The incredible efficiency of removing Tesla from the market is unmistakably better for consumers.

Lawmakers are working on a plan to shut down Tesla dealerships in New York State. …licenses could then be redistributed to other electric-vehicle manufacturers, like Lucid, Rivian and Scout Motors, a Volkswagen affiliate that also uses direct-to-consumer sales.

It doesn’t get much more efficient than that. Tesla is just toxic waste, like an oil spill, and nobody wants it to continue sucking the life out of markets.

Musk is “part of an administration that is killing all the grant funding for electric vehicle infrastructure, killing wind energy, killing anything that might address climate change,” the lawmaker said. “Why should we give them a monopoly?”

If you let oil spill, there’s nothing but oil left. If Nazis are allowed to march, pretty soon there’s nothing but Nazis in power. NY has seen this story before. Mayor LaGuardia didn’t mess around.

Historians David and Jackie Esposito have written, “In the face of large scale indifference to human rights violations abroad and growing isolationism at home … LaGuardia reasserted a Progressive’s faith in the rule of reason and the power of enlightened public opinion to face up to the Nazis and confront Hitler.” When the U.S. entered the war in 1941, LaGuardia’s principled position was vindicated.

Time for another principled cleanup.

The new case in Syracuse involving Westhill High School lacrosse players has exposed something far more troubling than mere illegal “hazing.”

Among the five victims identified by the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office, one student was taken to a remote area in the county when people appeared from the woods, dressed in black and armed with what appeared to be at least one handgun and at least one knife, Fitzpatrick said.

That group put a pillowcase over that student’s head, then tied him up and threw him in the trunk of a car before he was left in a wooded area in the southern part of the county, the district attorney said.

“He was eventually returned home. There was a period of time where he thought he was going to be abandoned in the middle of nowhere,” Fitzpatrick said. “You can hear that some of the individuals found it amusing,” he said, referencing a videotape of the incident recovered during the investigation.

Make no mistake, these terrorism tactics of hooded capture sending a victim into a remote forested area are very well known by the historians who study “America First”.

The group obviously is drawing from the KKK history of the region. That’s why it is especially alarming to read how a large group organized to bind, hood, and terrorize teenagers using weapons… has adults trying to frame it as a prank, just a misdemeanor crime at most.

We’re witnessing the fruits of a poisoned tree.

What the Syracuse terror group enacted was, in essence, a ritualized kidnapping that mirrors America’s worst historical business practices of human trafficking and torture. A district attorney’s willingness to offer pleas for what is at face value an armed abduction speaks volumes about how normalized such behavior has become and will continue to be for whites in America.

Just like the 1927 Queens KKK rally that led to arrests—including one involving a man with the same name and address as Fred Trump—this appears to be the next generation repeating familiar patterns of terrorism and intimidation.

Once again, authorities in New York find themselves arresting young white men for acts of ritualized terror, like a grotesque echo of the KKK from nearly a century ago.

Children in Syracuse don’t emerge from nowhere with the idea to stage another mock execution or kidnapping. They are acting out the very core mindset of the xenophobic, racist regressive MAGA movement like it’s 1915.

Such terror-laced behaviors are taught and learned, absorbed from communities where intimidation tactics have been quietly accepted, minimized, or even celebrated across generations of Klan mentality. The high school terror group was in effect simply performing what they’ve been taught as acceptable—by omission if not commission.

Syracuse’s history as a KKK stronghold in the 1920s provides the fertile ground from which these acts emerge. Like the wealthy families of 1920s New York who participated in these activities—including the Trump family empire that would later face serious housing discrimination criminal charges—today’s perpetrators come from communities where certain forms of intimidation have been sanitized and repackaged as “tradition.”

When parents and community leaders fail to explicitly condemn historical patterns of intimidation and terrorism, fail to criticize the KKK roots of Trump’s abuse doctrines, they create the space for these patterns to reproduce themselves in new forms. The language of “hazing” and “pranks” becomes a convenient mask for what should otherwise be recognized for what it is: assault, kidnapping, and terror.

The most chilling aspect isn’t just that parents raised children to commit these acts, but that a community exists where they could conceive of such behavior as within the boundaries of acceptable conduct. Misdemeanor for the armed kidnapping of a child by binding them with a hood? This case isn’t about a few “bad apples”—it’s about the orchard being tended in the open that produces them.

The contrast between this case and others is damning: compare the gentle misdemeanor offers here with the aggressive terrorism charges pursued against the “Newburgh Four“—four Black men ensnared in a controversial FBI sting—and the pattern of racial double standards becomes undeniable.

Until communities honestly confront their complicity in normalizing such white supremacist violence tactics and intimidation for 200 years, we’ll continue to see these “traditions” emerge in new generations, cloaked in the America First language of MAGA culture and ultra-competitive bonds, carrying the same destructive mindset of America’s worst chapters of lawful yet immoral terrorism.

