What happens when two Teslas with their latest and most sophisticated “collision avoidance” systems, marketed as such since at least 2016, are driving towards each other?
State police identified the victim as 21-year-old Alexis Ann Newcomb of Ashburnham, MA. […]
According to state police, the crash was a head-on collision between two Tesla Model Y vehicles. One was white and the other was gray.
Troopers said it appeared that the driver of the gray Tesla headed southbound when he crossed into the northbound lane and collided with the white Tesla, in which Newcomb was the passenger.
The Tesla trapped the driver and killed them, as we have come to expect now, very unlike other car designs.
The accident, between the Tesla and an SUV, occurred shortly after 4 p.m. at Northeast 163rd Street between 29th and 34th avenues. The car went up in flames after the crash and trapped the driver, who was the only person inside, said Detective Corey Darden, North Miami Beach police spokesman.
Witnesses apparently said the car exploded upon veering into a utility pole, where infamously defective doors prevented rescue. A crowd could only watch in shock and horror as Tesla burned yet another person to death.
A lot of people were near the car and we could see the car and I told them, “Please, all of the people should give some distance,” said witness Ariel Craser. […] “I might have witnessed his last moments, if it was a guy or girl, I don’t know. I’m speechless, I don’t even know what to say,” said Barreto.
Police say the Tesla veered suddenly and lost control in an area long known to have dangerous driving conditions.
Institutional Capture and the Presidential Declaration of American Civil War
After President Grant had crushed the slaveholders at war he dismantled their political platform. It rebranded as Christian nationalist “America First”, which Trump has put into the White House
Contemporary analysis reveals a coordinated strategy to dismantle the very institutional safeguards designed to prevent extremist infiltration by America First, using democratic processes to systematically eliminate democratic accountability.
The current systematic reversal of post-World War II accountability mechanisms in particular represents more than conservative policy preferences. It mirrors Hitler’s strategic pivot after 1928, when he demonstrated how the Nazi movement abandonment of direct revolutionary tactics could shift into legal, institutional capture. This is core to understanding the “cowboy hat” corruption of America today.
Source: Skousen manual for white militias
Hitler’s Strategic Transformation: From Revolution to Institutional Capture
Following electoral failures in the mid-1920s, Hitler fundamentally altered Nazi strategy. Rather than direct confrontation with democratic institutions, the movement pursued “legal revolution” by working within existing systems while systematically undermining them from within. This approach involved maintaining plausible deniability while coordinating institutional capture across multiple sectors simultaneously.
America First worked to spread and defend Nazism before, during and even after WWII
The strategy proved devastatingly effective because it exploited democratic tolerance and legal processes to dismantle democracy itself. By 1933, institutional capture had progressed sufficiently to enable the Enabling Act, which legally abolished legal constraints on Nazi power. The transformation occurred through existing channels, making resistance difficult to organize and justify.
Anyone promoting America First surely knows this history far better than most, because Hitler was their man.
The Semantic Battlefield Carpet Bombed With Reality Inversions
Pete Hegseth, as a self-declared Secretary of War, may be seen as a very particular appointment; one who operates from a background of documented instability that undermines any claimed authority.
In 2015, he threw an axe on live television that missed its target and struck West Point drummer Jeff Prosperie, who later sued for what he called “obvious negligence.”
A sworn affidavit submitted to the Senate documented that Hegseth’s alcohol abuse was so severe his second wife developed an “escape plan” involving a texted safe word to alert family when she felt unsafe, hiding in her closet on at least one occasion.
Witnesses reported him chanting “Kill All Muslims!” while drunk at a bar in Ohio, being carried out of a Minneapolis strip club while intoxicated and in military uniform during a National Guard drill weekend, and regularly passing out or vomiting at family and work events.
He paid $50,000 to settle a sexual assault allegation from a 2017 incident where, according to police reports, he was visibly drunk and blocked a woman from leaving his hotel room.
Fox News colleagues confirmed his drinking was an “open secret,” with beer cans regularly found in his office trash.
