Noem taps new ICE leadership to bring back accountability and results
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tapped a new director and deputy director to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as she works to reinstate a culture of results and accountability under President Donald Trump's administration.
Noem announced the appointments on Sunday, saying Todd Lyons will serve as acting ICE director, and Madison Sheahan will serve as the deputy director of ICE.
"For the past four years, our brave men and women of ICE were barred from doing their jobs—ICE needs a culture of accountability that it has been starved of under the Biden Administration," Noem said. "Todd Lyons and Madison Sheahan are work horses, strong executors, and accountable leaders who will lead the men and women of ICE to achieve the American people's mandate to target, arrest and deport illegal aliens."
In a press release, Homeland Security said Lyons currently serves as the acting executive associate director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).
Noem Sends Message To Those Considering Entering Us Illegally: 'Don't Even Think About It'
He has served in a variety of other roles within ICE, including assistant director of field operations for ERO, where he oversaw all 25 field offices and domestic operations across the U.S. Prior to that, Lyons worked as the ERO field office director (FOD) in the Boston field office, where he oversaw ERO activities in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Vermont.
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Lyons started his career in federal service in 1993 as a member of the U.S. Air Force, and in 1999, he went into civilian law enforcement in Florida. Lyons joined ERO as an ICE agent in Dallas, Texas, in 2007.
Sheahan and Noem have worked together in the past, though most recently the new deputy director of ICE has served as the secretary of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, where she oversaw a $280 million budget and led a team of over 800 employees across wildlife, fisheries and enforcement divisions.
Dhs Secretary Noem Appears To Accuse 'Corrupt' Fbi Of Leaking La Ice Raids
She helped establish the Special Operations Group inside the enforcement division, which places priority on public safety through historic partnerships with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies when major events like Mardi Gras and the Super Bowl take place in The Big Easy.
Sheahan also advised Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry in her role.
Prior to that, she worked for then-South Dakota Gov. Noem in various leadership positions, including the state Republican Party and on special initiatives aimed toward advancing Noem's agenda.
Noem Ends Biden-era Use Of Controversial App To Allow Migrants To Board Flights, Except To Self-deport
Sheahan and Lyons did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comments on their new positions.
Noem served as South Dakota governor from January 2019 to January 2025, when she was sworn-in as the nation's eighth Department of Homeland Security chief.
She was the fourth member of the Trump administration to gain approval from the Senate, and is leading the department at a time when securing the border and tackling illegal immigration are top priorities for the new administration.
The administration has taken a number of actions to secure the border, including deploying the military, restarting wall construction and ending Biden-era parole programs.Original article source: Noem taps new ICE leadership to bring back accountability and results
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Trump will target US employers in next phase of immigration crackdown, Homan says
The Trump administration is planning to ramp up civil and criminal prosecutions of companies that employ workers without legal status, White House border czar Tom Homan said in an interview Wednesday. 'Worksite enforcement operations are going to massively expand,' Homan said. The White House has faced criticism from Democrats and even its own anti-immigration allies for exaggerating an immigrant crime wave while holding harmless the employers whose decisions shape huge sectors of the American economy. President Donald Trump 'won't prosecute companies for bribery and won't prosecute companies for hiring illegal immigrants,' Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., said on X Tuesday. 'This administration just takes care of its donors.' But behind the scenes, American companies are 'freaking out' about the possibility of civil and criminal sanctions, or about the operational impact of losing a huge labor force, said Chris Thomas, a partner at Holland & Hart, who represents employers in immigration cases. He said clients have been 'calling in a panic — asking if they should be looking for ways to cut out potentially undocumented workers.' (He added that his clients do not know themselves to be employing any.) Employers are 'very scared — folks in LA, particularly,' said Bruce Buchanan, a leading immigration lawyer based in Nashville. Trump appeared to respond to those worries on Thursday morning: 'Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,' he posted on Truth Social, promising that 'changes are coming.' For now, however, Homan confirmed that employers' fears are justified. Though the Trump administration prefers to focus on 'sanctuary' city policies that prevent police from turning over migrants who have committed crimes, this week's turmoil in Los Angeles began when federal agents raided four workplaces in the city's garment district as part of criminal investigations. Homan said the government will seek sanctions against employers. And major public companies have begun to warn investors that their models depend on migrant labor: 'Increased enforcement efforts with respect to existing immigration laws by governmental authorities may disrupt a portion of our workforce or our operations,' Smithfield, a major meatpacker, wrote in late March, the first time such language had appeared in its securities filings. DoorDash said in a recent filing that a crackdown 'may result in a decrease in the pool of Dashers.' 'They're coming here for a better life and a job, and I get that,' Homan said. 'The more you remove those magnets, the less people are going to come. If they can't get a job most of them aren't going to come.' Federal authorities have generally avoided targeting companies for a range of reasons, including the high burden of proof under laws that require showing that employers affirmatively knew the workers they hired lacked legal status. Unlike most developed economies, the US has no standardized national requirement that employers use its system for checking workers' papers, known as eVerify — and many workers evade that system by using a different legal worker's identity. Trump's first term saw some stepped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement action against employers, with a two-step nationwide audit in 2018 and a record-setting $80 million civil settlement against the giant Asplundh Tree Experts over an investigation that began in the Obama years. Allies had expected the enforcement, which typically comes as much as a year after worksite raids, to ramp up before the coronavirus pandemic derailed immigration enforcement. Employer enforcement 'makes sense, but it has political impact on both sides,' Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told Semafor. 