Those who study history see the signs of Nazism most clearly in Elon Musk’s words, behavior and actions. Every time someone says “but why self harm” or “makes no sense” about Musk’s plans for mass death and institutional suicide, I suspect they aren’t familiar enough with 1930s Nazi Germany:
“We now seek a science that forms the whole human character in accordance with the great racial and political task before us.” [Ernst Krieck, head of Frankfurt University] added: “We know we are on a new road in science, provided for us by our character, fate and history. We know that sooner or later all other nations will have to follow us on this road.” “Never before,” editorialized the New York Times days later, “did a great institution of learning joyously participate in its own degradation.”
Hitler’s Reich Radio Company and Postal Ministry gained control over every area of government through seizing telegraph, telephone and broadcast systems. Hitler’s OG of “DOGE” thus went around forcing out skilled technicians and implementing ‘modernized’ standards – creating a centralized system of surveillance and control, weaponized against any resistance.
Perhaps enough Americans still don’t understand what it means that Elon Musk was raised in South Africa by a Canadian family that fled as a designated national security threat, to continue Hitler’s mission after he killed himself. Here’s how Elon’s father described it:
[Elon’s mother and family] came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.
An apartheid boy raised on Nazism who abruptly lands a fake top job in American government is of course aiming to inflict rapid institutional brain damage, known in Nazi circles as the old saying “boots to the head“.
Musk said that “USAID is a criminal organization.”
“Time for it to die,” he posted on X.
[…]
Other top Trump officials, such as Stephen Miller… [has framed the “crime” as having more than one party,] accusing its workforce of being overwhelmingly Democrats.
And so the White House seems officially to be repeating 1933 Nazi German procedures. They are overtly stating that Americans in organizations of democracy who do not immediately adhere to a 1930s vision of single party system – loyalty to Der Führer Musk – should literally be killed.
The system of control is in process of being deployed right now. The U.S. government doesn’t seem able to stop the criminalization of thought, the breach of confidential systems. An active hunt for any resistance to Musk implementing absolute tyrannical control, the critical next descent into Nazism, already has been said out loud.
According to sources, personnel from the Musk-created office first physically tried to access the USAID headquarters in Washington, DC, and were stopped. The DOGE personnel demanded to be let in and threatened to call US Marshals to be allowed access, two of the sources said. […] Katie Miller, whom Trump named to DOGE in December, on Sunday appeared to confirm that DOGE personnel had accessed classified information.
In a functioning democracy, such an overt and obnoxious replay of a Nazi “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” would not be possible. Rogue American Executive branch agents trying to commit crimes (e.g. remember Watergate?) would logically be classified immediately as active threats to American national security and not only stopped, but arrested.
Americans are watching Elon Musk run the Hitler playbook with American government IT systems, justified with the same Hitler claims of “efficiency” while eliminating any and all institutional security protections against the next Hitler.
In 2022 a swarm of Russian helicopters descended on Ukraine’s Hostomel Airport on the false pretense of being “liberators” – because a capitol city nearby was in Putin’s disinformation crosshairs. They were there to “denazify” Ukraine, to “rescue” it from “corrupt influences,” to “restore” it to its rightful place in the Russian world. The invasion wasn’t painted as invasion, but rather to be seen as “strong men” performing a cleansing of “enemies within.”
After Putin’s elite special forces failed to seize Ukraine’s capitol city by surprise, blocked from power instead and killed by Ukrainian regular soldiers, the destroyed Antonov An-225 at Hostomel Airport represented supreme sacrifice (the giant six-engine plane had been a source of intense national pride). (Celestino Arce / Associated Press)
Obviously that plan to ignite a fraudulent civil war failed, leading to Russia declaring war on Ukraine instead, but does any of this sound eerily familiar in 2025 America?
Just as Putin planned to install non-Ukrainian loyalists into power while claiming they represent “true Ukraine”, America faces its own imported strongmen claiming to represent “true America” – a South African tech billionaire positioning himself to reshape American institutions while declaring himself more American than Americans (because… he’s a white man).
False Narrative Underlying Power Capture
Putin’s framing of Ukraine as riddled with internal enemies mirrors today’s American rhetoric about “deep state” operatives, “woke ideology,” and the need to “take back our country” from diversity (DEI).
Source: BlueSky
Just as Putin labeled Ukrainian defenders as “Nazi sympathizers,” we see American institutional defenders branded unfairly as “corrupt ideologues” or targeted with McCarthy-era hateful phrases like “diversity hire incompetents.”
This is all about the chess moves well known in information warfare circles, with Russia attempting to drive Americans into a tactical trap:
Resist slower: End up like Prague in 1968
Resist faster: Get painted as proving the “enemies within” narrative
Either way: Institutional collapse is being setup to be blamed on the institutional defenders
Remember Prague?
