Just a few months ago this average Arkansas guy was praising Hitler, and Trump, as if they were all in the same camp.

Outside of fighting, Mitchell is also known for being a proud farmer in Arkansas and for his comments describing Adolf Hitler as a “good guy.”

“I really do think before Hitler got on meth, he was a guy I’d go fishing with,” Mitchell said on the ArkanSanity Podcast in January. “He [Hitler] fought for his country,” he added.

A good guy? Before he took drugs?

This “Hitler was fine until the drugs” framing is historically nonsensical and morally bankrupt. Hitler’s antisemitism, violent authoritarianism, and territorial ambitions were fully formed by the early 1920s. Mein Kampf was published in 1925. The Beer Hall Putsch was 1923. The methodical legal destruction of Weimar democracy happened 1933-1934, well before amphetamine use.

The false “drug cause” narrative avoids confronting what Hitler actually believed and actually built from the beginning.

The Arkansas context matters because it’s not idiosyncratic. This is a regional political culture with deep roots in Lost Cause mythology, where you can venerate Confederate leaders, celebrate “heritage,” and react with fury when called racist.

The same mental infrastructure applies to Hitler: admire the aesthetics of power, the mythology of national revival, the “fighting for his people” narrative, while externalizing the genocide as either propaganda, an unfortunate excess, or a drug-induced deviation from his “true” character. Hitler was an Austrian who took over Germany and murdered millions of his own people. He fought for himself at everyone else’s expense.

Well, the Epstein files have apparently gotten to at least this one Hitler advocate.

“The first thing for me was he didn’t release the Epstein files—they’re even acting like they didn’t exist,” the 31-year-old said [he’s] “not with Donald Trump no more.”

“I don’t support him, I don’t like him, I think he’s a corrupted leader, and it took me a while to come to that conclusion, but I finally am coming to it,” the controversial UFC fighter added.

What’s revealing here is the transactional, personality-driven nature of American politics. Hollywood good/bad framing like a god/devil binary fear to avoid actual understanding.

There’s no engagement with ideology, policy, or governance. Hitler becomes “a guy I’d go fishing with” based on totally fraudulent vibes (white people who grow up in Arkansas often praise Hitler, yet are deeply offended if you say they are Nazis).

There’s a specific strain of white identity politics where praising Hitler can coexist with violent offense at being called a Nazi—because in that framing, “Nazi” means BAD person, and they separate that from someone who shares Hitler’s ideology.

They’ve carved out rhetorical space where you can admire Hitler’s “nationalism,” his “fighting for his country,” his “strength,” and even his diet and his preference for roads with no curves, while treating the Holocaust as either exaggerated, incidental, or the result of him “going bad” on drugs.

It’s a Holocaust inversion common in Arkansas mixed with American exceptionalism: we could have that kind of genocidal obsessed strong leader without those genocidal consequences.

Trump thus gets all their support until one specific grievance—the Epstein files—becomes the sudden breaking point. Not family separation, not January 6th, not fraud convictions, not bankruptcy, not the documented pattern of sexual misconduct, not illegal detention, not racism, not ignorance, not authoritarian rhetoric about terminating the Constitution. But this one thing.

This pattern—where support for authoritarian figures is based on parasocial identification rather than principled analysis—makes democratic accountability almost impossible.

Treating politics like drinking buddy tests means vetting based on whether they’ve “gone bad” on a random moral issue, not engaging with what makes authoritarianism dangerous: the systematic concentration of power, the elimination of institutional constraints, and the targeting of vulnerable populations.

The Epstein angle is particularly telling. It suggests he believed Trump would release the files, that this was somehow a litmus test for anti-establishment credibility. But why would someone with Trump’s documented history in those circles, with his public statements about Epstein and young women, with his own allegations—why would that person be the one to expose it? The cognitive dissonance required is extraordinary. Trump lies about everything, hurts everyone, but this… this?

This is the danger of the “good guy gone bad” narrative. It prevents people from recognizing authoritarian projects even as they’re the ones building it.

The hollowness at the core of personality-cult politics is terrifying.

There’s no there, there.

No analysis of how power works, how wealth concentrates, how institutions get captured, how rights get stripped away systematically.

It’s all just vibes, grievances, and the perpetual search for a strong father figure who’ll hurt the “right” people.

This makes the personality cult people complicit in building what they claim to oppose. They’re not recognizing the authoritarian project because they’re helping construct it, while falsely painting themselves as the rebels.

What makes the “Hitler fought for his country” line so historically illiterate is that Hitler was Austrian, took over Germany through a combination of violence and institutional capture, and then destroyed Germany. He didn’t fight for Germany—he fought for a racist imperial vanity project that considered actual Germans expendable. Millions of Germans died because of his decisions. The country was partitioned for half a century. If “fighting for your country” means leaving it occupied, divided, and devastated, then the definition is meaningless.

