History, Poetry, Security

Mode Confusion: Tesla is an Apartheid Engine, Unable to Handle the Diversity of Roads

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A Tesla Cybertruck running Autopilot on the 69 Eastex Freeway in Houston reached a Y-shaped interchange last August and chose the wrong path. Where the road curves right, the vehicle drove straight into a concrete barrier. Driver Justine Saint Amour disengaged the system and grabbed the wheel. She was too late.

The resulting lawsuit, filed in Harris County district court and reported by the Houston Chronicle, seeks more than $1 million. It names the failure precisely: no LiDAR, no effective emergency braking, and a CEO whose override of his own engineers produced the design.

That last allegation is not rhetorical. It is a theory of the case. And it fits a pattern that runs well beyond the Eastex Freeway.

Tesla’s Own Taxonomy

LiDAR reads curves. It uses light to measure three-dimensional space ahead of the vehicle. Tesla’s own engineers recommended it. Every serious competitor — Waymo, Cruise — built their systems around it. Musk called it “freaking stupid” and chose cheap camera arrays instead.

NHTSA’s investigation EA22002 analyzed 467 Tesla crashes and found 111 roadway departures where Autosteer was inadvertently disengaged by the driver. Almost all occurred within five seconds. The agency also found that Autopilot resisted manual steering inputs — a system actively discouraging the correction it simultaneously required.

Tesla’s engineers built an internal taxonomy for this. They run a crash database query program allegedly called Cabana. Mode confusion is one of their own category labels: the driver believes the car is steering when it isn’t. When Tesla denied in formal litigation that more than 200 such crashes existed, their own lawyer corrected the number in open court. Tesla then filed Recall 23V838 covering two million vehicles for exactly this failure — while explicitly stating in the filing they did not agree the defect existed. A software patch. No redesign. NHTSA found crashes continued and opened an inquiry into whether the recall worked.

Tesla is now fighting in federal court to keep expert testimony about the recall and the pattern away from juries.

Saint Amour’s dashcam footage, provided to the Chronicle by her lawyers, shows the sequence: ramp, fork, divider managed, turn begun, then straight into the sidewall. Hood open. Body panels separating. She was diagnosed with two herniated discs in her lower back, one in her neck, sprained wrist tendons, and neuropathy in her right hand. The next object past the barrier was the freeway below.

The Man Who Decided

The Saint Amour complaint alleges negligent hiring and retention of Elon Musk as CEO, asserting that his participation in product design decisions contributed to unsafe outcomes. Tesla’s own engineers recommended the sensor that reads curves. He overruled them. That is the paper trail the lawsuit is walking.

A straight-line, no curves, commitment runs through the biography.

Musk grew up in Pretoria under apartheid. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was, according to Errol Musk’s own account, “fanatical” in support of apartheid and supportive of Nazism. Errol Musk was elected to the Pretoria City Council in 1972 and ran a construction and engineering business wealthy enough to support two homes, a yacht, a plane, and five cars. He dealt in emeralds from a Zambian mine — confirmed in his own interviews. Elon left at 17, partly to avoid military conscription into the system’s enforcement apparatus.

Elon Musk had the high-profile and sudden 1994 death of Nazi “Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging” (AWB) terrorists in mind when he marketed his Swasticar as bullet-proof

Apartheid was a system opposed to any changes, arguing against a steering wheel because white nationalist infrastructure murders anyone who dares to diverge. Its architecture — pass laws, Bantustans, labor controls — was built to arrest a curve that was already visible and documented. The demographic and political trajectory of southern Africa was known. The system went straight anyway. It crashed in 1994.

The beneficiaries of that system were not confused about what it was doing. They were experiencing, in the language Tesla’s engineers later coined, mode confusion in reverse: trusting a system that had already disengaged from any viable future.

Dismantling the Steering Infrastructure for Curves

The U.S. Civil Rights Division was established in 1957 precisely to institutionalize accountability for straight-line power — to build enforcement mechanisms that would force institutions to negotiate with legal and demographic reality. Since January 2025, 70% of its attorneys have departed. Roughly 250 lawyers — the voting rights section, the police accountability section, housing enforcement — are gone. The new leadership has redirected the division toward investigating noncitizen voters and “anti-Christian bias.” The Fair Housing Act no longer appears in its housing guidance. The Voting Rights Act barely appears in its voting guidance.