'Many entrepreneurs who are Republican by inclination would protest mightily. They can't have it both ways.' Such a move 'would reverberate through Congress,' he said. A concerted focus on employer enforcement would also shake huge segments of the US economy. Almost a quarter of construction workers lack legal status, a 2021 survey found, and as many as half of meatpacking workers. A focus on those industries could also undercut two of Trump's campaign promises: to make housing more affordable and bring down food prices. 'I won on the border, and I won on groceries,' he told NBC's Kristen Welker in December. President Trump suggested in April that he would propose a guest worker program for some of those businesses: 'We have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to need people.' But ICE raided a Nebraska meatpacking plant this week. 'Congress has a job to do,' Homan said. 'We're going to do worksite enforcement operations until there's a deal made.' When I first asked Homan about employers' role, he turned to talking points about sanctuary cities and the importance of sending agents in to arrest 'bad guys' who municipal authorities wouldn't turn over. Are employers, I asked, 'bad guys' in his view? 'Depends,' he replied. 'I know some employers don't know a fraudulent document from a legal document. But I truly believe that nobody hires an illegal alien from the goodness of their heart. They hire them because they can work them harder, pay them less, and undercut their competition — that hires US citizen employees, and drive wages down.' And yet, if and when the Trump administration moves past the popular, theatrical pursuit of alleged gang members and criminals, the White House and Congress will need to make hard decisions about how America sees its vast migrant workforce. Even the most dedicated restrictionists, like Homan, acknowledge that criminals are a tiny minority. 'Most illegal aliens are regular working stiffs,' said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. 'If you're not going after those people, you're not going to change the fundamental calculus.' (Krikorian is a longtime leader of the US anti-immigration movement — a figure who was so marginal in the Republican Party 20 years ago that when I, as a young reporter for the conservative New York Sun, tried to quote him, my editor told me he was beyond the pale. Now he's the intellectual architect of White House policy.) Gallego's comment suggests that Democrats, flailing for an affirmative policy on the border and immigration, may also see employers, rather than workers, at the center of the debate. The 'magnet' of migration is a decades-long, tacit agreement that meatpackers, construction companies, and farmers can employ migrants without any real penalties, and without the kind of tax and regulatory enforcement that's common across other developed countries. The US has struggled for decades to reach an agreement to regularize that system. Restrictionists have long dreamed of trading the legalization of immigrants who arrived illegally as children, known as Dreamers, for broad use of employment authorization. But many in Trump's movement simply want fewer immigrants, pitting them against big American business and Democrats alike, and while the outlines of a deal have been clear since the early 2000s, the prospect of a bipartisan agreement seems as remote as ever. The mixed signals toward employers have fed cynicism among those who like Trump's economic nationalism. 'The contradiction at the heart of the administration's approach reveals a fundamental tension between populist rhetoric and pro-business reality. While cameras roll for dramatic deportation footage, the industries dependent on illegal migration are maintaining business as usual. This disconnect could ultimately undermine the economic nationalism that propelled the Trump campaign to victory,' Lee Fang wrote on Substack. Trump's focus on immigrants with criminal records in US cities has produced an expanding national conflict, per The New York Times. the apprehension among employers, who are bracing for a wave of audits.
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More than 30 arrested at immigration protest in Spokane sparked by arrest of 2 immigrants
Jun. 12—Immigration protests erupted in Spokane on Wednesday, sparking a massive police response and 30 arrests. Mayor Lisa Brown issued a 9:30 p.m. curfew for perhaps 1,000 protestors who flooded Riverfront Park and surrounding downtown streets. It's the first such measure since the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder. The curfew and police presence had the desired effect as most of the crowd dispersed. By 11 p.m. about 20 protesters remained. "We want everybody to be safe and we thought this was the best path forward in order to achieve that," Brown said. "I made the decision that the safest course of action was by Spokane Police, not ICE, to try to safely disperse the crowd." She made the call in response to hundreds of demonstrators who blocked federal immigration enforcement agents in Spokane on Wednesday evening from leaving a downtown immigration office reportedly with refugees who were detained at court hearings earlier in the day. Spokane Police Chief Kevin Hall said at a late-night news conference that while it appeared that officers deployed tear gas, it was actually smoke grenades. He also said Spokane police officers used pepper balls but did not fire rubber bullets. He said about 185 city officers responded to both incidents. Hall said that he not heard that any other law enforcement agency used rubber bullets. "Certainly there were peaceful folks demonstrating and utilizing their First Amendment rights, and there were also people in the crowd who were committing crimes," Hall said. The protest is arguably the most extreme local showing of resistance, among others in Los Angeles and across the country, to President Donald Trump's sweeping immigration crackdowns since he took office for the second time in January. The day of unrest began on Cataldo Avenue after former City Council President Ben Stuckart sent a social media post at about 1 p.m. asking "that if you care at all about these illegal detainers you meet me at 411 West Cataldo by 2 p.m. I am going to set in front of the bus. Feel free to join me .... "The Latino community needs the rest of our community. Not tonight, not Saturday but right now!!!!" Stuckart was responding to the arrest of 21-year-old Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez, who is seeking asylum from Venezuela, and Joswar Slater Rodriguez Torres, a Colombian national also in his early twenties. Stuckart said he officially became the Venezuelan's legal guardian three weeks ago, and arrived with him and the man from Colombia for a scheduled "check-in" appointment at the Spokane facility this morning. The two were in the United States on work visas and had full-time employment at the Walmart in Airway Heights until Friday, when their "work permits were revoked," he said. Both young men are hard workers who have been diligent about following the legal process and building better lives, Stuckart said. "You can't help spend time with them and not understand just what great young men they are," Stuckart said. "They've done everything right, and they're escaping horrible situations, and then to have them come in for a checkup and be detained illegally is morally reprehensible." For the first few hours, most of the demonstration remained peaceful, aside from a masked person who covered the driver's side of the bus windshield with a layer of white spray paint about a half hour into the demonstration. More than a dozen protestors joined