Summer, 1940, a small German city:
Isach Mendelsen and his family have just begun to eat breakfast. The two windows facing the street in their second floor apartment are open. They hear the morning hum of their small city, a few cars are going by, and there’s noise of the milkman's horsedrawn cart. They hear the chatter of people outside walking the streets and the sound of a few merhcants opening their stores. Then there is silence. They hear a car stop in front of their house. The engine turns off and the doors open and close.
Nine year old Hyman goes to the window and looks out and sees a new Citroën in front of their apartment building. There aren’t too many cars like that on their street.
“Mommy, daddy, there are men outside,” he exclaims. Isach goes to the window and looks out. Four men in trench coats and wearing hats are walking towards the door of their building.
(Above: real Gestapo)
He knows who they are. The Mendelsens are the only Jews living in the building. He knows why they are there.
A year from now in a small American city:
Anti-Trump journalist Clark Putnam works from home. He’d been fired from his job at a local television station's news department for not towing the pro-Trump company line. He has barely been making a living writing a Substack about how the Trump adminstration is ruining the lives of ordinary people. With about 200 readers paying $8 a month to both read and comment on his essays, and his wife’s income from her job working at a convenience store. They’d exhausted half of the family savings. They knew it was a mater of time before they’d have to sell their house and find a cheaper place to live.
He has just finished breakfast with his family in their suburban home on a quiet residential street. It is a spring morning. He hears his neighbor start his lawnmower.
He's mulling over what to write his Substack about. He has to write one every day. This is what his readers pay for. Gradually more people are deciding it is worth paying both to support his work and to be able to make comments. He gets about one or two new paying subscribers each day. That’s $8 or $16 a month but it adds up. This reminds him of the commercials on TV which show a sick or starving child and say “for only $19 a month, that’s only 63 cents a day, you can help this child.” (There’s a reason so many charities choose this amount.)
There was an ICE raid at a hospital where seriously ill immigrant patients were loaded into a van to be taken to a deportation center. That was a human interest story he thought people could relate to. There was also the news that the US Postal Service, long since put under the Department of Commerce, had announced that they would cease to allow mail-in ballots to be sent in postage paid envelopes. It seemed like a small victory that courts managed to stop from outlawing mail in voting but this was clearly an effort to make it more difficult. Mail service was so slow with postal workers fired and post offices closed that many people stopped even buying stamps since they rarely mailed letters.
Clark had settled into a mood of low grade depression and anxiety. He tried to breathe in the aroma of newly mown grass and clear his mind so he could decide what to write about. Then his neighbor's mower stopped. There was nothing unusual in that, but he had a sudden sense of dread that came out of nowhere. It prompted him to look out of the window.
What he saw chilled him to the bone. It was one of those armored Tesla Cybertrucks that the FBI was now using. He'd seen photos of them on the news. He'd watched as Musk met with Kash Patel and Dan Bongino at a Tesla plant where the vehicles were being manufactured. He heard Musk explain how powerful they were, how much gear they could carry, and especially how they could stop the bullet from an AR-15. There were videos on TV of FBI agents using Cybertucks as they raided high profile anti-Trumpers. Three or four of these futuristic vehicles pulling up in front of someone’s house was somehow more terrifying to watch than the same number of black Ford Suburbans.
He thought he was small potatoes. He never thought they would come for him. He had the presence of mind to get the name of a decent criminal lawyer, just in case, and write it down, but in a panic he couldn't remember where he put it.
He watched as four heavily armed men in FBI body armor exit the car and begin to walk towards the path to his house. "Honey," he said to his wife, "it's happening, they are here for me."
The back story:
This was first reported earlier in February:
It was denied but then new information came out yesterday:
It never made sense that an armored Cybertruck would be appropriate for ferrying diplomats from place to place. It does make sense for the FBI Gestapo to adopt them their primary mode of transportation. When they do their raids they offer the protection from being shot at. If they need to pursue anybody they are incredibly fast.
And finally, there’s this:
If they needed more firepower they could mount a machine gun in the back. (Read article)
Excerpt:
The warlord leader of Chechnya has mounted a machine gun on a Tesla Cybertruck that he says he plans to send to Russian forces on the battlefields in Ukraine.
Ramzan Kadyrov published a video on Saturday of himself driving the vehicle, which he said had been sent to him by “the strongest genius of our time,” Elon Musk, before it was adapted.
Musk later denied giving the vehicle to the Chechen leader. “Are you seriously so retarded that you think I donated a Cybertruck to a Russian general?” Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he owns.
In the slickly produced video, a grinning Kadyrov is seen driving the vehicle through an empty square in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. He then gets out of the truck and stands behind the machine gun with an ammunition belt draped round his neck.
“We received a Tesla Cybertruck from the respected Elon Musk. I was happy to test the new equipment and personally saw that there’s a reason that it is called the ‘Cyberbeast,’” Kadyrov wrote on Telegram.
Kadyrov said he “literally fell in love” with the vehicle, which he said was “invulnerable,” “fast,” “comfortable” and “maneuverable.”
Now we know. Musk, who has threatened to cut Starlink to the Ukrainian military, has already helped the Russians. This is the General he gave the Cybertruck to:
For decades, Kadyrov has been criticized for alleged human rights violations. The US State Department sanctioned him in 2020, saying it “has extensive credible information” that Kadyrov was responsible for “gross violations of human rights,” including torture and extrajudicial killings. Kadyrov has also been sanctioned by the United Kingdom and European Union.
Monday’s Substack:
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