Court testimony from Benavides v. Tesla I have reviewed has been damning. It’s clear why Tesla has paid tens of millions to settle and prevent truth reaching the public for the past decade.

Tesla’s cynical deployment of deeply flawed Autopilot technology to public roads represents a clear violation of safety principles established over more than a century.

Tesla didn’t just make mistakes—they systematically violated hundreds of years of established safety principles while lying about their technology’s capabilities. Rather than pioneering new approaches to safety, Tesla deliberately ignored basic methodologies that other industries developed specifically to prevent the kind of deaths and injuries that Tesla Autopilot has caused.

This analysis reveals that Tesla knowingly deployed experimental technology while making false safety claims, attacking critics, and concealing evidence – following the same playbook used by tobacco companies, asbestos manufacturers, and other industries that prioritized profits over human lives.

The company violated not just recent automotive safety standards, but fundamental principles of engineering ethics established in 1914, philosophical frameworks dating to Kant’s 1785 categorical imperative, and safety approaches proven successful in aviation, nuclear power, and pharmaceutical industries.

PART A: Which historical safety principles did Tesla violate? Let us count the ways.

1) A century of established doctrine in the precautionary principle

Caution is required when evidence suggests potential harm, even without complete scientific certainty. These deep historical roots are what Tesla completely ignored. First codified in environmental law as Germany’s “Vorsorgeprinzip” in the early 1970s, the principle was formally established internationally through the 1992 Rio Declaration:

Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures.

Tesla violated the principle by deploying Autopilot despite acknowledging significant limitations.

Court testimony revealed that Tesla had no safety data to support their life-saving claims before March 2018, yet continued aggressive marketing. Expert witness Dr. Mendel Singer testified that Tesla’s Vehicle Safety Report—their primary public safety justification—had “no math and no science behind” it.

NO MATH.

NO SCIENCE.

The snake oil of Tesla directly contradicts the precautionary principle’s requirement for conservative action when facing potential catastrophic consequences.

The philosophical foundation comes from Hans Jonas’s “The Imperative of Responsibility” (1984), which reformulated Kant’s categorical imperative for the technological age:

Act so that the effects of your actions are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on Earth.

Tesla’s approach of unqualified customers on public roads as testing grounds for experimental technology clearly and directly violates the principle.

2) Engineering ethics codes: Professional obligations established 1912-1914

Tesla’s Autopilot deployment violates the fundamental principle established by every major engineering ethics code over a century ago:

Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.

These codes emerged directly from catastrophic failures including bridge collapses (Tay Bridge 1879, Quebec Bridge 1907) and boiler explosions (Grover Shoe Factory 1905) that demonstrated the need for professional accountability beyond commercial interests.

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) code of 1914 specifically required engineers to “present consequences clearly when judgment is overruled where public safety may be endangered.”

Tesla violated this by continuing operations despite NTSB findings that Autopilot had fundamental design flaws. Court testimony revealed the extent of Tesla’s knowledge: expert witness testified that in the fatal crash:

…the Autopilot system detected a pedestrian 140 feet away and classified it correctly, but ‘never warned the driver’ and ‘never braked.’ Instead, it simply ‘turned off Autopilot’ and ‘gave up control’ just 1.3 seconds before impact.

NEVER WARNED THE DRIVER AND SIMPLY TURNED OFF.

Tesla’s diabolical and deadly approach mirrors the Ford Pinto case (1970-1980), where executives knew from dozens of crash tests that rear-end collisions would rupture the fuel system, yet proceeded without safety measures because solutions cost $1-$11 per vehicle.

Tesla similarly knew of Autopilot limitations but chose deployment speed over comprehensive safety validation. Court testimony exposed the company’s knowledge: they knew drivers were “ignoring steering wheel warnings ‘6, 10, plus times an hour'” yet continued marketing the system as safe.

Additionally, the system could “detect imminent crashes for seconds but was programmed to simply ‘abort’ rather than brake.” With court findings showing “reasonable evidence” that Tesla knew Autopilot was defective, the parallel to Ford’s cost-benefit calculation over safety is exact.

ABORT RATHER THAN BRAKE WHEN IMMINENT CRASH DETECTED.