Stuckart despite warnings from a pair of uniformed federal agents who came out of the building to warn the crowd that obstructing their pathway could lead to arrests and charges. Protesters responded by parking their vehicles in front and behind the bus. "I don't want this bus to leave with my friends," Stuckart said. "And I told everybody I was down here, and if people wanted to join me, they could. It's not right. It's not morally right, what's happening." The Cataldo crowd included several prominent politicians, activists and community leaders, including Spokane County Democratic Party Chair Naida Spencer; state Rep. Timm Orsmby; Spokane City Council candidate Sarah Dixit; union advocate and a former Democratic candidate for local, state and federal offices Ted Cummings; Thrive International Director Mark Finney and Latinos en Spokane Director Jennyfer Mesa. While the protestors share a desire to see the young men let go, and frustrations with federal immigration enforcement, they disagreed as to how. Some were a silent presence, others carried signs and chanted, while others were more direct in showing their displeasure by shouting at the law enforcement officers. The disconnect became evident as barriers were formed in front of the gated parking lot using benches, cones and Lime scooters, taken down by others and then reformed in front of the line of Spokane police and Spokane County Sheriff's deputy cars next to the building. Mesa said both of the young men are clients of Latinos en Spokane. But her presence Wednesday was meant as a gesture for her friends, not just her clients. "They're good kids," she said, choking back tears. "They have been volunteering, they're doing the process and everything legally. I just don't understand why they're being detained." Stuckart said the federal employees in the ICE office would not allow him to accompanying Alvarez Perez during his appointment and they did not disclose why either young men were being detained. Stuckart estimated it took around seven minutes from when they went back for their appointment for federal officials to come out and inform him they were being detained. "And each of them has a stack of legal paperwork at least 2 inches thick, with all their asylum paperwork and their guardianship paperwork, and they clearly didn't look at it," Stuckart said. "They just said, 'We're detaining them.'" Stuckart said he started the legal guardianship process earlier this year after a call from Latinos en Spokane for local residents to assist local "vulnerable juveniles." He volunteers with the organization regularly and said he has greatly enjoyed getting to know Alvarez Perez, who's lived in Spokane for six months. Alvarez Perez came to Spokane by way of Miami, after walking through nine countries on his way from Venezuela and meeting Rodriguez Torres along the way. Stuckart said his main responsibility as a guardian is to provide mentorship. "He's not living with us, and I'm not in charge of his finances or anything," Stuckart said. The gathering grew to about 100 people at about 5 p.m., including about 15 blocking the bus. Stuckart was not in front of the bus at the time, but he remained at the protest. Among the protestors was Alicea Gonzalez, 27, who brought her 5-year-old son Javell and father, Adam Betancort, 46. She wore a Mexico T-shirt to the protest, and the pair brought flags, one of Mexico, the other half-Mexican, half-American. The latter flag is representative of Betancourt and his identity, he said while holding the flapping fabric towards passing cars on the corner of Cataldo Ave and Washington Street, right outside the ICE facility. "I'm American and I'm a Mexican," he said. Though they don't know either of the men detained by ICE, they're familiar with their story; Gonzalez's maternal grandmother crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1950s, floating across the river in a car tire, she said. Betancort's parents are also immigrants from Mexico. "I appreciate that; I wouldn't have the life that I live without her," Gonzalez said. "So I'm just showing my support, letting people know that they have people out here that will stand behind them, and use their voices to speak up for them." Around 5:25 p.m., a group of roughly 150 protesters ran around the back of the building to obstruct three unmarked law enforcement vehicles from leaving a fenced-in parking area abutting the public parking area for Riverfront Park. Protesters shouted "Shame" repeatedly and about 10 of them linked arms in a line in front of the parking lot gate. A handful of agents, faces covered by ski masks and sunglasses, began to push the human chain of demonstrators, knocking their glasses and handmade signs scattering on the ground. Protestors and officers shoved each other in a mass of yelling and chanting for about a minute before the agents retreated into their parking lot and the gate closed. Not long after the agents retreated back inside, a handful of protesters hauled Lime scooters and park benches as a barricade to block vehicles from leaving from the gate. Spokane Police officers arrived shortly before 6:30 p.m., followed by Spokane County sheriff's deputies. The local law enforcement response grew to dozens outside the building by about 6:45 p.m. The group then formed a sort of protective barrier for an exit on the Washington Street side of the building. They carried weapons to shoot less-lethal munitions, with what appeared to be tear gas canisters and large hip bags with unidentified materials inside. As the officers widened their perimeter to encompass much of the yard abutting the Washington Street side of the building, another group of deputies and officers began forcibly removing protestors from around the small bus. A Spokane Police Department officer spoke over the regional SWAT car speaker system at 7:13 p.m. and ordered everyone present to disperse. The officer gave the demonstrators five minutes to do so. Few left the scene when police warned at 7:22 p.m. that they would use force if the crowd did not leave. Stuckart, Spencer and at least a dozen others were arrested just after 7:30 p.m. Brown said she talked with Stuckart earlier in the day and it was clear he was prepared to get arrested in an attempt to prevent the bus from leaving. She also consulted with Washington Attorney General Nick Brown and connected Stuckart to Nick Brown. "Ben did inform me that members of his group intended to peacefully protest, and they intended to stay at the facility until they were arrested," she said at the conference. The mayor said she told Stuckart that Spokane police would comply with the Keep Washington Working Act, strive to keep the peace and "enforce Spokane laws." The Keep Washington Working Act restricts state and local law enforcement in Washington from assisting federal immigration enforcement. She said that arresting protesters blocking immigration detainees from being jailed is not a violation of the state law because protestors were violating other city laws, like blocking the public right-of-way. She said protesters were warned repeatedly if they were violating laws before arrests were made. "The vast majority were peaceful, expressing their viewpoints as they have every right to do and compliant with officers," Brown said. "There's serious concerns about federal policies. We want people to feel free to express those concerns and we want to keep everyone safe." Police began detaining the 15 or so demonstrators who enveloped an unmarked red van with two ICE officers in the front seat. The windows of the van were tinted, but protestors