Across the federal government, DOGE — the operation Musk funded and runs — has closed civil rights offices at the Social Security Administration, the Department of Education, and agencies throughout the executive branch. The agency that should pull Saint Amour’s telemetry and formally count this crash among ADAS failures — NHTSA — now operates under an administration run by the CEO of the company it regulates.

Waymo launched driverless commercial service in Houston last month using LiDAR-equipped vehicles. The comparison the Saint Amour lawsuit invites will be made in front of a Harris County jury. This is about a system built to read the actual road ahead versus one built by a man with a documented, multigenerational commitment to only looking backwards and rigidly refusing to adapt.

Attorney Bob Hilliard’s statement lands exactly where Tesla’s own documents already sit:

This company wants drivers to believe and trust their life on a lie: that the vehicle can self-drive and that it can do so safely. It can’t, and it doesn’t.

Tesla’s engineers called out the failure. It has a name: mode confusion. They thought they were describing a car, but it’s a man in denial of history.

A single police officer in 1994 killed AWB (Nazis) who had been driving around shooting at Black people. It was headline news at the time, because AWB promised civil war to forcibly remove all Blacks from government and instead ended up dead on the side of a road.
A Nazi AWB member in 2010 South Africa (left) and a “MAGA” South African-born member in 2025 America (right). Source: The Guardian. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images, Reuters

Security

America Designates Wrongful Detention a Threat to America

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WASHINGTON — In a move legal experts are calling “a paperwork issue,” the United States this week designated Afghanistan a state sponsor of wrongful detention under a framework Trump created, using criteria Trump meets, to punish behavior Trump is currently performing.

“Anyone who uses an American as a bargaining chip will pay the price,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the official empowered to decide who counts as using Americans as bargaining chips, a determination that he says does not apply to the United States because Trump says so.

The designation activates sanctions, export controls, and travel restrictions against governments found to engage in “a pattern of unjust or unlawful detention of nationals without charges, used as political leverage.” It is the second such designation issued under the framework, after Iran was labeled on February 27, two days before the United States and Israel launched strikes against it. Afghanistan received the designation two weeks later. Officials said the timing was coincidental.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who a federal judge ruled in September had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by deploying Marines and federalized National Guard troops to conduct warrantless detentions during immigration raids in Los Angeles, praised the designation as a critical step toward domestic unaccountability. Hegseth had also federalized Illinois National Guard units and deployed them to Chicago over the governor’s explicit objection. He was not available for comment, as he was reviewing options for wrongful detention in San Francisco.

The executive order establishing the designation framework, signed by President Trump in September 2025, defines a state sponsor of wrongful detention as any government demonstrating “a pattern in which the government is responsible for, complicit in, or materially supports the unjust or unlawful detention of third country nationals.” Administration officials confirmed the definition does not apply to the American administration because Trump says so.

“The Taliban views Americans as a commodity they can grab and trade in the future,” Rubio said. “That is completely different from detaining green card holders at naturalization appointments to extract deportation cooperation from foreign governments, which is called policy.”

Afghanistan is the second country to receive the designation. It really should be third. The United States wrote the designation. At press time, no one had filed the paperwork.

History, Security

America First Imposing a Religious Test for Citizenship: KKK in Office

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The Constitution prohibits religious tests for holding office (Article VI), but contains no mechanism to remove someone for expressing hate speech including anti-Constitutional Islamophobia (an inversion of the religious tests for holding office).

KKK membership itself has never been illegal, while the KKK in principle is the Arkansas born and bred domestic terrorism platform for those who refuse to admit defeat in the Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson infamously restarted the KKK from the White House and in 1919 sent federal troops to murder American Blacks in Elaine, Arkansas.