His reckless behavior, substance abuse-fueled volatility, and disregard for safety—whether throwing axes near people or abusing those closest to him—explains the man systematically inverting reality through linguistic manipulation precisely because his actions cannot withstand scrutiny.
“Divisive” Inversion: Hegseth divided the troops by calling women’s inclusion in military service “divisive;” divisively removing women from positions while calling it inclusion. His acts of exclusion come with calling inclusion divisive. The person who separates and removes, claims integration is separation. This isn’t policy disagreement, it’s white supremacist inversion language.
“Woke” Awareness: The systematic attack on “wokeness” targets consciousness itself. “Woke” means awake, aware, accountable—precisely the institutional vigilance that emerged from confronting fascism. Programs designed to identify extremist infiltration become the threat. Diversity initiatives that monitor exclusionary ideologies become “divisive.” Accountability mechanisms are reframed as persecution, another white supremacist talking point.
“Warrior” Aggression: The elevation of “warrior ethos” over “defensive” posture explicitly rejects legal and ethical constraints. When Hegseth declares “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” he positions legal frameworks as weakness. The semantic shift prepares military leadership for operations unconstrained by the accountability standards that distinguish defense from war crimes, a white supremacist platform foundational to over 150 years of domestic terrorism.
The KKK in 1921 used bi-planes to firebomb Tulsa, OK. They also dropped racist propaganda leaflets across America. The swastika was their symbol, and the X.
“Legacy” Supremacy: The restoration of Confederate base names is justified through “legacy” and “tradition.” But whose legacy? The legacy of armed rebellion against the United States to preserve slavery becomes “heritage.” The systematic reversal eliminates the accountability that confronted this history. The KKK could have printed his speeches.
America First has meant white nationalist xenophobia consistently since the late 1800s
This linguistic inversion serves institutional capture by white nationalism, making resistance to hate appear unreasonable while positioning the divisive hateful actions as unity. The person creating division calls integration divisive. The person eliminating accountability calls accountability oppressive. The semantic manipulation enables systematic exclusion while blaming inclusion for the conflict that exclusion creates.
The Department of War is a Reversal: Symbolic Centerpiece of Institutional Capture by Enemies of America
Can you imagine a neighborhood developed today in Germany with streets all named to Nazi generals? America still allows developments where every street spreads militant racist propaganda for capture from “within”.
The renaming of the Department of Defense to “Department of War” serves as the symbolic centerpiece of this institutional reversal, explicitly rejecting the post-fascist commitment to defensive rather than aggressive military posture.
The 1947 transformation from “War Department” to “Department of Defense” represented calculated rejection of militaristic imagery associated with defeated fascist regimes. The name change aligned with UN Charter principles, supported narratives of American restraint, and helped justify unprecedented peacetime military expansion as defensive necessity rather than aggressive ambition.
The current reversal directly contradicts post-war institutional arrangements to Defend America, thus signaling it has lost its defenses against crime and corruption.
When Trump declares “Defense is too defensive” and Hegseth promotes “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” they explicitly reject the legal and ethical frameworks designed to distinguish legitimate defense from war crimes. The semantic shift prepares both military leadership and legal frameworks for different accountability standards.
The Economist/The New Yorker weren’t wrong
The Campaign Lies: The irony becomes stark when considered against Trump’s 2024 campaign messaging. Throughout the election, Trump positioned himself as the peace candidate while denigrating opponents as warmongers. Yet his first major military initiative explicitly rebrands the Pentagon to emphasize warfare over defense. This contradiction reveals calculated manipulation—campaign rhetoric promised restraint while actual governance immediately signals aggressive military posture that contradicts electoral promises.
Hegseth’s “We’re Back” Means Pre-Accountability Military Culture
When Defense Secretary Hegseth declares “this War Department, just like America, is back,” the historical context becomes crucial. The statement references not merely traditional military culture, but specifically pre-accountability military culture—the institutional arrangements that existed before the military developed systems to identify and counter extremist infiltration.