thought it may soon carry the two men ICE detained. Police warned the demonstrators if they didn't move, they'd be arrested for obstruction. The 15, including Stuckart, had prepared to be arrested, writing phone numbers up their arms and leaving belongings with other protesters. Some went willingly, quietly putting their own hands behind their back as officers led them one by one to a SWAT car parked nearby. One protestor resisted their detainment, wriggling and contorting themselves while yelling as multiple officers pinned them to the group and tied their hands and feet. Eventually, each person who enveloped the red van was detained. Someone deflated one of the van's tires and it was towed off hours later after police had dispersed the crowd in that area. A second, planned protest at Riverfront Park escalated hours after the Stuckart-led event and riot-clad officers began shooting tear gas and making arrests, with the two eventually merging. Harris Kahler, a 23-year-old protestor said he was standing in the front lines when officers pulled out paint guns and shot the ground in front of the line around 8:40 p.m. After that, smoke canisters were thrown and Kahler kicked one back in response. Kahler then went to grab another, turned around and believed he was shot in the lower back with a rubber bullet. "I'm in a lot of pain, but if I physically have to be here, I'll be the shield I got to be," Kahler said. In a telephone interview, City Council President Betsy Wilkerson said she acknowledged the right of everyone to protest. "If I wasn't somewhere else, I might be there myself to support our sisters and brothers," she said. "I'm just hoping for the best outcome, elevating the issue and getting people involved in the way they feel they best can, and that's a protest. "With that being said, we're not trying to throw more wood on this fire, to elevate it to more than a peaceful protest." Reached by phone, City Councilman Jonathan Bingle said he fully supports the right of every American to peacefully protest. "It's one of the rights that makes our country so great! But, the moment a protest turns into small vandalism, threats, or lawlessness, it is no longer protected speech. It becomes a crime, and should be dealt with as such," Bingle said. "I am stunned by the position of some of our current and former elected officials in our city. Instead of standing for the rule of law and the officers who keep our streets safe, they seem more interested in scoring points or justifying bad behavior. That is not leadership." City Councilman Paul Dillon in an interview that he supported those who were willing to stand up for their beliefs. "No human being is illegal," he said. "This is a direct result of the escalation and fears the Trump administration inflicts on communities which create chaos." Reporters Elena Perry, Thomas Clouse, Emry Dinman and Corbin Vanderby contributed to this report. Elena Perry's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
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Elon and the Genius Trap
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Was Elon Musk ever a genius? Yes, he revolutionized the electric-car industry and space travel. Yes, he once seemed to represent America' restored American confidence in its ability to innovate at the cutting edge of technology. But Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and he doesn't regularly appear in headlines as a prominent tech genius. In fact, many well-informed people probably don't even know his name. So what makes one man merely wildly accomplished and another a genius? And which descriptor makes a man more likely to engage in an ego-crushing battle with the president? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Helen Lewis, author of The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea. Explaining how Musk tanked his reputation has many ways: First, he alienated environmentalists by teaming up with Trump, and then he alienated Trump fans by insulting their hero. Another way is clear by looking at American culture's historical relationship with 'genius,' and how it tends to go wrong. Genius, it turns out, is less a series of accomplishments than a form of addiction. It traps the men who indulge it, and they often end up, like Musk, depleted. We talk with Lewis about what Musk has in common with Thomas Edison, how the psychedelics fit into the archetype, and what the possible paths are for Musk moving forward.[] News clip: The bromance is over. President Trump and Elon Musk trading barbs today over Republicans' 'big, beautiful bill.' Hanna Rosin: Well, last week, something no one could have expected to happen finally happened. The president of the United States and the richest man in the world had a spectacular falling out. News clip: A pretty intense back-and-forth between Donald Trump and Elon Musk— News clip: Musk now claiming he won Trump the 2024 election to Trump threatening to cancel Musk's federal contracts— News clip: Elon Musk tweeting within the past one minute: 'Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That's the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!' Rosin: The feud between Trump and Musk escalated at a bewildering pace. Donald Trump: Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if it went well anymore. I was surprised. Rosin: Trump may have been surprised, but to a lot of us watching, a partnership of two egos this huge was doomed to break up. This week, Musk has tried to patch things up, saying he regrets some of what he said, without specifying what exactly. But Trump is more or less not engaging, and it looks like, for the moment at least, Musk's reputation has hit rock bottom. I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Today, we consider the long arc of Elon Musk in the context of other historical figures who, like him, were given the revered title of 'genius.' Not that long ago, Musk was considered a visionary by Americans across the political spectrum, an inventor solving climate change, space exploration, and, really, whatever he set his mind to. But as we all know, the last few years have seen his reputation crater on the left: His support of Trump, his buyout of Twitter, his online presence, loaded with memes and conspiracy theories. Basically, anything to troll the libs, many of whom had been his fans. Now his fallout with the president is making him suspect on the right, leaving him a constituency of no one. So how do we understand the arc of Musk, someone who could have gone down in history as one of the great tech geniuses but, instead, used his reputation to get himself more and more attention and, in the process, seems to have torched that very reputation? As it so happens, staff writer Helen Lewis has a very timely book out next week that helps explain this pattern. It's titled The Genius Myth, and Musk is its quintessential modern example. As Lewis argues, societies build myths of individual geniuses, and often those geniuses overstay their welcome, having second or third acts as they try to be experts in every field or to simply keep the attention they're accustomed to. I asked her to put the week's Musk news into a wider picture, and to explain why she thinks we should avoid the label 'genius' altogether. Here's our conversation. [] Rosin: Helen, welcome to the show. Helen Lewis: Thank you. Rosin: Sure. So I wanna start before this feud between Trump and Musk, maybe even before Musk bought Twitter. So let's say it's 2020, and this is when Trump publicly calls Musk 'one of our great geniuses' and compares him to Thomas Edison. What