What’s happening in Syracuse today is neither isolated nor accidental. It’s the direct product of our national refusal to honestly confront the deep roots of white supremacist violence as parental guidance. When a district attorney offers misdemeanor pleas to young men who enacted what amounts to a KKK-style kidnapping, we aren’t witnessing lenience—we’re watching the continuation of a protected American tradition.

The pillowcase over the head. The remote wooded area. The mock execution. The laughter. These are not youthful mistakes but sacred rituals passed down through generations, preserved and protected by a system that refuses to name them for what they are: domestic terrorism.

The same social and legal mechanisms that shielded Fred Trump after the 1927 KKK rally and that minimized his company’s housing discrimination are now working overtime in Syracuse to transform an armed kidnapping into a “hazing incident.” The most accurate measure of any society is whom it protects and whom it punishes. By this measure, America’s moral ledger remains fundamentally unchanged since the days when the Klan paraded openly through our streets.

If we truly want to break this cycle, we must demand more than just punishment for these eleven students. We must confront the parents, coaches, teachers, and community leaders who created the environment where such acts were conceivable. We must examine the institutions that continue to offer protective euphemisms for white terror. And we must recognize that the language of “America First”—from Woodrow Wilson to Donald Trump—has always been inextricably tied to the language of white supremacy.

Until then, Syracuse’s children will continue to be taught the most enduring lesson in American history: that for some, terrorism isn’t a crime—it’s a birthright.

If there’s one thing my time at LSE studying asymmetric war taught me, it’s that we must learn from history or be doomed to repeat it. The recent CENTCOM press release regarding operations against the Houthi forces is very concerning as a virtual carbon copy of the exact mistakes that led us into the quagmire of Vietnam. Frankly, it’s worse because we should know better by now.

When I look at their statistics and claims, I’m transported back to the military briefings I read from the late 1960s. They were called “Five O’Clock Follies” for good reason—saccharin press conferences filled with optimistic assessments that bore little resemblance to ground reality. Today’s claims are just as divorced from strategic reality as they were back then.

The Metrics Mirage: From Vietnam to Yemen

What strikes me so forcefully about the current situation is how we’ve regressed to the same flawed thinking that characterized our approach in Southeast Asia. The parallels are not just concerning—they’re downright alarming.

Missing the Strategic Forest for the Tactical Trees

What disturbs me most is that we’ve had fifty years to internalize the lessons of Vietnam. We spent decades analyzing where we went wrong. Military brass, let alone academics in history departments, sponge up these lessons. Yet here we are, seeing the same fundamental errors in strategic thinking.

The press release’s emphasis on percentages of reduction in missile launches is particularly troubling. The release tosses out a “69% drop in ballistic missile launches” and “55% decrease in drone attacks” as meaningful. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean any reduction in actual damage or successful strikes. During Vietnam, the U.S. often emphasized metrics like “body counts” or “bombing tonnage” that didn’t translate to any strategic gain.

As any basic reader of Vietnam War 101 could tell you, guerrilla forces adapt. When America dramatically interdicted the Ho Chi Minh Trail in one sector, supplies easily moved through another. When North Vietnam’s ports were pummeled with bombs, the logistics dispersed as should have been expected. The Houthis will do the same, and already have given how the Saudis thoroughly bombed them for years.

Attributing Houthi capabilities solely to Iranian backing echoes Vietnam-era assertions that any localized adversaries had to be merely a puppet of China/USSR, grossly underestimating factors and motivations. A fixation on bogus military metrics obscures political reality, like the makeup room for men fiasco glowing up in Hegseth’s face. He literally posted the following statement to deflect attention from him spending so much time and money on his makeup routines:

We should have installed tampon machines in every men’s bathroom at DoD…

In Vietnam, we could win nearly every battle on paper yet lose the whole damn war because we oversimplified us/them and then failed to understand the obvious political dimensions of conflict. Today’s CENTCOM press release shows we’re still thinking in terms of hair gel and eyeliner (appearances of bombs dropped) rather than meaningful political objectives achieved and measured on the ground. I’m reminded particularly of when the USAF claimed it was so successful it had destroyed more trucks than had ever existed in Vietnam.

The notion that destroying a port facility will “impact Houthi ability to conduct operations” misunderstands asymmetric warfare in the same way we misunderstood it in Vietnam, the same way the Italians misunderstood it in Ethiopia. Determined adversaries adapt, improvise, and overcome.

The Way Forward

If we’re serious about not repeating the mistakes of Vietnam, we need to fundamentally rethink our approach. This means:

1. Realistic assessments that acknowledge failures, not just known limitations of military power against a politically motivated adversary
2. Transparency about clear goals and measured outcomes, with allies and independent verification, rather than open-ended commitments
3. Understanding that bombing campaigns alone never, ever defeated determined insurgencies

In Vietnam, we kept doubling down on failed strategies, believing that just a little more force, a little more bombing, would turn the tide. It never did. I fear we’re on the same path again, but this time with Pete “dirty lines” Hegseth kitting out makeup rooms without the excuse of ignorance. This time, we should know better.