Systematic Symbolic Restoration: Hegseth’s comprehensive rebranding campaign extends far beyond the Department of War renaming. He has systematically restored Confederate-era names to military bases through bureaucratic manipulation, circumventing federal law by finding soldiers with matching surnames. He removed the name of Harvey Milk, the gay rights activist and Navy veteran, from a naval vessel. He terminated the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, calling it “divisive.”
Personal Symbolic Alignment: Hegseth’s documented history with extremist-associated symbolism reinforces this interpretation. His Crusades-era tattoos—the Jerusalem cross and “Deus Vult”—led to his removal from presidential security duty as a potential “insider threat.” These symbols have been widely adopted by white nationalist movements and were present at the January 6 Capitol attack. His 2024 addition of an Arabic “kafir” (infidel) tattoo demonstrates escalating symbolic messaging.
Pete Hegseth’s tattoo explained. Source: Princeton
Elimination of Accountability Mechanisms: Under the banner of fighting “wokeness,” Hegseth has systematically eliminated the oversight mechanisms that emerged from historical reckonings with extremism. Programs designed to identify extremist infiltration are characterized as persecution. Diversity initiatives that monitor for exclusionary ideologies are terminated as “divisive.” The very accountability structures developed to prevent institutional capture are being dismantled by those they were designed to monitor.
The Assessment Function: Military Purge Through Loyalty Testing
The unprecedented gathering of hundreds of military leaders served its true purpose on September 30, 2025, when Trump explicitly told assembled generals they would be deployed for “war from within” against American citizens in major US cities. But the event revealed something more disturbing: the commander-in-chief’s evident mental deterioration and the generals’ stone-faced response to both his incoherence and his unconstitutional orders.
Source: Encyclopedia of Alabama, 1 Sept 1868 Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor. The KKK threatened that March 4, 1869 — first day of Presidential rule by avowed racist Horatio Seymour — would bring lynchings of white Americans (“scalawags” and “carpetbaggers”). Instead the Presidency was won in a landslide by Civil War hero and civil rights pioneer Ulysses S. Grant)
The Threatening Order: “Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for a quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances,” Trump told the generals. “This is gonna be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”
If history means anything at all then American soldiers soon can expect to be put in front of a firing squad by colleagues loyal only to a dictator
Trump named specific cities for military deployment—San Francisco, Chicago, New York—then added ominously: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military—National Guard, but military—because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city with an incompetent governor. Stupid governor.”
Armed National Guards and African American men standing on a sidewalk during the “red summer” of white supremacist mob attacks in Chicago, Illinois, 1919.
The Constitutional Crisis: As predicted and warned, this gathering and directive directly violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which bars the military from civilian law enforcement unless expressly authorized by law. The Constitution’s 10th Amendment reserves policing powers to states. Trump is ordering military officers to take up arms against fellow Americans, violating federal law and constitutional principles, to rapidly shift military leadership into a comply or die state.
Redacted page one headline of the “Austin American-Statesman” in Austin, Texas. Mon, Oct 6, 1919.
The Mental Deterioration: But according to The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, who documented the event, Trump’s performance revealed something equally alarming. The president “seemed quieter and more confused than usual,” following Hegseth’s speech by immediately noting “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before” as officers refused to provide the applause he expected.
Trump rambled incoherently, claiming the Department of War was renamed “in the 1950s” (it was 1947-49), that “the Atomic Energy Commission” confirmed his Iran strike destroyed their nuclear program (the AEC hasn’t existed since the 1970s, and Iran still has a nuclear program), and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lasted “three thousand years” (it began in the early 1900s). Perhaps most revealing of his serious mental failure was telling the Navy to use steel because modern ships have “aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away.” It’s one thing to be ignorant of history, common in America, but telling the Navy to use steel is unmistakably Hitler-level of military ignorance.
