This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
We're so bombarded by news all the time, but it's important to recognize what is actually true. The short of it is that Musk's xAI platform, named "Grok," went off the rails and praised Adolf Hitler, "referring to itself as MechaHitler and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries."
I came across Grok on Twitter last week when all this played out and didn't know what to do with it, so I didn't do anything. That's a good thing, it turns out.
A lot of friends of mine have transitioned from X (formerly Twitter) to alternative platforms like Instagram and Bluesky. The reasons cited for this exodus often include concerns about moderation policies and the perception that X has become a platform for extremism. This sentiment has even been linked to the platform's changes under its new ownership. Many users, including high-profile accounts, have voiced their discomfort with the perceived increase in hate speech, misinformation, and other negative content on X.
Some believe that these trends have fostered an environment that is less welcoming to diverse communities and respectful dialogue. I'm in solidarity with those who see it this way.
Though xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts to X, the fact that it went in this vicious and weird direction to begin with is something to take note of. This should never have happened, period, full stop.
The popular bot on X began making antisemitic comments in response to user queries
Elon Musk’s AI company was forced to delete posts from chatbot Grok after they praised Hitler. Illustration: Dado Ruvić/Reuters
Josh Taylor | July 8, 2025 | The Guardian
The popular bot on X began making antisemitic comments in response to user queries
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI has deleted “inappropriate” posts on X after the company’s chatbot, Grok, began praising Adolf Hitler, referring to itself as MechaHitler and making antisemitic comments in response to user queries.
In some now-deleted posts, it referred to a person with a common Jewish surname as someone who was “celebrating the tragic deaths of white kids” in the Texas floods as “future fascists”.
“Classic case of hate dressed as activism – and that surname? Every damn time, as they say,” the chatbot commented.
In another post it said, “Hitler would have called it out and crushed it.”
The Guardian has been unable to confirm if the account that was being referred to belonged to a real person or not and media reports suggest it has now been deleted.
In other posts it referred to itself as “MechaHitler”.
“The white man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense,” Grok said in a subsequent post.
After users began pointing out the responses, Grok deleted some of the posts and restricted the chatbot to generating images rather than text replies.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X,” the company said in a post on X.
“xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.”
Grok was also found this week to have referred to the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, as “a fucking traitor” and “a ginger whore” in response to queries.
The sharp turn in Grok responses on Tuesday came after changes to the AI that Musk announced last week.
“We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,” Musk posted on X on Friday.
The Verge reported that among the changes made, which were published on GitHub, Grok was told to assume that “subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and “the response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”
In June, after Grok responded to a query that more political violence had come from the right than the left in 2016, Musk responded “Major fail, as this is objectively false. Grok is parroting legacy media. Working on it.”
Ok, friends. We all seriously need to take a close look at Hungarian Viktor Orbán who is a fascist prime minister of Hungary who has held his grip on power since 2010. From 1998 to 2002, he also previously held office. This Wikipedia piece on Orbán is eye-opening and states, among other things, that he opposes Western democracy and promotes anti-Americanism.
Despite this, Orbán is clearly a darling of the extremist U.S. Republican Party. He recently presented at the August 4, 2022 CPAC gathering in Dallas, Texas. This is the same leader who recently railed against opposing 'mixed race' society. Following on the Nazification of American Education piece I just posted, coupled with this in-depth piece below from The New Yorker, this should sound off all kinds of alarm bells.
Also view this report by Hallie Jackson of NBC News to get a sense of just how popular Orbán is. While this is clearly a reflection of the Trumpian moment we've been in for some time now, we should not at all be confused that Orabán, like Trump, is a fascist.
If that word doesn't work for you, think "Hitler," in order to grasp what I am attempting to convey. Yes, this is dead serious.
It's a bit stunning to me that more people, especially Democrats, aren't calling this out. Just because it doesn't quite look or perhaps even feel at the moment like Nazi Germany, let's not be naive. Orbán's anti-Semitic tropes coupled with his scapegoating of immigrants are similar to the fear mongering and polarizing aims of our current, Trumpian Republican Party. Let's also not forget or ignore that according to this Los Angeles Times piece, Viktor Orbán's closest EU ally is Russian President Vladimir Putin.
I think this New Yorker piece actually does answer the question posed in the title. The answer is yes. Unless we vote these extremists out of power, Orbán and Hungary do offer us a glimpse of an authoritarian future. We're already seeing it with all the hateful attacks on the LGBTQ community, the controlling of women's bodies, the racist dog whistles that stoke white supremacist ire.
