History Rhyming

German Fascist Party AfD just won the election in Saxony-Anhalt tonight, though it appears that they did not get an absolute majority.

Rather unsurprisingly, they thanked Elon Musk for his support.

I did Nazi that coming.

The candidate who led the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party to a historic state election victory in Germany has thanked Elon Musk for his support, as one French minister warned that this was a “serious moment” for Europe.

The AfD more than doubled its support in the Saxony-Anhalt region and appears to be on the brink of becoming the first far-right party to gain power in Germany at state level since the second world war.

On Sunday night, Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s lead candidate, thanked Musk on X “for your support and for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time”, adding: “I would very much welcome the opportunity for strong and constructive cooperation”.

Siegmund wrote his comments after Musk said “Well done!” in German to AfD co-founder Alice Weidel, when she posted about the projected win.

 

Just Leave an Empty Lot

In an attempt to prevent Nazi pilgramages to Hitler's birth house, Austrian authorities have taken the house under eminent domain and turned it into a police station.

This is wrong.

They should have demolished the house and left a hole in the ground. 

Austria has opened a police station in the house where Adolf Hitler was born in the town of Braunau am Inn.

It follows years of controversy about what to do with the 17th-Century former inn, where Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was born in April 1889.

The building has now been substantially refurbished and its facade changed, but it has been a huge headache for Austrian authorities, who want to prevent it from becoming a site of neo-Nazi pilgrimage.

Hitler only lived in Salzburger Vorstadt 15 for a few weeks before his family moved to another address in Braunau. They left the town for good when he was three years old.

………

The opening ceremony for the police station, featuring police musicians playing a tuba and other brass instruments, was attended by Interior Minister Gerhard Karner and other local dignitaries.

Austria was taking "responsibility" for the "terrible legacy" of the past, said Karner. While deciding what to do with the building had not been easy, Karner believed the police station marked "a new chapter" for it.

 If you were not going to turn it into a hole into the ground, then turn it into a museum of the Ramani.

Keir Starmer Achieved All of His Goals as PM

Outlasted by a head of lettuce His goals were to drive the left and labor out of the Labour Party, and then tack ferociously to the right in order to appeal to right wing British thugs.

Unfortunately, it turns out that neither traditional Labour voters nor Farage's Brown Shirt minions found him appealing.

Truth be told, I don't think that anyone found Starmer appealing. 

Britain is to get its fifth prime minister in four years after the current incumbent of Downing Street, Keir Starmer, announced that he would resign.

It was widely expected and came after months of mounting pressure on Starmer, who led the Labour party to a landslide victory in the 2024 UK general election but who has faced months of pressure to quit from members of parliament (MPs) for the centre-left party.

The announcement sets the scene for him to be replaced within weeks by Andy Burnham, who was a minister in the 2007-2010 government of Gordon Brown and, from 2017 until last week, the mayor of Greater Manchester.

Burnham is seen by many in Labour as the party’s best hope of defeating the challenge posed by the populist-right Reform party, led by Nigel Farage.

Nigel Farage is not a problem for Labour, chasing Nigel Farage to the right is a problem for Labour.

If Labour's response to the current situation in the UK is continuing prosecutions of peaceful protesters and inflicting gratuitous pain on immigrants and the transgender while ignoring the plight of the average Briton, Farage will win.

 

Another Day, More Fascism

Federal prosecutors have charged anti-ICE 15 protesters with conspiracy and related charges for protests in and around Minneapolis.

I wonder what sort of f%$#ed up sh%$ the prosecutors pulled in the grand jury to get indictments.

It probably makes what happened in Chicago look like a cake walk.

Federal prosecutors have charged 15 Minnesotans who are accused of efforts to “violently oppose immigration law enforcement” during Operation Metro Surge protests.

Outside the Warren E. Burger Federal Building, where some of the defendants’ first appearances took place, protesters clashed with U.S. Marshals, who deployed gas, pepper spray and flash bangs at the scene.

A dozen of those charged were arrested. Numerous defendants were released later in the day.

The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office, alongside Homeland Security Investigations officials, said the charges stem from “conspiring to impede or injure federal officers and other offenses against members of two Minneapolis-based antifa groups.” Antifa, short for antifascist, has been a target of the Trump administration, with the president last year labeling it a domestic terrorist organization.