The Authoritarian Double-Bind: Most disturbing was Trump’s opening statement, which encapsulated totalitarian logic in a single breath:
Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if you want to do anything you want, you can do anything you want. And if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank; there goes your future.
This is authoritarianism, explicitly:
You have freedom, but exercising it destroys you. You can choose, but only one choice is permitted.
The laughter that rippled through the room wasn’t amusement—it was the nervous recognition of threat delivered as joke. Officers understood immediately the reason for being summoned, they now served under a dictator: compliance masked as freedom, coercion presented as choice.
The Loyalty Test Revealed: The gathering’s dual purpose becomes clear. Military officers must now navigate a commander-in-chief who is both mentally unstable and ordering unconstitutional domestic military deployment. Do they follow constitutional oaths prohibiting such operations? Or obey orders from a president who threatens their careers for dissent while demanding they wage “war” against American civilians?
The Officer Response: The stone-faced silence throughout both Hegseth’s and Trump’s speeches provided its own answer. As Nichols observed, officers “could mostly tune out the sloganeering” of a beardless Hegseth, but “could not ignore the spectacle that President Donald Trump put on.” The question Tom said was haunting the room:
How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?
The Assessment Mechanism: By physically consolidating military leadership while simultaneously delivering incoherent, threatening, unconstitutional orders, Trump and Hegseth identified who will implement illegal directives from a commander-in-chief showing signs of mental deterioration. The silence itself becomes data—revealing officers’ recognition that they face both constitutional crisis and command instability simultaneously.
Advice from Walt Disney on the appropriate reaction to dictators
Hitler Pattern Recognition: Why 1928 Parallels Matter
The 1928 Nazi pivot succeeded because democratic institutions failed to recognize institutional capture while it occurred through legal channels. The strategy exploited democratic tolerance and procedural legitimacy to systematically dismantle democratic accountability.
Contemporary institutional capture follows remarkably similar patterns:
Working within existing legal frameworks while systematically undermining institutional safeguards
Maintaining plausible deniability through bureaucratic interpretation and semantic manipulation
Coordinating elimination of oversight mechanisms across multiple sectors simultaneously
Framing accountability itself as oppression requiring resistance
The systematic nature of symbolic reversals—from Department of War to base names to extremism monitoring—suggests coordinated institutional strategy rather than isolated policy preferences. The comprehensive elimination of post-WWII accountability mechanisms targets precisely the safeguards designed to prevent extremist infiltration.
Democratic Resilience Against Dictator Donald
“Donald in Nutziland”. Source: Disney.
The critical question becomes whether democratic institutions retain sufficient resilience to recognize and counter institutional capture that operates through legal channels while systematically dismantling accountability mechanisms. The 1930s demonstrated that even established democracies remain vulnerable to extremist infiltration, particularly when economic anxiety combines with sophisticated propaganda operations.
The contemporary moment presents similar vulnerabilities: the systematic elimination of institutional memory, the coordination of symbolic reversals across multiple sectors, and the exploitation of democratic processes to undermine democratic accountability.
Understanding these patterns requires neither conspiracy theorizing nor partisan interpretation, but rather careful attention to documented evidence, historical precedents, and institutional analysis. The 1928 pivot demonstrates how democratic societies can be systematically undermined through legal channels when accountability mechanisms are eliminated and institutional memory is erased.
The Department of War renaming represents more than nomenclature—it embodies the systematic reversal of America’s post-fascist institutional arrangements, occurring alongside documented elimination of accountability mechanisms and coordinated symbolic restoration of pre-integration military culture. When considered within the broader pattern of institutional capture, Hegseth’s declaration that “we’re back” takes on historical significance that warrants serious attention from anyone still committed to preserving democratic governance against militant white supremacists seizing control from “within”.
Each red dot represents a local Klan chapter, known as a Klavern, that spread across the country between the 1915 “America First” Presidential campaign and 1940. Source: Virginia Commonwealth UniversitySource: GriotSource: Tulsa Historical SocietyTulsa officials in 1921 immediately moved to erase all records of mass shootings by “America First” militias, building a giant “Klavern” headquarters directly over the firebombed Black businesses and homes.
