Technology always intersects with human rights, whether the usual technologist recognizes it or not. An abolitionist network in the 1800s defied unjust laws to free enslaved people, and today technologists are drawing explicit parallels to this tradition. We’re witnessing an evolution toward a modern Digital Underground Railroad as citizens resist what they see as Trump’s systematic human rights violations.

Imagine being stopped, having rifles pointed at your head, being harassed or detained simply because a computer system tagged you as suspicious based on the color of your hat at dawn or the car you drove.

Consider the example of Quantrill’s Raiders, who were masked armed men without uniforms similar to the “enforcers” showing up in communities today. They terrorized America in the 1860s through brutal mob acts like the Lawrence Massacre. Critics rightly compare immigration enforcement raids of Trump to these historical patterns of militant violence adjacent to state-sanctioned oppression based on race.

The parallels connect past and present systems, exploited by white supremacist groups for them to operate outside judicial oversight, which leaves technologists at a crucial fork in the road that has been seen before.

I’m not even going to explain why President “America First” Wilson similarly sent federal troops in 1919 to open fire on Black farm workers in Arkansas, murdering hundreds after they organized in a Church to discuss fair wages. And that’s to say nothing of airplanes used in 1921 to firebomb Black neighborhoods in Oklahoma, while firefighters and police stood by doing nothing. Americans should know these past events well already, or at least be able to recognize the symbolism of the X within KKK and Nazi history.

While examining historical parallels and wondering where the Quantrill Raids go next, read Confederate General McCulloch complaints about the escalating civilian mistreatment by armed white supremacist mobs that expanded even under his militant command attempting to restrain them:

Civilians were accosted, homes were broken into, church steeples were shot up, and a Confederate recruiting officer, Major George N. Butts, was found shot to death on the side of a road. “They regard the life of a man less than you would that of a sheep-killing dog,” said McCulloch.

These descriptions invite reflection on modern law enforcement approaches, especially how anti-immigrant militant leaders planning systemic armed actions against American communities, may be unable to prevent their own troops devolving into total chaos, which is what the legendary patriot John Brown had warned until he was hanged for taking a stand against the violence.

Remember the symbolism of the X? Historical context gives perspective to the recent action against GlobalX Air, where technologists identifying with Anonymous accessed flight manifests and records of an ICE charter airline.

Anonymous said their “data liberation” operation targeted specific flights that were central to ongoing litigation, including deportation flights that allegedly were rushed to depart. Why were flights in a rush? The Trump regime saw this as their way to “hack” the courts, exploit a loophole to undermine lawyers who were in process of defending national security.

A digital version of the famous General Tubman thus justified entry into the GlobalX systems as simply “enforcing a judge’s order,” positioning the patriotic act as upholding American law rather than violating it. “Anonymous has decided to enforce the Judge’s order since you and your sycophant staff ignore lawful orders that go against your fascist plans,” read the message on GlobalX’s updated website.

A U.S. judge had indeed ordered a report of flight manifests and records. And suddenly the Trump regime decided it was no longer able to be in a rush. The Anonymous disclosure, therefore serving that judge in a more timely fashion, provides records of GlobalX from January through May. It delivers clear evidence of systematic removal of many innocent people from American soil; indiscriminate Quantrill-like raids by plain-clothed masked militants targeting non-white communities for racist incarceration or death.

Making America Grotesque Again

The immigration enforcement under the current administration has been characterized by critics as operating with questionable legal authority, particularly when deportations proceed despite pending legal challenges. This creates a complex ethical terrain where some view digital intervention to serve the law as a necessary response to what they perceive as systematic circumvention of legal processes.

We must ask: Who here really operates outside the law?

The GlobalX Air files accessed do indeed document flights central to a Supreme Court case involving Venezuelan asylum seekers who were reportedly removed from the country in direct and intentional opposition to the law. The timing of such a “hack” by the Trump regime brings profound questions about their relationship to enforcement actions designed to exploit vulnerabilities in judicial oversight.

Conducting a Digital Freedom Railroad

In comparison, an emerging pattern of digital resistance to Trump draws directly from American traditions of civil action to enhance law and order and restore moral foundations. Those who engage in these actions rightfully invoke historical figures like General Tubman because they fit within a lineage of Americans who aligned defense of law and order in America to its underlying documented principles (e.g. Constitution).

The digital actions countering unlawful deportations are information exposure rather than system interruption, unlike the Trump regime’s aggressive and destructive actions. Like whistleblowers, they direct information to sunlight, creating accountability channels outside compromised structures.