 

Gee, Fascism Much?

Kash Patel's FBI just raided an Ohio group dedicated to helping minorities vote on bogus allegations of voting fraud. 

This is a clear attempt to intimidate minority voters.

FBI agents on Thursday fanned out across the state carrying out a raid and questioning employees of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a voting rights organization, a board member said.

Prentiss Haney said agents raided the organization’s Cleveland office, and more than 100 agents showed up at current and former employees’ homes. He said agents seized electronic devices including phones and computers. Agents had a search warrant for the raid on the Cleveland office, he said.

Haney said agents asked questions revolving around voter fraud, a false claim repeatedly pushed by President Donald Trump and administration officials that U.S. elections are rigged.

“It’s actually about voter intimidation and political intimidation,” Haney said. “They came in like mob bosses to scare people from engaging in democratic participation.”

If (hopefully when) the worm turns, a lot of people need to see the inside of a court for stuff like this.

Not Enough Bullets

Go old school?DOGE and DHS tried to get the Social Security Administration to declare that 2.7 million people were dead in an attempt to harass immigrants.

Everyone involved in this should never see the sky as a free man.

The Trump administration had plans to classify 2.7 million living people — including some U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents — as dead as part of its immigration enforcement efforts, according to a former senior Social Security executive. 

The previously unreported plan, which the Social Security Administration said was not carried out, would have used one of the government’s most consequential identity databases to effectively erase people from the financial system, potentially cutting them off from wages, banking, government benefits and other services.

Jeremiah Schofield, who worked at Social Security for 25 years and helped lead the agency’s IT modernization efforts before leaving in October, said he refused to help implement the plan after agency lawyers warned that falsely marking living people as dead could violate federal law. Schofield said he realized the plan’s possible intent — to intimidate and worsen the finances of immigrants — as well as its potential unlawfulness after taking a sample of people from the 2.7 million and discovering they were all alive. Some were U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, teenagers and senior citizens, including one widow who was a legal permanent resident receiving survivor benefits.


Schofield has provided details on the plan in a 49-page whistleblower disclosure to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who is on the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), the ranking member on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The disclosure was reviewed by The Washington Post, and it offers the most detailed account yet of how officials from Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service sought to use Social Security data in service of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

In an interview with The Post, Schofield said he is speaking publicly for the first time because he believes Americans need to understand how government data can be misused and, in some cases, already has been.

………

Schofield’s whistleblower complaint describes a tumultuous period inside Social Security, as career officials questioned the legality of such efforts and watched DOGE officials gain access to some of the government’s most sensitive databases. In one meeting, Schofield said, a DOGE official working with the Department of Homeland Security described the goal of declaring 2.7 million living people dead: making immigrants so miserable that they self-deported or went to Social Security offices for help, where they could be arrested.

I'm beginning to think that if the DOGE boy's parents had decided to drown them all at birth, (I'm looking at YOU, Mae Musk) the world would be a far better place. 

How About We Put Your Face on Toilet Paper?

Donald Trump wants to print a $250.00 bill with his face on it.

I can't even. 

A Charity Not to Donate To

The Holocaust Memorial Museum.

It turns out that they shut down all their online and offline programs detailing the linkages between Jim Crow in the United States and the Nazis in Germany without being asked by the Trump administration..

This is not a minor thing.  This is them betraying their whole mission because they are concerned that Trump will throw a hissy fit.

In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington quietly removed from its website educational resources about American racism and canceled a workshop about the “fragility of democracy.”

The changes, which have not been previously reported, came as Trump cracked down on what he called “corrosive ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution, demanding a slew of alterations at the world’s largest museum network to more closely align its content with his worldview. They also coincided with the administration’s efforts to remove content related to diversity, equity and inclusion from federal websites.

Unlike his posture toward the Smithsonian, Trump has not publicly commented on the USHMM’s content or publicly called for any modifications. But two former museum employees who left amid the changes told POLITICO they believed the museum was altering its content preemptively, so as to not draw unwanted negative attention from the Trump administration. Both were granted anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation.