EU Energy Revolution is a National Security Upgrade
June 2025 marked a quiet turning point: solar became the EU’s single largest electricity source for the first time, generating 22% of the grid’s power. Not the largest renewable—the largest source, period.
Nuclear came in second at 21.6%—a position it’s going to have to get used to. With 350 GW installed and another 60+ GW being added annually, future solar has crossed from an “alternative” to the present “foundational infrastructure.”
Slovakia is in the best position to accelerate this further. The country currently sits at 22.1% renewable generation—among the EU’s lowest. But with rapid solar deployment options now on the table, Slovakia could leapfrog directly to the distributed generation model that’s reshaping Europe’s grid.
This transition is strategically sound: solar eliminates fuel logistics, severs dependency on energy imports, and distributes generation across millions of sites that can’t be targeted kinetically. No one misses worrying whether Russian billionaires will turn off pipelines from emotion, US billionaires will explode pipelines from neglect, or undersea infrastructure will be undermined.
At the same time we would be remiss to ignore how speed of technology adoption has outpaced security oversight (as usual). The gaps are creating risks and opportunities for controls that most existing frameworks weren’t designed to address.
What Changes in Transition
The shift to distributed solar fundamentally improves energy security—but in ways that require rethinking safety of power infrastructure.
Physical resilience through distribution: You can bomb a gas plant or a pipeline. You can’t meaningfully attack millions of distributed panels at scale. Solar is a genuine upgrade. Wars destroy centralized infrastructure; distributed generation systems simply reroute and carry on in scenarios that would cripple traditional grids.
No fuel supply chain: Once installed, solar has zero operational dependencies. No rail cars to intercept, no tankers to blockade, no refineries to sabotage. The strategic autonomy is real. No mines to send explosive drones into and shut down permanently, burning all the workers to death with a horrific fireball—you know, that famously clean coal dust Trump told the UN about. But I digress…
Faster recovery: A destroyed solar installation can be replaced in days or weeks. Rebuilding power plants takes many years. At scale, this means better grid resilience even if individual assets are compromised. Distributed resilience works under pressure—just look at Tokyo under occupation in 1948, which deployed hundreds of electric cars charging from hydro when the city had no fuel.
Nissan’s car making origin story is this Tama electric vehicle from 1947 with rapid “bomb bay door” rapid battery replacement on both sides.
These advantages are why the transition makes sense. But solar also introduced something new: millions of internet-connected control points with unclear security ownership.
The New Architecture Exposed
The computing analogy is familiar: mainframes had physical security and limited access. PCs introduced millions of endpoints requiring patches and antivirus. Mobile phones added cellular networks and location tracking. Each transition improved capability while requiring new security paradigms.
Solar’s transition is from physically secured, professionally operated generation to IoT devices managed by homeowners, monitored by installers, and remotely accessible by manufacturers.
The SPE report (SPE 2025 Solutions for PV Cyber Risks to Grid Stability) documents the concentration: thirteen manufacturers maintain remote access to over 5 GW each. Seven control more than 10 GW. Huawei alone shipped 114 GW to Europe between 2015-2023, with estimated remote access to 70% of that installed base. Chinese firms overall supplied 78% of global inverter capacity in 2023.
Individually, a compromised home solar system means nothing. Collectively, manufacturers have remote access to capacity equivalent to multiple large power plants. The report’s grid simulations found that coordinating just 3 GW of inverters to manipulate voltage through reactive power switching could trigger protective relays on nearby generators—potentially cascading into broader outages.
This mirrors early botnet dynamics: individual compromised PCs were nuisances until aggregated into DDoS networks capable of taking down critical services.
“No Operator” Problems
Traditional power infrastructure has clear security ownership. A nuclear plant has a security team, regulatory oversight, 24/7 monitoring. A rooftop solar installation has… a homeowner who set it up once and moved on.