3) Duty of care: Legal framework established 1916

Tesla violated the legal principle of “duty of care” established in the landmark MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. (1916) case, where Judge Benjamin Cardozo ruled that manufacturers owe safety obligations to end users regardless of direct contractual relationships. The standard requires that if a product’s “nature is such that it is reasonably certain to place life and limb in peril when negligently made, it is then a thing of danger.”

Autonomous driving systems clearly meet this “thing of danger” standard, yet Tesla failed to implement adequate safeguards despite knowing the technology was incomplete. Court testimony revealed Tesla’s deliberate concealment: expert witnesses described receiving critical crash data from Tesla that had been systematically degraded: “videos with resolution ‘reduced, making it hard to read,'” “text files converted to unsearchable PDF images,” and “critical log data with information ‘cut off’ and ‘missing important information.'” As one expert testified:

This is just one example of data I received from Tesla where effort had been placed in making it hard to read and hard to use.

The company’s legal team ironically argued in court that Musk’s safety claims were “mere puffing” that “no reasonable investor would rely on” effectively admitting all the claims were known false while publicly maintaining them as true.

PART B: Philosophical and ethical frameworks Tesla systematically violated

Informed consent: Kantian foundations ignored

Tesla’s deployment fundamentally violated the principle of informed consent, rooted in Immanuel Kant’s Formula of Humanity (1785): never treat people “as a means only but always as an end in itself.” Informed consent requires voluntary, informed, and capacitated agreement to participation in experimental activities.

Tesla failed on all three dimensions. Users were not adequately informed that they were participating in beta testing of experimental software. Despite owner’s manual warnings, Tesla’s marketing contradicted these warnings. Court testimony revealed Musk’s grandiose 2016 claims captured on video:

The Model S and Model X at this point can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person… I really would consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem.

Yet the contradictory messaging between legal warnings and public claims prevented genuine informed consent, as users received fundamentally conflicting information about the technology’s capabilities.

The company treated customers as means to an end – using them to collect driving data and test software – rather than respecting their autonomy as rational agents capable of making informed decisions about risk.

Utilitarian vs. deontological ethics: Violating both frameworks

Tesla’s approach fails under both major ethical frameworks. From a utilitarian perspective (maximizing overall welfare), Tesla’s false safety claims likely increased rather than decreased overall harm by encouraging risky behavior and preventing industry-wide safety improvements through data hoarding.

From a deontological perspective (duty-based ethics rooted in Kant’s categorical imperative), Tesla violated absolute duties including:

• Duty of truthfulness: Making false safety claims
• Duty of care: Deploying inadequately tested technology
• Duty of transparency: Concealing crash data from researchers and public

And for those who actually care about EV ever reaching scale, Tesla’s behavior fails the universalizability test – if all companies deployed deeply flawed experimental safety systems with false claims and no transparency, the consequences would be catastrophic. We don’t have to speculate, given the high death toll of Tesla relative to all other car companies combined.

Epistemic responsibility: Systematic misrepresentation of knowledge

Lorraine Code’s concept of epistemic responsibility requires organizations to accurately represent what is known versus uncertain. Tesla systematically violated this by:

Claiming certainty where none existed: as already stated, Tesla generated pure propaganda as expert Dr. Singer testified that “there is no math, and there is no science behind Tesla’s Vehicle Safety Report.” Despite this, Tesla used the fake report to claim their vehicles were definitively safer.

Concealing uncertainty: Tesla knew about significant limitations but emphasized confidence in marketing. They knew the system would “abort” rather than brake when detecting crashes and that drivers ignored warnings repeatedly, yet continued aggressive marketing claims.

• Blocking knowledge advancement: Unlike other industries that share safety data, Tesla actively fights data disclosure.
• Systematic data degradation: “When Tesla took a video and put this text on top of it, it didn’t look like this. Before I received it, the resolution of this video was reduced, making it hard to read.” The expert noted: “In my line of work, we always want to maintain the best quality evidence we can. Someone didn’t do that here.”

PART C: Let’s talk about parallels in a history of American corporate misconduct

Tesla’s Autopilot strategy follows the exact playbook used by industries that caused massive preventable harm through decades of deception.

Grandiose safety claims without supporting data

• Tobacco industry pattern (1950s-1990s): Companies made broad safety claims while internally acknowledging dangers. Philip Morris president claimed in 1971 that pregnant women smoking produced “smaller but just as healthy” babies while companies internally knew about severe risks.