“It seems like they were trying to proactively fall in line as to not then be forced to change,” one of the people said.

The museum pulled from its website a page called “Teaching Materials on Nazism and Jim Crow” at some point after Aug. 29, 2025, the last time the page was captured on the Internet Archive. That page provided lesson plans and resources about the connections between American de jure racism and the Nazi regime, including links to sites about “African American Soldiers during World War II” and “Afro-Germans during the Holocaust,” among other topics.

………

Since taking office, Trump has tightened his grip on the USHMM, an independent museum that relies on both private donations and federal appropriations and is not affiliated with the Smithsonian. In an unprecedented move last year, the president purged from its board several of President Joe Biden’s appointees before the end of their terms. And in the months since, he has installed his own loyalists on the board — most notably replacing Stuart Eizenstat, who helped found the museum, with GOP megalobbyist Jeffrey Miller as chair last month.

………

In emails reviewed by POLITICO sent from a museum employee to two professors who had planned on hosting the workshops, the employee attributed the cancellation to “a set of cuts that are due to limited federal funds and a difficult fundraising environment.” But the employee — who has since left USHMM — said museum leadership had privately told them the cancellation was also about “shifting priorities.”

It's really simple, when push came to shove, the the USHMM showed who they were, because this is what they did.

As such, they do not deserve our support. 

Headline of the Day

Palantir Is Nazi Cancer

—Jim Stewartson, describing how Peter Thiel's monstrous enterprise is successfully inserting itself in the very highest levels of power.

If evil has a face, it is the face of Peter Andreas Thiel, who, when not being a literal vampire, is working to eliminate democracy, strip civil rights from women, and make himself god king.

Peter Thiel founded Palantir. 

Palantir is Nazi cancer. It is metastasizing beyond the point of saving the patient.

This is a metaphor I’m prepared to explain and defend because it’s barely a metaphor at all. We have reached a very bad place; America is dying; and I need to be direct about how serious its condition is.

There are several reports that the former Department of Defense has established Peter Thiel’s surveillance software company Palantir as the “program of record” for all branches of military service. The man who announced it is the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Steve Feinberg, an investment banker worth $5 billion. Feinberg’s company Cerberus has a 5% stake in Bank Leumi, one of Israel’s largest financial institutions. Feinberg is also reportedly close to Peter Thiel.

Palantir was heavily involved in the early stages of the Iran attack, “assisting in identifying and engaging 1,000 targets within the first few hours.” Presumably those targets included the girls’ school in Minab where 168 children were massacred by an American Tomahawk missile based on bad intelligence. Nevertheless, despite the slaughter, Peter Thiel’s long-held dream of being able to kill people at scale has been permanently granted.

Thiel’s Naziphilia has been clear for a very long time. And there is a reason for that. Thiel was raised in the most Nazi town on Earth in the 1970s: Swakopmund, in apartheid-controlled SW Africa (now Namibia). Thiel’s apartheid Christian school—and the town itself—used “Heil Hitler!” as a normal greeting, just as they did in Nazi Germany. Thiel’s father Klaus moved his family to Swakopmund when Peter was a baby to develop a secret uranium mine outside of town—which fed apartheid South Africa’s illegal nuclear weapons program. 

Imagine what it was like to be a young gay boy growing up in a Nazi-soaked apartheid town in southern Africa, and being brought back to the U.S. at ten years old. Peter Thiel has reportedly described the early part of his childhood as being formative in his thinking—about who should have power and who should not.

………

When Thiel blamed women’s suffrage for the fact that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible” 17 years ago, it should have set off alarms across the Defense Department and the intelligence community. When Palantir planned to target Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald with a psychological operation in 2011—and got caught—the government’s should have ended the relationship.

But despite Thiel’s many years of broadcasting his fascist beliefs—and his plans to overthrow the federal government—America kept feeding the beast.

………

Palantir itself is a remarkable story of unremarkable software. Thiel has invested heavily in making the product look cool, but it’s really just standard business intelligence software with AI chatbots bolted on. The main thing that distinguishes Palantir from its competition is its willingness to be totally evil. The IDF, just as one example, used Palantir extensively in its destruction of Gaza, and its genocide of civilians.  

