UPDATE: Investigators have seized a Nazi flag from the scene where a driver was detained after a truck crashed into security barriers near the White House, officials say. https://t.co/7E2X9ABE6B
— NBC News (@NBCNews) May 23, 2023
I try not to overrate the ‘damaged individual attempts damage’ trope, but this particular story adds a twist to the old ‘Timothy McVeigh with a U-Haul’ pattern:
… The white U-Haul box truck crashed into the barriers on the north side of Lafayette Square, a few hundred feet from the White House, just before 10 p.m. ET.
A bystander appeared to capture on his cellphone the moment when a 26-foot U-Haul truck jumped a curb but couldn’t fit through barriers set on the sidewalk.
“There were no injuries to any Secret Service or White House personnel and the cause and manner of the crash remain under investigation,” Anthony Guglielmi, the Secret Service chief of communications, said in a statement Monday night…
The Reuters news agency published an image showing a Nazi-style red flag emblazoned with a swastika laid on the ground beside the van. Reuters, citing its own photographer on the scene and a witness, reported that the items apparently taken from the truck had been placed on the sidewalk and were seized by officers.
Video footage later showed a robot opening the back of the truck, which appeared to be empty.
A Marquette High School spokesperson tells us 19-year-old Sai Varshith Kandula is a Jan 2022 graduate. He is accused of crashing a U-Haul into a White House barrier, threatening to harm the president. Here’s his yearbook photo.
More details: https://t.co/5oIIjgy5qO@ksdknews pic.twitter.com/LmiOGBYPWo
— Paula Vasan (she/her) (@PaulaVasan) May 23, 2023
His poor family…
Driver who crashed near White House told officials he was prepared to kill Biden and 'seize power' https://t.co/9GeRnJLWEk
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) May 24, 2023
From what I understand, kid’s the right age for a first schizophrenic break, and I only wish it were harder to get ‘radicalized’ by online bigots:
… Sai Varshith Kandula, of Chesterfield, Missouri, rented the U-Haul truck Monday night immediately after flying from St. Louis to Dulles International Airport on a one-way ticket, a Secret Service agent said in a statement of facts filed in federal district court in Washington D.C.
The statement was included with a criminal complaint charging Kandula with depredation of property of the United States in excess of $1,000.
Around 9:35 p.m., he drove the vehicle onto a sidewalk outside the White House and into a metal barrier just north of the White House, according to the document…
Kandula allegedly told authorities he had been planning the attack for six months and detailed the plans in a “green book,” the document states.
He “stated his goal was to ‘get into the White House, seize power, and be put in charge of the nation,'” the document states. “When agents asked how KANDULA would seize power, he stated he would ‘Kill the President if that’s what I have to do and would hurt anyone that would stand in my way.'”
In the St. Louis suburb of Chesterfield, where Kandula lives, FBI agents were seen entering and leaving his home Tuesday and acquaintances struggled to link the alleged attack with the “chill” teen they know…
Errion Barfield, who was on the Marquette High School track team with Kandula, remembered him as quiet and unassuming.
“He was nice and chill,” Barfield said in a Facebook message to NBC News. “Ain’t ever expected him to do something like that.”
Kandula was a member of the sizable South Asian population of Chesterfield, a middle-class suburb about 20 miles west of St. Louis…
Kandula appeared in Washington D.C. Superior Court on Tuesday and is expected to make an initial appearance in federal court Wednesday afternoon.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Kandula has a lawyer to speak on his behalf.
Sai Varshith Kandula thought nazis “have a great history,” likes their "authoritarian nature, Eugenics, and their one world order,” and likes “Hitler, because he was a strong leader,” per Secret Service. pic.twitter.com/PqGWtXs6t1
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) May 23, 2023
Baud
Anything to avoid primary season.
Quinerly
This is strange. I know Chesterfield well. Read a lot of local pieces earlier. This kid was described over and over as “chill.”
Quinerly
Cray Cray
https://www.thedailybeast.com/maga-media-runs-wild-with-bs-claim-of-tuck-friendly-target-kidswear
Anne Laurie
@Quinerly: Sometimes, if my family history is anything to go by, it’s a short walk from ‘chill’ to ‘disassociated’…
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Someone didn’t understand a Nazi Swastika is simply the shadow of a German Iron Cross.
bookworm1398
Despite the Nazi flag, I don’t know if I would call this white supremacy. Guy was clearly not in touch with reality.