The Arkansas Lost Cause infrastructure makes the stupidity possible because it’s already normalized this exact cognitive move: venerate leaders who destroyed their own society (the Confederacy lasted four years and left the South devastated), claim they were fighting for “their people” (they were fighting to preserve slavery), externalize the atrocities (slavery wasn’t that bad, or it would have ended anyway, or the North was worse), and react with rage when called out for supporting a violent racist genocidal platform.

It’s the same playbook: Arkansans romanticize the aesthetics, deny the ideology, and externalize all the consequences of their hate-based fantasy.

An interesting post in the Chinese news reveals that GM just topped a driverless competition.

The Ningbo station’s route was extremely challenging. The biggest difference from previous competitions was that the route was completely hidden before the race, equivalent to a closed-book exam. The entire route spanned 29 kilometers, passing through 28 traffic lights, 5 waypoints, and 8 test points, examining the participating vehicles’ city NOA intelligent driving capabilities in traffic scenarios including narrow community roads, roundabouts, blind spot U-turns, artificial obstacles, U-turns, village roads, right-turn U-turns, and rural roads.

[…]

According to the judging panel, the top three finishers in the Second Smart Driving Competition Ningbo Station City NOA Race were:

Champion: Buick GL7!
Second place: Yangwang U7!
Third place: Zeekr 9X

The GM story actually is that using Momenta’s R6 generation of autonomous driving AI, version 1.0, wins easily against Tesla latest version (13? 14?). Their Buick gets the award, yet Momenta is the secret sauce doing the heavy lifting. I mean their new system shows why Tesla fell almost all the way out of the top ten, squeaking in a ninth place.

Traditional approaches wanted to copy human drivers. Reinforcement learning (RL) systems however, such as Momenta’s “Flywheel” platform, can potentially handle edge cases better than humans because they can be exposed to scenarios millions of times in simulation. Edge cases become expected and known. Rather than separate modules for perception, planning, and control (Tesla’s approach until recently), the Momenta RL also integrates everything into one neural network that learns holistically.

Here’s what all that meant in competition: At one test point—a basic protected U-turn that any beginner human should handle—nine vehicles required human takeover, including multiple premium Chinese EVs and the Tesla. The Buick GL7 sailed through. It had already “practiced” that exact scenario ten million times in simulation, learning not just what to do, but when hesitation creates danger and when aggression does.

It’s basically the exact opposite of Tesla.

As great as this sounds, we’re looking at the next frontier in automotive litigation. When an RL-powered vehicle crashes, the “why” isn’t in if-then rules you can read—it’s in billions of neural network weights shaped by reinforcement learning.

You can’t depose a neural network. You can’t cross-examine an algorithm that “learned” through trial-and-error in simulation. The traditional questions that expose Tesla as a fraud—”What did the system detect? When did it decide to brake? What rule did it follow?”—become meaningless when the decision-making process is a black box of interconnected weights.

The manufacturer will say: “Our system was trained on 3 billion kilometers of A and passed rigorous testing of B.” Your expert will need to ask: “Ok, but what reward function shaped its learning? Did it prioritize smooth rides over collision avoidance? Can you reconstruct why it made this specific decision?”

Blade Runner where are you? If the machine can’t explain itself, can it be trusted with safe operation? We need the Voight-Kampff test…

On top of its track performance, the new Buick GL7 costs just $25K—roughly half what a Tesla Model 3 with Full Self-Driving costs in China. Momenta achieves better performance at lower cost with an optimized sensor suite: 11 cameras, 1 radar, 1 LiDAR.

Not the fanciest hardware, but the smartest software.

This is the “good enough” disruption of great engineers playing out in real time. Tesla blew years and billions into a vertical integration that barely works. Momenta built a platform that any automaker can license, achieved far superior performance, and did it at low cost. Their version 1.0 just made every Tesla look like it runs version oh no.

Tesla built a mythology.

Momenta built a product.

Buick just dominated the track.

It’s not just yet another story about Autopilot design flaws that allow Tesla drivers to fall asleep, it’s that Tesla STILL can’t see a police car.

Barrington Hills police arrested and charged a Tesla driver who claimed they were asleep and their car was in autopilot when it crashed into a South Barrington police car. The Village of South Barrington said a South Barrington police squad was involved in a crash on October 15.

The police had activated emergency lights. The police had high visibility markings. And now this.

Walsh said officers discovered a loaded pistol in Fresso’s belongings. He does not have a valid Firearm Owner’s Identification card.

No valid ID, loaded weapon, asleep at the wheel, crashing into the police. That’s Tesla.