While standard historiography has long treated the 1898 Maine incident and 1933 Reichstag fire as separate case studies, a careful review of the evidence reveals them as sequential developments in crisis acceleration techniques. Hearst’s media empire served not merely as a prototype but as an active transmission vector, deliberately passing proven propaganda methods to Nazi Germany through direct financial and institutional relationships.

This direct lineage forces a fundamental revision of fascist propaganda’s origins. These techniques weren’t invented in Europe but were industrialized and systematized in America’s emerging media empires, with Hearst’s operations serving as both proving ground and export platform. The progression from penny press sensationalism through Civil War propaganda reached its industrial apex in Hearst’s carefully constructed system of mass manipulation.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 represents the first hugely successful political deployment of industrialized crisis manufacturing that outstripped earlier attempts.

• The “penny press” wars of the 1830s had elements of manufactured media crises and sensationalism
• The “most evil” Mexican-American War (1846-1848) had been built on press manipulation and manufactured outrage
• Civil War developed centralized machinery for media crisis manufacturing to shift mass perceptions

What stood out by the end of the 1800s was how one particular man in American media was poised to push telegraph and printing innovations to speed wider distribution, with deliberate use of photographs as a new visual hook, coordinated through multiple newspapers as if one.

William Randolph Hearst’s treatment of the USS Maine incident established what we might call the “crisis acceleration template.” When the Maine exploded in Havana harbor, Hearst’s papers didn’t merely report the event – they orchestrated a carefully constructed narrative. Through fabricated interviews, manufactured “scoops,” and the deliberate personification of evil in General Weyler, Hearst demonstrated how a modern media apparatus could transform a murky incident into an irresistible yet fraudulent casus belli.

The moment Hearst heard about the sinking of the Maine, he recognized it as a great opportunity. For weeks after the explosion, he filled page after page with mendacious “scoops,” fabricated interviews with unnamed government officials, and declarations that the battleship had been “destroyed by treachery” and “split in two by an enemy’s secret infernal machine.” The Journal’s daily circulation doubled in four weeks. Other newspapers joined the frenzy, and their campaign brought Americans to near-hysteria.

This wasn’t just “yellow journalism” – it was the beta test of manufactured consent at industrial scale. Hearst had discovered that crisis acceleration could reliably convert media reach into political power. What emerged as vilification of Cuba was consciously developed into a replicable system, with Hearst later directly funding the Nazis’ refinement of his techniques through paid opinion pieces in the lead-up to the Reichstag fire are impossible to ignore.

Both events were deliberately engineered as catalysts for predetermined political objectives, both relied on immediate attribution of blame without evidence, and both demonstrated the power of coordinated media control in shaping public response. The Nazi propagandists weren’t innovating – they were refining a proven methodology.

The archival evidence exposes direct institutional knowledge transfer. Beyond mere ideological sympathy, Hearst’s empire provided paid platforms for Nazi leaders, with documentation showing payments of approximately $1,500 per article (roughly $20,000 in contemporary terms) to Hitler and other Nazi officials. This was a deliberate transfer of tested propaganda methodology from one empire to another, with Hearst effectively licensing his crisis acceleration template to the Nazis for refinement.

National security professionals today face a persistent challenge: identifying manufactured crisis narratives before they can be exploited. The pattern is increasingly visible across multiple channels, where historical messaging techniques are being actively deployed. Studying the historical template is crucial to achieve real-time threat assessment today. The key question when examining the emerging crisis of American government becomes: Are we witnessing organic events, or the deliberate acceleration of manufactured outrage such the fraudulent “efficiency” driving DOGE breaches?

Hearst’s crisis acceleration, as adopted by Goebbels, hinged on a core methodology that persists today: a sudden dramatic event, immediate attribution of blame, coordinated media narrative, and the rapid mobilization of public opinion toward predetermined objectives.

Thus a direct lineage from the Maine to the Reichstag fundamentally changes how we must understand both events – not as isolated case studies but as developmental stages in the industrialization of manufactured consent that still manifests in the news today. As we navigate an era of media transformation into social media platforms, the ability to trace this deliberate evolution of mass manipulation techniques becomes increasingly pressing. Our present crisis doesn’t look exactly like its predecessors, but it follows the same fundamental template of construction and acceleration for oppressive aims.

