History, Security

Kash Patel Proves Skin Color Doesn’t Determine FBI Racism

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The idea that only white people can be racist, or that having darker skin automatically makes someone incapable of racist views, is both logically flawed and counterproductive. It reduces complex human beings to their racial categories and ignores the reality of how prejudice actually works.

It is indeed racist – and factually incorrect – to suggest that someone can’t be racist because of their skin color or ethnic background. Such horrible racial essentialism treats people as defined entirely by their identity rather than their individual beliefs and actions.

Racism of course is perpetrated by people of any background, even hypocritally against their own best interests. History and current events provide many examples of this, such as the current head of the FBI who is being rightly criticized for mounting evidence of white supremacist demolition to American democracy:

…Texas lawmaker, in a hearing with FBI Director Kash Patel, cast doubt on his numbers showing significant drops in crime…

“I don’t know who feels safe in this country except for the white supremacists….”

The criticism of white supremacy stuck an odd note when aimed at Mr. Patel, who is Indian American and was raised in the Hindu faith.

Indeed, those facts drew rare praise from Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, who pointed out that former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a white nationalist, “would undoubtedly be turning over in his grave” by Mr. Patel’s ascendance to the job.

Praise? I don’t see any praise.

Do you see praise?

I see only a historical observation about how America has had a recent window of anti-racism (someone not white could be appointed) rather than actually praising Patel himself. The reporter’s characterization of this as “praise” seems like a completely unsupported stretch.

The article perfectly illustrates why evaluating people based on their actual statements, policies, and actions is crucial, rather than making assumptions based on their race or religion. A personal background might inform experiences, but it doesn’t predetermine character or beliefs. The head of the FBI may have been specifically nominated because of his known white supremacist allegiances, regardless of his race or religion.

The NAACP is deeply disturbed by the confirmation of Kash Patel as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). On the eve of the 60th recognition of the assassination of civil rights leader Malcolm X, our country is actively taking steps to bring us back to a time of the criminalization and brutalization of Black Americans. Mr. Patel’s writing and public statements regarding his “enemies list” and intention of using the government as a tool of retaliation reflect fundamental hostility to the role of government in upholding the law. His confirmation is an unacceptable regression of democratic ideals. We refuse to stand idly by and watch a few extremists revert the progress of entire generations. The NAACP will continue to fight for true justice and the imperatives of our Constitution.

He was literally called out during confirmation for his clear opposition to the rule of law, and for advocating the abuse of power. That’s precisely why now he is being criticized for predictably serving a white supremacist doctrine.

The FBI, like any law enforcement agency, should operate on evidence and individual assessment. Instead, what we see emerging is the same binary logic that has plagued American institutions under Presidents Jackson, Polk, Wilson, Nixon, and Reagan. The same thinking that drove MAGA’s logical predecessor, “America First” nativism of the KKK.

Woodrow Wilson adopted the 1880s nativist slogan “America First” by 1916 and soon after the infamous white robe costumes of domestic terror appeared, based on the film “Birth of a Nation” that he heavily promoted to white-only audiences.

Either the white supremacists of MAGA accept you as one of their adherents or they threaten “invisible empire” logic of unitary executive extrajudicial detention and violence.

There is a word for the premeditated killing for people outside of context of armed conflict. That word is murder.

We saw this doctrine loudly proclaimed by MAGA just this week. The US military was ordered to murder civilians in international waters, foreshadowing federal troops domestically being turned backwards in time to something like 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma or 1919 Elaine, Arkansas: shoot first, ask questions later.

Redacted page one headline of the “Austin American-Statesman” in Austin, Texas. Mon, Oct 6, 1919.

In related news this week, a young Black man was found dead hanging from a tree in Mississippi, only an hour’s drive from the 1919 “America First” massacre in Arkansas.

Mississippi police on Wednesday awaited autopsy results for a Black student found hanging from a tree at Delta State University…

Map of “America First” lynchings during the period MAGA today calls a “golden” era.
History, Sailing, Security

US Military Continues Blatantly Murdering Civilians at Sea

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Secret squirrel logic is being given by the American government during an offensive military campaign targeting and killing civilians at sea.

“There is no evidence – none – that this strike was conducted in self-defense,” Sen. Jack Reed, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said last week. “That matters, because under both domestic and international law, the US military simply does not have the authority to use lethal force against a civilian vessel unless acting in self-defense.”

