalize Pinto fire deaths through statistics. Everyone was horrified. Today, we’re watching the same corporate playbook unfold with Tesla, yet this time they are running the play through supposed fact-checkers.

A recent Snopes article, under the guise of innocently examining a viral meme and not the actual deaths, provides masterclass in how to hide mounting safety concerns behind a wall of statistical manipulation.

Misleading Meme Compares Ford Pinto and Tesla Fire Fatality Statistics

The parallels from Snopes numbers game to Ford’s defense of the Pinto are chilling.

Here’s what should shock you: Tesla’s CEO screamed at reporters that his cars are “the safest on the road” and every death matters. Meanwhile, their death count from fires keeps climbing while they seem to be getting less safe. After fifty years of automotive safety advancement, Tesla isn’t just failing to demonstrate dramatically better safety than the Pinto – they’re racking up more deaths faster.

Let’s examine how Snopes is helping obscure this truth.

Look at other modern EVs like the Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt. Where are their mounting fire death tolls? They don’t exist. Because proper EV design CAN be safe. But instead of asking this obvious question, Snopes sets out a weird shell game with global fleet sizes and production numbers, as if somehow having more cars on the road makes each death more acceptable.

How many Boeing 737 are in the air? How many were made? Nobody really knows or cares when a 737 crashes. Yet when Tesla keeps getting called out as a death trap burning dozens of people alive, Snopes appears more than ready to recite production numbers as some kind of excuse.

The manipulation goes deeper. Snopes ironically attacks tesla-fire.com, a fact-check site that simply collects news reports about Tesla fires, implying some hidden agenda. Their crime? Making facts and thus patterns visible for proper understanding by gathering local news stories in one place. It’s the same way early Pinto deaths were initially dismissed as isolated incidents until journalists connected the dots.

But here’s where Snopes truly fails public safety: while questioning the motives of fact-checking safety trackers, they never once examine Tesla’s agenda in fighting against investigations, using NDAs after accidents, blaming drivers after crashes, or disbanding their PR department to avoid questions. Snopes is so skeptical of news reports, and then swallows biased corporate safety claims as wholesome and delicious.

Most dangerously, Snopes completely ignores an accelerating death count behind static numbers. Tesla fire deaths aren’t just continuing, they’re rapidly increasing. Arguably the local news reports reveal Tesla incidents rise as nearly 5X the production rate of Tesla. But you wouldn’t know that from Snopes’ analysis, which buries this crucial trend beneath its bizarrely strained comparisons to a 50-year-old car model.

Source: tesla-fire.com

We’ve seen this before. When Mother Jones investigated the Pinto, they were attacked as anti-business. Now Snopes suggests that modern safety journalism simply recording Tesla facts is somehow less legitimate than historical investigations. The difference? Ford was eventually held accountable. Tesla is apparently being coddled and shielded by supposedly investigative fact-checkers.

The truth is simple and stark: after fifty years of safety advancement, we shouldn’t be debating whether a modern vehicle is marginally safer than a Pinto. The fact is 27 deaths were far too many in the 1970s! There is no world where it should be acceptable for the “safest car on the road” boasting CEO to be clocking in nearly 100 fire deaths so far, expected to grow worse every year, and be let off the hook. Cars today should be dramatically, unquestionably safer, with death rates approaching zero, which is exactly what Tesla keeps insinuating in their marketing. Musk literally just said Tesla AI will have zero crashes in 2025 knowing full well that is a bald-faced lie.

Here he is January 9th, 2025 saying Tesla driverless could hit 10X safer than humans this year and then he pumps that to 100X and it “just won’t crash”… also this year!

Source: Twitter

Sound familiar? He boasted back in 2021 that Tesla driverless “now” was 10X less likely to crash than the average vehicle.

10X was a done deal in 2021, which means 10X maybe happens in 2025. Obviously 100X being soon after just seals that absurd take on safety. They are made up numbers by Tesla. He’s misleading investors and lying about the future. What’s the actual Tesla driverless crash trend you ask?