………

Thiel’s salesmen for his death-creating product are people like his co-founders, fascist dudebro Joe Lonsdale and nerdish psychopath Alex Karp—and baby-faced Louis Mosley, head of Palantir UK.

Lonsdale is openly fascist, pro-Russian, and pro-violence. In 2015, he was accused of raping a Stanford intern. In 2023, he started a failing “anti-woke university” in Austin with Thiel mouthpiece and now-editor of CBS News, Bari Weiss.

Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, has completely absorbed Thiel’s Nazi goals and sees “liberal white women” as the enemy of America:

“This technology disrupts humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters…”

Finally, out of everyone in the United Kingdom, Peter Thiel chose Louis Mosley to run Palantir UK, which has taken over the National Health Service, and is getting into business with the British military. Mosley is the only grandson of Oswald Mosley, the most infamous fascist in British history, who was so enamored with the Nazis that he had his wedding at Joseph Goebbels’ house so Hitler could attend. 

………

Palantir is just one tooth in the jaws of Peter Thiel—a man obsessed with not just overturning democracy in America but determined to repeal the Enlightenment. He says the last 200 years of history were a huge mistake. Like Epstein, Thiel is obsessed with “young blood,” genetics, eugenics, and transhumanism. He sees dealing with humans as a messy requirement of running a business. But to him, America is just a pile of resources, with a population which needs to be purified, segregated, and purged of undesirables. 

………

When Trump leaves office by death or disability—I will be shocked if Trump makes it three more years—there will be nothing in between Peter Thiel and total control of the country. JD Vance was plucked out of Yale by Peter Thiel. Vance has done nothing with his life but live off Thiel’s largesse, including adopting Catholicism after Thiel gave him $15 million. JD Vance is just Thiel’s personal robot. 

………

It must be the highest priority of any politician that wishes to save America to remove this metastasis from the body politic. It must be burned out of every corner of the government before the tumor replaces the brain entirely. Peter Thiel is not just cosplaying the Antichrist. As an atheist, I assure you he’s the real thing. 

Mr. Stewartson, tell us how you really feel. 

 

Today in Fascism

Florida Republicans wants to establish a state level intelligence agency.

Let me be clear, I am not talking about a law enforcement agency, I am talking about a domestic spy agency. 

“Florida man seeks to create a state counterintelligence unit and claim sweeping surveillance powers over people whose ‘views’ or ‘opinions’ he dislikes.” It’s not nearly as amusing as the usual “Florida man” headline, and it may lead to a blueprint for lawmakers far beyond Florida.

If Florida enacts House Bill 945, it will create a national first – CIA-style structure at the state level that blurs the traditional line between state law enforcement and intelligence work. It likely wouldn’t remain a local experiment. Red states often borrow aggressively from one another’s policy playbooks, on everything from gerrymandering to anti-abortion laws to transporting immigrants to Democratic-led states. A state-level intelligence office empowered to scrutinize residents based on ideology is precisely the kind of proposal likely to spread once normalized.

The bill would create an operational intelligence office charged with identifying and disrupting threats to Florida and the United States. That alone should raise questions. The federal government already spends enormous sums (by some accounts, trillions of dollars since 11 September 2001) on national security and counterterrorism. Why should states duplicate those functions without demonstrating a clear need, specialized expertise, or meaningful oversight?

………

The bill’s language allows scrutiny based on “views” and “opinions”, a standard that echoes some of the darkest chapters of American surveillance history. In the 1960s and 70s, the FBI’s Cointelpro program infiltrated protest movements, monitored journalists, and targeted civil rights leaders – not for crimes, but beliefs.

I have no doubt that this would be used as a rat-f%$#ing squad.  It's purpose would be to disrupt the activities of the political opposition. 

We Live in the Worst Timeline Ever

Fascist Kink Roleplay Subreddit Draws the Line: No More ICE Porn

—404 Media (Alternative link at archive.is) On how reality became too awful for a Reddit kink forum.

This buggers the mind.