  

• Asbestos industry (1920s-1980s): Johns Manville knew by 1933 that asbestos caused lung disease but Dr. Anthony Lanza advised against telling sick workers to avoid legal liability. The company found 87% of workers with 15+ years exposure showed disease signs but continued operations.
• Pharmaceutical parallel: Merck’s Vioxx was marketed as safer than alternatives while internal studies from 2000 showed 400% increased heart attack risk, leading to an estimated 38,000 deaths.
• Tesla parallels: Court testimony revealed Musk’s grandiose claims captured on video from 2016: “The Model S and Model X at this point can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person” and “I really would consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem.” He predicted full autonomy within two years. Yet Tesla privately had no safety data to support these claims, and expert testimony says their primary safety justification had “no math and no science behind” it.

Attacking critics rather than addressing safety concerns

Tesla follows the historical pattern of discrediting whistleblowers rather than investigating concerns. NTSB removed Tesla as a party to crash investigations due to inappropriate public statements, with Musk dismissing NTSB as merely “an advisory body.”

This mirrors asbestos industry tactics where companies convinced medical journals to delay publication of negative health effects and used legal intimidation against researchers raising concerns.

Evidence concealment and destruction

Tesla’s approach to data transparency parallels Arthur Andersen’s systematic document destruction in the Enron case, where “tons of paper documents” were shredded after investigations began. Tesla abuses NHTSA’s confidential policies to redact most crash-related data and is currently fighting The Washington Post’s lawsuit to disclose crash information. Court testimony revealed systematic evidence degradation: one expert described receiving “4,000 page documents that aren’t searchable” after Tesla converted them from text files to unsearchable PDF images. Critical data was systematically damaged:

The data I received from Tesla is missing important information. The data I received has been modified so that I cannot use it in reconstructing this accident.

The expert noted the pattern:

This is just one example of data I received from Tesla where effort had been placed in making it hard to read and hard to use.

Tesla received crash data “while dust was still in the air” then denied having it for years.

Johns Manville similarly blocked publication of studies for four years and “likely altered data” before release, knowing that destroyed evidence could not be recovered.

Tesla management undermined safety standards by ignoring all of them. Let’s count the ways again.

1) Aviation industry: Straightforward transit safety frameworks totally abandoned

Aviation developed rigorous safety protocols specifically to prevent the kind of accidents Tesla’s approach enables. FAA regulations require catastrophic failure conditions to be “Extremely Improbable” (less than 1 × 10⁻⁹ per flight hour) with no single failure resulting in catastrophic consequences.

Tesla violated these principles by:

• Releasing experimental technology without comprehensive certification: Court testimony revealed that Tesla deployed systems that would “abort” rather than brake when detecting imminent crashes
• Implementing single points of failure: The system “never warned the driver” and “never braked” when it detected a pedestrian, instead simply “turning off Autopilot” and giving “up control”
• Using customers as test subjects: Expert testimony showed Tesla knew drivers were “ignoring steering wheel warnings ‘6, 10, plus times an hour'” yet continued deployment rather than completing controlled testing phases
• Aviation’s conservative approach requires demonstration of safety before deployment: Tesla did the opposite – deploying first and hoping to achieve safety through iteration.

2) Nuclear industry: Defense in depth ignored

Nuclear safety uses “defense in depth” with five independent layers of protection, each capable of preventing accidents. Tesla’s approach lacked multiple independent safety layers, relying primarily on software with limited hardware redundancy.

The nuclear industry’s conservative decision-making culture contrasts sharply with Tesla’s “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley approach. Nuclear requires demonstration of safety before operation; Tesla used public roads as testing grounds.

3) Pharmaceutical industry: Clinical trial standards bypassed

Tesla essentially skipped the equivalent of Phase I-III clinical trials, deploying beta software directly to consumers without proper safety validation. The pharmaceutical industry requires:

• Phase I: Safety testing in small groups
• Phase II: Efficacy testing in hundreds of subjects
• Phase III: Large-scale testing in thousands of subjects
• Independent Review: Institutional Review Board oversight

Tesla avoided independent safety review and failed to implement adequate post-market surveillance for adverse events. Court testimony revealed they knew about systematic problems—drivers “ignoring steering wheel warnings ‘6, 10, plus times an hour'” and systems that would “abort” rather than brake when detecting crashes—yet continued deployment without addressing these fundamental safety issues.