Also, he damaged some property. He didn’t hurt or kill anyone. He had a flag not a gun in his car.
JaySinWA
I just ran into this article about WA state regulating pet insurance. As an open thread this doesn’t have to be on topic, but I suppose we could claim Pet Insurance uses terroristic threats of financial ruin. The legislature passed and the Gov. signed into law Pet Insurance regulations that look pretty decent to me.
https://www.shorelineareanews.com/2023/05/insurance-commissioner-what-washingtons.html
schrodingers_cat
Name is of south Indian origin. Hitler is popular among India’s homegrown Nazi style organization, the RSS and is inspired by Fascists and Nazis. BJP is the political arm of the RSS.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
So he’s not even Aryan?
Manyakitty
@Quinerly: my aunt and uncle lived in Chesterfield. I wouldn’t call it middle class unless that’s the bad part.
Another Scott
I was surprised that he is only 19. I understand that most car rental places require that the renter be at least 25 and assumed that was the case for U-Haul as well. But, Google tells me that one only needs to be 18 to rent one of their trucks. (Which makes sense for kids moving out to college, etc.)
I’m glad that nobody was hurt.
I hope that he gets the help he needs if there’s a disease of some sort working on his head…
Cheers,
Scott.
Inventor
@Baud: Some Indians and many Persians consider themselves to be Aryan.
Baud
@Inventor:
Right, but that’s usually north Indians that speak a Sanskrit derived language.
CaseyL
@JaySinWA:
Good to see, even though I never got insurance for any of my kitties because I was never in a position to afford it.
What I’d really like to see is tax deductions for companion animals, like dependent children.
On topic: We have an absolute epidemic of insanity in this country, because we have constructed a society that is brutish and cruel. The resources that could have provided affordable housing, good wages, decent schools, and effective healthcare, have been sequestered the by wealthy.
I’m not sure how to deconstruct what we’ve got, short of re-establishing a 90% tax rate for the filthy rich, putting estate taxes back where they were before the Republican Revolution, and declaring that corporations are not, in fact, “persons.”
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Idk could be a Brahmin.
Kyle Rayner
@Inventor: I’ve always wondered how exactly “Aryan” got twisted around to mean “white blonde germans.” I guess some form of exoticism and romantization of a glorious past even if uh… that past belonged to someone else?
cain
@Another Scott:
Hard to be cool and speed in a U-Haul unlike a car.
Honestly, we should revisit that. We don’t really have kids running amok. It’s those boomer and Gen Xers!
Dan B
@schrodingers_cat: It’s interesting that the very far south of India is Kerala a communist, not authoritarian, government. So other parts of South India are very conservative.
cain
@Baud:
I wasn’t aware that Brahmins claimed aryan blood.
Inventor
@Kyle Rayner: A lot of it was Nazi pseudo-science along with some questionable archaeology. They used “Aryan” in place of “Nordic”. Whereas Nordics are a small offshoot from the larger Aryan group at most and I think there may even be some academic dispute about that.
Quinerly
@Manyakitty:
I think I mentioned upper middle class earlier when the the RFT article dropped. It’s not Town and Country for sure. Pretty good sized municipality close to 50,000. Good sized Asian population (professionals) that have settled there in last few years.
Alison Rose
“authoritarian nature”
Yeah, that’s, uh…one way to put it.
Ken
Sounds like some of the speakers at the National Conservatism (“Nat-C”) conference last week.
eversor
@Ken:
National Conservatism is a CHRISTIAN push specifically for CHRISTIANITY. If you aren’t willing to deal with Christianity first you might as well sign the National Conservatism manifesto and change your last name to Dreher.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kyle Rayner:
I think it had something to do with Blavatsky’s bizarre fictional history of the white race that involved Atlantis and Thule and stuff. She ran a con on rich and important white supremacists and they ate that shit up? Like, straight line to Hitler’s beliefs.
