When President Wilson screened “Birth of a Nation” (based on the book Clansman) at the White House in 1915, he didn’t just show a film – he sent a signal that legitimized racial violence under the banner of “free speech.”

The film’s extremely controversial nationwide release, protected and promoted by racists as free expression, helped fuel the resurging Ku Klux Klan and contributed to the tensions that erupted in the Red Summer of 1919, when white supremacist mobs violently attacked Black communities to destroy over 30 cities across America. Deaths still are underestimated to this day as the hidden mass graves of President Wilson’s “America First” campaign haven’t yet been properly recorded and exposed, let alone exhumed.

The film’s defenders falsely claimed they were protecting artistic freedom and historical expression. The bogus “freedom” argument provided cover for hate speech meant to incite and help coordinate campaigns of intimidation and violence.

The subsequent racial violence that exploded in 1919, after Wilson had pushed anti-liberal extremism for years, meant groundwork had been laid in normalized discrimination cloaked in the language of liberty.

Trump’s 2025 “ENDING FEDERAL CENSORSHIP” executive order similarly falsely wraps itself in First Amendment language meant to rush the dismantling of content moderation systems. The rollback of AI safeguards announced by Twitter and Facebook – social media companies’ retreat from content oversight – means we’re seeing a similar pattern: official policies that enable and legitimize coordinated harassment under the guise of protecting freedom.

Just as Wilson’s actions went beyond a simple domestic terrorism film screening to signal broader social permission for low-level widespread violence, today’s changes represent more than mere policy shifts. They create an infrastructure where targeted harassment and discrimination can flourish while claiming constitutional protection.

The echoes of President Wilson’s reign of terror by 1915 “America First” adherents remind us that when government actions delegitimize safeguards against organized hate, the consequences can be far-reaching and extremely violent.

One hundred years ago, America suffered through one of the biggest outbreaks of racial violence against African Americans in its history, and few people know about it.

Few people know about it because there was no freedom allowed to talk about the violence, only freedom given for the hate speech to create it. America literally erased public mentions of the early 1900s racist riots, fire bombings and shootings.

Here’s a perfect example of the hypocrisy and propaganda tactics. At the same time this executive order claims to end ALL federal censorship… an opposite executive order was given to censor all federal speech (communications were ordered completely shutdown in the agency that warns about public safety risks). That’s the tightly controlled speech model of dictatorships for you, similar to how Goebbels centralized all radio for Hitler and labeled the heavy censorship as freedom for Nazis.

Mass graves from America First violence in 1921 still hidden and unstudied in 2024 should say it all. There was more than enough freedom granted for white supremacist hate speech, and none granted to talk about stopping it, because it suited the white men in power to keep things heavily lopsided that way.

Today Trump speaks in identical terms as a President Wilson about going back, rebirth of white nationalist power by removing safeguards meant to prevent racist violence. And somehow people don’t notice the obvious repeat. He claims ignorance of the century-old violent white nationalist hate campaigns he promotes, to normalize incitement as protected speech.

Ask yourself this: what is the role of technology then (planes with napalm) versus now (AI with crypto)?

July 2023 an artist famous for political commentary dropped his work on social media.

Ai Wei Wei’s artwork hit different from most – this was someone already who had been jailed and banned from Twitter for speaking truth to power.

Yet when he called out clear Nazi connections, there was no denial and barely a whisper of restriction (Elon Musk censored Wei Wei’s animated X by deleting it). The silence spoke volumes.

He’s particularly scathing about Elon Musk, who received multiple favours from the CCP to set up his Tesla factory in Shanghai and sings the praises of the Chinese government. Musk owns X, the platform that used to be Twitter, and Ai has on his phone an animation he created, the X spinning and turning into a swastika. It was deleted from X but was still available on Instagram. ‘It’s so creepy. I mean it looks so ugly,’ he said.