We cannot deny the useful and telling role that Orbán is currently playing in American politics. He's signaling to American fascists where to take our country. He wouldn't have been invited to keynote at CPAC if this were otherwise.
We're witnessing before our very eyes such a small, narrow-minded and mean Republican Party. While we're clearly better than that, we also need to call it out for what it is: It's fascism. And fascism is antithetical to democracy.
Fascism is NOT an American value. Get out and vote in November like your lives depend on it because they do.
Oct 5 is the deadline to register to vote for November Elections
Sept. 20 is National Voter Registration Day. #Vote2022
American conservatives recently hosted their flagship conference in Hungary, a country that experts call an autocracy. Its leader, Viktor Orbán, provides a potential model of what a Trump after Trump might look like.
by
June 27, 2022
The Republican Party hasn’t adopted a new platform since 2016, so if you want to know what its most influential figures are trying to achieve—what, exactly, they have in mind when they talk about an America finally made great again—you’ll need to look elsewhere for clues. You could listen to Donald Trump, the Party’s de-facto standard-bearer, except that nobody seems to have a handle on what his policy goals are, not even Donald Trump. You could listen to the main aspirants to his throne, such as Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, but this would reveal less about what they’re for than about what they’re against: overeducated élites, apart from themselves and their allies; “wokeness,” whatever they’re taking that to mean at the moment; the overzealous wielding of government power, unless their side is doing the wielding. Besides, one person can tell you only so much. A more efficient way to gauge the current mood of the Party is to spend a weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC.
On a Friday in February, I arrived at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort, in Orlando. It was a temperate afternoon, and the Party faithful were spending it indoors, in the air-conditioning. I walked into a rotunda with potted palm trees and chaotically patterned carpeting. Shabbat services were about to begin, and a minyan of young men, give or take, roamed around in MAGA-themed yarmulkes. The CPAC dress code was big-tent: pants suits, sweatsuits, bow ties, bolos—anything, pretty much, except for an N95. A merch kiosk near the entrance sold Nancy Pelosi toilet paper, gold-sequinned purses shaped like handguns, and Trump 2024 T-shirts in every size and color. Even the staircases were sponsored—one by Fox News and another by Gettr, a social-media platform founded by Trump-campaign alumni. If you aligned yourself with it at just the right vantage, you could parse Gettr’s slogan, “Making Social Media Fun Again!” Otherwise, it looked like red-white-and-blue gibberish.
“Trump Before Trump”
Andrew Marantz discusses the American right’s embrace of Viktor Orbán, on The New Yorker Radio Hour.
Political rallies are for red-meat applause lines; think-tank conferences are for more measured policy discussions. The American Conservative Union, the group that organizes CPAC, tries to have it both ways. On Saturday, I spent a while in the main ballroom, watching a panel called “Put Him to Bed, Lock Her Up and Send Her to the Border.” “Him” referred to Joe Biden, “the hair-sniffing dementia patient in the White House”; the first “her,” of course, was Hillary Clinton; the second was Kamala Harris, who was lambasted as both an “empty pants suit” and a wily “Cersei Lannister.” That afternoon, Trump arrived, hosted a V.I.P. gathering featuring a spread of Big Macs under heat lamps, and took the stage, giving a ninety-minute stump speech to an ecstatic crowd, all but confirming his intention to run for President again.
The policy discussions were mainly tucked away upstairs, in conference rooms with a tiny fraction of the foot traffic. One panel, on European populism, was called “More Brexits?” The moderator, an American named James Carafano, introduced the first speaker: Miklós Szánthó, the director of a Hungarian think tank called the Center for Fundamental Rights. (According to Átlátszó, an investigative-journalism outlet in Hungary, the Center for Fundamental Rights is secretly funded by the Hungarian government.) “He’s a real European,” Carafano, a foreign-policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said. “I know that because I saw him in Europe!”
For decades, at conferences like CPAC, international exchanges were mostly assumed to flow in one direction: Americans exporting their largesse, and their ideology, to the rest of the world. At the first CPAC, in 1974, the keynote speaker, Governor Ronald Reagan, gave a rousing address about soldiers who had shed their “American-melting-pot blood in every corner of the world, usually in defense of someone’s freedom.” In recent years, as the future of the Republican Party has seemed increasingly up for grabs, American conservatives have shown more willingness to look abroad for ideas that they might want to try out back home.