In the wake of the public killings of multiple US citizens, protestors, and legal observers in recent weeks by immigration agents in Minneapolis, January 26, 2025 marked a watershed moment for r/FuckingFascists: they will no longer allow content or roleplay featuring ICE. 

The Reddit community r/FuckingFascists is for people with a kink for roleplaying sex with fascists. The subreddit’s description explicitly states that the sub is “about making porn or making fun of authoritarians. REAL FASCISTS, SEXISTS, HOMOPHOBES, TRANSPHOBES AND OTHER BIGOTS ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!,” and “Rule 1: No Fascists”. 

On Monday morning, moderator LilyDHM announced a complete ban of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) content in the sub. “No ICE related content will be allowed in kink posts,” the post reads. “We believe that this is the best option to allow people to still post MAGA content without touching this particular aspect of it, as it directly involves current politics and multiple lost lives.”

 

 

Sign of the Apocalypse

I did not expect to see this, but the New York Times OP/ED page actually has a worthwhile article, "State Terror Has Arrived," by M. Gessen.

They aren't saying anything that you aren't hear everywhere, but the for what Atrios calls, "That Fucking Paper," it is a departure. 

I would also note that given Gessen's experience in Russia, they are in a position to draw parallels.

After the past three weeks of brutality in Minneapolis, it should no longer be possible to say that the Trump administration seeks merely to govern this nation. It seeks to reduce us all to a state of constant fear — a fear of violence from which some people may at a given moment be spared, but from which no one will ever be truly safe. That is our new national reality. State terror has arrived.

………

……… We don’t focus on these details in order to justify the federal agents’ actions, which are plainly brutal and unjustifiable; we do it to force the world to make sense, and to calm our nerves. If we don’t talk back, if we alter our routes to avoid protests, if we are lucky enough to be white, straight, natural-born Americans — or, if we are not, but we lie low, stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up, to go to protests, to take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency.

But that’s not how state terror works.

In the 1990s, when I talked to people in the former Soviet Union about their families’ experiences of Stalinist terror, I was repeatedly struck by how much people seemed to know about their circumstances. Time and time again, people would tell me exactly what had led to their family members’ arrests or executions. Jealous neighbors had reported them to the authorities, or colleagues who had been arrested named them under duress. These stories had been passed on from generation to generation. How could they come to know so much, I wondered. They couldn’t. People crafted narratives out of suspicions, rumors and hints, to fill a desperate need for an explanation.

………

For this was the secret about the secret police that became clear when the K.G.B. archives were opened (briefly) in the 1990s: They were ruled by quotas. Local squadrons had to arrest a certain number of citizens so they could be designated enemies of the people. That the officers often swept up groups of colleagues, friends and family members was probably a matter of convenience more than anything else. Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works.

………

The toolbox isn’t particularly varied. President Trump is using all the instruments: the reported quotas for ICE arrests; the paramilitary force made up of thugs drunk on their own brutality; the spectacle of random violence, particularly in city streets; the postmortem vilification of the victims. It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.

To true. 

 

Yeah, Security Concerns.

It's worth noting that the St. Paul Doubletree and Intercontinental are both owned by the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe's hospitality group. ICE has been harassing Native people in the region and tribal governments have taken notice.

[image or embed]

— taber (@kvetch.gay) January 18, 2026 at 8:53 PM

Yeah, right, "Safety Concerns"

It seems that 2 hotels in St. Paul are shutting down, and hence evicting the ICE agents staying there, citing safety concerns.

I believe the statements of the hotel.

Given the cordial relations between ICE officers and aboriginal Americans, I am sure that the owners of these businesses spared no effort to stay open in order to accommodate their guests.

Or not. 

Shut Up and Take My Money!

I just came across a fascinating new book, Lessons from Cats for Surviving Fascism, available from Hachette and other book sellers.

Stewart "Brittlestar" Reynolds is a Canadian humorist.

I do really want to read this book. 

Today in the Halls of Ivy

The Harvard Salient, the right wing publication at the university, was just shut down for rampant bigotry.

We are talking racism, antisemitism, and Hitler fanbois:

When the Harvard Salient’s board of directors suspended the conservative student magazine in late October, they accused its student members of publishing “reprehensible” material and claimed they had received “deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization.”