Fast forward to 2025 and the pattern is painfully clear. While some still debate whether to call a spade a spade, Musk has moved from dog whistles to bullhorns, now openly making Hitler salutes at political rallies that spark “we’re back” celebrations across social media.

“Maybe woke really is dead,” white nationalist Keith Woods posted on X.

“Did Elon Musk just Heil Hitler …” right-wing commentator Evan Kilgore posted on X. “We are so back.”

Today’s Nazi groups aren’t hiding anymore – they’re celebrating how their messages have gone mainstream, just as Ai Wei Wei warned us through his art years ago. The path from his Twitter critique to American political rallies is as straight as it is terrifying.

And here’s where history rhymes with a vengeance. Our language “experts” stand in rising floodwaters, watching the dam crack, telling us to wait for “concrete evidence” of danger. By the time they admit the obvious, the flood will have already swept us all away.

“I’m skeptical it was on purpose,” said Jared Holt, a senior research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tracks online hate. “It would be an act of self-sabotage that wouldn’t really make much sense at all.”

Self-sabotage doesn’t make sense? My Jared, it’s the very definition of Nazism. Do you not know history?

To understand Nazis is to understand self-destruction because it’s their entire endgame. Every time. The proof is found in history, as artists painting on Musk’s own factory have depicted so simply:

This isn’t about academic caution – it’s about the deadly paralysis of overthinking while fascists build real power. They don’t need your perfect analysis. They just need your hesitation.

Remember: While scholars polish their dissertations on “the nature of rising authoritarianism,” extremists are seizing actual power. They don’t play by academic rules. They never have.

We’ve seen this playbook before. We know how it ends. When people say “we’re not Germany in the ’30s,” they’re reporting something today potentially even more dangerous — classic racist “show me your papers” mixed with modern technology that we need to call out as immoral and illegal. Millions of explosive racist killer robots descending on cities is not out of the question right now.

After all, the Nazis themselves studied and borrowed from American systemic and industrialized racism to build the European genocide machine. History doesn’t repeat, but it echoes – and right now, those echoes are extremely clear.

The only question is who among us will act on the warning signs this time.

Wei Wei was right.

Related: I coincidentally wrote on this blog two days after Wei Wei’s tweet, how the Twitter rebrand is a swastika on top of Tesla already being steeped in Nazi messaging.

The Great AI Safety Rollback:
When History Rhymes with Catastrophe

The immediate and short-sighted repeal of AI oversight regulations threatens America with a return to some of the most costly historical mistakes: prioritizing quick profits over sustainable innovation.

Like the introduction of leaded gasoline in the 1920s, we’re watching in real-time as industry leaders push for unsafe deregulation that normalizes reckless behavior under the banner of innovation. What happens when AI systems analyzing sensitive data are no longer required to log their activities? When ‘proprietary algorithms‘ become a shield for manipulation? When the same companies selling AI tools are also controlling critical infrastructure?

The leaded gasoline parallel is stark because industry leaders actively suppressed research showing devastating health impacts for decades, all while claiming regulations would ‘stifle innovation.’ Now we face potentially graver risks with AI systems that could be deployed to influence everything from financial markets to allegedly rigged voting systems, with even less transparency. Are we prepared to detect large-scale coordination between supposedly independent AI systems? Can we afford to wait decades to discover what damage was done while oversight was dismantled?

Deregulation Kills Innovation

Want proof? Look no further than SpaceX – the poster child of deregulated “innovation.” In 2016, Elon Musk promised Mars colonies by 2022. In 2017, he promised Moon tourism by 2018. In 2019, he promised robotaxis by 2020. In 2020, he promised Mars cargo missions by 2022. Now it’s 2025 and SpaceX hasn’t delivered on any of these promises – not even close. Instead of Mars colonies, we got exploding rockets, failed launches, and orbital debris fields that threaten functioning satellites.

