The idea that only white people can be racist, or that having darker skin automatically makes someone incapable of racist views, is both logically flawed and counterproductive. It reduces complex human beings to their racial categories and ignores the reality of how prejudice actually works.
It is indeed racist – and factually incorrect – to suggest that someone can’t be racist because of their skin color or ethnic background. Such horrible racial essentialism treats people as defined entirely by their identity rather than their individual beliefs and actions.
Racism of course is perpetrated by people of any background, even hypocritally against their own best interests. History and current events provide many examples of this, such as the current head of the FBI who is being rightly criticized for mounting evidence of white supremacist demolition to American democracy:
…Texas lawmaker, in a hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel, cast doubt on his numbers showing significant drops in crime…
“I don’t know who feels safe in this country except for the white supremacists….”
The criticism of white supremacy stuck an odd note when aimed at Mr. Patel, who is Indian American and was raised in the Hindu faith.
Indeed, those facts drew rare praise from Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who pointed out that former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a white nationalist, “would undoubtedly be turning over in his grave” by Mr. Patel’s ascendance to the job.
Praise? I don’t see any praise.
Do you see praise?
I see only a historical observation about how America has had a recent window of anti-racism (someone not white could be appointed) rather than actually praising Patel himself. The reporter’s characterization of this as “praise” seems like a completely unsupported stretch.
The article perfectly illustrates why evaluating people based on their actual statements, policies, and actions is crucial, rather than making assumptions based on their race or religion. A personal background might inform experiences, but it doesn’t predetermine character or beliefs. The head of the FBI may have been specifically nominated because of his known white supremacist allegiances, regardless of his race or religion.
The NAACP is deeply disturbed by the confirmation of Kash Patel as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). On the eve of the 60th recognition of the assassination of civil rights leader Malcolm X, our country is actively taking steps to bring us back to a time of the criminalization and brutalization of Black Americans. Mr. Patel’s writing and public statements regarding his “enemies list” and intention of using the government as a tool of retaliation reflect fundamental hostility to the role of government in upholding the law. His confirmation is an unacceptable regression of democratic ideals. We refuse to stand idly by and watch a few extremists revert the progress of entire generations. The NAACP will continue to fight for true justice and the imperatives of our Constitution.
He was literally called out during confirmation for his clear opposition to the rule of law, and for advocating the abuse of power. That’s precisely why now he is being criticized for predictably serving a white supremacist doctrine.
The FBI, like any law enforcement agency, should operate on evidence and individual assessment. Instead, what we see emerging is the same binary logic that has plagued American institutions under Presidents Jackson, Polk, Wilson, Nixon, and Reagan. The same thinking that drove MAGA’s logical predecessor, “America First” nativism of the KKK.
Woodrow Wilson adopted the 1880s nativist slogan “America First” by 1916 and soon after the infamous white robe costumes of domestic terror appeared, based on the film “Birth of a Nation” that he heavily promoted to white-only audiences.
Either the white supremacists of MAGA accept you as one of their adherents or they threaten “invisible empire” logic of unitary executive extrajudicial detention and violence.
There is a word for the premeditated killing for people outside of context of armed conflict. That word is murder.
We saw this doctrine loudly proclaimed by MAGA just this week. The US military was ordered to murder civilians in international waters, foreshadowing federal troops domestically being turned backwards in time to something like 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma or 1919 Elaine, Arkansas: shoot first, ask questions later. Redacted page one headline of the “Austin American-Statesman” in Austin, Texas. Mon, Oct 6, 1919.
In related news this week, a young Black man was found dead hanging from a tree in Mississippi, only an hour’s drive from the 1919 “America First” massacre in Arkansas.
Mississippi police on Wednesday awaited autopsy results for a Black student found hanging from a tree at Delta State University…
Map of “America First” lynchings during the period MAGA today calls a “golden” era.
Secret squirrel logic is being given by the American government during an offensive military campaign targeting and killing civilians at sea.