Worse than cars used for domestic terrorism.

It’s like promising in 2016 he’d colonize Mars by 2022 and then after being awarded billions of dollars, announcing in 2024 he was thinking more like 2028 would work… or later, with no guarantees about people making it there alive.

Who really counts anything properly anymore? How does he get away with it?

The answer is layers of protection – from captured regulators to compromised media to, yes, fact-checkers who seem more interested in statistical gymnastics than the mounting body count. When Snopes spends more time attacking a website that documents Tesla fires than questioning why those fires keep happening, they’re not just missing the story – they’re helping bury it.

The supposed fact-checker bizarrely helps normalize an increasing fire death toll with statistical sleight-of-hand.

This isn’t actually fact-checking. It’s corporate defense masquerading as analysis. And it’s making us all less safe by helping hide serious safety issues behind a veneer of statistical sophistication meant to bury the news about Tesla sending so many people to an early grave. When fact-checkers prioritize defending corporate reputations over exposing mounting safety concerns, their disinformation facilitates the problem they’re supposed to help solve.

The next time you see a fact-check that reframes real human death tolls into a spreadsheet of margins, dates, fleet sizes and production numbers, remember: we’ve seen this playbook before from Ford.

The only question is how many people will die before we stop falling for cars made unsafe at any speed.

Security

White Supremacy Kills: Musk Openly Attacks LA Firefighters in Disinformation Campaign

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Apparently Tesla vehicles on fire just consumed more than two million gallons of California’s water during a severe drought. As firefighters struggle with these versus the hugely resource-intensive wildfrire blazes, Musk’s recent racist and misogynist attacks on emergency responders only make their jobs harder and raises troubling questions about corporate responsibility. And I don’t just mean because since 2016 Tesla “AI” continues to violently crash into their trucks with no signs of improving.

Tesla fraudulently promoted its driverless products as safe for public use, even after repeatedly fatally crashing directly into fire trucks, police cars and more.

But seriously where was Elon Musk to complain about Elon Musk being unable to stop all the crashes and fires from Tesla?

He has been negligently throwing matches on gasoline for years, while ignoring the consequences, and now he’s shifted into unmistakably spreading Nazi-like propaganda blaming women and minorities for LA’s wildfire devastation. This is a man who knows damn well that his own Tesla fires rapidly have drained millions of gallons of water from drought-stricken areas, and have been only getting worse with each Tesla crash.

Many Tesla end up in junkyards before 10,000 miles, with horrible fires. Loopholes in regulation allow profits while avoiding basic safety engineering, by shifting the heavy burden of novel cleanup to the communities responding. Tesla has developed a unique reputation for its “dump a burning bag of shit on everyone’s front lawn and run” approach to building modern cars.

This isn’t just overt hypocrisy from a man who practices permanent improvisation to avoid prosecution – it’s a calculated profit-driven attack on public safety from multiple angles:

  1. Use racist propaganda to undermine trust in diverse fire departments
  2. Drain their resources due to increasingly deadly Tesla fires
  3. Force communities to choose between usual fires and containing his defective cars
  4. Blame his manufactured chaos on the very people targeted and responding

Simple facts with logic demolish Musk’s toddler-like propaganda while exposing his company’s deadly toll:

  • Diverse fire departments consistently demonstrate better community outcomes when they’re not forced to waste resources on Tesla
  • California’s water crisis has been exacerbated by massive requirements for Tesla negligence fires
  • Emergency services have been stretched thin handling both regular duties and rapid rise in unique Tesla dangers
  • Black and brown communities face disproportionate impacts from both his racist rhetoric and his resource-draining refusal to build quality products

But facts aren’t the point here, and never are with Nazis, because Musk knows exactly what he’s doing by spreading white supremacist propaganda.

Elon peddles in the same playbook of his apartheid politician grandfather who fled Canada due to campaign that looked remarkably like he wanted to help Hitler win.