This isn’t innovation – it’s marketing masquerading as engineering. Reportedly SpaceX took proven 1960s rocket technology, rebranded it with flashy CGI videos and bold promises, then used public money and regulatory shortcuts to build an inferior version of what NASA achieved decades ago. Their much-hyped reusable rockets? They’re still losing them at an alarming rate. Their promised Mars missions? Apparently they haven’t even reached orbit yet without creating hazardous space debris and being grounded. Their “breakthrough” Starship? It’s years behind schedule and still exploding on launch.

Yet because deregulation has lowered the bar so far, SpaceX gets celebrated for achievements that would have been considered failures by 1960s standards. This same pattern of substituting marketing for engineering produced Cybertrucks unable to be exposed to water, increasingly in the news for unexplained deadly crashes.

Boeing’s 737 MAX disaster stands as another stark warning. As oversight weakened, Boeing didn’t innovate – they took deadly shortcuts that killed hundreds and vaporized billions in value. When marketing trumps engineering and systems get a similar free pass, we read about unmistakable tragedy more than any real triumph.

History teaches us that true innovation thrives not in the absence of oversight, but in the presence of clear, meaningful, measured standards especially related to safety from harm.

Consider how American scientific innovation operated under intense practical pressures for results in WWII. Early radar systems like the SCR-270 (which detected the Japanese at Pearl Harbor but was ignored) and MIT’s Rad Lab developments faced complex challenges with false echoes, ground clutter, and atmospheric interference.

The MIT Radiation Laboratory, established in October 1940, marked a crucial decision point – Vannevar Bush and Karl Compton insisted on civilian scientific oversight rather than pure military control, believing innovation required both rigorous standards and academic freedom. This approach led to the February 1940 cavity magnetron breakthrough by John Randall and Harry Boot that revolutionized radar capabilities. Innovations like the cavity magnetron and H2X ground-mapping radar demonstrated remarkable progress through regulations that enforced rigorous testing and iteration.

Contrast the success of heavily regulated outcomes in WWII with the vague approaches in the Vietnam War, such as Operation Igloo White (1967-1972) – burning $1.7 billion yearly on an opaque ‘electronic battlefield’ of seismic sensors (ADSID), acoustic detectors (ACOUSID), and infrared cameras monitored from Nakhon Phanom, Thailand. The system’s sophisticated IBM 360/65 computers processed thousands of sensor readings but couldn’t reliably distinguish between North Vietnamese supply convoys and local farming activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, leading to massive waste in random bombing missions. It was such a failure that President Nixon ordered the same system installed around the White House and on American borders. Why? He opposed regulations that made it clear the system didn’t work.

This mirrors today’s AI companies selling us a new generation of ‘automated intelligence’ – expensive systems making bold claims while struggling with basic contextual understanding, their limitations obscured behind proprietary metrics and classification barriers rather than being subjected to transparent, real-world validation.

Critics have said nothing proves this point better than the horrible results from Palantir – just as Igloo White generated endless bombing missions based on misidentified targets, Palantir’s systems have perpetuated endless cycles of conflict by generating flawed intelligence that creates more adversaries than it eliminates. Their algorithms, shielded from oversight by claims of national security, have reportedly misidentified targets and communities, creating the very threats they promised to prevent – a self-perpetuating cycle of algorithmic failure marketed as success: the self-licking ISIS-cream cone.

The sudden rushed push for AI deregulation is most likely to accelerate failures such as Palantir and lower the bar so far anything can be rebranded as success. By removing basic oversight requirements, we’re not unleashing innovation – we’re creating an environment where “breakthrough developments” require no real capability or safety, and may even be demonstrably worse than before.

Might as well legalize snake-oil.

The Real Cost of an American Leadfoot

The parallels with the tragic leaded gasoline saga are particularly alarming. In the 1920s, General Motors marketed tetraethyl lead as an innovative solution for engine knock. In reality, it was an extremely toxic shortcut as a coverup that avoided addressing fundamental engine design issues. The result? Fifty years of widespread lead pollution, untold human and animal suffering, that we’re still cleaning up today.