No evidence is a problem because, without it, such targeting and killing of civilians is clearly illegal. America becomes a criminal state.

According to the opaque and evasive Hegseth doctrine running the Pentagon, a throwback to assassinations of leadership deemed “too leftist” by the Nixon administration, the public now isn’t allowed to know who may be killed next by the current President or why.

“We knew exactly who they were, exactly what they were doing, what they represented, and why they were going where they were going,” Hegseth told reporters on September 4 during a visit to Fort Benning, Georgia.

“How did you know?” a reporter asked.

“Why would I tell you that?” Hegseth responded.

Why explain?

Well, Hegseth should know Senator Frank Church already conclusively explained why, way back in 1975. And that is not to mention all the explanations from the post-WWII tribunals at Nuremburg. Such a refusal, by what amounts to a war mongering executive claiming no accountability, marks an end of democracy.

Senator Frank Church displays the CIA poison dart gun at committee hearing with vice chairman John Tower on September 17, 1975 (Source: U.S. Capital via Levin Center, photo by Henry Griffin)

The Church Committee’s work in the 1970s established that democratic oversight requires transparency about targeting criteria and legal authority. Without it, democracy ends.

Civil Rights campaigners of the 1960s certainly would recognize this “shoot first, justify second” mentality of white men claiming their invisible empire can’t be questioned. The Secretary of State Rubio admitted the civilians in a boat “could have been interdicted rather than destroyed” yet the President overruled everyone to dictate immediate lethal strikes “as a matter of first, not last, resort.”

When Hegseth refuses to explain any basis at all for such offensive thought, he’s essentially claiming an executive authority has been invented to designate kill lists. He overtly rejects any balance of judicial review or meaningful oversight. To put it another way, a few months ago he fired the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force in order to enable today’s illegal use of force on civilians.

As one expert reviewing Hegseth’s actions has precisely explained:

There is a word for the premeditated killing for people outside of context of armed conflict. That word is murder.

This campaign of assassination, designed to bypass not just American legal protections but any legal system that might provide due process or accountability, could now pivot to the military troops Hegseth deploys to target Black-led cities.

The pattern should remind us of Nixon’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which did the same by claiming certain categories of people could be killed without due process based on intelligence assessments that could never be challenged or verified. The Church Committee specifically identified how such programs inevitably expand beyond their stated parameters because there are no meaningful constraints on their application.

They assassinated JFK, Lumumba, Mondlane, Hammarskjold, MLK, Malcom X… which reveals a continuity of this system. The same networks that eliminated leaders who challenged white supremacy and American imperial power are now operating with open impunity, using Nixon’s racist “war on drugs” and “counter-terrorism” as pretexts for a campaign of state-based terror.

The Venezuela news serves as a very simple yet critical boundary test by white nationalists.

Once the principle is established that their unitary executive model is unopposed to designate any group for extrajudicial killing based on secret criteria, the categorical thinking is transferable to any group or individual for elimination.

And that’s why recent government campaigns, arguing they can target people based on race alone, should be seen for exactly what they are, a state building the scaffolding for mass detention and murder.

…the supreme court has “effectively legalized racial profiling”, granting federal agents the power to stop people in Los Angeles simply for speaking Spanish or appearing Latino…

This goes beyond policy disagreement into America once again deploying infrastructure and plans for state-sponsored mass violence against targeted populations. Hannah Arendt identified this process: the intentional creation of stateless populations who exist outside legal protection in order to normalize mass human oppression and extermination.

Security

VA Tesla Kills One in Head-on Crash

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Police already have indicated the Tesla crossed a double yellow line.

The Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office said that it happened at around 5:45 p.m. in the 6800 block of Courthouse Road.

When deputies arrived at the scene, they saw that a 2022 Tesla X and a 2024 Hyundai Tucson had gotten into a head-on crash.

Preliminarily, it is believed that the Tesla had crossed the double yellow line and struck the Hyundai.

The Hyundai driver, Donna Pinnell, 76, died at the scene.

Security

Romanian and German Jets Burn $600K to Intercept Cheap Russian Drone

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Following Poland’s report, invoking NATO Article 4, the Romanian military has published a their own report of Russian violation of airspace.

A Geran drone used by the Russian Federation in its attacks on Ukraine penetrated the Romanian airspace on Saturday, September 13th, at 6:05 p.m. and was intercepted by two F-16 fighter jets, which were conducting an air patrol mission in northern Dobruja. […] The German allies deployed to Mihail Kogălniceanu scrambled two Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft in support of the Romanian ones, which monitored the area until 9:30 p.m.