Constitutional Disregard is a Trump Family Tradition

When executive actions appear to intentionally and cruelly “hack” judicial review, fundamental constitutional questions emerge. The intervention in GlobalX Air systems to deliver justice presents a complex case study in the tensions between executive enforcement power, judicial authority, and citizen intervention.

Throughout American history, from abolitionism to civil rights movements, significant moral progress has often begun with acts of civil action to serve the greater meaning of law and order. Today’s digital actions represent the latest chapter in this ongoing negotiation between law, justice, and resistance.

As we evaluate these events, we confront profound questions about democratic processes: When formal systems of checks and balances are under attack by white supremacist groups aiming to imbalance power for selfish gains, what responsibilities do citizens have? At what point does resistance to attacks on America become not just justified but necessary to restore the balance of power and prevent tyranny?

What Would LaGuardia Do?

Speaking of airlines and airports, let’s take a moment to think about LaGuardia, mayor of New York during the rise of fascism in Europe. He was well-known as a warrior of direct and uncompromising stance against authoritarianism. He understood that certain moments in history require clear moral language rather than cautious equivocation. In 1937, for example, he directly called out fascism by name and denounced dictators like Hitler and Mussolini when many American politicians were still hesitant to do so. This wasn’t just a foreign concern, but more importantly a domestic one where America First campaigns were correctly ruled an act of sedition.

We’re at a similar inflection point regarding immigration enforcement and civil liberties. When LaGuardia saw the early signs of authoritarianism, he recognized the urgent need to speak plainly about the threats he perceived, rather than softening his language out of political convenience.

Acts of resistance against extrajudicial deportations are within this tradition of urgent moral action. The Underground Railroad and abolitionists, from John Brown to General Tubman, inform Americans how direct action can effect change where formal systems have been compromised and redirected towards harm of vulnerable populations.

Saturday’s Russian-looking “vote” of SpaceX employees to incorporate Starbase, Texas as a public government might seem like a grand victory for the discredited and disliked Elon Musk. With 212 votes for and only 6 against, the company town’s creation appears to cement SpaceX’s destruction of local environmental regulations for their rocket launch facility. The company bought 90% of the local real estate, and all the “elected” officials are current or former SpaceX employees appointed by the CEO.

But in the cavalier rush to consolidate power and ignore communities, SpaceX may have unwittingly introduced vulnerabilities that could eventually undermine their desire for absolute unrepresentative control.

By transforming their private facility into a public municipality, they’ve opened new avenues for change through Texas municipal law—potentially repeating the pattern that has led to the downfall of every single American company town in history.

Look at the prior art to understand the collapse or transformation beyond a controlling company’s original vision of private profit leading to public control.

1. Distributed Power Still Finds a Way: The Pullman Strike of 1894 demonstrated how company towns can backfire spectacularly. When George Pullman cruelly cut wages and refused to lower rents in his model town, company residents revolted in what became one of America’s most significant public rights protests. A company town on strike eventually involved 250,000 people across 27 states only suppressed with federal military intervention.
2. Monarchs Can’t See What’s Coming Until Late: Company towns face a fundamental contradiction—paternalistic control cannot coexist indefinitely with democratic municipal governance. As Starbase must now hold public elections, maintain public records, and follow Texas municipal law, opportunities for democratic participation emerge that weren’t available in a purely private corporate setting.
3. Adjacent Development Means Power Will Recenter: As was seen in historic company towns, development in surrounding areas inherently creates competing economic and political power that will outperform SpaceX myopic tyranny. Texas law specifically provides multiple pathways for strategic land acquisition and development adjacent to municipalities, especially undemocratic ones.
4. Economic Prosperity Undermines Company Control: Over time, successful towns inevitably attract other businesses and residents with better interests. Should Starbase genuinely grow into a “world-class place to live” that SpaceX PR claims, that growth necessarily makes SpaceX’s narrow local corporate goals look worse and worse, holding back the better more “worldly” residents.

With these historic lessons in mind it seems only appropriate to point out the incorporation plan exposes specific vulnerabilities:

1. Public Records and Transparency Requirements: As a municipality, Starbase must now comply with Texas open records laws, making previously private corporate decisions subject to public scrutiny.
2. Municipal Utility District Opportunities: Texas law allows for the creation of Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs) that could serve as simple beachheads for labor-friendly development surrounding and pushing hard into Starbase.
3. Election Cycles: While SpaceX employees currently stacked the voter rolls like they hate democracy, municipal elections occur regularly and operate under different rules than corporate governance, potentially allowing organized groups to gain representation without detection.
4. Legal Challenges Through Public Processes: Municipalities must follow procedural requirements that can be challenged through legal means, unlike private corporate decisions.