Elon Musk’s grandfather in WWII was arrested and exposed by Canadian newspapers as a threat to democracy. He then moved his compound to South Africa to build the white supremacist dream. When apartheid failure looked imminent in 1988, Elon’s family rushed him back to Canada so he could illegally immigrate into America and launder their ill-gotten riches (e.g. PayPal). Source: The Leader-Post, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Tue, Oct 8, 1940, Page 16

These men used to blame all of a nation’s troubles on diversity while actively causing those troubles. Jewish businesses were raided and destroyed by Nazi mob violence before being told they had to pay fines to the mob leaders who would then clean it up. The Kristallnacht “broken window” fallacy of easy profits for white men goes like this: take any crisis (even ones you cause), blame marginalized groups, present white male supremacy as the solution. Extract maximum value, create more crises.

Rinse. Repeat. Lebensraum (e.g. white supremacist enclave).

While California has been suffering catastrophe from severe drought, Tesla engineered a 600 gallon-per-minute water disaster for every vehicle they put on the road (the latest estimate has been 50,000 gallons/fire). When a man with an outsized attention system, floated by fraudulent stock valuations, is able to use natural disasters to push racist propaganda while his company drains emergency resources, we have a serious problem. Dismissing his screaming on a soap-box as just a little controversy means becoming complicit in his escalating pattern of intentional societal destruction.

Our firefighters deserve far better than to be assaulted by this unrepentant windbag inflaming racism while they battle both wildfires and his defective products that make everything worse. Our communities deserve better than having their emergency resources drained by Tesla while being blamed for the resulting chaos.

The question isn’t whether any of Musk’s regular vomiting of unfair statements need to be handled with care. That’s like asking if Lance Armstrong still deserves consideration for a medal after he yells into a reporter microphone that cycling judges are not white enough to let him cheat.

When will journalists finally recognize and confront the deadly combination of weaponized racism and corporate negligence of Elon Musk before it claims more lives? How many must die in a fire every month before Musk faces court?

Source: tesla-fire.com

Consider how he has repeatedly called aerospace technology “alien-level” threats right up to the point he caused the explosive Cybertruck suicide of a decorated Green Beret loyal to him. His cars for a decade have created direct threats to firefighting capabilities, and yet he’s on a soap box now to attack the heroes managing his selfish catastrophes.

Some say we shouldn’t “amplify” Musk’s ongoing campaign of destruction by speaking directly about it. But scientists studying genocide say it’s the silence that accelerated a slide into catastrophe. His growing body count – from deadly Cybertruck explosions in his loyal fan base to resource-draining Tesla fires killing dozens every month now – demands we speak out while we still can.

Exploiting public resources and attacking public servants should be seen for what it is.

The timing of Musk attacks on firefighters isn’t random at all (he’s had plenty of time before now, given they constantly have to respond to his Tesla fires), but rather follows the same pattern we saw with the tragedy of a Green Beret suicide.

Just as he mocked Livelsberger’s death related to the very “alien technology” rhetoric that Musk had contributed to it, he attacks firefighters after his defective products have increasingly undermined their ability to save lives:

  • His apartheid-era wealth laundered in sale of PayPal (benefit from systemic racism, then attack diversity initiatives)
  • His Twitter/X takeover (accelerate hate speech, blame targeted groups)
  • The Cybertruck tragedy (promote dangerous ideas, ignore and mock victims)

These aren’t isolated incidents, and rather a coherent strategy of exploitation and harm known in history as white supremacist dictatorship.

Based on tesla-fire.com data, there are approximately 45 documented Tesla fires in California from 2013-2024. If we chart each fire requiring a reported 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish:

  • Total water waste: 2,250,000 gallons
  • Average yearly water waste: ~204,545 gallons
  • Additional environmental impact from specialized firefighting foam required for battery fires
  • Disproportionate impact on drought-affected areas
  • Rising fatality rate after (fraudulent) claims of learning and safety

Please also recognize, the frequency and severity of fires with Tesla is not a problem found in any other electric vehicle. Tesla engineering quality is uniquely poor as a direct result of Elon Musk violently opposing safety regulations. His engineers have repeatedly testified to lying and cheating to appease his need to gather attention, effectively misleading customers about capability and safety of his products.