Threat Response Calculation:

  • 2 F-16s × 3.5 hours × $27,000/hour = $189,000
  • 2 Typhoons × 3.5 hours × $62,000/hour = $434,000
  • Total NATO response cost = ~$600,000

Rough Cost Ratio

  • NATO response: ~$600,000
  • Geran drone: ~$30,000

NATO response cost roughly 20 times more than the drone itself.

Ouch.

We know Russia has adopted a doctrine to flood the Ukraine airspace, launching more one-way attack drones from September through December 2024 than in the preceding 23 months combined. Just one day on July 9 saw 728 Shahed-type drones used in a saturation attack.

This comes from the Russian industry producing more than 5,000 long-range drones each month, split between Shahed-type strike drones and decoy models (Gerbera – a flying cardboard box). It’s believed nearly 200 Geran-2 drones per day are made.

Notably, as a historian, this actually says to me that ex-KGB are executing on a 40-year old concept. The intelligence elites of yesteryear circling around Putin still are talking about America ruining their Soviet economy. They can’t think about current problems, a fundamental problem in dictatorships, so they are smarting about the huge military overspend that Gorbachev finally admitted was their failure.

Yuri Andropov, director of the KGB, created a secret department during the 1970s within the KGB devoted to economic analysis. What he eventually studied was CIA Director William Casey’s aggressive plan to undermine and destroy the Soviet Union through a combination of economic warfare and sabotage, hot and cold war, a punishing arms race, and sophisticated and heated psychological and political warfare.

The KGB veterans thus were on the front lines to see economic warfare as the sharp tip that brought down the USSR, and they’re hungry to flip the lessons against NATO. A staggering 20:1 cost ratio is a deliberate echo of the American economic pressures that bankrupted the Soviet military-industrial complex. Putin himself is a former KGB officer who lived through the Soviet collapse and understands precisely how forcing unsustainable military spending ratios can cripple an economy.

And it should be stated that swallowing such doctrine is what is rewarded by autocrats. The KGB veterans that Putin surrounds himself with have a playbook based on what they know worked against them. That’s their weakness. They can’t adapt or innovate beyond that framework because Putin would kill them the minute they exposed a truly independent thought.

So let’s dig into basic anti-fascist history and take this another possible path. Americans under normal circumstances would see a massive strategic opportunity for industry, where economic incentives are perfectly aligned with rapid expansion. The Romanian incident essentially handed the German government a half million dollar payment for a few hours of operations against a $30,000 target.

That’s math just begging for industrial innovation. But the Americans are MIA, and clearly can’t be trusted, drunkenly pouring billions down the drain on dumb military PR stunts like the Yemen and Iran “air power embarassment” of strategic bankruptcy (let alone pandering to “iPad on your face” guy selling defense lemons).

NATO has an immediate reality of three dozen countries facing a rapidly growing threat from cheap robot swarms. Layered defense systems are needed for both military and critical infrastructure markets. That’s basically another way of saying Russia just unlocked German industrial power with a potential $50 billion addressable high tech market over next decade.

Russia is taunting Germany to solve a manufacturing optimization problem, which is exactly what built the massive anti-Soviet automotive and machine tool dominance in the first place.

American engineering culture meanwhile is in steep decline, a corrupt political mess of anti-science bureaucracy pumping flashy, late, expensive, over-engineered PR as solutions nobody wants. Germany already has shown it’s perfectly positioned to pivot their quality control of “mass-producible minimum viable” engineering philosophy into independent and sustainable European commercial dominance of contested airspace. This is a made-in-EU moment.

Putin’s old man shouting at the birds grudge-fueled KGB-inspired economic warfare strategy, which he expected to weaken NATO, might end up creating the first truly independent European defense industrial base, powered by German engineering excellence. There’s real irony being funded by the paper robot threat Russia itself created.

Ukraine, Czechia, Romania and Poland have just made the innovation demand clear:

  • Accelerate European defense autonomy (exactly what the old KGB fears)
  • Seize ideal conditions for German industrial resurgence
  • Fund the next generation of European military technology
  • Eliminate American defense dominance (accept Hegseth for his malicious self-destruction)

Russia deserves exactly what happens when you give German engineers a clear problem, unlimited market demand, and necessary freedom from the stupidity of the American culture war clowns grinding themselves down even faster than foreign threats ever could.