@eversor:
And yet it turns out you get the exact same ideals, even idolizing Hitler himself, among non-Christian groups.
catothedog
Americans are literally ignorant of the Fascism of the Hindutva movement and their funding by expat Indians (mostly from the US)
https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/2021-03-01/ty-article-opinion/.premium/why-is-indias-government-celebrating-an-antisemitic-pro-genocide-hitler-devotee/0000017f-e108-d804-ad7f-f1fa46980000
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2017-12-14/ty-article/hitlers-hindus-indias-nazi-loving-nationalists-on-the-rise/0000017f-f880-d460-afff-fbe61fe20000
Funded by Expatriate Indians in the US. Indian origin supporters of Fascism in the US will soon leave in dust what you see with Hispanic lovers of Fascism ( Florida /GOP)
https://scroll.in/article/668870/new-report-shows-how-hindutva-groups-operate-in-us-send-money-to-india
Vivek Ramaswamy is not an outlier. He is more representative of Indians in the US (high caste, well-off authoritarian racists, than the average American), than Ro Khanna or Pramila Jayapal.
Oh, and they mudered Gandhi (who was no saint himself, but still abhorred violence)
https://southasia.ucla.edu/history-politics/hindu-rashtra/nathuram-godse-rss-murder-gandhi/
NotMax
From U-boats to U-trucks.
//
Sure Lurkalot
@CaseyL:
Good start, let’s go!
Andrya
@Baud: In the 1930s, JRR Tolkien received an inquiry from a German publisher interested in publishing a German edition of “The Hobbit”- but first they had to know that he was Aryan. Tolkien replied that as far as he knew none of his ancestors had spoken any form of Persian, or any of the languages derived from Sanskrit. (He praised Jews in the same letter.) Needless to say, the publishing deal did not go through.
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
The smoking age in Missouri is only 12.
Origuy
Aryan started out as a linguistics term to mean what we call today “Indo-European”, that is the family of languages that includes languages derived from Sanskrit, Persian, and most of the modern European languages, among others. Then it was narrowed down to mean the Indian and Iranian languages. The Nazis picked it up and warped to their own purposes.
oatler
@Andrya:
There’s also the anecdote that a German publisher had rejected Tolkein’s book because after searching his publishers dictionaries he could find no evidence of “hobbits”.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
I did Nazi this coming
Lacuna Synecdoche
RyanJReilly via Anne Laurie @ Top:
God, I feel old.
I mean, I’m so old now, I can remember when people thought Hitler was a bad guy, it was okay for Indiana Jones to shoot Nazis, Republicans publicly fretted about new world orders instead of advocating for them, eugenics was generally reviled, and authoritarianism was considered dystopian.
Yutsano
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
THANK YOU!
I thought it was just me.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Yutsano:
It just all makes me feel so … quaint.
eversor
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
And then Republicans got the CHRISTIAN vote and of course had to turn on all that shit. Again, the problem is Christianity. Always has been. Always will be. So fight Christianity or give up.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@eversor: You’re focusing (to a near-monomaniacal degree) on a symptom, not the cause. Tribalism and authoritarianism take many forms.
Marx made the same mistake in thinking that capitalism was the root cause of the misery he saw in the world, rather than a symptom.
Chetan Murthy
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: perhaps it’s best not to feed the troll. Many of us have gotten caught in his trap.
FelonyGovt
And meanwhile, Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural poem has been banned from an elementary school in Florida . All because of a mother who thought the author was Oprah Winfrey.
gene108
@Frankensteinbeck:
More to do with the idea of Indo-Europeans and the Aryan Invasion theory, which states the Harrapan civilization was overrun by these light skinned Aryan tribes from Central Asia. Also, work in trying to determine language families showed some kind of central Indo-European language that gave rise to German, Sanskrit, etc. This got twisted to be that light skinned Aryans conquered and settled large parts of Europe and Asia and therefore are the race Germans and other Northern Europeans are derived from and not mixed with lesser races like in India.
gene108
@catothedog:
Bullshit.
As a high caste Hindu living in the USA most of my life, your generalization is wrong.
JWR
Great, now it’s Target upsetting the delicate sensibilities of the bigots.
And yesterday, the AP did a fact-check on rumors that Target was selling “tuck-friendly” swimsuits in kids sizes. (They weren’t.) But these sorts of hateful campaigns make me wish the internet had never been invented. Thanks, AlGore!