Notably, Ukrainian remember well what happened in the 1960s, the 1970s… Czechoslovakia’s response to Soviet invasion shows the cost of hesitation, allowing for asymmetry in power to choke off resistance even at national scale.
By the time Czech citizens in 1968 began organizing resistance, the Soviets already had landed and expanded:
Seized control of key infrastructure
Replaced key personnel
Established new command structures
Made institutional capture irreversible
The tragedy of Prague wasn’t just that resistance was slow to materialize compared with “insiders” seizing control – it’s that early resistance might have been labeled “anti-Soviet provocation” anyway. They faced the same tactical trap but chose a form of paralysis that undermined their own chances of safety.
How Ukraine Exposed the Paper Putin
Ukraine masterfully found a way through the double-bind. Arguably, because they knew their Soviet history so well, they flipped the script on Putin’s geriatric attack plans, refusing to accept foreign-born loyalists as legitimate representatives of Ukrainian interests.
Similarly, American institutions must now resist foreign-born billionaires claiming sole authority – being corrupt and fraudulent strong white men – to define American values.
Belarus also shows how this playbook works, given foreign-backed figures claim deeper patriotism than natives, while systematically replacing local institutional knowledge with imported loyalists. Sound familiar, Tesla shareholders? The founders of Tesla were abruptly pushed out and replaced with Elon Musk and his cousins, right?
The Ukrainian defense of integrity and anti-corruption model thus offers crucial lessons:
Institutional Resilience
Built redundant systems that couldn’t be easily centralized
Maintained professional networks outside official channels
Documented everything to preserve institutional memory
Created backup communication systems
Prioritized protecting critical databases and infrastructure
Smart Resistance
Focused on defending systems, not winning rhetorical battles
Built broad coalitions that transcended political labels
Maintained professional standards even when branded as corrupt
Created distributed leadership to prevent decapitation strikes
Protected technical infrastructure from both capture and collapse
Threading the Dictator’s Needle
Resistance to the end of freedom and democracy in America, given today’s context, therefore requires:
Preemptive Protection
Secure critical databases before they can be compromised
Create backup systems for essential functions
Document institutional procedures and safeguards
Build professional networks that can survive purges
Establish clear protocols for protecting critical systems
Strategic Response
Focus on protecting functions, not fighting narratives
Maintain professional standards as proof against “incompetence” claims
Build cross-institutional support networks
Create distributed rather than centralized resistance
Preserve technical expertise and institutional knowledge
Resilient Systems
Design systems that can’t be easily centralized
Create redundancies in critical functions
Maintain independent communication channels
Document everything to prevent memory holes
Build coalition networks that transcend political labels
False Choice Seduction
The tactical trap offered by Putin and then Musk, as enabled by their puppet Trump, presents a false choice between resistance and survival. Ukraine proved how to take on the “inside” threat and do both by:
Focusing on functional rather than symbolic resistance
Building resilient systems rather than rigid hierarchies
Maintaining professional standards as a form of defense
Creating distributed networks rather than central points of failure
Protecting critical infrastructure while avoiding escalation traps
Three years after Ukraine won its Hostomel moment, America stands facing the same threat but with a crucial difference – we can learn from both Ukraine’s success and Prague’s tragedy. The choice isn’t between resistance and accommodation, but between smart resistance and fatal hesitation.
The “enemies within” narrative has been building for years either way. Elon Musk tweets “civil war is coming” like twenty times a day, as if trying to invoke it on his own. The only question is whether we’ll have preserved our institutions against a South African immigrant who rushes to replace American government with a cabal of young Seymour-like sycophants.
After Grant defeated Seymour’s overt white nationalism in 1868, the KKK rebranded as “America First”. Today’s “America First” makes the same claims it always has, thay only certain white men can be “real Americans” – promoting a South African billionaire and his Russian-backed patron to lecture America about who belongs. History repeats, first as tragedy then as Elon.
Time is short. The Tesla vehicles are in the streets, the SpaceX spy satellites are overhead, SpaceX rockets descending. Will we protect our infrastructure, or wait until protection becomes impossible?
The 1964 Animatronic Lincoln was allegedly programmed to say repeatedly: “Oh no! Not this again!”The White House’s 2025 Black History Month proclamation reveals systematic bias through calculated linguistic choices that reinforce racial hierarchies. Its superficially celebratory language masks a deeper pattern of exclusion, evident in pronoun usage (“they/their” vs “we/our”), selective representation (focusing on conservative figures), and strategic omissions of civil rights history. Drawing on well-known Critical Discourse Analysis frameworks, the rhetorical structure of the White House language systematically positions whites as the unmarked norm while othering Blacks as perpetual outsiders – a pattern particularly evident in its consistent use of racial qualifiers before “American.”
Through careful examination of language patterns, word choice, and rhetorical structures, the proclamation reveals concerning patterns of marginalization masked behind celebratory language.