is it about Musk that qualifies him for that rarefied public title of genius? Lewis: At the time, I think the assumption was that he had revolutionized not just one but two industries, which is very rare. You know, in driving down the cost of space parts, he undoubtedly challenged, essentially, the kind of government-funded monopoly and the slow way that space exploration was going. You know, there was this humbling period for America, where it couldn't even get its own astronauts up into space. It had to rely on, you know, hitching a ride with the Russians. And he managed to, in that sense, restore a kind of American pride in itself. And then, obviously, you have Tesla and its electric vehicles, and turning electric vehicles away from their previous reputation, which was the Toyota Prius, which is a sort of thing you bought as a kind of hair shirt, right— a hair shirt with wheels on to say, I'm sorry for killing the planet—into the idea that an electric car was something you might have because it was cool and it was a good car. And both of those really did remind me actually of Thomas Edison, because both of them are kind of—the nickname that Edison had was the 'American Prometheus.' They were both about an idea of America as a place that still is at the white-hot edge of technology. You know, a place you can still build things and do things. Rosin: Okay, so Elon has these amazing accomplishments. He restores a certain kind of American confidence in itself. But is a genius just someone who accomplishes great things? Like, in the book, you make a really interesting comparison to Tim Berners-Lee, who's thought of as the actual inventor of the World Wide Web. So why does one get to be a genius, and the other is a man who just does a lot of amazing accomplishments? Lewis: Well, you have to also, I think, be prepared to play the role of the genius in public and inhabit that role. And you know, Tim Berners-Lee has had a lot of acclaim. He's got a knighthood here in Britain. He's an honorary fellow in lots of places. But he doesn't swagger about like he's a kind of special sort of human, a class apart, which is I think what Musk, you know, has accepted for himself—that, you know, and has again, like Thomas Edison done, driven a lot of that mythology himself. You know, Thomas Edison notoriously worked through the nights at the laboratory in Menlo Park with his team. And Elon Musk had a similar mythology, which is all about the fact that, you know, he never sleeps. You know, he would have a sleeping bag on the floor of the factory because he was so dedicated. And, like, he was just relentless, and everybody had to be 'extremely hardcore.' So the argument in the book is that achievements are one thing, but we're also into this idea of a kind of mythology around a person. There's this kind of embrace of specialness. And the line that I give that's the, kind of, classic example of this is, you know, Elon Musk currently has—where are we now? I mean, who knows by the time this comes out how many acknowledged children we have, but I think we're currently at 14, and they're called things like Romulus and X Æ A-12. And, you know, Tim Berners-Lee's kids are called Alice and Ben, right? Rosin: (Laughs.) Lewis: This, to me, is just, like: One of you is just a normal person who happens to have done some cool stuff, and one of you has decided I'm gonna try and, like, optimize everything in my life to be a really great story to sound special. Rosin: Right. So the key ingredient of genius is that you're willing to step into the role or mythology of genius. You're willing to sort of lean into the story about yourself as a public genius. Lewis: Right. And you also become a symbol of something bigger. That's what I mean about—becoming a national symbol is a very obvious version of this. William Shakespeare is not just a brilliant playwright—I think that's unarguable—but he became, over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, an argument for the English language at a time that Britain was expanding its ambitions abroad. You know, this was the kind of high point of the British empire and, therefore, we needed a playwright to match. And I think you can actually see a similar thing with maybe someone like Chinua Achebe, who becomes a kind of symbol of the nation, or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for Nigeria now. You know, she's writing novels that are concerned with the Nigerian experience or the Nigerian American experience, inhabiting that bigger role than just being another writer. Rosin: So when you think of Musk in these terms, like how he has successfully styled himself as this very special category of person—the genius—how did that play into his relationship with Trump? Lewis: Well, if you have two people who are both convinced that they're geniuses, it doesn't usually work well. And actually, maybe this is something that Musk should have known, because the car company he owns—obviously, Tesla—is named after Nikola Tesla. And Nikola Tesla, an absolutely brilliant engineer, walked out of working there. He just couldn't get on with Thomas Edison. The story goes that he had a bet, and he won it, and Edison refused to pay up, which bizarrely has an analog in the story that Sam Harris, the former member of the 'Intellectual Dark Web,' tells about having a bet about COVID deaths with Elon Musk. And Sam Harris won, and Elon failed to pay up. So, you know, I think the trouble is genius is always a story about ego, and I don't think I was alone in predicting that the Trump-Musk relationship would at some point explode, because you have two giant silverback-gorilla egos wrestling for dominance, and that is a tension that simply can't be sustained. Rosin: Right, right. And it is true that Trump called himself a genius. He doesn't call many people geniuses, but he did refer to himself as a genius. In the book, you write about how if we declare someone a genius, we believe they have magical powers to do anything, as opposed to, say, specialized skills to do a few specific things. I was wondering if that contributed to Musk's downfall—this idea (that maybe Trump had also) that he could fix any problem, like inefficiencies in the government, just whatever. You set the genius loose and the genius fixes everything. Lewis: Yeah, DOGE is a story of enormous hubris. I think everyone would agree that the American government, like all governments, has a certain amount of waste and inefficiency built into it. But the idea that you could do what Musk did—which is go in with a small cadre of lieutenants, lock everybody else out, and start deleting things based on simple-keyword searches—and that this would not have any negative or unintended consequences is laughable. And the reason that I think Musk thought that worked is that, to some extent, it had worked, particularly at Twitter—which, in the book Character Limit, his takeover there is chronicled. And he did exactly what would then become the DOGE playbook there: you know, brought in his lieutenants, cut the head count, told everyone that they were lazy and that only super, 'extremely hardcore' people could stay. And, you know, sure enough: Twitter is not what it once was. And I thought his tenure at Twitter would be a disaster, and I think probably in economic terms it has been. But what it did was it bought him the attention of Donald Trump. And that looked like it was a very good bet because he was then in a position to make sure he had extremely preferential access to the government in terms of his contracts. That's now a more questionable outcome, given the