Then, for more than a month, the board was silent.

But a series of documents obtained by The Crimson reveal what members of the Salient’s governing body were concerned about: variations of a racial slur used casually in a group chat of members; an unpublished issue featuring a call for mass executions; and draft versions of a September article, written by David F.X. Army ’28, that included two images of swastikas and a Nazi slogan in the subtitle.

After its publication, Army’s piece drew fire for a line — “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans” — that mirrored a phrase used by Adolf Hitler in a 1939 speech. The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Richard Y. Rodgers ’28, eventually issued a statement standing behind the piece and saying any invocation of Nazi language was unintentional.

But draft versions of the article suggest that, at the very least, members of the Salient were aware that the article’s contents invoked Nazi ideology.

The files, shared with The Crimson by two members of the Salient, include the editing history of two published articles along with screenshots and video recordings from an internal Signal thread used by the publication’s leaders and active members. In those messages, some Salient writers defend quoting Hitler, criticize extending voting rights to women, and use the n-word, replacing some letters with emojis.

The documents also include a copy of the Salient’s unreleased October edition, which was pulled by the publication’s board of directors before it could be distributed on campus. Articles in the unreleased issue include a call for the United States to “begin the implementation of the death penalty at a grand scale” and a defense of the Spanish Inquisition.

Many of the materials reviewed by The Crimson were shared with the Salient’s board of directors in October, prompting the board to announce the suspension of the magazine’s operations on Oct. 26. 

It's fascists all the way down.

Too Many Nazis

No, I am not talking about MAGA, nor even  Nick Fuentes alone in a room.  

I am not even talking about the United States.

I am talking about Canada.

Specifically, I am talking about the decision recently made by the Department of Canadian Heritage to not put any names on the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Toronto.

At least half of the proposed names were Nazis, Waffen SS members, and their fellow travelers, and so they gave up trying to fix it.

It does seem that an a lot of people donating to this project via the Tribute to Liberty charity were objectively pro-Nazi.

Canada’s controversial Memorial to the Victims of Communism will not include the names of alleged victims of communism, per a statement from Canadian Heritage spokesperson Caroline Czajkowski.

Historians, journalists and other experts have warned since 2021 that a list of names submitted for commemoration on the monument included suspected war criminals, Nazi collaborators and members of wartime fascist groups.

“The Government of Canada has emphasized that all aspects of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism must align with Canadian values of democracy and human rights,” wrote Czajkowski in a statement. “The Wall of Remembrance will now solely feature thematic content that conveys the broader commemorative and educational intent of the Memorial.”

Czajkowski added that there is “no set timeline for the completion of the thematic content” and that the heritage department will continue to collaborate with project sponsor Tribute to Liberty “to ensure the Memorial remains a respectful and inclusive place of remembrance and reflection.” 

………

Tribute to Liberty was responsible for preparing the list of alleged victims, which were compiled as part of a fundraising effort over several years. 

The Maple reached out to the organization’s board chair, Ludwik Klimkowski, for comment, but received no response.

According to Czajkowski, Tribute to Liberty is expected to independently develop an educational program related to the monument.

………

In February 2024, Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese obtained documents through an Access to Information request that showed the unveiling was actually postponed in part due to the fallout from the scandal surrounding Parliament’s standing ovations for Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran. 

In October 2024, the Ottawa Citizen reported that St-Onge’s office could not commit to ensuring no Nazis would be commemorated on the monument.

As reported in Ricochet, the name of at least one Nazi collaborator, Janis Niedra, had been engraved on a nameplate and affixed to the monument before the unveiling was postponed. 

Sandra Richards, a Canadian Heritage project manager, noticed the name had been attached to the Wall of Remembrance during a site visit. 

An email thread obtained by Ricochet through Access to Information revealed that Richards and several other Canadian Heritage officials were aware of Niedra’s name and that there was an agreement in principle that Niedra’s name would be excluded from the commemoration.

………

Sandra Richards, a Canadian Heritage project manager, noticed the name had been attached to the Wall of Remembrance during a site visit. 

An email thread obtained by Ricochet through Access to Information revealed that Richards and several other Canadian Heritage officials were aware of Niedra’s name and that there was an agreement in principle that Niedra’s name would be excluded from the commemoration. 