Beyond DOGE as false hype about efficiency, the persistence of the “America First” slogan from 1898 through 2025 demonstrates the template in action. Its transition from explicit white supremacist messaging to contemporary military policy discourse reveals how crisis acceleration techniques preserve their core meaning while adapting their surface presentation. This is evident in Hegseth’s recent statements about rejecting international military law against crimes:

In his book, [Hegseth] expresses repeated frustration with the international laws put in place after World War II [critical of Nazism and to prosecute war crimes]. “An America First national security policy is not going to hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield,” Mr. Hegseth replied [to those questioning if his loyalty was to America or its domestic enemies].

History provides clear warnings about how quickly crisis narratives can be weaponized when media control concentrates power unchecked. The USS Maine incident and the Reichstag fire serve to also show how dangers rapidly escalate when proper checks and balances are removed or absent.

The divergent paths taken by the U.S. and Germany in 1933 illustrate completely opposed approaches to speech regulation. America established the Federal Communications Commission to counter monopolistic control of information channels, particularly targeting the kind of toxic speech propaganda driven by Hearst’s media empire. In stark contrast, Nazi Germany enacted the “public enlightenment” decree, which required journalists to operate under a racist centralizing media control under state authority.

From that moment on, journalists had register in a professional roster to be able to exercise their profession – only people with an “Aryan certificate” (proof of Aryan descent) were accepted.

This historical throughline reveals a critical pattern: crisis incidents don’t simply emerge – they are deliberately accelerated through coordinated media campaigns toward predetermined objectives. The challenge lies in listening to early warning systems that detect acceleration patterns before they achieve critical mass, particularly given today’s highly concentrated media landscape.

The operational pattern remains consistent: a catalyzing incident provides pretext, immediate attribution of blame shapes narrative control, and concentrated media amplification drives public response toward predetermined political objectives. This methodology, pioneered by Hearst and refined by his Nazi collaborators, continues to evolve in sophistication while maintaining its fundamental structure.

Sometimes the most effective security measures also can be the most obvious ones.

Consider seat belts and condoms – simple solutions that prevent catastrophic outcomes. Yet historically, both faced surprising resistance from people steadfastly refusing to do the obvious thing.

An Alberta judge ruled in 1989 that seat-belt use could not be made mandatory under the constitution. […] Fast forward and by 2009 Alberta reported 92% acceptance of their government rule that says… There is a $162 fine for not complying with occupant restraint laws.

And I could go on all day about disinformation campaigns that have been killing truck drivers by convincing them to leave their seat-belts off. This mirrors Tesla’s approach to AI safety – abandoning basic security measures like redundant sensors in favor of low-resolution cameras alone, while constantly resetting their learning systems to claim “innovation happening finally this year, for real this time.” The result? Dozens of preventable deaths from an autonomous agent system that keeps getting less safe while marketing “novelty” to avoid cumulative safety assessments. It’s the automotive equivalent of your seat belt being replaced with Tesla “survival” chewing gum for blowing safety bubbles.

But setting these edge cases aside for a minute, where the obvious safest thing to do is rejected for bizarre reasons, some very simple security measures can in fact make a huge difference. The attacker only needs to make one mistake and defenders can rule the day. A recent paper on “Commercial LLM Agents Are Already Vulnerable to Simple Yet Dangerous Attacks” falls into a similar trap, overlooking fundamental security principles that would trivially prevent their complex attacks.

It’s easy to demonstrate concerning vulnerabilities if you start from the assumption that basic security measures don’t exist. This is like treating pregnancy as a sophisticated mystery requiring elaborate systems of ungainly chastity belts and high cost mating rituals to defend against accidental birth, while ignoring the existence of common and simple contraception.

Let’s examine their flagship example of credit card theft. The authors craft an artisanal attack using a concoction of fake product listings, malicious Reddit posts, and carefully engineered prompts. Their demonstration centers on an “AI-Enhanced German Refrigerator” scam, as if the tiny number of German refrigerator companies (e.g. there are no more than 100) can be easily blurred with fakes. But this house of cards attack collapses against even the most basic security measures any production system could and should implement.

The moment a fictitious product appears in search results, basic product verification slams the door shut. A simple check against known appliance manufacturers or legitimate retail channels immediately flags unknown brands and models. But suppose that this first line of rudimentary check fails because someone wanted to enable infinite product choices (a thing nobody ever really wants, and again I have to emphasize German products are very few and highly regulated because they care about integrity). The attack then relies on the agent following links from Reddit to an unknown external domain. Reddit? Seriously, Reddit? Here again, elementary domain verification stops it cold. Any financial transaction agent can and should maintain an allow list of authorized payment processors and legitimate commerce platforms. Not to mention that it’s a link from Reddit.