falling out between him and Donald Trump. Rosin: It's very interesting how you describe the history of Twitter, given your book, because even though his management of Twitter was not genius-level successful, it does seem to have increased his mythology as a genius. Like, he sort of spread the word and myth about himself via Twitter, even as he was doing, you know, less-than-genius things at the actual company. Lewis: The original title for the book, working title, for a long time was The Selfish Genius, which I liked as a pun and, it turned out, no one else got. But it did go to this idea that you are more likely to be held as a genius if you run a kind of election campaign for it. So, you know, one of my examples would be Isaac Newton, undoubtedly a brilliant mathematician but also extremely keen that he got the credit for calculus rather than his German rival, Gottfried Leibniz. You know, these things don't necessarily happen by accident. Often, the genius themselves or their fans, you know, run a kind of publicity campaign for this idea of them as a genius. Rosin: Right. Part of being 'the genius,' like, with quotes around it, is being your own PR around the genius. Like, you just have to be good at that. Lewis: Yeah. Or you have to go and sit in obscurity and kind of let other people create the mythology for you. Rosin: Right. And I guess Musk does both. I mean, he's able to rally an army of fans, stans, and to also do his own PR. Lewis: And there's a phrase that Manvir Singh, the anthropologist, uses about shamans in traditional society, which is that they cultivate an air of 'charismatic otherness.' And I think that also very helpfully describes what geniuses do, or the people around geniuses do. I can't remember who it was who said that every Silicon Valley startup essentially functions like a cult. You know, there's this mission, and there's this one guy at the top of it who's leading everybody on the mission. And I think probably, in the case of Musk's earlier businesses, when he was trying to, essentially, solve climate change and solve space exploration, people did want to join the Elon cult. It's just when the mission is Let's turn Twitter into a more effective vehicle for racism and videos of people losing their shit on street corners, who wants to join that mission? Who wants to, you know, sacrifice their weekends to believe in that? Rosin: Well, this is such an interesting moment because as the breakup is happening—and we're in the middle of it, so we don't know where it will land and what will happen to Musk's reputation, but—the language and the reputation is shifting in real time. So Trump has now reportedly referred to Musk as part genius, part child—he adds the word child—but also crazy. And I'm just wondering if there's some moment where, you know, it's the one drop in the milk that curdles the milk—like, some line where what people used to perceive as eccentricities of the so-called genius suddenly seem like, you know, real negatives, not fake, charismatic negatives, but actual negatives—and if you've been tracing that line. Lewis: The danger for Elon Musk now is that, having alienated basically anyone on the broad left of politics, you know, his original constituency—back when he was a Democratic donor and he was talking about electric vehicles as necessary for combating climate change—they're all gone. He's now alienating anybody on the right who is loyal to Trump, which is, on the surface, everybody. You know, who knows how they feel in the secrets of their hearts, but ostensibly the Republican Party is the Trump party, so he doesn't really have a kind of caucus who want to advance him as an argument. This is what I mean in the book, about genius being an argument for something. Calling someone a genius is often a way of making an argument. And the argument that Elon Musk, as lionizing him, was making, is the idea of: Government is slow and sclerotic and holds back innovation. You know, You need to let Tesla do its thing. You need to let SpaceX do its thing. That's the only way we get to the future. And of course, that's a partial story. Tesla makes a lot of money by trading carbon credits to other car companies. It makes a lot of money from government subsidies from electric cars. You know, these stories are very rarely as rugged and 'Randian' as they appear on the surface. But, you know, Elon Musk was used as an argument for the singular innovative genius, and that's a right-wing argument predominantly in America as it currently stands. But having lost the left, he's now just quite spectacularly lost the right, and you look at his approval ratings, and they are in the Mariana Trench—I mean, just could not be lower. Rosin: When we're back, I ask Helen what happens when a reputation craters like Musk's has, and what the myth of genius can leave out of the story. That's when we're back. [Break] Rosin: And so that's what we are witnessing in real time now with Elon Musk, the kind of deconstruction of whatever mythology he had built around himself, and we just still don't know how it will play out. So once he no longer effectively represents that argument, maybe the sort of glow fades like he's not a genius anymore, because genius needs a purpose—like, a political or social purpose, the label 'genius.' And when he's not doing it effectively, Trump is less interested. Lewis: Well, yeah. I mean, that's the point, isn't it? Musk is no longer as useful to Trump. Not least, I think the biggest thing that he did that was a mistake was to give his interview to Mishal Husain of Bloomberg and say, I'm not going to give any more money in the midterms, at which point, your reason for stifling your doubts about why this guy is toting his kid around and, you know, jumping in the air, and doing mad posts, and all that stuff is just taken away, right? There was a lot of Shut up and, like, We need his money. And as soon as you say, I'm cutting off the money, then people are free to air the opinions that they've clearly always held in the background anyway. Rosin: Right. Like, the news about Musk's drug use, which had been bubbling up but is now pretty voluminous—although, we should say that Musk recently said he's not taking drugs and simply tried prescription ketamine a few years ago. That said, I could imagine a world where, previously, people would look at his reported psychedelic use and kind of excuse that as the habits of an eccentric genius. And now they look at it more—now that the 'genius' label is fading—as more just genuinely dysfunctional. Lewis: Yes. I mean, you are right to mention, you know, the drug use, because it's interesting that, again, genius is a sort of connection with the divine in a secular society. It's a promise of something superhuman. And so it's not surprising, to me, that you see lots of these tech guys talking about going to Burning Man, talking about doing ayahuasca, talking about altered states of consciousness—because that, again, positions them as modern shamans. You know, they're in connection with something that is outside of the experience of ordinary mortals. I have this line in the book that genius transmutes oddness into specialness. And I think what happens is a lot of reverse engineering, where somebody gets anointed a genius, and then their whole biography is kind of combed through for things that confirm the theory. So it can be, you know, Oh, look at his childhood. In the case of Elon Musk, the things we hear about his childhood was that he would have these reveries, where he would drift off, and that he was badly bullied. And those are, funnily enough, the