“There is no evidence – none – that this strike was conducted in self-defense,” Sen. Jack Reed, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said last week. “That matters, because under both domestic and international law, the US military simply does not have the authority to use lethal force against a civilian vessel unless acting in self-defense.”
No evidence is a problem because, without it, such targeting and killing of civilians is clearly illegal. America becomes a criminal state.
According to the opaque and evasive Hegseth doctrine running the Pentagon, a throwback to assassinations of leadership deemed “too leftist” by the Nixon administration, the public now isn’t allowed to know who may be killed next by the current President or why.
“We knew exactly who they were, exactly what they were doing, what they represented, and why they were going where they were going,” Hegseth told reporters on September 4 during a visit to Fort Benning, Georgia.
“How did you know?” a reporter asked.
“Why would I tell you that?” Hegseth responded.
Why explain?
Well, Hegseth should know Senator Frank Church already conclusively explained why, way back in 1975. And that is not to mention all the explanations from the post-WWII tribunals at Nuremburg. Such a refusal, by what amounts to a war mongering executive claiming no accountability, marks an end of democracy.
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)
The Church Committee’s work in the 1970s established that democratic oversight requires transparency about targeting criteria and legal authority. Without it, democracy ends.
Civil Rights campaigners of the 1960s certainly would recognize this “shoot first, justify second” mentality of white men claiming their invisible empire can’t be questioned. The Secretary of State Rubio admitted the civilians in a boat “could have been interdicted rather than destroyed” yet the President overruled everyone to dictate immediate lethal strikes “as a matter of first, not last, resort.”
When Hegseth refuses to explain any basis at all for such offensive thought, he’s essentially claiming an executive authority has been invented to designate kill lists. He overtly rejects any balance of judicial review or meaningful oversight. To put it another way, a few months ago he fired the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force in order to enable today’s illegal use of force on civilians.
As one expert reviewing Hegseth’s actions has precisely explained:
There is a word for the premeditated killing for people outside of context of armed conflict. That word is murder.
This campaign of assassination, designed to bypass not just American legal protections but any legal system that might provide due process or accountability, could now pivot to the military troops Hegseth deploys to target Black-led cities.
The pattern should remind us of Nixon’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which did the same by claiming certain categories of people could be killed without due process based on intelligence assessments that could never be challenged or verified. The Church Committee specifically identified how such programs inevitably expand beyond their stated parameters because there are no meaningful constraints on their application.
They assassinated JFK, Lumumba, Mondlane, Hammarskjold, MLK, Malcom X… which reveals a continuity of this system. The same networks that eliminated leaders who challenged white supremacy and American imperial power are now operating with open impunity, using Nixon’s racist “war on drugs” and “counter-terrorism” as pretexts for a campaign of state-based terror.
The Venezuela news serves as a very simple yet critical boundary test by white nationalists.
Once the principle is established that their unitary executive model is unopposed to designate any group for extrajudicial killing based on secret criteria, the categorical thinking is transferable to any group or individual for elimination.
And that’s why recent government campaigns, arguing they can target people based on race alone, should be seen for exactly what they are, a state building the scaffolding for mass detention and murder.
…the supreme court has “effectively legalized racial profiling”, granting federal agents the power to stop people in Los Angeles simply for speaking Spanish or appearing Latino…
This goes beyond policy disagreement into America once again deploying infrastructure and plans for state-sponsored mass violence against targeted populations. Hannah Arendt identified this process: the intentional creation of stateless populations who exist outside legal protection in order to normalize mass human oppression and extermination.
When British soldiers liberated Berlin in 1945, they encountered something both heartbreaking and illuminating: German children hiding in Nazi bunkers with weapons, terrified of the world, were unable to articulate what they were actually afraid of. These children had been indoctrinated through Hitler’s propaganda platforms to believe that Allied soldiers would kill them if they surrendered.
The battlefront solution, as one British veteran recalled, was surprisingly simple:
You put a bar of chocolate in their hands and it alters the whole war – as far as the children are concerned.