4) Transit Fail-safe vs. fail-deadly: Engineering principles ignored

Traditional automotive systems were fail-safe – when components failed, human drivers provided backup. Tesla implemented fail-deadly design where software failures could result in crashes without adequate backup systems. Court testimony revealed the deadly consequences: when the system detected a pedestrian “140 feet away” and “classified it correctly,” it “never warned the driver” and “never braked.” Instead, it “turned off Autopilot” and “gave up control just 1.3 seconds before impact.”

Safety-critical systems require fail-operational design through diverse redundancy. Tesla’s approach lacked the multiple independent backup systems required for safety-critical autonomous operation, as demonstrated by this fatal failure mode where detection did not lead to any protective action.

Technology deployment philosophy violations

Tesla’s approach embodies what Evgeny Morozov calls “technological solutionism” – the mistaken belief that complex problems can be solved through engineering without considering social, ethical, and safety dimensions. This represents exactly the kind of technological hubris that philosophers from ancient Greece to Hans Jonas have warned against.

The deployment violates Jonas’s imperative of responsibility by prioritizing innovation speed over careful consideration of consequences for future generations. Tesla used public roads as testing grounds without adequate consideration of the precautionary principle that uncertain but potentially catastrophic risks require conservative approaches.

The historical pattern: Corporate accountability delayed but inevitable

Every industry examined – tobacco, asbestos, pharmaceuticals – eventually faced massive legal liability and regulatory intervention. Tobacco companies paid $206 billion in the Master Settlement Agreement. Johns Manville filed bankruptcy and established a $2.5 billion trust fund for victims. Merck faced thousands of lawsuits over Vioxx deaths.

The outcome is clear: companies that prioritize profits over safety while making false claims and attacking critics eventually face accountability – but only after causing preventable deaths and injuries that transparent, conservative safety approaches could have prevented.

Conclusion: Tesla has been callously ignoring over 100 years of basic lessons

Tesla’s Autopilot deployment represents a systematic violation of safety principles established over more than a century of engineering practice, philosophical development, and regulatory evolution. The company ignored:

• Engineering ethics codes established 1912-1914 requiring public safety primacy
• Legal duty of care framework established 1916 requiring manufacturer responsibility
• Philosophical principles of informed consent rooted in Kantian ethics
• Precautionary principle established internationally 1992 requiring caution despite uncertainty
• Proven safety methodologies from aviation, nuclear, and pharmaceutical industries

Rather than learning from historical corporate disasters, Tesla followed the same playbook that led to massive preventable harm in tobacco, asbestos, and pharmaceutical industries. Court testimony documented the false safety claims (Vehicle Safety Report with “no math and no science”), evidence concealment (systematic data degradation where “effort had been placed in making it hard to read and hard to use”), and moral positioning (claiming critics “kill people”) that mirror patterns consistently resulting in corporate accountability.

Tesla had access to over a century of established safety principles and historical lessons about the consequences of violating them. The company’s choice to ignore this framework represents not innovation, but systematic rejection of hard-won knowledge. Court testimony reveals Tesla knew their system would “detect imminent crashes for seconds but was programmed to simply ‘abort’ rather than brake” and that drivers “ignored steering wheel warnings ‘6, 10, plus times an hour,'” yet they continued aggressive deployment and marketing claims about superior safety.

The historical record suggests that the Tesla management approach, like the awful predecessors, ultimately has to result in regulatory intervention and legal accountability. And this can not come soon enough to protect the market from fraud, given how Tesla is causing preventable harm that established safety principles were specifically designed to prevent.

Nearly half of the participants in the latest Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report said they did not trust Tesla, while more than a third who said they had a negative perception. The company also had the lowest perceived safety rating of any major EV manufacturer, following several high-profile accidents.

DW describes a new German history book that explores the life of the Stasi and their informants.

These unofficial informants would spy on their friends and family — either willingly, or because they themselves were put under pressure.

But what made them work for the authoritarian regime?

That depends, said historian Philipp Springer, whose book, “Die Hauptamtlichen” (“Staffing the Stasi”) was published in July in Germany.

“One reason was the feeling of having power over your fellow citizens,” Springer explained of motivations for joining the Stasi. “And then there were the promises made by the ministry, which would claim that the job was interesting and might even allow for deployments abroad. At the end of the day, it was a very secure job to have — especially for people struggling with their career prospects.”