Current EU cybersecurity frameworks (NIS2, the Cyber Resilience Act, Network Code on Cybersecurity) assume there’s an entity responsible for critical infrastructure security. For distributed solar, that entity often doesn’t exist legally. The installer completed their short job. The manufacturer is headquartered abroad. The homeowner thinks it’s appliance-level technology that someone else is responsible for, which would be fine if their Chinese-made-and-controlled toaster couldn’t accidentally destabilize the entire German power grid, but here we are.
During World War II, Deming was a member of the five-man Emergency Technical Committee. He worked with H.F. Dodge, A.G. Ashcroft, Leslie E. Simon, R.E. Wareham, and John Gaillard in the compilation of the American War Standards (American Standards Association Z1.1–3 published in 1942) and taught wartime production. His statistical methods were widely applied during World War II and after (foundational to Japanese auto manufacturing)
The SPE report further states that only 1 of 5 tested inverters supported basic security logging. Default passwords are common. Firmware updates are irregular. Network segmentation is rare. This isn’t malicious—it’s what happens when residential-scale deployment moves faster than security standards.
New Model, New Requirements. Ambiguity means neglect.
The technology doesn’t need to slow. The security framework needs to catch up. This is familiar territory for any director of security with a few years of direction under their belt.
Clear responsibility assignment: Either manufacturers are liable for their installed base security (like automotive recalls), or grid operators assume responsibility, or third-party security operators emerge as a market.
Communication architecture that matches the threat model: Germany’s approach with smart meter gateways is instructive—critical control functions (start/stop, power setpoint changes) route through regulated infrastructure. Monitoring and maintenance can remain direct. This applies standard IT security principles (network segmentation, controlled access) to distributed generation.
Supply chain transparency without protectionism: The issue isn’t where hardware is manufactured—it’s that concentration creates leverage, and remote access by entities outside regulatory jurisdiction creates enforcement gaps. Solutions range from Lithuania’s 2025 law (requiring EU-based intermediaries for systems >100 kW) to hardware/software separation (devices source globally, control software must be auditable and locally hosted).
Standards reflecting actual deployment: Current inverter security standards treat them like industrial control systems. But a device installed by a contractor, connected to home Wi-Fi, and managed via consumer apps isn’t an industrial system. It needs consumer electronics-level security: automatic updates, secure defaults, encrypted communications, no exposed credentials.
State-run Opportunity and Patterns
Rapid deployment in lagging states doesn’t have to repeat the security debt accumulated elsewhere. The country could mandate security baselines upfront: require certified communication gateways for grid-connected systems, establish clear responsibility chains, ensure data localization for operational telemetry.
This isn’t exotic technology. It’s applying lessons from mobile computing and IoT security to distributed generation. The components exist—Hardware Security Modules, Trusted Execution Environments, regulated intermediaries, cryptographic firmware signing. What’s missing is regulatory clarity and enforcement.
Every infrastructure revolution creates security debt paid down over time. Early automobiles had no seatbelts. Early internet had no encryption. Early mobile phones had no app sandboxing.
Solar is mid-transition. Capability deployment happened fast (Europe added 60+ GW in 2024 alone). Security retrofit is lagging. That’s normal but fixable.
The unique aspect: solar’s security model should be superior. Distributed systems are inherently more resilient. But only if distribution is real. When remote access reconcentrates control with manufacturers, you’ve recreated centralized vulnerability while losing traditional plants’ physical security and professional operation.
Europe’s solar buildout is strategically sound. The cybersecurity gap is solvable with existing technology. What’s missing is regulatory clarity on responsibility and baseline security requirements for distributed generation at scale.
Any future rapid deployment can be a model—showing that speed and security aren’t trade-offs when architecture is right from the start. Or it could simply balance out tech debts and provide resilience while others catch up.
The tech works, for national security. The economics work, for national security. The climate math even works, for national security. Now the security model also needs to catch up and work… for national security.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