Origuy
@FelonyGovt:
The woman who made the complaint about Amanda Gorman’s book wasn’t just some parent. She was–no surprise–a member of “Moms for Liberty” and she was also a supporter of the Proud Boys.
AlaskaReader
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
Capitalism incentivizes planetary destruction.
That’s not a symptom, that is causal.
schrodingers_cat
@cain: The people who wrote the Vedas referred to themselves as Aryas or the pure ones and called they lived was called Aryavart.
Many S. Brahmins claim northern origin. They also do have more Steppe DNA, than other south Indians according to researcher of ancient DNA, David Reich.
So I was referring to the original meaning not the Nazified one. Although the Sanghified types may have those affinities as well.
Rebel’s Dad
@eversor: I’m a liberal Christian. I’m not interested in debating anything, but it’s not fair to paint us with the same brush as Christofascists. As I said the other night, there are terrible people in every group, religious or atheist. For every klansman or Crusade-encouraging Pope, there’s a Mao and Stalin to match.
People are garbage, period.
schrodingers_cat
@gene108: I agree with you. VR types are usually the Republicans amongst us. So less than 30 percent. A significant percentage but not a majority.
.
Tony Jay
@eversor:
Love it. Now, do the whole thing over again, but this time replace every usage of the letter E with that noise clown-horns make.
You either do it right, or you’re doing it wrong.
Manyakitty
@Quinerly: oh, right. Town and Country is where they lived, but their mailing address was Chesterfield.
mrmoshpotato
With apologies to The Onion, why does all of this Biden-hating trash keep sucking Nazi cock?
mrmoshpotato
@eversor: Holy horse’s ass, Batman! How’s it taste, because you’re sucking it?
Anyway
This reminds me, whatever happened to Bobby Jindal? What RW grift is he running these days?
Chris T.
@Baud:
You have to remember that for these Nazis, “Aryan” means whatever they want it to at the moment, the way “freedom” means “I get to own slaves” to Republicans.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Oh Missouri! 😞
Matt McIrvin
@JWR: The fact that Target is capitulating to the terrorists to some degree is what disturbs me. Busch is genuinely hurting from taking the tiniest step in the direction of trans rights, too, and they’re backing down.
I can’t tell if we’re winning or losing the war, frankly. Corporations follow rather than lead–they can be reactive, panicky beasts and really only care about the bottom line. Are we going to wake up one morning and suddenly everything in pop culture has shifted toward the reactionaries–all the LGBT visibility suddenly erased, all the depictions of multiracial families and integrated workplaces gone, everything pushing the white conservative Christian nuclear family, because the people holding the strings decided to cut their losses?
I remember something like that happening before, in the 1980s. Reagan came in and everything suddenly got way more reactionary, hypergendered, pro-violence, heterosexist and Christianist. But there was less to undo then.
Soprano2
@Quinerly: They don’t understand how women’s swimwear works.
Searcher
As always when this topic comes up, I’d like to remind everyone that eugenics isn’t just immoral, it is also dumb.
Winnowing a gene pool, reducing genetic diversity to a set of pre-approved traits, weakens it. It turns humans into monocrop agriculture. Temporarily productive, perhaps, on a per-acre metric, but extremely vulnerable to change or disease. A pandemic in a homogeneous population is many times worse than a pandemic in diverse population — as a virus adapts to its present host, it also becomes extremely suitable for all future identical hosts.
Also, humans, like most forms of higher life, reproduce sexually with recombination of discrete genes. This means it’s unnecessary to remove “bad” genes from the gene pool because parents only have a 50% chance of passing them on. If you have a debilitating genetic birth defect, you might choose not to pass it on, but if you do have kids, it doesn’t threaten the gene pool itself. A gene only becomes prevalent if it is not detrimental to survival regardless of what we do, and if a suboptimal gene sticks around for awhile it adds extra genetic diversity which is beneficial to the gene pool. Extra diversity means extra robustness against disease and extra opportunity for new mutations to discover new genes that aren’t reachable from the baseline genome.
TLDR: eugenics isn’t the hard but wise choice of a science-minded rationalist, it’s the dumb idea of a stupid small-minded bigot.