That reads like the system was designed to fail. Intelligence was oriented around petty grudges and personal issues.

There is a crucial dynamic to disinformation that historians often overlook. Propaganda generates blowback, where feedback loops themselves may be laced with disinformation that spins out of control.

In other words, experts in propaganda know that it’s danger is in how it creates artificial polarities that force false choices. It’s the art of social engineering that falsely rewards extreme positions over nuance, which has become known as “social media” platforms that profit in polarization. Entire populations are being driven into binary, brittle, explosive mindsets of machine-driven outcomes that are less and less about human nature.

The Jeffrey Epstein case is a good example where extremist right-wing propagandists pushed release of his “list” as a necessity, until the act became a threat to their own leader. Politicians who start using divisive rhetoric for tactical advantage often find themselves prisoners of the extremist movements they’ve unleashed. The rhetoric reshapes their base, which then demands increasingly radical positions. Trump can’t seem to get people to stop demanding exactly what he told them to demand.

Trump’s own MAGA base is squeezing Trump with massive pressure for Epstein file releases, where Republican lawmakers say it’s “the number one phone call” they get from constituents. Trump is pivoting to call the controversy he generated a “hoax” and blame “Radical Left Democrats” for the demands his own supporters are making in response to his order they make the demands.

Since that’s so fresh as to still be very confusing to people, lacking the hindsight of history, let’s look further back in time at some other cases. The world has seen this all before, many times.

Consider in the Salem Witch Trials the accusers eventually accused each other. Or consider in the French Revolution the revolutionaries consumed their own leaders. Stalin and Hitler infamously were so paranoid they destroyed their own inner circles, forcing suicide of their most loyal adherents, if not disappearing them.

When Britain spread false intelligence in WWI about coastal invasions to draw German forces away from the front, they were so convincing that their own intelligence services and military planners began to take the threat seriously. The fake became real in their minds, leading to genuine panic and resource misallocation on the British side.

This reveals the most insidious danger of propaganda: it corrupts the information environment for everyone, including those who create it. Once false or exaggerated narratives enter circulation, they take on a life of their own. The propagandists lose control of their own creation.

I can’t emphasize enough how disinformation experts recognize this pattern from studying the past.

McCarthyism in the US wasn’t just about cynical politicians exploiting fear, many of the anti-communist crusaders genuinely terrified themselves with their own rhetoric, leading to increasingly irrational policies. McCarthy himself died from alcoholism, discredited and caught by his own web of fear-mongering that drove him to total isolation.

The CIA’s Cold War propaganda operations often ended up misleading American policymakers who read their own disinformation in foreign media and assumed it was independent confirmation of threats. I documented a great example of this the other day, looking at the origin of the term “disinformation” itself (America likes to promote that it was a Soviet concept, when in fact it was American in origin).

CIA veteran Ralph McGehee documented the most revealing case of intelligence blowback in his own experience. In 1965, the CIA fabricated a story about weapon shipments supposedly sent by sea to the Viet Cong, planting it in foreign media to “prove” international support for the Vietnamese communist forces. The false story was designed to shape public opinion and justify American escalation.

But the fabricated intelligence didn’t stay confined to its target audience. It circled back through intelligence channels and contaminated the CIA’s own information files. Agency analysts, unaware the story was their own creation, began citing it as independent confirmation of foreign involvement in Vietnam. The lie became part of their threat assessment.

This feedback loop corrupted American decision-making at the highest levels. As one declassified CIA document admitted:

In deceiving the public, the decision-makers also deceived themselves, and eventually came to believe optimistic ‘military progress’ reports, released to the public based on the ‘latest intelligence,’ when in fact at the highest level, the estimates were based on misleading information from the field.

I’ve written here before, for example, about the “all in” conservative American drive to create the Taliban and then the urgency that same group seemed to feel that they must stop the Taliban monster that they had created.

In the 1980s under Ronald Reagan American military intelligence plastered Afghanistan with posters like the following one, promoting violent religious extremism as a form of invincibility.

It’s not unlike when I wrote how Palantir figured out a “God’s Eye” unaccountable business model of generating a whole new group of terrorists (ISIS), which they used to ask for billions more in order to stop the terrorist group that they had just created.