Let’s face it, Elon Musk keeps running anti-patterns. He clearly thinks Hitler should have won WWII. And now he’s showing how a push into company towns also could repeat the wrong side of history.

Every major company town in American history—from Pullman to Hershey to coal mining communities—eventually faced a reckoning with people exposing the patently unfair and soul crushing designs. The American government protection of workers’ rights to unionize spelled the end of purely company-controlled towns, which surely has to do why Musk thinks he will replay the past to prove a different result. Even Hershey, considered one of the most benevolent company towns, faced a significant strike for rights in 1937.

SpaceX’s corporate control currently seems absolute and tyrannical in mind, but the legal structure of Texas municipalities expands their target surface with pathways for change that wouldn’t have existed without incorporation. The company may have unwittingly traded short-term benefits (streamlined approvals for environmental destruction, closure authority to deny local children access to beaches) for long-term vulnerabilities inherent to public governance structures.

For now, Starbase represents a bold experiment in Elon Musk pushing fascism into American government – but if history is any guide, its long-term fate may be a lesson we have learned repeatedly already.

European EV sales are really taking off with booming sales.

BYD’s sales grew 94 percent to 4,436, Polestar was up 84 percent to 2,405, and newcomer XPeng logged 1,034 sales, representing an increase of 259 percent from February 2024. The best-performing brand in terms of EV sales, however, was VW, whose registrations boomed 180 percent to 19,600. The German brand’s ID.4 was the third-best-selling EV… and VW,’s ID.7 and ID.3 were in fifth and sixth spot, separated from the ID.4 by Renault’s Car of the Year-winning 5.

Meanwhile, it’s really hard not to notice how Tesla campaigns to boost a German political party (AfD) affiliated with Nazism had a direct impact on the European market.

Tesla’s sales are diving headfirst into the red. In France, deliveries were down 59.4 percent compared to April last year, with just 863 vehicles sold. Denmark saw a 67.2 percent decrease, bringing the monthly total there to only 180 cars. But, as reported by Reuters, Sweden takes the prize for most dramatic plunge: sales dropped 80.7 percent, from 1,052 units last April to just 208 this year.

Europeans, still picking shrapnel from their grandparents’ photo albums, are teaching Tesla a sales collapse lesson that makes the Hindenburg disaster look like a successful landing.

Do you know who completely distances themselves from Nazism? Billionaire Germans.

…siblings Stefan Quandt and Susanne Klatten own more than 40% of BMW and are worth about $38 billion [thanks to their family operating] …battery factories in Berlin, where, thousands of forced slave laborers were used, including female slave laborers from concentration camps, you learn nothing about [this] history.

They hide their Nazism so they can keep all the money from it. Which goes to show how stupid Tesla was to attempt to out-Nazi the billionaires behind German brands born out of Nazism.

Buying a Tesla in Europe today is about as socially acceptable as an AfD politician goose-stepping in a SS uniform through Anne Frank’s house. Who wants that? Or more to the point, what would Knut Lier Hanson do with a Tesla today?

Nazi children who grew up in Germany under Allied occupation know better than to build fleets of Swasticars.

Musk, meanwhile, was raised in apartheid South Africa where segregation wasn’t a shameful historical footnote but a lifestyle choice—like the family had rooted for Nazism, thought it delightful even after defeat, and decided to emigrate to its last remaining franchise location.

They amassed wealth that would later fuel Musk’s political ambitions such as big AfD campaigns. In a November 2024 interview, his father Errol Musk claimed that Elon’s maternal grandparents “support Hitler and all that sort of stuff” and were “part of the Nazi, the German party in Canada” before moving to South Africa because they supported the apartheid regime. As one reporter described, the Musk family lived “what can only be described as a neocolonial life” in post-colonial Africa with servants and extensive property holdings including emerald mine investments that generated significant wealth through exploitative labor practices. This heavily curated avoidance of Allied victory and occupation shaped his worldview, clearly influencing his business practices and political positions as if Hitler didn’t commit suicide.