same things that you hear about Thomas Edison's childhood. He was deaf and seemed to be spending a lot of time in the world of his own. Now, that's true of lots of children, most of whom don't go on to greater achievements. But because you've put this label on someone, we look back and read everything through that prism. Rosin: Right. Okay. So what does the template leave out then? Like, in the case of Elon, you know, there's a template. It leads to your rise in success. What parts are not told? What people get left out of a story like this? Lewis: I mean, all the support staff, really, and all the people who kind of grease the wheels for the great man get slowly downgraded—you know, all the collaborators. You know, I still regularly catch myself and copy wanting to write 'Elon Musk, founder of Tesla.' And, of course, he wasn't, right? It was founded by two other guys, and he took it over. I mean, he was an early investor, but he got the title co-founder as part of a legal settlement. You know, and the fact that X—you know, he was forced out of PayPal by Peter Thiel and the board. You know, he had failures along the way too. All of that stuff kind of gets hastily kind of airbrushed away. Like, I always think of it a bit kind of like a scaffolding around the kind of statue of David, right? And we knock away the scaffolding, and then we just got the perfect statue. And that's the way that we tend to look at geniuses. You know, all of that kind of stuff. And, you know, I have a chapter in the book, obviously, about wives. You know, having somebody who is both your kind of domestic partner and somebody who is maybe a muse or maybe your kind of collaborator, but happy to take a secondary role, that's a huge, huge advantage to you. And also, material conditions: You know, why did Elon Musk move from South Africa to America? Because he wanted to study at the best university, where people were doing the most interesting stuff. He wanted to get funding from venture capitalists who are based in Silicon Valley. You know, Elon Musk could not have been Elon Musk in Pretoria. If he'd stayed there, he might have been a very successful businessman, but he wouldn't be who he is today. So this is what I find deeply irritating about the people who think that, you know, it's all them and they're this unique success story. Elon Musk's success story, credit to him—he has a great deal to do with it. But it is also a story of universities, of American culture, of American wealth, of everything that [Silicon] Valley built up over the course of more than half a century. There are a lot of other bit-part players in the story who shouldn't be, you know, downgraded so we can focus only on the protagonist. Rosin: You know, I deeply appreciated your chapter about wives because one fact that always breaks my brain is how, across the decades and even up until now, we so closely associate the term genius with men. And you created a very simple formula, which is that a genius needs a wife, and it's much less often that a woman has a wife. And so, you know, that's part of the mythology. Lewis: Yeah, I mean, Gertrude Stein had Alice B. Toklas, and that worked out pretty well for her. But it's been throughout history, yes, I think straight women have particularly suffered. I remembered this from writing Difficult Women, my previous book, which was about feminism. I had a chapter on the suffrage movement in the U.K., and there was a quote from the suffragette Hannah Mitchell that said, No cause was won between dinner and tea—which, to translate that into American meals, that's actually lunch and dinner. But her point was that if you had domestic responsibilities, your thinking time was disrupted, and actually not just, you know, in sheer volume of hours, but just in the amount of your kind of brain space you could dedicate to having big thoughts. And it's really interesting that so many—you know, look at the MacArthur genius grants now. They are about taking away money worries and domestic concerns, in order that people can excel to their fullest potential. We all acknowledge that it's really, really hard to manage that kind of big, demanding career as well as being a primary caregiver. In fact, it's pretty much impossible. I mean, Marie Curie managed it, just about, but very few people do. Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. Now, Elon's interest in propagating little Elons—in your book, you describe a long history of geniuses being very interested in the continued propagation of geniuses as a special class. How does he fit into that history? Lewis: Well, it's the propagation of people like themselves, really. I think that's the thing. Rosin: But isn't it also this idea that you can propagate yourself? I mean, it's almost like trying to sort of take this idea of the genius and reduce it to some kind of perfect science? Like, you can just replicate it or clone it. Lewis: Yeah, it's hardcore belief in the power of hereditary genius, which that's the title of the book, the 19th-century book, by Francis Galton, the eugenicist, Hereditary Genius, in which he attempted to categorize all of Britain into different classes, which he all gave a different letter to and worked out how many people fitted in each one. Which, you know, to me, now that obviously sounds like a sort of deranged plan, but this was at a time when people were obsessed with classification and, also, because of the recent discovery of evolution by natural selection, a real interest in breeding and its effect on animals and, therefore, humans. And from that, as you say, you do get this horrific legacy of eugenics, as practiced by both the Nazis and in lots of America, including California. But it persists in these soft forms about people wanting to have smart kids. Now, that's something that everybody would like to do at a kind of basic level. But there is this often-recurrent belief among supersmart people that their children will be supersmart. And actually, statistically, the issue with that is that there is a very common phenomenon known as 'reversion to the mean,' which means that, you know, if you are very smart, you are an outlier—you've probably got the kind of best version of all of the genes that influence intelligence—and that your children are not likely to be outstanding to the exact level that you are and the exact way that you are. So it's, to some extent, you know, a delusion, but it's a very recurrent one. And the story of the genius sperm bank, which there's a book by David Plotz about it, which I highly recommend to people. Essentially, an eccentric millionaire called Robert K. Graham, who made his money inventing shatterproof plastic lenses for spectacles, decides that he's going to go and collect the sperm of a load of Nobel Prize winners, in order to kind of breed a sort of, you know, better, superior race of Americans because America was getting very degenerate. I mean, this is the bit that is always—the side adjunct to it is: Why do we need these geniuses? And the answer usually comes back, Modern culture is degraded. Everybody's lazy. Everybody's degenerate. Often that comes with racial overtones. You know, it's no longer pure (read: white European). And you know, so he said that he got three Nobel winners to donate, including William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor, and then embarked on an enthusiastic second career as a scientific racist and eugenicist. And I think, you know, Shockley is an interesting template for a kind of proto-Elon Musk in the 20th century, in that he had an undoubtedly distinguished first half