According to California Highway Patrol, a 41-year-old deputy from the Cabazon Station was responding to a call for service with emergency lights and sirens on just after 10 a.m., driving westbound on Cherry Valley Boulevard in his Ford Explorer patrol vehicle. That’s when a Tesla Model 3 made a left turn from Roberts Street onto Cherry Valley — into the deputy’s path. The deputy then slammed into the Tesla. The 21-year-old driver of the Tesla, identified by CHP as Gavin Hinkey, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Such a report reads like a suicide. Although perhaps the driver, like so many of these Tesla crashes, was under the influence of FSD (e.g. asleep).
People are just asking questions. Earlier I wrote the history of Peter Thiel’s father Klaus, and asked whether he had refused to end WWII by deliberately sheltering his son in order to transmit Nazism. Now a German news site has continued the exposure, writing a brief summary of Peter’s time in college and early work. Here’s my interpretation through translation of their new article:
Until the early nineties, Thiel studied at Stanford, where his extremist worldview crystallized. The elite university provided an intellectual veneer for ideas he had absorbed through his father’s deliberate ideological transmission.
Thiel said he obsessed over the work of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist who provided intellectual justification for dismantling democratic institutions and consolidating authoritarian power.
Thiel also used his studies to embrace the theories of René Girard, whose concept of “mimetic desire” and scapegoating mechanisms offered a framework that complemented his inherited authoritarian mindset. Girard’s focus on violence and the necessity of sacrificial victims resonated with someone raised to see democracy as an obstacle to proper hierarchical order.
This intellectual foundation appealed to Thiel precisely because it provided sophisticated language for the anti-democratic beliefs his father had carefully preserved and transmitted. “He was so out of step with the times, which naturally appealed to a rather rebellious student,” Thiel later said about Girard, revealing his attraction to ideas that challenged egalitarian principles.
Technology as Racial Supremacy: Thiel synthesized these influences into a techno-authoritarian philosophy that echoes his father’s belief in racial and technological hierarchy. “What distinguishes us humans from other animals is our ability to perform miracles. We call these miracles technology,” he wrote in 2014, promoting a vision of technological supremacy that mirrors the Nazi concept of superior peoples deserving to rule. In 2009, he explicitly rejected democratic governance, stating his understanding of freedom was “no longer compatible with democracy.
During his studies, Thiel’s provocation wasn’t mere intellectual rebellion—it was the expression of inherited extremist ideology. His former professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy recognized this, noting Thiel’s opposition to “women’s suffrage, equal rights and inclusion.” Dupuy identified Thiel as “an advocate of chaos—to destroy the system, democracy,” understanding that behind the friendly demeanor lay a commitment to dismantling democratic institutions.
After graduation, Thiel systematically worked to translate his anti-democratic ideology into economic and political power. His mockery of legal institutions and democratic governance reflected not Silicon Valley iconoclasm, but the fulfillment of his father’s project to undermine American democratic norms from within.
The 1998 founding of Confinity and subsequent creation of PayPal represented more than business success—it established a network of like-minded technologists committed to circumventing democratic oversight of economic power.
The self-described “PayPal Mafia” became a vehicle for advancing Thiel’s vision of corporate governance superseding democratic accountability, with alumni founding Tesla, SpaceX, YouTube and LinkedIn as extensions of this anti-democratic project.
This wasn’t entrepreneurial innovation—it was the methodical construction of parallel power structures designed to render democratic institutions irrelevant, apparently as his father had taught him through their strategic migrations away from every emerging democratic accountability.
How is my translation?
This German article to me carries a tone of “like father like son”, especially given scholarship about the transmission of Nazism.
Historians like Norbert Frei, Mary Fulbrook, and Harald Welzer have documented how Nazi beliefs persisted in post-war German families and communities. Welzer’s research on “communicative memory” shows how families transmitted Nazi-era attitudes through everyday conversations and silences, often without explicit ideological instruction.
Studies of second and third-generation Germans reveal patterns of inherited authoritarianism, antisemitism, and democratic skepticism. The work of researchers like Sabine Reichel (“What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?”) and Peter Sichrovsky documented how Nazi ideology was preserved through family dynamics, geographic choices, and social networks.
The student movement in 1968 explicitly aimed to force Germany to confront its Nazi past and break the silence surrounding war crimes and collaboration. Students demanded that their parents’ generation account for their roles in the Holocaust and Nazi regime. This new generation was specifically trying to prevent exactly the kind of ideological transmission that appears to have occurred in cases like the Thiel family.
Klaus Thiel fled Germany in 1967, just as his reckoning was intensifying, typical of Germans who sought to avoid this confrontation with the past. It places the Thiel family within a documented historical pattern of Nazi ideological preservation through geographic escape and institutional avoidance. This isn’t speculative – it’s applying established frameworks for understanding how extremist ideologies survive generational transitions.
What’s particularly revealing by German press is how Peter’s intellectual development at Stanford wasn’t random academic exploration, but rather the sophisticated articulation of beliefs his father had carefully preserved and allegedly transmitted. The embrace of Carl Schmitt (the Nazi legal theorist) and René Girard’s theories about violence and scapegoating reads very differently when understood as the formalization after intentional transmission of extremist ideology.
Thiel’s subsequent political activities – funding JD Vance, supporting Trump, advocating for corporate governance over democratic accountability – appear as the logical culmination of a multi-generational Nazi project that never accepted defeat.