History, Security

Grab Them by the Glaciers: Trump’s Greenland Fantasy Reveals Colonial Pattern from Florida to the Arctic

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When Donald Trump floated his plan to acquire Greenland, many dismissed it as another bizarre outburst from a president who treats geopolitics like a reality TV show. But this obsession with the Arctic reveals something far more sinister: the latest chapter in a colonial playbook refined over centuries. Trump’s rhetoric about Greenland follows a template so precise it could have been plagiarized from Andrew Jackson’s diary, only with SpaceX snake-oil slides replacing speeches on Manifest Destiny.

Six years from 2016 we will be colonizing Mars? Let me get my calculator out.

Beta Test Invasions: Florida to Hawaii

The American colonial playbook was first tested in Florida in the 1810s. Jackson’s campaign in Florida set the model: delegitimize indigenous governance, create security pretexts, deploy overwhelming force, and most importantly, ignore legal constraints. By the time Texas was annexed in 1845, the “security necessity” argument was fully polished. California followed in 1846, and Hawaii in 1893, each expansion a refinement of the formula. It was no longer just about acquiring land—it was about perfecting demographic engineering and entrenching settler dominance for rapid value extraction and centralization.

Source: Professor Grace Chee, Los Angeles Community Colleges

Every time you look at the common banana-split, consider how it advertises to this day the sweet spoils of American militant imperialist lies and abuse to unjustly assert territorial domination over indigenous groups.

After America staged a coup to invade and seize Hawaii, James Dole is pictured grabbing a pineapple by the prickly bits: “I swear I just was examining this large hot and juicy warm fruit for quality”

Mussolini’s Attention-Seeking Upgrade

In 1935, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was a chilling echo of America’s colonial methods, but with a fascist twist. He studied America’s expansionist playbook, applying it to Ethiopia and justifying his actions with the same rhetoric of “civilizing” indigenous populations. His campaign wasn’t just awful murderous barbarism and brutality—he setup a test case to prove that the American model could be scaled abroad under intentionally misleading propaganda about market dynamics or keeping the peace.

In a speech before the Senate tonight on the nation’s foreign affairs, Premier Mussolini declared that Italy is an imperialist nation. But, he added, her imperialism, far from being aggressive, explosive or in preparation for war, is the peaceful, intellectual, cultural and economic expression of a great nation arriving somewhat late at its maturity.

His rhetoric about Ethiopia’s “strategic necessity” mirrored the justifications of American territorial expansion, showing that the template was global and adaptable. After military invasion, waves of geologists and colonial planners were pushed into rapid settlement among the tens of thousands of dead.

Hitler’s Industrialized Application

Hitler took this American template and Mussolini’s systematic approach to deception, scaling it for even more rapid and industrialized repetitive conquests. The Sudetenland in 1938 was his “Florida,” a first step where he proved the world would acquiesce. By the time Poland was invaded in 1939, international resistance had been so thoroughly debunked that it resembled a wet paper bag. Nazi territorial ambitions weren’t impulsive—they were calculated, a direct line from the aggressive bully patterns learned and facilitated over time from Jackson to Mussolini.

Trump’s Digital Copy

Trump’s focus on Greenland represents the latest evolution of this colonial playbook, now fused with two technology leaders of the modern surveillance state (Thiel and Musk). His rhetoric hits every historical note: delegitimize indigenous governance (“nobody knows if they have any right”), manufacture security pretexts (“strategic necessity”), threaten overwhelming force. But now, there’s a terrifying new layer: the tools of AI and demographic control like something straight out of 1980s South Africa.

Unlike Jackson’s era, where expansion meant physical occupation, today’s colonialism seeks to control populations through data, surveillance, and automated systems of the infamous “BOSS” watching everyone to keep apartheid running.