Analysis of Insider Data Poisoning Attacks on U.S. Citizen Registries

Bureaucratic Erasure History

From an historical perspective, the current administration’s leaked policy of classifying living people as “deceased” in federal databases represents a troubling evolution in what scholar Achille Mbembe termed “necropolitics” – the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die.

Wa syo’lukasa pebwe
Umwime wa pita
[He left his footprint on the stone
He himself passed on]
Lamba proverb, Zambia

What distinguishes this particular implementation is its distinctive integration of database manipulation and corruption as a mechanism of state control.

Throughout modern history, states have employed various administrative techniques to render populations controllable, removable, or invisible. The Nazi regime’s systematic revocation of Jewish citizenship through the Nuremberg Laws, South Africa’s Bantustan policies, or Myanmar’s denial of Rohingya recognition all employed bureaucratic mechanisms to erase legal personhood. However, the deliberate falsification of mortality status within federal databases represents a novel permutation of these historical precedents.

The Trump administration is moving the immigrants’ names and legally obtained social security numbers to a database that federal officials normally use to track the deceased, according to the two people familiar with the moves and their ramifications.

Integrity Breach of Death Registration Data

What merits particular scholarly attention is how a federal administration policy of lying and poisoning databases fundamentally corrupts integrity of vital statistics essential to living. Death registration systems were established for legitimate demographic, statistical, and administrative purposes – not as tools of denying freedoms to the living. By intentionally introducing false mortality data, the administration has compromised the fundamental integrity of these formerly trusted systems.

The Trump administration has moved to classify more than 6,000 living immigrants as dead, canceling their social security numbers and effectively wiping out their ability to work or receive benefits…

This represents a profound breach of data integrity principles that should concern not only migration scholars but also those studying public administration and information systems ethics and security. The deliberate contamination of vital centralized databases with known false entries violates core principles of data governance and raises serious questions about administrative ethics and the rule of law.

It also begs the greater questions of redundancy, federation and disaster recovery when data integrity is breached by insider attacks. Financial institutions are well-versed in sophisticated inside threats attacking integrity of centralized systems and data, with decades of criminal investigations to draw from. Can the lessons be translated directly to federal government systems under attack?

Jurisdictional Arbitrage of El Salvador Detention

The administration’s policy of financing migrant detention in El Salvador warrants similar integrity breach examination through the lens of what legal scholars seem to call a “jurisdictional arbitrage” – strategic exploitation of “crossing” boundaries to evade accountability. Physically transferring people from America to detention facilities in El Salvador, irrespective of their nationality, while simultaneously declaring them “dead” in federal systems, the Trump family has constructed a fog of extra-judicial detention with little to no integrity. Anyone can disappear for any reason and have no way to be rescued, not least of all because there was insufficient explanation of who they are and how they disappeared without any validation.

This arrangement allows American authorities to exercise de facto control over targeted, or even mistaken, lives while maintaining a fiction of non-responsibility, with “know nothing” and “who me” denials. Historical parallels might include various colonial powers’ use of extraterritorial detention to circumvent domestic legal constraints – though the additional element of administrative “death” by database breach represents an unprecedented innovation.

Immutability Flaws as Intentional Design

Perhaps most revealing from a systems analysis perspective is the exploitation of asymmetric administrative processes. Government systems are meticulously designed with clear procedures for declaring individuals deceased, but deliberately lack efficient mechanisms for reversing such determinations. This asymmetry is not incidental but rather reflects the historical development of bureaucratic systems optimized for unidirectional administrative actions.

The exploitation of this structural asymmetry demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of administrative vulnerabilities. By triggering a one-way administrative process, authorities have effectively created a form of bureaucratic event horizon – a point beyond which administrative reversal becomes practically impossible for the affected individuals.

Implications for Democratic Forces Defending National Security

This convergence of database manipulation, extraterritorial detention, and exploitation of administrative asymmetries represents a concerning development in the history of state control over mobile populations. When established administrative systems are repurposed in ways that fundamentally contradict their intended function, we observe not merely a policy shift but a potential erosion of administrative integrity that underpins democratic governance.

What we are witnessing now can be appropriately termed “digital genocide” – a novel twist to oppression where the state doesn’t merely physically eliminate populations but erases their very existence within administrative reality by polluting centralized data. Declaring living persons “dead” in federal databases enacts a form of bureaucratic violence that effectively eliminates individuals from the social and legal fabric, foreshadowing a physical extermination. This represents a sophisticated evolution in necropolitical techniques – one that achieves many of the objectives of traditional genocide through purely administrative means to initiate the destructive goals.

National security experts including historians would do well to document this moment carefully, as it may represent a significant inflection point in how states manipulate technologies to control citizenship registries for oppressive aims. The digital “death” of Americans through a death registry manipulation attack foreshadows more expansive applications of these techniques, with implications extending far beyond immediate policy debates and into clear parallels with historical precursors to systemically planned concentration camps and genocide.