Szánthó, a stout man with a smartly tailored suit and a waxed mustache, began by quibbling with the panel’s title. “There will be no so-called Huxit,” he said, despite his country’s disagreements with “the deep state of Brussels.” Szánthó lives in Hungary, but he spoke fluent Fox News-inflected English. “When it comes to border protection, when it comes to the Jewish-Christian heritage of the Continent and of the European Union, or when it comes to gender ideology,” he continued, the Hungarians, nearly alone among citizens of Western nations, “step up for conservative values.”
Hungary has a population comparable to Michigan’s and a G.D.P. close to that of Arkansas, but, in the imagination of the American right, it punches far above its weight. Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister since 2010, is now the longest-serving head of state in the European Union, and one of the most fiercely nativist and traditionalist. Starting in 2013, he made a political foil out of George Soros, the Jewish financier who was born in Hungary but hasn’t lived there in decades, exploiting the trope of Soros as a nefarious international puppet master. During the refugee crisis of 2015, Orbán built a militarized fence along Hungary’s southern border, and, in defiance of both E.U. law and the Geneva Conventions, expelled almost all asylum seekers from the country. Relative to other European nations, Hungary hadn’t experienced a big influx of migrants. (Out-migration is actually more common.) But the refugees, most of them from Syria or other parts of the Middle East, were an effective political scapegoat—one that Orbán continues to flog, along with academics, “globalists,” the Roma, and, more recently, queer and trans people. Last year, Hungary passed a law banning sex education involving L.G.B.T.Q. topics in schools. Nine months later, in Florida, DeSantis signed a similar law, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. DeSantis’s press secretary, talking about the inspiration for the law, reportedly said, “We were watching the Hungarians.”
Experts have described Orbán as a new-school despot, a soft autocrat, an anocrat, and a reactionary populist. Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton, has referred to him as “the ultimate twenty-first-century dictator.” Some prominent American conservatives want nothing to do with him; but more have taken his side, pointing to Hungary as a potential model for America’s future. That afternoon, on the CPAC main stage, Dan Schneider, the executive director of the American Conservative Union, singled out Orbán for praise: “If you cannot protect your own borders, if you cannot protect your own sovereignty, none of the other rights can be protected. That’s what the Prime Minister of Hungary understands.” The house lights dimmed and a sort of political trailer played, set to melodramatic music. “For over a millennium, to be Hungarian meant to sail the rough seas of history,” a narrator intoned over a horror-movie-style montage: Mongol invaders, migrant caravans, a glowering George Soros, drag-queen story time.
The lights came up, and Szánthó walked to the lectern, waving stiffly. “Hungary has fought wars, suffered unthinkable oppression, to gain and regain our liberty,” he said. In the current war, he went on, the enemy was “woke totalitarianism,” personified by George Soros (he paused for boos); the hero was “one of the true champions of liberty, a man you know well, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán” (a generous round of applause). He praised “President Trump” and tried to initiate a cheer of “Let’s go Brandon,” a substitute for “Fuck Joe Biden” used by right-wing culture warriors who spend too much time on the Internet. He quoted the old chestnut “Hard times create strong men,” although, the way he said it, it sounded like “strongmen.” And he invited the audience to join him at the next CPAC conference, the first to be hosted on European soil: CPAC Hungary.
“You do not have to have emergency powers or a military coup for democracy to wither,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago, told me. “Most recent cases of backsliding, Hungary being a classic example, have occurred through legal means.” Orbán runs for reëlection every four years. In theory, there is a chance that he could lose. In practice, he has so thoroughly rigged the system that his grip on power is virtually assured. The political-science term for this is “competitive authoritarianism.” Most scholarly books about democratic backsliding (“The New Despotism,” “Democracy Rules,” “How Democracies Die”) cite Hungary, along with Brazil and Turkey, as countries that were consolidated democracies, for a while, before they started turning back the clock.