A new Nazi Information Control System is being built by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

In 1933 William Randolph Hearst actively worked to install fascism in America. German intelligence archives reveal his Berlin bureau paid Hitler for “friendly coverage,” while Hearst personally met Mussolini multiple times, featuring him in positive newsreels. Hearst’s papers promoted German rearmament as necessary against communism. When Franklin Roosevelt investigated Hearst’s Nazi connections, the publisher mobilized his media empire against FDR. His 1934 “Red Scare” campaign spread Nazi propaganda, fraudulently claiming the strongly independent thinker Roosevelt was controlled by centralized “international Jewish bankers.”

In 1934 as a countermeasure to consolidation of data, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fundamentally shaped American democracy through a decision that might seem technical but was profoundly political: they broke up the Hearst media monopoly and reversed the slide into America First dictatorship. Hearst had built a vast empire that threatened to concentrate information control in dangerously few hands barking nonsense about Hitler being good for the economy.

The FCC commissioners understood a deeper truth: Hitler had explicitly outlined his information strategy in “Mein Kampf”—control the narrative, then control the people. The Nazi regime’s systematic data collection wasn’t just about identity; it tracked political affiliations, religious practices, sexual orientation, and financial dealings. They didn’t just collect data—they created weighted citizen scores for targeting. By 1935, every German had a racial-political profile.

This new commission on communication safety wasn’t just about business regulation. It was about ensuring that multiple voices could reach the public airwaves to help oppose Hitler. The commissioners (who later also served in the Nuremberg trials to convict Nazis of crimes against humanity) understood that democracy depends on diverse information sources. If one unelected, unaccountable person abuses technology to control what millions hear, they control what millions may think and do.

America knew diversity was the foundation of its freedom, whereas consolidation and centralized data was for Nazism.

Contrast the freedom of decentralized data sources with what was happening simultaneously in Germany. While America was building guardrails against information monopoly, the Nazi regime was methodically centralizing all communication channels. By 1933, Joseph Goebbels had consolidated control over radio, press, and culture under the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. American and British intelligence officers warned Churchill and Roosevelt of the slide to dictatorship, even as Hearst tried to dupe the public into believing the opposite.

But the Nazis didn’t stop at media. They began compiling comprehensive data on every citizen, especially targeting a particular race in populations. Tax records, business registrations, property deeds, and personal information were pooled into centralized databases. This was labeled efficiency—it was really for targeting.

By 1938, the architects of government efficiency in Nazi Germany proved its lethal potential during Kristallnacht. Using the centrally compiled databases, Nazi authorities knew exactly where every Jewish business, synagogue, and home was located. They didn’t have to search—they had compiled all the data into lists. The systematic violence wasn’t spontaneous; it was directed and enabled by a method of unregulated systematic data collection.

The 1933 Nazi census was the cornerstone of this targeting infrastructure. Within months of Hitler taking power, IBM (using its German subsidiary Dehomag) helped design and execute a door-to-door racial census that created detailed “profiles” for tracking bloodlines back generations. The machine-tabulated census expanded the list of potential targets by identifying individuals with even distant Jewish ancestors to exclude and incarcerate them.

Each person was assigned a Hollerith number and categorized with specific punch-card codes—”8″ was Jewish, “3” was homosexual, “13” was prisoner of war. The cards were processed by IBM’s “Hollerith Department” running IBM machines in concentration camps throughout the Reich. As historian Edwin Black documented in “IBM and the Holocaust,” the American tech company tracked every prisoner from identification to extermination, assigning specific numeric codes for different methods of murder.

The IBM technology and its management was not merely administrative—American big tech was the operational backbone of genocide. Watson, IBM’s CEO, personally micromanaged the Nazi relationship from New York, demonstrating how American technologists have been willing partners in authoritarian systems because profit is prioritized even for mass murder.

This technological Nazi approach influenced more than Thiel and Musk’s families who rushed to hide their affiliations in a newly formed 1948 apartheid regime. The South African white supremacist state adopted identical information control methods to Hitler—racial classification databases, surveillance of “undesirable” populations, and systematic tracking. When Peter Thiel in 1977 left the Nazi expat community raising him in Africa, his German family’s wealth had “shifted” into uranium mining—the same industry that supplied Hitler’s nuclear program. Musk’s family similarly owned mines worked by Black laborers under apartheid conditions, and abruptly fled the 1988 fall of apartheid to extract and launder their ill-gotten riches in American technology. Both men had literal Nazi grandparents who steeped them in power structures that normalized aspirations for racist authoritarian data control.

Their life-long learning was to form one entity in charge of technology who can control both the narrative and the data, such that elections won’t matter and citizens lose both privacy and voice.