When GM pushed leaded gasoline, they funded fake studies, attacked critics as ‘anti-innovation,’ and claimed regulation would ‘kill the auto industry.’ It took scientists like Patterson and Needleman 50 years of blood samples, soil tests, and statistical evidence before executive orders could mature into meaningful enforcement – and by then, nearly irreversible massive damage was done. Now AI companies run the same playbook with a crucial difference. We need to scientifically define ‘AI manipulation’ before we can regulate it. We need updated ways to measure evolving influence operations despite no physical traces. Without executive level regulation requiring transparent logging and testing standards now, we’re not just delaying accountability – we’re ensuring manipulation will be undetectable by design.

Clair Patterson’s initial discoveries about lead contamination came in 1965, but it took until 1975 for the EPA to announce the phase-out, and until 1996 for the full ban. This was an intentionally corrupted 31-year gap between scientific evidence and regulatory action. The counter-campaign by the Ethyl Corporation (created by GM and Standard Oil) included attacking Patterson’s funding and trying to get him fired from Caltech.

While it took 31 years to ban leaded gasoline despite clear scientific evidence, today’s AI deregulation is happening virtually overnight – removing safeguards before we’ve even finished designing them. This isn’t just regression; it’s willful blindness to history.

Removing AI safety regulations doesn’t solve any of the fundamental challenges of developing reliable, useful and beneficial AI systems. Instead, it allows companies to regress towards shortcuts and crimes, potentially building fundamentally flawed systems unleashing harms that we’ll spend decades trying to recover from.

When we mistake the absence of standards for freedom to innovate, we enable our own decline – just as Japanese automakers dominated by focusing on quality (enforced under anti-fascist post-WWII Allied occupation) as American manufacturers oriented instead around marketing and took engineering shortcuts. Countries that maintain rigorous AI development standards ultimately will leap ahead of those that don’t.

W. Edwards Deming’s statistical quality control methods, introduced to Japan in 1950 through JUSE (Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers), became mandatory under occupation reforms. Toyota’s implementation through the Toyota Production System (TPS) starting in 1948 under Taiichi Ohno proved how regulation could drive rather than stifle innovation – creating manufacturing processes so superior that American companies spent decades trying to catch up.

For AI to develop sustainably, just like any technology in history, we need to maintain safety standards that can’t be gamed or spun away from measured indicators. Proper regulatory frameworks reward genuine innovation rather than hype, the same way a good CEO rewards productive staff who achieve goals. Our development processes should be incentivized to build in safety from the ground up, with international standards and cooperation to establish meaningful benchmarks for progress.

False Choice is False

The choice between regulation and innovation is a false one. Its like saying choose between having a manager and figuring out what to work on. The real choice is between sustainable progress versus shortcuts that cost us dearly in the long run — penny wise, pound foolish. As we watch basic AI oversight being dismantled, we must ask ourselves: are we willing to repeat known mistakes of the past, or will we finally learn from them?

The elimination of basic oversight requirements creates an environment where:

• Companies can claim “AI breakthroughs” based on vague probably misleading marketing rather than measurable results
• Critical safety issues can be downplayed or ignored until they cause major problems and get treated as fait accompli
• Technical debt accumulates as systems are deployed without proper safety architecture, ballooning maintenance overhead that slows or even stops innovation
• America’s competitive position weakens as other nations develop more regulated and therefore sustainable approaches

True innovation doesn’t fear oversight – it thrives on it. The kind of breakthrough development that put America at the forefront of aviation, computing, and space exploration came from environments with clear standards and undeniable metrics of success.

The cost of getting this wrong isn’t just economic – it’s existential. We spent decades cleaning up the incredibly difficult aftermath of leaded gasoline that easily could have been avoided. We might spend far longer dealing with the privacy and integrity consequences of unsafe AI systems deployed in the current unhealthy rush for quick extraction of value.

The time to prevent this is now, before we create a mess that future generations will bear.