of his career, and then the second half of his career was spent saying increasingly radical things to enormous pushback, which he then presented as him being whatever the 1970s word for 'canceled' was. You know, as if the reaction itself proved that he was doing something right. And also, in both cases, about a feeling that maybe the creative juice of the career had run dry but, you know, the attention tap needed to stay on. And that's something that I think you see with lots of people who talk about this kind of breeding of geniuses, is that they know that they're putting their hand on, you know, a hob that is still hot. They know people react enormously strongly to these discussions about race and intelligence, and, therefore, they can't stop themselves from dabbling in it. Rosin: Right. Okay. So that's where we are now with Musk. Now he's a little bit of a different case study than some of the historical geniuses you write about, because he's alternately a genius and a juvenile idiot. Like, he attracts genius sycophants as much as genius debunkers. What does that mean? Like, none of these other geniuses existed in the age of social media, where you had so much controversy around someone. Do you think that points to a different path for him? Lewis: He's certainly a much more unfiltered genius than you've got in the past, but there are precursors to that. One of the reasons Thomas Edison is so famous is that he was operating in Menlo Park in New Jersey, which was a short train ride away from New York, which meant that if you were an enterprising young reporter on a big New York paper, you could get on a very easy train and be there in a couple of hours and stroll into his laboratory—where he would spin you a yarn about the latest thing that he was creating—and go home, write it up, and everybody would be, you know, excited. Being Thomas Edison correspondent was a good gig. And so you did get a lot of him being publicized by a whole cadre of people whose careers came to depend on him. And as you say, in his later career, after his great success helping the electricity grid be put into New York, he did really run dry. He did some very badly received experiments with ore mining. By that point, he'd moved out of the kind of useful phase of his career into the kind of oracle phase. And people would come, and he would, you know, talk to them about intelligence and the spirit world and his plans for world peace. And that is the phase—I think you're right—that Elon Musk is currently in. The only difficulty is that he doesn't have that filtered through a load of newspaper reporters in whose interest it is to present him in the best and most interesting possible light, you know, to perpetuate the myth of this kind of savant. What we have, instead, is him posting pictures of himself, like AI-generated images of him as Kekius Maximus, the gladiator, which makes it slightly harder to maintain the kind of genius mystique that you might hope for in those situations. Rosin: Right, right, right. Yeah. I think the phrase you used about Edison was coasting on the fumes of his own publicity, and it made me see very vividly the possible future paths for Musk. Like, you can see a future where he just goes on and fixes Tesla and, you know, does some useful things for space exploration, as you mentioned. But there's this other path, where he's just increasingly a meme—like, increasingly ridiculous. Lewis: He's at a crossroads right now. And, you know, Joe Rogan, the podcaster, who is a personal friend of his, said on his show last week, I think Elon needs to put the phone down. And I think at that point, when, you know, your extremely anti-woke friend who says—you know, I watched Joe Rogan do standup for the piece I wrote for The Atlantic last year, and he said, you know, Elon's so intelligent. He makes me feel like a man and his dog when I talk to him—if that friend is the one saying to you probably time to put the phone down, you have to hope that he would listen. But I don't know if he will. But that is the great paradox of Elon Musk—is that, you know, he has two futures ahead of him: One, beloved sage who got us to Mars; one, vile shitposter who burned away a promising reputation while still maintaining a huge amount of money. You know, this might be a sort of delightful bump on the road in the Musk story. You know, this might be the sort of Rocky-style montage, where he was at his worst low, and from that he rebuilt. Because these are stories and they're, therefore, you know, flexible. And, you know, then they could be rewritten. But you can almost feel everything bending towards the shape that the story wants to be. That's how I felt when I was writing this, is that we have these templates and the facts end up being nudged towards them, and people end up acting in ways that do that actively too. Rosin: Right. Let's move into an alternate universe, which is something that Musk likes to do, where Elon is not subject to the genius myth. How should we think of a person like Musk? Would you be just evaluating accomplishments? Like, would you say something a person did is genius, but you would not step into the trap of calling a person a genius, because that triggers so much else mythology—but it would be reasonable to say, Oh, this company or this decision that a person made was a genius decision? Like, would that be a better way to use that term? Lewis: That's, ultimately, how I see it. It's better to talk about moments of inspiration, of fingertip touches with a divine, if you want to see it like that. You know, I don't want to be a killjoy who crushes people's appreciation of— you know, I write in the book about looking at the paintings of Van Gogh, which I just absolutely love, and you know, the fact that he melded together impressionism and Japanese woodblock prints in this completely new synthesis. And the paintings, you can just feel the emotion pouring out of them and the brush work is so distinctive. I just—you know, I love them, and I'm bowled over by them. And I don't want to cheapen that by being, you know, grubby about it and saying, It's just a painting. My 5-year-old could have done that. No one's better than anyone else. No, I do think that those paintings are some of the best expressions of genius, in the sense of being kind of unfathomable. But I do think that the mythology itself is essentially marketing, you know, in the case of Van Gogh, very much created by his sister-in-law. So his posthumous reputation is bolstered by the idea of him as the tortured genius. And I think you're exactly right. In the case of Musk, it would be more interesting to read an appraisal of Tesla as a company or SpaceX as a company, and just take him out of the equation entirely, because I think that he's there looming over it and maybe, really, clouding people's judgment about those companies. Tesla is, you know, is paying him vast amounts of money, to the extent that it is currently in court about how much they want to pay him, because they believe that having a genius at the helm is so vital to what they're doing. And that may be profoundly distorting the reality of Tesla's market position. So yeah, I think it would be a healthier story to just try and put aside the mythology and see what's actually happening. Rosin: Right. Well, that is so helpful, Helen. Thank you so much for helping us understand this moment through the lens of genius. And congratulations on your book. Lewis: Thank you. [] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at I'm Hanna Rosin. Talk to you next week. Article originally published at The Atlantic