“Defense lemon” contractors profit from both creating instability and then selling “solutions”. If you don’t know what I mean, ask any of the latest and most advanced “vibe” AI coding tools to write code, get charged a bunch of money for it, and then ask those tools to stop writing crap and clean it all up, and get charged a bunch of money for it.

Does anyone still read the Cat in the Hat? I mean seriously, this is kind of stuff kids are supposed to be able to recognize and stop early in the cycle.

If Dr. Seuss can teach 6-year-olds to spot this manipulation, why are Americans falling for it over and over again when corporations and governments do it?

Come on America, kick these fat cats out and stop the coup of stupid.

But I digress…

The most dangerous propaganda isn’t the obvious, heavy-handed stuff, it’s the kind that becomes so embedded in how we think about problems that we can’t see alternatives. It’s a technology company creating false urgency and offering false choices as the only options forward, both of which favor their bottom line while everyone else involved will suffer.

When societies become convinced that complex hierarchies, endless growth, or military solutions are “natural” or “inevitable,” they lose the ability to imagine other ways of organizing themselves.

Two powerful examples of embedded propaganda are the terms “civilization” and “feudalism” – words that seem neutral but actually force us into predetermined thinking patterns.

Take “feudalism.” Most people assume it describes a medieval economic system, but the term was actually invented during the French Revolution as political propaganda. Revolutionary leaders needed a scary name for the old aristocratic order they were overthrowing, so they created “feudalism” to represent everything backward and oppressive. This gave Napoleon a convenient strawman – he could position himself as the modern alternative to “feudal” chaos, justifying his own authoritarian rule as progress.

“Civilization” works the same way. The word carries built-in assumptions about progress and superiority – it implies that complex hierarchical societies are naturally better than simpler ones. This obscures the violence, inequality, and environmental destruction that often accompany what we call “civilized” systems.

The Romans perfected this linguistic trick. They called their conquests “bringing civilization” while the people being conquered called it invasion. Same violence, different vocabulary.

Modern examples follow the same pattern. “Developed” versus “developing” nations implies everyone must follow the same path – the Western industrial model becomes the only legitimate option. “Free markets” promises liberation while often delivering corporate domination. Even “Balkanization” gets used as a scare word, as if breaking up oppressive power structures could only lead to chaos rather than freedom from tyranny.

These aren’t accidental word choices. They’re propaganda tools that eliminate alternatives before we even think to look for them. When the vocabulary itself is rigged, every conversation starts from a false premise. It’s not unlike how animals are herded into pens, where the metal scaffolding of language channels our thinking in predetermined directions, denying agency of real choice.

Propaganda doesn’t just lie about facts, it corrupts how we process information entirely, training us to think in ways that serve power rather than truth.

To be any kind of genuine truth seeker in this environment, a scientist or a “woke” voice as some would put it, is to be labeled a threat to power desperate to keep themselves in power through propaganda. When leaders allow propaganda to become systematic, anyone who questions the framework itself becomes dangerous to those benefiting from it.

Historian Luke Kemp argues we’ve been conditioned by 5,000 years of what he calls “Goliath” propaganda, which are rulers convincing us that selfish dictatorships of hierarchical domination is natural and inevitable.

It’s always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths [because] these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years.

Kemp identifies the source of our propaganda problem: leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism.

These aren’t random personality defects; they’re the psychological profiles that rise to power in systems built on domination. The concept of “free markets” is really like “free ride” from Epstein’s private plane parked next to the Mar-a-lago spa, a trick for those seeking domination who use sweet rhetoric to justify the kind of awful predatory control that destroys freedom.

When such people control information systems, propaganda blowback becomes inevitable. The awful lies eventually trap the liars.

U.S. Steel in the 1960s displayed a “Portfolio of Possibilities” by Syd Mead. Notable among the possibilities was a walking garbage truck that didn’t mind the snow.

Of course everyone knows what happened next. The movie industry pivoted this optimistic artistic vision into the Evil Empire, a robot of destruction and death. The terrible garbage “walker” was depicted storming a snowy remote rebel stronghold in the 1980 movie called the Empire Strike Back.

Fast forward to today, and Trump has performed live shows as if trying to appear as Emperor of a garbage walker Empire, in heated campaigns where he regularly boasts he will strike back.