Exclusion Through Language
The proclamation’s systematic othering operates through precise grammatical choices that linguistically distance Blacks from American identity. This manifests in three key patterns:
First, consistent use of third-person pronouns (“they,” “their”) rather than inclusive first-person (“our,” “we”) when discussing Black achievements, creating what linguists term “exclusionary deixis.”
Second, passive voice constructions that minimize Black agency, as in phrases like “have been among our country’s most consequential leaders” rather than active constructions that center Black leadership.
Third, the repeated qualification of “American” with racial modifiers creates a linguistic hierarchy where unmodified “American” implicitly means white, while others require hyphenation – a pattern dating to segregationist discourse.
Selective Representatives
The proclamation’s careful curation of Black representatives reveals a calculated political strategy through three distinct patterns.
First, it pairs historically radical abolitionists (Douglass and Tubman) with contemporary conservative voices (Sowell and Thomas), creating a false equivalence that obscures these figures’ sharply different stances on systemic racism.
Second, by elevating only conservative Black voices from recent decades, the document implicitly delegitimizes modern civil rights leadership and progressive Black thought.
Third, in choosing Tiger Woods as the sole cultural representative, the proclamation not only reduces Black cultural achievement to athletics but specifically selects an athlete known for distancing himself from Black identity – reinforcing the document’s broader pattern of elevating those who minimize racial critique.
Strategic Erasure
The proclamation’s most revealing feature lies not in what it says, but in what it systematically erases through calculated omission. This erasure operates on three temporal levels to minimize Black resistance and agency:
Historical erasure: The document entirely omits the civil rights movement, obscuring the mass mobilization and collective struggle that forced institutional change. By jumping from abolitionists directly to contemporary conservative figures, it creates what historians call a “silence gap” that erases decades of organized Black resistance.
Contemporary erasure: The proclamation ignores modern Black excellence across multiple fields – the scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and innovators who continue to shape American culture and technology. This omission reinforces the document’s reductive focus on athletics and conservative politics as the only spheres of Black achievement.
Future erasure: By avoiding any mention of ongoing systemic challenges – from wealth inequality to criminal justice reform – the proclamation preemptively delegitimizes current civil rights advocacy. This creates what critical discourse analysts term a “closure effect,” where past achievements are used to suggest that no further struggle is necessary.
Together, these carefully crafted omissions work to present a sanitized narrative that erases both historical resistance and contemporary critique.
Political Manipulation
The proclamation’s rhetorical strategy systematically subordinates Black history to political self-promotion through several calculated moves. The document’s pivotal phrase – “as America prepares to enter a historic Golden Age” – reveals this manipulation in three ways:
First, it repurposes Black achievement as merely instrumental to a future defined by the current administration rather than celebrating historical contributions in their own right.
Second, it employs what critical discourse analysts call “temporal displacement,” shifting focus from historical injustices to an imagined future while avoiding discussion of present-day challenges.
Third, by positioning the administration as the agent of this “Golden Age,” the text transforms what should be a commemoration of Black resistance and achievement into a vehicle for white political authority – a rhetorical move that paradoxically reinforces racial hierarchies within a document meant to challenge them.
Regressive Bias in Language
Even basic style choices reveal bias. The proclamation uses lowercase “black” when referring to Blacks, ignoring current editorial standards that recognize “Black” as proper noun when referring to racial and cultural identity. This deviation from contemporary standards suggests either careless oversight or a deliberate calculated rejection of linguistic norms around racial discourse.
The proclamation’s framing of “black American” rather than simply “American” perpetuates a deeply rooted linguistic tradition of exclusion dating back to Woodrow Wilson’s successful “America First” Presidential re-election campaign of 1916.
This horribly racist slogan, emerging from earlier racist nativist movements, established a rhetorical framework where “American” implicitly meant “white,” while all others required qualifying adjectives – “Black American,” “Chinese American,” etc. By consistently placing racial and ethnic identifiers before “American,” this linguistic pattern reinforced who could and couldn’t claim unmodified “American” identity.
The 2025 proclamation returns to this long-gone error: even in a document meant to celebrate Black achievement, the text never refers to its subjects simply as “Americans,” but always with the preceding racial qualifier. The White House thus has resurrected Wilson-era KKK rhetoric that “America First” linguistically marks certain races (“black Americans”) as perpetually denied the category of “true” Americans.
Source: “Behold, America: The Entangled History of ‘America First’ and ‘the American Dream'”, Sarah Churchwell, 2018
Drawing on theories of “linguistic subordination,” this pattern of modified Americanness serves to continuously reaffirm a racial hierarchy where whiteness remains unmarked and normative, while other identities are perpetually marked as different and secondary. The intentional racism in “America First” is thus to signal to non-whites they are American second and thus always outsiders.