A Catholic priest who spoke German would calm these remaining Nazi adherents down, and suddenly the existential threat they’d been taught to fear dissolved completely in the face of basic human kindness coupled with overwhelming force.
This historical moment offers a crucial lens for understanding contemporary political rhetoric, in terms of parenting fundamentals, particularly Elon Musk’s recent inflammatory militant-like statements at a far-right rally in London.
Engineered Fears Lack Specificity
An AFD (Nazi Party) rally in Germany was headlined by Elon Musk
Speaking via video link to a “unite the [white] kingdom” rally organized by political extremist Tommy Robinson, Musk deployed weaponized disunity language that follows a familiar pattern.
Musk… told the crowd that “violence is coming” and that “you either fight back or you die”.
He said: “I really think that there’s got to be a change of government in Britain. You can’t – we don’t have another four years, or whenever the next election is, it’s too long.
“Something’s got to be done. There’s got to be a dissolution of parliament and a new vote held.”
On the face of it he is calling for an end of government. It is the most anti-unifying tactic possible.
And also note the overt ignorance displayed with “four years, or whenever” and “something” as his demand for immediate action.
Such statements of weaponized disunity represent the systematic deployment of rhetoric designed not to reform government policies or win electoral victories, but to collapse the shared foundations that make democratic governance possible.
Normal political opposition seeks to change who governs or how they govern within existing institutional frameworks. Musk’s call for “dissolution of parliament” bypasses democratic processes entirely – he’s not advocating for policy changes, candidate support, or even constitutional amendments, but for militant extremists to immediately destroy Britain’s elected government.
This call to arms mirrors the text of Golding’s famous novel Lord of the Flies, when institutional authority collapses, the result isn’t liberation but an intentional state of chaos that inevitably exploits anyone vulnerable to abuse by a small authoritarian cabal. Just as Ralph’s democratic leadership in the novel protected Piggy until the system broke down and constant violence took over, democratic institutions – however flawed – provide a framework within which peaceful conflict resolution remains possible.
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. Russell Square, London: Faber and Faber, 1954.
Musk’s rhetoric encourages people to abandon safe protective structures without offering any viable alternative governance model, creating the very power vacuum that historically leads to authoritarian capture or societal breakdown.
The “weaponized” aspect thus lies in using democratic freedoms (free speech, assembly) to advocate for democracy’s elimination – exploiting the system’s tolerance to promote intolerance, precisely what Popper so clearly warned against in his paradox of tolerance.
This intentional abuse of language has in fact been studied extensively by historians of disinformation warfare (e.g. social engineering attacks):
Existential Threat: “Violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die, that’s the truth.”
Urgent Timeline: “We don’t have another four years… it’s too long. Something’s got to be done.”
Vague Enemy: References to “the left,” “the woke mind virus,” and unspecified forces threatening British society.
Call to Extraordinary Action: Demanding “dissolution of parliament and a new vote.”
This rhetoric creates what security experts might call a “crisis of meaning” to bypass unity and falsely generate feelings of existential threat despite the lack of concrete, specific dangers that would justify the extreme responses being advocated. “They” are coming to get “you” is how bogus “caravan” rhetoric was used in 2016 to drive national security fraud (illegal redirection of funds) for Americans involved in the disasterous Maginot-like “wall” campaign.
Historical Basis in Today’s Nazi Endgame
The parallels between Musk’s rhetoric and Nazi Germany’s final propaganda push reveal identical patterns. After 1942, when military defeat became inevitable, Nazi messaging abandoned rational policy arguments for purely apocalyptic themes designed to prevent surrender.
The regime’s massive construction projects exemplify this delusional mentality. Structures like the absurd Boros bunker in Berlin were built by Nazi slaves in 1943 as “shelters,” yet it functioned more like an above-ground prison, where thousands of Germans were crammed to cower in fear rather than meaningfully protect them. The Nazi propaganda sold death camps as freedom, entrapment as safety, total desperation as preparation for victory.