Nazi ideology has been tactically laundered through Silicon Valley success and academic respectability. Peter left the legal industry a failure, he left the financial industry a failure, yet in the rapidly emerging unregulated technology industry he found the least resistance to expressions of Nazism. Twitter infamously worked hard to censor women for showing breasts (yet no men for the same), and delayed or refused restrictions on hate speech. In 2017, Twitter said they would finally ban Nazi swastikas, which in 2022 rapidly pivoted when they changed their logo to a swastika.
This artist’s rendering of the X brand was deleted from the platform by the self-promoting “free speech extremist” Elon Musk. Source: Ai Wei Wei
Klaus’s strategic positioning succeeded – Peter now wields enormous influence over American politics while his Nazi genealogy remains largely hidden from public discourse. Fascist ideology can persist and adapt across decades, using migration, economic success, and intellectual sophistication to avoid accountability while working to undermine democratic institutions from within.
This isn’t coincidence. Klaus created a record of deliberate choices that consistently aligned with authoritarian, racially hierarchical systems while avoiding democratic accountability.
Peter’s trajectory – from defending apartheid at Stanford to obsessing over Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt to explicitly rejecting democracy – follows logically from this foundation. His current influence over American politics through Vance and others represents exactly what you’d expect from someone raised with these transmitted beliefs.
Peter Thiel’s documented political activities – opposing democracy, funding authoritarian candidates, advocating for corporate governance over democratic accountability – are concerning enough on their own merits. These don’t require a Nazi genealogy narrative to be problematic.
That being said, it’s unmistakable the fight against Nazism didn’t end in 1945. Is Peter Thiel an example of how?
The uncomfortable possibility is that an insistence on conventional evidentiary standards may be part of the problem – that the very analytical frameworks designed to maintain objectivity could be inadequate for identifying sophisticated forms of fascist coordination that operate through simplistic plausible deniability.
Mercedes-Benz presented the 300 SL in February 1954 at the International Motor Sports Show in New York. It featured gull-wing doors with hidden handles.Although described as hidden, the Mercedes mechanical lever really just had a small protrusion to press open.
Chinese automotive journalists are discussing a potential 2027 ban on defective door handle designs due to high failure rates.
In other words… regardless of which type of fully concealed door handle is used, their convenience and safety are always inferior to traditional door handles.
The article says SAE data shows that concealed door handles only improve a sedan’s drag coefficient by 0.005-0.01Cd, far below the 0.03Cd claimed by automakers. In terms of cost, a single electronic door handle costs three times more than a mechanical one, yet has eight times the failure rate. Due to the high failure rate, this leads to increased maintenance costs for electric vehicles. Leaked after-sales data from a leading electric vehicle manufacturer shows that door handle failures account for 12% of all vehicle repair cases, with many requiring complete assembly replacement.
From a safety perspective, in accidents involving collisions or fires, power outages can cause electric exterior door handles and electric interior door handles to fail, creating greater obstacles for rescue and escape. During the 2024 “frozen car door” incident in Changchun, an electric vehicle’s door handle motor froze, causing trapped passengers to miss the critical rescue window. In the same year, during Guangdong’s rainy season, multiple vehicles had electric door handles that failed to open due to short circuits, forcing passengers to break windows to escape.
China Insurance Automotive Technology Research Institute (C-IASI) crash tests show that vehicles equipped with electronic door handles have only a 67% success rate for door ejection after side impacts, far below the 98% rate of mechanical door handles. Additionally, according to consumer association statistics, complaints about concealed door handles injuring children’s fingers increased by 132% year-over-year in 2024, with one brand even having an extreme case where a child’s finger was fractured.
In recent years, several popular vehicle models have had door handles fail to deploy after accidents, preventing timely rescue and ultimately resulting in vehicle destruction and fatalities. These incidents have caused major public outcry. (Invisible door handles become “culprits”: Why can’t doors open after collisions? How should rescue be conducted?) According to data from the National Automotive Accident In-Depth Investigation System (NAIS), traffic accidents caused by door handle failures increased by 47% year-over-year in 2024, with concealed door handles accounting for 82% of these cases.
Tesla is known for its particularly bad designs, with many unnecessary deaths.
[Elon Musk] insisted on retractable handles, despite repeated warnings from engineers. Since 2018, they have been linked to at least four fatal accidents in Europe and the US, in which five people died.
In February 2024, we reported on a particularly tragic case: a fatal crash on a country road near Dobbrikow, in Brandenburg, Germany. Two 18-year-olds were killed when the Tesla they were in slammed into a tree and caught fire. First responders couldn’t open the doors because the handles were retracted. The teenagers burned to death in the back seat.
A court-appointed expert from Dekra, one of Germany’s leading testing authorities, later concluded that, given the retracted handles, the incident “qualifies as a malfunction”. According to the report, “the failure of the rear door handles to extend automatically must be considered a decisive factor” in the deaths. Had the system worked as intended, “it is assumed that rescuers might have been able to extract the two backseat passengers before the fire developed further”. Without what the report calls a “failure of this safety function”, the teens might have survived.
A minute after I posted news about a German death from Tesla hitting a tree, here comes the UK with its own version of the Tesla tragedy.
Officers and paramedics were called to High Side, Parson Drove, near Wisbech, at about 7pm yesterday (Tuesday September 2). A blue Tesla Model 3, which had been heading north towards Parson Drove, had crashed into the tree. The driver, a man in his 60s from Leverington, was taken to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, in Cambridge, suffering from serious injuries.
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