Institutional Power Through Language
The above analysis hopefully has clarified how the White House’s 2025 proclamation operates as an instrument of racial hierarchy by implementing three interlocking mechanisms of linguistic power:
First, it employs grammatical structures that systematically position Blacks as objects rather than agents of American history – from exclusionary pronouns to passive voice constructions that minimize Black agency.
Second, through strategic representation and calculated omission, it constructs a narrative that delegitimizes collective resistance while celebrating individual achievement in ways that reinforce existing power structures.
Third, its temporal manipulation – moving between selective past and mythologized future while avoiding the contested present – creates what critical discourse analysts call “narrative closure,” where acknowledgment of historical figures serves to deny contemporary injustice.
These patterns matter because presidential proclamations don’t merely describe reality – they actively shape it. Military intelligence officers know this. Disinformation and propaganda experts recognize this.
Indian troops in the Egyptian desert get a laugh from one of the leaflets which Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel has taken to dropping behind the British lines now that his ground attacks have failed. The leaflet, which of course are strongly anti-British in tone, are printed in Hindustani, but are too crude to be effective. (Photo was flashed to New York from Cairo by radio. Credit: ACME Radio Photo)
When the highest office in American government employs linguistic strategies meant to subtly reinforce racial hierarchies while appearing to celebrate diversity, it reveals how institutional power operates through corrupted language to maintain racial hierarchies while denying their existence.
The Economist, The New Yorker and The Mirror in 2017
Recent coverage of heavy drug use among the young white men of Silicon Valley, as highlighted by Elon Musk’s ketamine news, has focused largely on narratives of innovation and mood optimization while leaving out things like major side-effects.
At high doses, ketamine may cause psychosis, a mental illness that causes a person to lose touch with reality. Frequent recreational ketamine use can lead to delusions that can last to up to one month after a person stops using it.
While side-effects may seem like an obvious omission, reporting on Silicon Valley’s institutional embrace of performance-enhancing drugs has another missing element — a complex and troubling history of chemically-induced exceptionalism that deserves proper examination.
The Nazi regime, notably, provides one of the most thoroughly documented historical examples of systematic drug culture. Under Hitler’s regime, methamphetamine (marketed as Pervitin) was widely distributed to his adherents to improve their mood, modify performance and stamina. Hitler himself, as well as many high-ranking followers, were regularly juiced on various stimulants and chemicals including Eukodal (oxycodone) from rather careless and selfish physicians like Dr. Theodor Morell.
This wasn’t merely incidental drug use, just like Silicon Valley narratives about exceptional elitism today aren’t incidental, because it was so integrated into Nazi ideology and narratives about the need for superhuman performance and “optimization” of human capability. Leaders simultaneously promoted an image of racial purity and clean living while systematically administering unclean drugs to differentiate themselves from “others”.
Today’s Silicon Valley narratives around ketamine and psychedelics frankly echo very disturbing historical precedents that seem to get left out of social channels as they endorse so much drug use they cause shortages. We should see more coverage of clearly problematic themes:
The language of human optimization and enhancement
Institutional normalization of drug use for performance
The gap between public image and private practice
The intersection of drug use with ideologies of exceptionalism
While Silicon Valley’s drug culture still occurs in a vastly different context than Nazi Germany’s “chemical enhancement” program (at least for now), both cases demonstrate how institutional drug use can become entwined with ideologies of discriminatory human “superiority” patterns. Adding historical context allows up to raise important questions about what’s really being discussed in news such as this:
Silicon Valley elites are reportedly taking ketamine and attending psychedelic parties to bolster their focus and creativity.
The article fails to touch any of the most important themes, like a herd of elephants in the room nobody wants to talk about.
How does institutional drug use reflect and reinforce power dynamics?
What are the implications of normalizing drug use for workplace performance?
How do organizations reconcile public messaging with private practices?
What are the human costs of institutional performance enhancement?
Understanding historical patterns is far less about drawing direct equivalences (Nazis really, really hate being called Nazis), but rather about recognizing how institutional drug use often intersects with highly toxic ideologies of optimization and performance enhancement.
The drugs themselves might not harm you as much as the drug promotion culture pushing it with a very hidden intention of harm to certain segments of society. As ketamine and other psychedelics gain mainstream acceptance, we must carefully consider the ethical implications of institutional promotion and distribution.
When major tech publications celebrate the rise of heavy ketamine use, even just passively giving it headlines of “bolster focus and creativity” without examining historical contexts, they miss an opportunity for critical analysis. The “innovation” and “output” story really is far more about power, institutional control, and the complex relationship between drug policy and organizational ideology.
We would do well to remember that any enhancement short-cut circling around high-performance communities deserves careful scrutiny, especially when embedded in groups that appear to be prone to science denial. We don’t actually need to open the door to harmful, even deadly, fantasies of magic “happy” pills.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