Soprano2
@Ken: I can’t get over how conservatives think being a strong leader means you’re an asshole.
Steeplejack
Kandula pretty obviously has severe psychological problems. I hope he gets some help.
Oh, speaking of which, here is what my shitbird RWNJ brother posted on Facebook: “I’ve been saying we should ban U-hauls ever since OK City.” Hilarious. 😹 With a news photo from AOL.com, which lets everyone know how hip and with it he is.
jimmiraybob
Ah yes, the glue that holds the MAGA/Republican coalition together – the desire for a strong and ruthless leader willing to destroy the liberal democratic state to get sweet revenge on all the “others” that pollute their existence. Sure, a lot of people will suffer and die ….. but …….. but …………..no buts.
Matt McIrvin
@Searcher:
I think “monocrop agriculture” was precisely the model that, 100 years ago, eugenicists thought needed to be applied to human beings–the fear was that what we needed above all was innate biological intelligence, brain power, and that modernity had somehow changed our environment such that what humans were being selected for if you led them breed by themselves was not brain power. (The “Idiocracy”/”Marching Morons”/Cyril Burt fear.) And of course they justified all this with racism.
But the understanding of genetics back then, and of the dangers of the agricultural breeding model, was primitive.
Soprano2
@JWR: I hate to see them cave in to this, because it means there will be more of it.
schrodingers_cat
@Lacuna Synecdoche: This is actually standard RSS propaganda. RSS leaders modeled their organization after the Italian Fascists and German Nazis in the 1920s.
schrodingers_cat
@Andrya: English and Welsh both belong to the Indo-European group of languages.
schrodingers_cat
@schrodingers_cat: Edited version of the comment # 46 which I typed on my phone late at night.
The Steppe people who wrote the Vedas referred to themselves as Aryas or the pure ones . They called the region where they lived Aryavart. During the Vedic times that was the northwest of India along with what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the Gangetic basin was not a part of Aryavarta then. Non-Aryans were called UnArya.
Many S. Brahmins claim northern origin. They also do have more Steppe DNA, than other south Indians according to researcher of ancient DNA, David Reich.
So I was referring to the original meaning not the Nazified one. Although the Sanghified (those who believe in the RSS propaganda which cleverly mixes truths and lies) types may have those affinities as well.
Its a feedback loop of bigotry
ETA: Those who want to pursue this can read Patrick Olivelle’s translations of the Vedic texts. They are available in any good college library.
jimmiraybob
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yes, but even the “non-Christian” groups see a national Christianity that is focused on white supremacy as a motivating/organizing factor. Almost all white-supremacist and anti-government group brings god into their mission because god is easily weaponized and usually provides a shield lending credibility to the cause.
Chattel slavery, segregation and SA Apartheid all were grounded and defended on Christian principles (or, to put in Josh Hawley’s language, Christian tradition).
Even Ted Nugent, mediocre guitarist that put out the classic “Jailbait” about lusting after 13-year old girls (as a 32-year old man), is now using the god shield.
schrodingers_cat
@Dan B: I speak of a very specific subset. Also, if you think that the Communist party of Kerala is devoid of caste prejudices you would be wrong.
bookworm1398
Aryans: Indian supermatistics groups will tell you they are true Aryans, white Europeans are the ones who have intermingled their blood with others. And bastardized their culture by adopting Christianity while Indians continue to follow a religion close to their Aryan ancestors.
I don’t know if this guy, who grew in USA, had any of these beliefs though. He may simply have picked Hitler to show his non conformist status.
schrodingers_cat
It could be either or a superposition of the two factors. What is known about this man and his family?
Andrya
@schrodingers_cat: Of course. I’m an English speaker of Welsh and Scottish ancestry. Did anything in my post say otherwise?
Paul in KY
Seems like all the modern ‘aryans’ doing evil/crazy shit lately don’t seem to understand they’d be sent to the camps by the 1940s ‘aryans’ they so love…
Paul in KY
@Ken: Maybe his book on Nazism had the pages from 1941 on ripped out?
leeleeFL
@schrodingers_cat: Aryans originated in South Asia, if I remember correctly! Hence the 7 years in Tibet! The Nazis were seriously into the Master Race BS and so I wouldn’t be surprised if this kid fell for it.