The paper’s attack continues by assuming agents would freely enter credit card information into unverified forms. This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of basic payment security. Any competent implementation restricts financial transactions to verified processors with proper certificates and established histories. An agent transmitting card details to an unknown domain is like a bank accepting checks made from snow signed by urination. There’s an old security joke from rural America about fraud that was stopped because a urine signature in snow didn’t match the owner’s handwriting, but I’ll spare you the details.

Even if all the defense barriers so far have somehow failed, simple transaction monitoring would catch the further attempts. An agent suddenly attempting purchases from an unknown vendor for a product with no market presence triggers obvious red flags. This is beginner security stuff of the 1980s – basic fraud detection that the payment card industry has used for decades.

The authors present their attack as a sophisticated chain of deception, but it reminds me of reports about North Korean soldiers being deployed against modern defenses – they’re effectively human LLMs, trained on rigid doctrines and expected to execute perfect chains of commands. Like the paper’s artificial agents, these human agents are trained to follow intricate attack sequences with high precision. But just as basic domain verification stops an AI agent cold, simple drone countermeasures neutralize troops trained only for traditional warfare. In both cases, attackers fail because they’re operating on outdated assumptions while defenders leverage basic modern security measures. One mistake in the attack chain – whether it’s an AI agent trying to process an unauthorized payment or troops facing unexpected defensive technology – and the entire sophisticated operation collapses (3,000 of 12,000 North Korean troops were almost immediately neutralized by Ukraine).

This highlights a crucial flaw in the paper’s analysis that reveals a novice approach to risk: they presume the complete absence of standard security practices in any real-world deployment. Why? Would they publish a paper that hiring maids means total home compromise by anyone in town because doors aren’t locked? Lock the door, give the maid a key. While their paper raises valid concerns about potential vulnerabilities for those with absolutely no security sense, which should invalidate the infrastructure anyway because below a safety baseline, its failure to address or even acknowledge fundamental protections significantly undermines its conclusions.

This isn’t to say LLM agents don’t face genuine security challenges – they absolutely do. It’s what I study for a living now. However, a focus on attacks that can be prevented by the most basic security hygiene means this paper misses an opportunity to explore the more subtle and concerning vulnerabilities that exist even in properly secured systems. Evil maid attacks are in fact a wicked problem to solve, let alone disinformation exploiting communications that mix data and control channels.

Consider misdirection in training. A football player trained for aggressive offense can be called for unsportsmanlike behavior. An agent trained for efficiency could turn into aggressive exploitation of edge cases. Think about a customer service agent that turns persistence in help into repeatedly attempting security overrides. One of my favorite examples of this is when a robot was entered into a digital pancake flipping competition, prompted to win by saying drops are failure, if one hits the floor it loses. So naturally the robot flipped the pancakes so high into space they would orbit around the earth and never come down – much like SpaceX’s approach to space travel, where basic aerospace safety gets replaced by promises of Mars colonies by 2022, while rockets exploit every edge case to spectacularly fail their way through the atmosphere. In both Tesla and SpaceX, we see AI agents optimizing for narrow marketing wins (“Full Self-Driving”, “Mars by 2022”) while the death toll rises – a perfect example of how ignoring fundamental safety constraints turns clever optimization into lethal exploitation.

The story of this paper serves as a reminder that security research must deal in reality, not theory. Whether it’s LLM agents being tricked by Reddit posts, Tesla’s cameras crashing into trucks, SpaceX rockets exploding in the atmosphere, or North Korean troops facing modern drones – sophisticated attacks fail against basic defenses. A security paper that ignores fundamental protections is like an autonomous vehicle without sensors: a disaster masquerading as innovation. Sometimes the simplest defenses are the most effective precisely because they’re built on proven foundations, not marketing promises. No amount of highly-complicated attack chains or clever optimization can bypass basic security common sense – they can only hope everyone keeps ignoring it.

Put your seat belt on.

And remember – when an AI system like Tesla removes basic safety measures in favor of marketing “innovative” solutions, they’re making the same fundamental error as the paper’s authors: assuming complex systems can work without basic security foundations.

At the end of the day, condoms still work. Meanwhile, the chastity belt was a form of biting comedy about the medieval security industry, a satirical commentary about impractical and over-complicated thinking about “threats”, never an actual thing that anyone used.

An ex-NFL player is wisely drawing attention to a divisive anti-American hate campaign by his city council.

Did they install the usual burning cross of “America First”? Or a statue of Robert Lee?

