Seven vehicles were impacted by a Tesla crossing a concrete median. The Tesla occupant so far was the only person killed by Tesla.
Aftermath of Tesla attack, Upper Saucon Township. Source: Mike Nester, lehighvalleylive.com contributor
It occurred about 11 a.m. as a 2020 Tesla headed west on Center Valley Parkway in Upper Saucon Township crossed over the concrete median into eastbound traffic, township police said.
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The Tesla struck multiple eastbound vehicles in the 3300 block of Center Valley Parkway, and in the area of West Saucon Valley Circle and Corporate Parkway West, according to police.
Seven vehicles were involved, carrying 10 motorists. Authorities did not immediately release conditions of the three people taken to local hospitals.
The marketplace of ideas assumes a functioning marketplace. When a moderator silences the correction and amplifies the normalization, the theory collapses. But the law doesn’t account for that because the law assumes that the structural conditions it was written under would persist.
They did not.
The verification mechanism of public discourse, journalism, and the adversarial format has been corrupted into a delivery system for the thing it was supposed to check.
The US legal tradition layered the First Amendment on top of a marketplace of ideas as self-correcting. The theory was that bad speech gets answered by better speech. We see clearly this is not working, such as in a discussion about Hegseth committing and promoting war crimes.
Lt. Col. Frederic Wehrey (Ret.) was the better speech. He got cut off mid-sentence by a PBS moderator so that Col. Joel Rayburn (Ret.) could say that war crime is fine.
I mean, look, the Constitution specifies a separation between religion and state, between church and state. And so public officials are not supposed to use their office to push a particular religious vision. And that’s exactly what the secretary is doing with this very apocalyptic Christian nationalist vision.
The second issue is, the U.S. armed forces are very diverse. You have men and women of diverse faiths or no faiths at all. And that’s going to create frustration or alienation. It’s not a good leadership strategy. You’re not building inclusion.
I mean, the other problem with framing this…
John Yang:
Fred, I’m going to interrupt you, because we’re running out of time, and I’d like to hear Joel’s thoughts on this. […]
Col. Joel Rayburn (Ret.):
Yes, and I think Secretary Hegseth is the secretary at war. He’s trying to explain to his forces who are engaged while they’re fighting. And he’s trying to inspire them. […]
John Yang:
Joel Rayburn and Fred Wehrey, thank you both very much.
The short explanation for this failure is that the First Amendment was designed to protect dissent against the state, not to protect state propagandists. But it doesn’t distinguish between the two. It protects speech categorically, regardless of who benefits. You can see here the good speech is shut down, thumb on the scale, to normalize a crime and give it the last word.
The longer answer is historical. The post-WWII legal architecture of Geneva Conventions, Nuremberg principles, and the UCMJ was built to address the chain of command. The people who gave the orders and the people who pulled the triggers. That was the problem they could see clearly in 1945.
What they didn’t build a framework for was the machinery between the order and the public. Nuremberg prosecuted Julius Streicher for propaganda, but he was seen as a special case. Direct incitement to genocide was over decades through Der Stürmer. Propagandist Lord Haw Haw was charged with treason and maps to Pete Hegseth, yet who will prosecute today? The threshold was set extraordinarily high. Anything short of that was left unaddressed.
And so war crimes are actively promoted on American public television as inspirational, helping Hegseth feel better about losing the war.
Both got plenty of airtime on capabilities and strategy. Then on the single most consequential question, is the Secretary of Defense publicly ordering war crimes, Wehrey was building a three-part argument (constitutional violation, alienation of diverse forces, and a third point he never finished) and Yang cut him off mid-sentence on that question specifically. Rayburn then got the last word on that question specifically. And Yang closed the segment in favor of war crimes.
During a Cabinet meeting on March 26, the president interrupted a war briefing to deliver a five-minute monologue about a pen.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, envoy Steve Witkoff, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had just offered updates on missile strikes, uranium enrichment, and U.S. troops in harm’s way. Trump picked up a black and gold Sharpie, held it in the air, and said:
See this pen right here? This pen is an interesting example.
What followed was a pack of lies about how he replaced the White House’s “beautiful” $1,000 ballpoint pens with $5 Sharpies. A business story, he called it. An example of his instinct for saving the government money.
Every layer of the story is false. And nobody in the room stopped him.