Trump’s vision for Greenland isn’t just about resources; it’s about building a new kind of colony—one governed by digital tools that manage borders, movements, and populations. The modern version of manifest destiny is less about useable land and more about establishing an Aryan Nation fantasy of repopulation by “landing” and expanding a technology driven existence.

Greenland Fits Pattern

Greenland is positioned as a test case, much like how Florida was being treated in 1835, or Ethiopia 100 years later in 1935. The playbook has been refined over time—each expansion and conquest a proving ground for the next. Now, Greenland serves as the proving ground for a new era in expansive colonization under one white man. Canada being called a state of the U.S. in Trump social media is like looking at a racist pamphlet from Musk’s grandfather, who envisaged exactly such expansive Technocracy maps in the 1940s. Trump’s son, arriving in Greenland with MAGA hats in tow, is not just a historical echo; it’s a systematic replication of tactics that have worked before. Just look at Mussolini’s entourage to Ethiopia before invasion.

Mussolin sends his sons Bruno and Vittorio to Abyssinia / Big drafts leave Italy as war clouds thicken (1935)

Trump Stakes Aren’t Rare

This iteration of the colonial playbook is more dangerous than its predecessors. Where past empires used brute force, today’s empire will use technology to prevent resistence and control populations from the inside out. The tools of surveillance, AI, and automated systems are all being tested, and once in place, they will offer a level of control that earlier generations of colonizers could not have imagined.

When Trump talks about Greenland surrounded by tech billionaires, he’s not just channeling Jackson’s territorialism; he’s upgrading it for the AI age. The entitled certainty that allowed colonizers to take land is now coupled with the power to monitor, manipulate, and control populations on a global scale.

This week in 1937, Italian Fascists and colonizers began a three-day massacre in Addis Ababa, killing up to 20,000 Ethiopians. The slaughter is all but ignored in today’s Italy…

Recognition and Repudiation

The historical pattern is clear: after Florida came Texas, after Ethiopia came broader conquest, and after the Sudetenland came Poland. Each failure trained the world to believe resistance was futile except at massive cost of all out war. Trump’s Greenland obsession isn’t a fluke—it’s the next step in a playbook refined over centuries to abuse power.

The real question is whether we’ll recognize this pattern in time. When someone tells you they can “shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue” without consequence, don’t look surprised when it turns out to be the King of Denmark. The jump from “grab them by the pussy” to “grab them by the glacier” is not as far as it seems, and the tools for total control are already in motion.

The world shamefully didn’t register Haile Selassie’s clarion and accurate warning in 1936, let alone Silas Soule in 1864. Now, as Trump’s son brings MAGA hats to Greenland like Mussolini’s boys to Ethiopia, we face a choice: recognize the pattern or watch it repeat at faster pace and greater tragedy.

From this:

Mussolini’s long-expected invasion of Abyssinia began at dawn yesterday… Two of the bombers were reported to be piloted by Mussolini’s sons, Vittorio, aged 19, and Bruno, aged 18…

To this:

Greenland coming in hot…” Trump Jr. said in a post on the social platform X that featured video of the cockpit of an airplane flying over frozen topography.

The template is painfully clear: from Jackson’s Indian Removal to Musk’s family dreams of white settler colonies in Canada, South Africa, and Rhodesia, to today’s technocratic visions of controlled breeding programs in Arctic compounds. It was never just about land – it was always about engineering white demographic birthing fantasy through illegal compound distribution. Mars is the marketing pitch; Greenland is the just the latest aspirational target. Same abusive playbook, just with more emojis.

Security

Not Even Two Weeks Into 2025 Already Two Tesla Recalls

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The first NHTSA recall is for airbags installed torn and undetected during manufacturing (SB-24-20-001). Ok, technically the number reveals that was issued in late 2024, so does it still count if it’s only ever seen in 2025?

Planned Owner Notification Date: FEB 21, 2025

The actual first NHTSA recall is for a camera circuit board short, which can cause the rear view screen to fail (SB-25-00-001).