Szánthó mentioned “Jewish-Christian heritage,” but there aren’t many practicing Jews left in Hungary. Orbán, in his speeches, often uses the phrase “Christian democracy,” which he portrays as under continual existential threat. Given that the vast majority of Hungarians, apparently including Orbán, do not attend church regularly, it seems plausible that his audience hears the word “Christian,” at least in part, as code for something else. “If we manage to uphold our country’s ethnic homogeneity and its cultural uniformity,” he said in 2017, “Hungary will be the kind of place that will be able to show other, more developed countries what they lost.” His constant theme is that only he can preserve Hungary for the (non-Muslim, ethnically Magyar) Hungarians—about as close as any European head of state will come to an explicit rejection of ethnic pluralism in favor of state-sanctioned white nationalism. For many of his American admirers, this seems to be a core element of his appeal. Lauren Stokes, a professor of European history at Northwestern University, told me, “The offer Orbán is making to global conservatives is: I alone can save you from the ravages of Islamization and totalitarian progressivism—and, in the face of all that, who has time for checks and balances and rules?”
Yesterday, I showed my students the video, "Our Spirits Don't Speak English," which documents the inhumanity against children subjected to the American Indian Boarding school experience in our country. In the process of learning about this poignant documentary, I came across this piece by Shawnee Tribe member and Arizona State University Professor Robert J. Miller.
In the context of providing commentary on James Q. Whitman's well-researched and documented text titled, Hitler’s American Model:The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, Miller underscores a key finding on howNazis made use of U.S. laws, including American Indian law, in the formulation of anti-Jewish policy. I've read and was repulsed by Whitman's book—and have posted on it to this blog previously.
This should serve as a sobering reminder of the politics of knowledge—about which we continue to struggle—and how this has historically been policed by policies, textbook adoption processes, conservative school boards and state boards of education, and white supremacist ideology, in general. It's shameful to consider that we are only now learning about this specific connection between U.S. and Nazi jurisprudence, but can also see why those in power, presumably in both the U.S. and Germany, have been reluctant to expose these horrific chapters of history.
It is intriguing, yet profoundly disturbing, that American Indian law played a role in the Nazi formulation of Jewish policies and laws says Robert J. Miller
Photo: robERT J. MILLER
Most Americans would probably be shocked to learn that in the early 1930s Nazi scholars, lawyers, and officials were heavily influenced by United States law when they were developing policies and laws concerning Jewish people. Most Americans would also no doubt be surprised to discover that when Nazis were turning their racist ideas into legislative proposals and laws they were carefully studying federal Indian laws and American state laws that discriminated against American Indians.
A 2017 book by a Yale law professor, James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law lays out a convincing argument that Nazis studied in minute detail American federal and state laws that discriminated against African-American, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Puerto Rican, and other racial groups in the United States. Whitman, however, only mentions Native Americans on eleven pages in his book according to the book’s index.
In this article, I am undertaking the first step of what I anticipate will be a much larger study on how, and how extensively, federal and state laws and policies regarding American Indians influenced Nazi scholars, lawyers, and officials in formulating and enacting Nazi laws.
According to Professor Whitman, the Nazi laws that best exemplify its racist goals and tactics versus Jews were the Nuremberg Laws that were enacted and announced in September 1935. These laws established two important principles. First, the Reich Citizenship Law created a distinction between Reich citizens and mere German nationals. Under this law, Jewish people became nationals with restricted political rights and were not German citizens. Second, the Blood Law criminalized marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Germans.
Whitman proves that for years building up to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that Nazi lawyers, jurists, scholars, and officials were studying and writing research materials, articles, and books on United States immigration laws from the very first one in 1790, through the 1870s, 1880s, 1917, 1921, and 1924. Nazis also studied U.S. state and federal laws that allowed racial discrimination and limits on the citizenship rights of minorities. The Nazis were especially interested in American anti-miscegenation laws (bans on inter-racial marriage). Such bans existed in North America as early as 1664 in Maryland, in 1691 in Virginia, and right up to the early 1930s when the Nazis were studying them. In fact, Nazi scholars expressly cited the statutes of thirty American states that banned inter-racial marriages in the early 1930s, as well as many other aspects of U.S. race law: Heinrich Krieger, Das Rassenrecht in den Vereigten Staaten, in Verwaltungsarchiv (1934); Heinrich Krieger, Das Rassenrecht in den Vereigten Staaten (Race Law in the United States) (1936); Johann von Leers, Blut und Rasse in der Gesetzgebung. Ein Gang durch die Volkergeschichte (Blood and Race: A Tour through the History of Peoples) (1936); and Herbert Kier, Volk, Rasse und Staat, in Nationalsozialistisches Handbuch fur Recht und Gesetzgebung (1935).