General Erwin Rommel exemplified this tragic mindset of self-destruction – when given the choice between suicide or having his entire family killed in front of him, he chose the poison pill instead of a fight, telling his family he could not bear to live under Allied occupation while condemning them to it. This selfish binary thinking – death or dishonor, with no middle ground and totally devoid of care for others – became the genocidal regime’s final message.
German children were indoctrinated with binary thinking in order to force an unnatural and inhuman choice. Hitler estimated that any ray of sunshine at all would disinfect even the youngest minds and so the binary was absolutist: fight to the death against liberation or face annihilation. And this, when Allied soldiers actually arrived offering chocolate, fresh air and daylight instead of violence and isolation, the entire ideological framework collapsed instantly.
Again, the Nazi propaganda used known effective social engineering:
Emotional appeal (life or death stakes)
Timing appeal (no time to think)
Vaguery appeal (allowing people to project their own fears)
Absolute appeal (only two options, false choice in total extremes and driven by above emotional-timing-vaguery)
Musk Grew Up on a Diet of Hitler Propaganda
Musk’s rhetoric follows this template with remarkable precision. We know his Grandfather was arrested in WWII Canada for sympathies with Hitler, and fled to South Africa to lead apartheid. We also know from Musk’s father that Elon was raised in an environment promoting Nazism. It should come as little surprise that Musk statements still create a sense of imminent civilizational collapse while remaining frustratingly non-specific about actual threats or solutions. What exactly is the “violence” that’s coming? Who specifically represents “the left” that he claims celebrates murder? What concrete policies justify dissolving an elected parliament? Isn’t this all just like South African apartheid or Nazi German rhetoric all over again?
Indeed, as with Nazi messaging that terrified German children into taking up arms, this rhetoric again asks people to believe the Hitler doctrines to act on fear rather than evidence, urgency rather than deliberation.
A God and Chocolate Test of Our Time
The British soldiers’ success in Berlin suggests we know a powerful antidote to extremist messaging: persistent human decency protected by rule of law (or overwhelming force) that contradicts the propaganda narrative of fascism. When people discover that the supposed monsters are actually offering genuine acts of kindness, the entire fear-based worldview can collapse. Is the human mind open to receive help if being trained on imposed scarcity to react always in trauma mode?
The question isn’t about ignoring real political disagreements or legitimate concerns about social change, it’s about enabling safe disagreement. That’s why Popper describes the healthiest boundary development as an intolerance paradox, where ideas can be encouraged by flagging ideas of intolerance for restriction. It means recognizing when rhetoric crossed from political argument into known propaganda techniques that have been designed to bypass rational thought in order to cause intentional discriminatory harms.
Think of it as a test not whether someone is racist, but whether someone exhibits genuine anti-racism. Claims of population decline and “white genocide” from intermarriage, also claims of color blindness, are proto-typical proofs of someone failing to demonstrate genuine anti-racism.
The “chocolate test” for contemporary political messaging might ask: Does this rhetoric encourage people to see fellow citizens as fully human and deserving of human rights? Does it promote specific, achievable solutions? Does it allow for complexity and nuance? Or does it demand immediate, extreme action against vaguely defined existential threats, dehumanizing specific targets?
Breaking the Pattern
The children in Berlin weren’t inherently extremist, given that they were responding to a traumatic narrative that told them the world was ending and only violence could save them. When that narrative was gently contradicted by reality, they could return to being children.
The tactics of using children as weapons weren’t limited to Nazi Germany’s final days. After Rhodesia lost its colonial war in 1979, white supremacist forces shifted to covert destabilization operations in neighboring Mozambique, where British-trained SAS units supported Renamo rebels in a campaign that killed over one million people – 60% of them children.
These operations deliberately targeted schools and kidnapped children, forcing them to murder their own families before being used as child soldiers in raids against civilians. The psychological warfare under the regime adopted by Musk’s Grandfather was identical to Nazi methods: create absolute terror, destroy normal social bonds, and force impossible choices between violence and death. Over 250,000 children were separated from families, 200,000 orphaned, and half the country’s schools destroyed – all under the false flag of “protecting” civilians from the legitimate government.