Back to the FCC’s 1934 decision, America created a data sharing landscape where power remained distributed by design. Local stations, independent networks, and diverse ownership ensured no single voice could dominate like in Nazi Germany. This structural safeguard continues to influence how we think about information control.

Disturbing parallels are emerging now with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk rolling out their grandparents’ plans for a Nazi regime. As The Atlantic recently reported as the new panopticon:

Trump and DOGE are not just undoing decades of privacy measures. They appear to be ignoring that they were ever written. Over and over, the federal experts we spoke with insisted that the very idea of connecting federal data is anathema… DOGE has strong-armed its way into federal agencies; intimidated, steamrolled, and fired many of their workers; entered their IT systems; and accessed some unknown quantity of the data they store.

This mirrors exactly the steps for how Nazi centralization began. Take Deutsche Stunde in Bayern, a regional Bavarian radio station that initially resisted national control. They insisted on local autonomy and editorial independence. By 1933, despite their arguments, they were forcibly incorporated into the Reich Broadcasting Corporation. Their regional identity was erased as unacceptable diversity, their independent voices silenced.

Like those German regional stations that believed they could maintain autonomy, U.S. federal agencies are discovering no quarter under an administration that has decided centralization serves totalitarian purposes. The breaking down of “data silos” today repeats the breaking down of independent broadcasting in 1930s Germany, fails to honor the creation of the FCC to stop centralization and arrest Nazism in America.

The financial corruption behind this data consolidation becomes even clearer when examining Peter Thiel’s Palantir, which has seen its valuation artificially skyrocket from $50 billion to nearly $300 billion. CEO Alex Karp has articulated an ideology that’s far more sinister than simple profit-seeking—he’s arguing for what he fraudulently calls “authentic belief” while building systems that threaten democracy itself.

Karp’s fascist propaganda revealed in a TIME article lays the foundational self-contradicting ideology: he attacks what he calls Google’s “resistance to evil” while praising Palantir’s willingness to build targeting systems. He explicitly states that protecting free speech for Nazis (citing the Skokie march) is necessary—while simultaneously building software to track and potentially eliminate political opponents. The contradiction isn’t accidental: it’s the Nazi playbook of using democratic rights to destroy democracy.

Karp’s recent “we’re doing it” exclamation mirrors Musk’s exuberance, as these men can’t believe they are actually being allowed to replace American government with their love of Nazi totalitarian systems.

Like an abusive partner who creates chaos to maintain control, Palantir benefits from exactly the kind of social instability and authoritarian government Karp falsely claims he fears. This is like the days when America First operatives who backed foreign dictators attempted to assassinate President Roosevelt, arguing they feared authoritarianism. He warns about data collection for “an authoritarian government’s policing database”—while building precisely such systems. Palantir has openly pursued DOGE data for “real-time tracking” of non-white people for capture and control using his “kill chain” products, securing multi-million dollar contracts to do exactly what Karp claims to fear.

The Nazi regime similarly relied on companies that profited from state surveillance and targeting. IBM’s German subsidiary, Dehomag, made millions providing punch-card systems and running the census that tracked and categorized populations into death camps. IBM helped design the concrete bunkers to survive Allied bombings, so their genocide machines could maintain profitability as they ran Hitler’s agenda. When suffering becomes profit, the architecture itself becomes predatory. As Karp himself said: “If you do not feel it, you will not get it by hunting for it.” The question is: what does he feel when building systems he knows will be used for mass surveillance and targeting?

Today’s DOGE operates with identical methods to the Reich Security Main Office. Both organizations claim “efficiency” while systematically dismantling privacy protections. Both target civil servants who resist integration. Both create central databases without oversight. The key innovation isn’t technology—it’s the philosophical framework that treats data collection as benign until it becomes lethal. As one former CIA analyst warned: “The infrastructure for genocide begins with standardized record-keeping.”

The story of the FCC and the rise of the Nazi information state reminds us: the architecture of our information systems isn’t just a technical choice—it’s a foundational decision about the society we want to build. And when two Nazi families raise their boys to immigrate to America and take over the government using technology… it’s pretty clear we are overdue for another Hitler suicide.

This isn’t coincidence or loose analogy—it’s a deliberate recreation of Nazi information control systems by people who were educated in those very systems. The historical parallels are clear, the connections are documented, and the warnings couldn’t be more dire. The infrastructure for genocide has been built before. We must dismantle it now in America.