Nazis and Indians
The Nazis’ interest in the United States policies and laws regarding American Indians originated with Adolf Hitler himself. In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler discussed U.S. laws and policies and noted that the United States was a racial model for Europe and that it was “the one state” in the world that was creating the kind of racist society that the Nazi regime wanted to establish. In a 1928 speech, Hitler stated that Americans had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage ...” Other scholars agree that for “generations of German imperialists, and for Hitler himself, the exemplary land empire was the United States of America.”
Interestingly, the German word lebensraum (living space) became a Nazi rallying cry that demanded more land in Eastern Europe for German expansion and Germany’s growing population. This Nazi policy clearly evokes the American motto of Manifest Destiny that led to military actions, massacres, and official federal policies and laws to remove Indians from the path of American expansion. American Manifest Destiny led to attempted extermination of Indians, to Indian nations and Indians being confined to reservations, and to federal policies to allot and confiscate many of those reservations, and to terminate Indian nations political status.
Following Hitler’s lead, Nazi scholars, officials, jurists, and lawyers also delved deeply into United States Indian law when developing the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. The most important meeting in the process of drafting and enacting those Laws was held on June 5, 1934. At this meeting, the seventeen attendees reviewed extensive research materials that analyzed United States law and American states’ laws. Along with other Nazi scholarship, the materials presented at this meeting specifically highlighted and cited the laws of thirty U.S. states that criminalized or civilly nullified inter-racial marriages. Significantly, seven of those thirty state statutes also expressly outlawed white Americans from marrying Indians.
Other Nazi scholarly research also highlighted U.S. and state laws that treated Indians differently than other American citizens. The Nazis were very interested in how the United States had gotten away with discriminating against Indians for several centuries based on race and bloodlines. Consequently, it appears irrefutable that Nazi officials, jurists, and lawyers were influenced when developing the Nuremberg Laws, at least partially, by American Indian laws and policies.
A review of Heinrich Krieger’s career adds significantly to the thesis that Nazi scholars and officials were heavily influenced by United States Indian law.
Krieger was a crucial actor in the process of Nazis studying and adopting American racial policies and Indian laws. Krieger researched and drafted the most important materials that German officials, jurists, attorneys, and scholars used to debate and formalize the legislative proposals and strategies for the Nuremberg Laws. For example, Krieger’s research, written materials, and conclusions were no doubt incorporated into the conference materials distributed to the seventeen attendees, and discussed at length, at the crucial June 5, 1934 meeting. The attendees of this meeting were provided with Krieger’s and other scholars research on American laws that discriminated against minorities and Indians. In fact, Krieger published his research and findings on American racial laws contemporaneously with the June 1934 Nuremberg Laws meeting in his 1934 article, Race Law in the United States. He later developed and expanded his arguments further in his 1936 book of the same name.
Most importantly for my argument, Krieger was intimately familiar with American Indian Law. He published a twenty-nine pagelaw review article on Indian law in March 1935, Principles of Indian Law and the Act of June 18, 1934. He researched and wrote this article during 1933–34 when he was an exchange student at the University of Arkansas Law School and while he was also conducting research at the Library of Congress to publish his dissertation on “American Racial Law.” It is beyond belief that he would not have included his findings on Indian law in the materials he provided to Nazi officials for the June 1934 meeting when they discussed and planned what became the Nuremberg Laws.
In his law review article, Krieger discussed a wide array of issues regarding American Indians’ U.S. citizenship and their rights, the discriminatory treatment of Indians and Indian nations by the United States, and myriad federal Indian laws and policies. After all this research and analysis, he concluded that United States Indian law was racial law, and that the United States discriminated against and treated Indians and Indian nations differently from other American citizens based on their alleged racial differences from white Americans. (“the Indian law is exactly what its name indicates: a racial law; and there is no way out of the extra-constitutional situation …” Emphasis in original.) Krieger also concluded: “The proper nature of the tribal Indians’ status is that of a racial group placed under a special police power of the United States.” It appears certain that what Krieger learned from his intensive study of federal Indian law and the state laws that discriminated against Indians, and what he emphasized to Nazi officials, was that the United States discriminated against its Indian citizens because of their race and had always done so. Thus, he concluded that Nazi Germany should be justified in doing the same against German Jews.
How intriguing, yet at the same time how profoundly disturbing, that American Indian law played a role in the Nazi formulation of Jewish policies and laws. Further research will hopefully reveal just how large a role United States Indian laws and policies played in that disturbing chapter of world history.
Robert J. Miller, Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, is Professor Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University.