Screen capture from “Birth of a Nation”, which President Wilson used to restart the KKK and incite violence across America

Hugo Black was a KKK member before FDR put him on the Supreme Court. Robert Byrd was a KKK organizer before serving 51 years in the Senate.

Republican leadership today choosing not to respond to obvious signs of the KKK in office is their official response: enablement. The caucus calculates that hate speech like Islamophobia costs them nothing with their base and that Democrats denouncing it plays as culture war theater to their voters.

The Economist/The New Yorker weren’t wrong

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) posted Monday:

Muslims “don’t belong in American society” and “pluralism is a lie”.

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) wrote in February:choosing between dogs and Muslims (a KKK dog whistle) was

not a difficult one

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA) posted:

No more Islamic immigration. Denaturalize, deport, repeat.

Speaker Johnson, himself showing KKK indicators, did not respond to any of it.

Hitler campaigned into office by calling democracy a Jewish conspiracy. Johnson has campaigned that democracy is bad for America. The pattern is not subtle.

Fine has faced no consequences. Ogles has faced no consequences. Johnson only accumulated more power to end democracy. The KKK pattern across three members in two months is the GOP platform, not an accident.

How many times has the KKK been in government?

More than most Americans want to know. Wikipedia’s documented list of KKK members in U.S. politics is extensive and explicitly partial.

Klan membership was “invisible” by design, so confirmed figures are a floor, not a ceiling. “America First” membership is the older and more accurate measure.

Woodrow Wilson adopted the 1880s nativist slogan “America First” in 1916 and soon after the infamous white robe costumes appeared, based on the film “Birth of a Nation” that he heavily promoted to white-only audiences.

The Washington Post reported that by 1930 the KKK claimed 11 governors, 16 senators, and as many as 75 congressmen. The names were never released.

During the 1920s “second wave,” the Klan didn’t lurk at the margins while it controlled state governments. JSTOR Daily documents that Indiana’s Republican Party was heavily Klan-influenced, with one third of white American-born men joining. Oregon, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas saw Klan members in state legislatures. Alabama governor David Bibb Graves was himself Grand Cyclops of the Montgomery chapter. Dallas held a Ku Klux Klan Day at its county fair in 1923. The city police commissioner and county sheriff were Klansmen.

Each red dot represents a local Klan chapter, known as a Klavern, that spread across the country between the 1915 “America First” Presidential campaign and 1940. Source: Virginia Commonwealth University

Hugo Black, who spent 34 years on the Supreme Court, had joined the Klan in 1923 delivered over 100 anti-Catholic speeches to Klan meetings. Nonetheless, FDR nominated him in 1937. When his membership was revealed, Black went on radio to acknowledge it and kept his seat. The Senate confirmed him anyway. Biographers note he later became one of the Court’s most consistent civil libertarians, which also tells you something about institutional incentive structures rather than anything reassuring about the Klan.

The machinery that kept Klansmen in office was simple: no expulsion mechanism, a membership base that rewarded the rhetoric, and leadership that calculated silence as the safer bet. President Ford, the only president to never be elected, was a prominent member of the infamous pro-Hitler movement in the 1940s whose members later were charged with sedition, but not him.

That supported… Hitler. Source: Gerald Ford Presidential Library

That calculus has not changed. The names and targets have.

Three members. Two months. Pushing unconstitutional religious tests. No consequences. The historical continuity is plain for all to see.

History, Security

How American Blackface Was Stopped in the 1970s

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An interesting story about what stopped blackface, includes a footnote about the librarians who hid the books so that they may be found.

Barnes says the librarian admitted that, in 1987, she had personally hidden some of these books because she feared the material would be used by the Ku Klux Klan. […] When we didn’t adequately understand how long blackface was a mainstay in American culture. Because many historians believe that it had died out by 1900, when in fact it only accelerates and increases up through the 1970s. And so if you just say, “Oh, it just died out. It was no longer in fashion,” then what you’re losing is the incredible, dangerous, and brave work of thousands of Black and white mothers across the United States in the 1950s and the 1960s, of students who stood up during Jim Crow America and said, “This is not OK. We are humans. We deserve dignity. And we want you to understand our history.”