The $1,000 Hallucination
White House signing pens are usually A.T. Cross Century II ballpoints. The same model used by Obama, Bush, and Clinton. They retail for about $100. The distributor pays under $50. Even the fancier Cross Townsend model tops out around $260.
For about $300 you can get a real 14K gold Cross pen.
Nobody has ever documented a $1,000 White House signing pen, because it doesn’t exist. Anyone who buys pens knows that number is a lie. The number is inflated by a factor of ten to twenty, for intentional disinformation. Without it, there is no story. The entire interruption depends on a fabricated comparison.
Failed Negotiation That Saved Nothing
Trump said he called Sharpie and asked for custom pens, meaning with a gold logo. He said the company offered to make them for free. He insisted on paying $5 each.
A standard Sharpie costs $1 to $2 and it is worth less than half that.
The man who claims he “loves the government like I love myself, economically” rejected something free to volunteer to pay at least 2.5 to 5 times over the market price. This loss is claimed as the love, the savings.
Cost vs. Value
A Cross Century II is a refillable precision writing instrument backed by a lifetime mechanical warranty. It is American engineering. You replace the ink cartridge, not the pen. It is designed to last generations. That is the point of the tradition. The signing pen is the gift. Recipients keep the actual object used to sign the legislation. It is a historical artifact. Your grandchildren show it to people.
A Sharpie is a disposable felt-tip marker. The ink dries out. There is no refill. There is no warranty. It is plastic and goes in the trash.
Trump replaced a durable, refillable, historically significant instrument with a consumable product, paid above retail for it, and called it a deal.
The Company Denies It
Newell Brands, Sharpie’s parent company, said in a statement that it had “no information about the specific conversation Trump described.”
The phone call. The negotiation. The claim that a CEO asked “is this really the president?” None of it is confirmed by the other party.
Three layers of fabrication: a fake price for the old pen, a bad deal on the new one, and an origin story the manufacturer doesn’t recognize. Five minutes of cabinet time burned, during a war, to deliver a commercial full of lies for a marker nobody wants.
Hallucination Table
Claim
Reality
Old pens cost $1,000
Cross Century II pens cost $50-100
Sharpie deal saves money
He rejected free and insisted on paying $5, which is 2.5-5x retail
“I want to save money”
Built a $400 million ballroom by demolishing the East Wing
Sharpie is “a much better pen”
Disposable marker vs. refillable lifetime-warranty instrument
Custom pens are “hot as a pistol”
They are branded disposable markers that dry out
Called the head of Sharpie to negotiate
Newell Brands says it has no information about the conversation
The signing pen tradition exists because a pen that signs legislation into law has meaning. It becomes a piece of the historical record. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 with 75 pens and gave them to people including Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey. Those pens are now in museum collections including the National Museum of African American History. The pen notoriously represents something the KKK hates.07/02/1964 East Room, White House, Washington DC. LBJ Library photo by Cecil Stoughton
A Sharpie that dries out in a drawer and gets thrown away is the opposite of all that. It is not a cost saving. It is not a Civil Right. It is the replacement of something permanent and loved with disposable trash, by a man who cannot tell the difference, telling a story that may not have happened, during a meeting about a war.
Cross is a 180-year-old Rhode Island company, oldest pen maker in America, rooted in five generations of jewelers. Sharpie is a 1964 disposable marker whose most notable production was moved to a foreign country to dodge environmental regulations. The Sanford company in 1984 reacted to EPA regulations of workers breathing in polyester and felt byproducts by shutting down protected American jobs, making workers suffer brain damage in other countries instead.
Sharpies contain a cocktail of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that give them their characteristic odor and quick-drying properties. These compounds include: Ethanol, N-propanol, Diacetone alcohol, Various pigments and dyes.
[These chemicals] wreak havoc on the body, particularly the brain. The human body isn’t designed to process these substances in such concentrated forms…
The state whose founding narrative is the exodus from slavery remembered and taught as avadim hayinu has voted against a resolution that says slavery was a crime against humanity.
They voted during the season when every Jewish family is commanded to remember:
You were slaves.
You must never forget slaves.
You must never allow slavery again.
The Haggadah says: in every generation, a person is obligated to see themselves as if they personally went out of Egypt.
Then the UN asked 193 countries to do something much smaller, just acknowledge slavery happened and it was wrong.
Dear God, if your divine wisdom did not see slavery as a crime, we and our children and our children’s children would still be enslaved. But are you even real? The F-35 is real.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