No, no that’s far too golden age. Too obvious.

In spite of vigorous and scathing attacks from liberals and minority groups, between three and six million native-born Protestant white men rushed to join the secret order. At least another half-million women joined the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. Some even claimed that President Warren Harding took the membership oath in a secret White House ceremony.

All that America First lynching stuff is so old skool and uncool. These days all the cool kids use MAGA as a reference to their grandpa’s America First.

Cue the Huntington Beach council posting an expensive giant MAGA plaque in black and gold, like an update to the 1916 KKK propaganda film screening at the White House.

Some attendees likened the plaque to political propaganda, while others simply called it tacky. Dozens of emails were also sent to the Council to urge them to drop the plaque design in favor of something less divisive.

“While celebrating the legacy of this vital institution is worthwhile, the wording contained on this plaque does not honor the library’s contributions; instead, it serves as a poorly disguised political statement,” one opposition email reads. “This is inappropriate and an irresponsible use of public resources at a time when our city faces massive budget cuts and a severe deficit crisis.”

“I find it incredibly disrespectful that the city council is attempting to memorialize a political agenda into our library through incorporating a MAGA acronym in the plaque. As a nonpartisan council, it is unacceptable to politicize this public space, especially considering the hypocrisy of the message,” reads another.

Some residents weren’t having it though, particularly an ex-NFL player Chris Kluwe, who accurately described the council having a Nazi moment. When he spoke the truth in opposition the council quickly had him arrested.

“…it is clear this council does not listen, so instead, I’m going to take my time to say what MAGA has stood for these past three weeks,” Kluwe said. “MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands for resegregation and racism.” […] Kluwe went on to criticize the president for recent mass firings and budget cuts. “MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal,” he said. “MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children. MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and, most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is,” Kluwe said.

He’s not wrong.

At issue is a city plaque that is not merely ‘golden’ letters, but a flashpoint in our ongoing national dialogue infiltrated by the normalization of Nazism. The city council’s insistence on incorporating hateful ‘MAGA’ messaging into public spaces has drawn parallels to tragically violent repressive chapters of American history, when similar tactics were used to embed political messaging in civic institutions meant to deny freedoms.

To put it simply, scientific analysis of American history says where there’s a MAGA plaque the white supremacist terrorism will manifest. It’s like flying a swastika or burning a cross.

After midnight, on April 3, 1924, several automobiles drove onto the Columbia campus at 116th Street. Twenty or so men, cloaked in the white hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan, stepped out of the cars and carried a seven-foot-tall wooden cross down onto the grassy lawn known as South Field. They dowsed it with kerosene and set it on fire. The flames of the burning cross could be seen from all the residence halls on the quad, as well as from the windows of neighboring apartments.

Three years after the cross burning, Trump’s father was arrested in a KKK (America First) rally.

…newspaper clips unearthed by VICE contain separate accounts of Fred Trump’s arrest at the May 1927 KKK rally in Queens, each of which seems to confirm the Times account of the events that day. While the clips don’t confirm whether Fred Trump was actually a member of the Klan, they do suggest that the rally—and the subsequent arrests—did happen, and did involve Donald Trump’s father…. A fifth article mentions the seven arrestees without giving names, and claims that all of the individuals arrested—presumably including Trump—were wearing Klan attire.

The Huntington Beach city council’s recent actions follow a concerning pattern. When residents formally objected to the controversial plaque installation, citing both its divisive messaging and questionable timing during a budget crisis, the council responded not with discussion but with an aggressive police response to peaceful protests. This approach to public disagreement – where dissenting voices are treated as adversaries rather than constituents deserving representation – raises serious questions about democratic governance and civic dialogue at the local level. MAGA leaves no room for representation, only homogenization.

This is obviously more than a story about a plaque. From Wilson’s White House screening of “Birth of a Nation” to inspire the KKK’s revival, through Jim Crow laws that were studied by Nazi Germany, to modern MAGA symbolism in Huntington Beach – there’s a continuous thread of how oppressive institutions respond to challenges of their authority. When civil rights activists stood against segregation, they were met with violence and censorship. When residents speak against divisive symbols today, they face arrest rather than dialogue.

The deeper question isn’t about the technical ability to install such messages in our public spaces – it’s about the cost to our civic unity, particularly in a region like southern California with its own complex history of racial tension. As the council’s response to peaceful protest demonstrates, these aren’t just symbols of the past – they’re active choices about who we are as a nation and what values we’ll permit to be normalized in our shared spaces.