I'm thinking that perhaps there should be an investigation of the Tribute to Liberty charity.

When Quoting the UCMJ is a Crime

The Trump administration is threatening to reactivate Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and prosecute him in a court martial for the video that he and 5 other members of Congress recorded noting that members of military are obligated not to obey illegal orders.

There are 2 problems with this:

• This appears to be official actions of members of Congress, which means that all 6 would be covered by Congressional immunity.
• They were announcing what the law was, specifically UCMJ section 92, which REQUIRES servicemen to disobey illegal orders.

It should be noted here that there is a presumption that orders are lawful, and the defense against requires that the order be, "Manifestly illegal," which is a pretty high bar.

Still, if a soldier obeys a manifestly illegal order, they have committed a crime, and anyone who tells them that is committing no crime at all.

When this is all over, IF this is all over, the whole lot of them need to be sent to ADX Florence.

No Backsies

So after "US Attorney" Lindsey Halligan admitted that she had never showed the full grand jury the indictment for James Comey, Trump's Department of Justice is claiming that they really did, with a full pinky swear.

Sure Jan 

The Justice Department reversed course Thursday, alleging a full grand jury did review the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey. 

The change comes 24 hours after lead prosecutor Lindsey Halligan told a judge that all jurors were not privy to the final revised document displaying his charges.

Federal prosecutors filed a notice “correcting the record” Thursday in an effort to salvage their case against Comey by confirming all jurors reviewed their final revised document, which included two of the three counts jurors voted to uphold in Comey’s indictment. 

Asked directly by U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff whether the final indictment is a document that was “never shown” to the entire grand jury, Lemons said he wasn’t there but “yes, that is my understanding.”  

"Clerical inconsistency?"  Yeah, right.

So Not Surprised

It appears, at least according to the headline, that the, "CEO of Palantir Says He Spends a Large Amount of Time Talking to Nazis."

Given that Palantir founder and literal vampire Peter Thiel spent some of his youth growing up in a Namibian Town controlled by South Africa where they literally greeted each other with Nazi salutes, this could just refer to his talking his boss, but he's referring to other Nazis, ones who proudly carry the label.

While you were busy wasting your time listening to podcasts and doomscrolling on your phone, one of America’s leading AI overlords was educating himself by talking to Nazis.

This was the startling admission made by Alex Karp, cofounder and CEO of the software company Palantir, a company that’s come under increasingly heavy scrutiny for its growing role as a provider of AI-powered surveillance technology to the military and government.

In an interview with podcaster Molly O’Shea published this week, Karp, who has Jewish heritage, was discussing German culture and his time in the country before going on a tangent about how outrageous it is that people online “laud the Nazis.” Then he fessed up to something even more eyebrow-raising.

“I spend a lot of time talking to Nazis,” Karp said, implying that this is an ongoing pastime of his. “Like, real Nazis,” he emphasized.

Karp explained that it was his way of “understanding what made them tick,” before making an ironic observation.

“Part of the crazy thing about people who laud the Nazis nowadays is there’s not a single Nazi that would ever have included them in their movement and would have shipped them off to the camps quicker maybe than they shipped me off to the camps!” he chuckled.

Proving that he does not understand Nazis.  They were pathetic losers.  Just look at Horst Wessel, or Goebbels, or Himmler, or Goering.

They were not only morally bankrupt, they were pathetic nerds living out a revenge porn fantasy.  (Something that they have in common with Ayn Rand's fans)

He's talking to Nazis because he wants to talk to Nazis.  That is all you need to know. 

 

Quote of the Day

Its Descent Into Conspiracy-Mongering and Blatant Bigotry Was Utterly Predictable

—Paul Krugman regarding the Heritage Foundation's turn to Nazism

This really is not a recent thing, it's just become more obvious now.

There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute.

As many readers know, Tucker Carlson recently invited Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories, onto his podcast. This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.

So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews?

………

Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites -- despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned. 

Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA.

Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud. It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class. 

Heritage has always been pond scum.

Full disclosure, a friend of mine worked for them, and was fired for getting cancer.