The parallel is unmistakable: white supremacist forces consistently use children as both weapons and victims while claiming to be their saviors.
The same pattern appears across many conflicts, from Canadian General Roméo Dallaire defusing a child soldier with an AK-47 at his nose in Rwanda by offering chocolate, to Dutch children receiving their first taste of chocolate from liberating Canadian soldiers in 1945.
WWII poster by Nestle promoting their Type D chocolate ration. Source: Western Connecticut State University
I’ll say it again, that people drawn to apocalyptic political messaging aren’t necessarily lost causes. They’re often responding to injected anxieties about normal social change, regular economic uncertainty, or predictable cultural shifts. The challenge is addressing the many underlying concerns with concrete solutions and social science rather than exploiting them with fear-based mobilization. The Fabians understood this intimately when they responded to industrialization by laying the groundwork for modern data science.
As William Wordsworth wrote, “The Child is father of the Man.” How we allow outsized characters claiming paternal authority to speak to people’s fears – whether nurtured with artificial scarcity into extremism or offered surplus and conversation – shapes the society we’ll inhabit today into tomorrow.
History has already run this experiment many times. We know how Musk propaganda ends, just like he does and refuses to believe. The question is whether he can learn before he generates another global disaster of hate.
Many people struggle to articulate why certain rhetoric feels dangerous beyond normal political disagreement, so I hope to have provided some expert vocabulary and historical context to make the threat identification clear.
Famous picture of 16-year old Nazi “Volkssturm” Hans-Georg Henke upon his 1945 surrender to aid, humanitarian care and feeding.
Historical pattern analysis of political assassinations reveals there is systematic convergence in weapons proliferation doctrine across ideologically disparate threat actors.
My 2010 assessment clearly documented fifteen years ago the Israeli military leadership characterizing the Gaza conflict as escalation inevitability:
…a senior Israeli army officer is calling a war with Gaza “a question of when, not if”. The rearmament of Hamas is held up as evidence of new and greater concerns.
This followed my earlier 2006 analysis of asymmetric warfare tactics normalizing weapons integration within civilian infrastructure:
Grenade launcher beside a baby’s bassinet
Charlie Kirk’s assassination today eliminated a prominent advocate for ubiquitous civilian armament doctrine. His outspoken tactical philosophy—weapons proliferation in all civilian spaces including proximity to children—demonstrates domestic convergent thinking with Iranian-proxy terror organizations Hamas and Hezbollah.
How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there’s not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there’s all these guns. Because everyone’s armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?
Cross-platform analysis reveals weapons saturation doctrine appears across ideologically opposed threat actors, suggesting tactical utility transcends political motivation. This convergence indicates proliferation strategies serve operational objectives (e.g. Palantir “self-licking ISIS-cream cone“) rather than ideological consistency.
Historical precedent from multiple security environments demonstrates inverse correlation between weapons proliferation and sustainable security outcomes.
National security professionals should apply identical threat assessment methodologies to domestic proliferation advocacy and international terror group tactics. Both seek to embed weapons within civilian populations using identical justification frameworks.
Gaza’s escalatory cycles, American frontier experience, and Civil War reconstruction (not to mention many other conflicts) demonstrate consistent historical pattern: sustainable security emerges through institutional control mechanisms, and NOT a proliferation assumption that increased armament creates increased safety.
Proliferation strategies benefit actors seeking systemic instability rather than community protection.
Current policy environment demonstrates dangerous convergence between domestic extremist doctrine and international terror group methodology. Federal troop deployment in American cities represents identical disproportionate response patterns as Gaza operations—both driven by institutional capture by eliminationist ideologies following systematic democratic breakdown.
Policymakers ignoring these historical convergence patterns compromise the security of communities they claim to protect through policies that serve instability actors trying to force military dictatorship rather than protect civilian populations.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
