Latest news with #Haldeman
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Responders train for radiological emergencies in Lancaster County
LANCASTER COUNTY, Pa. (WHTM) — Emergency responders and residents in Lancaster County are staying prepared in the event of a radiological incident. 'The last incident that we primarily had was a vehicle fire on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Lancaster County,' said Chris Haldeman, Captain of the Lancaster County Special Operations Team. 'There was radiological pharmaceuticals inside the vehicle and when the vehicle caught fire basically the led things that were holding the radiological medicine inside melted and released the radiation into the air.' It's a very dangerous situation which could cause health issues. 'We had to contain the vehicle for a certain amount of days to make sure that it was clean,' he added. 'We had to make sure that everything was completely safe for everyone around the vehicle.' Haldeman told abc27 News, no injuries or fatalities stemmed from this incident — a reason why Lancaster County officials believe nuclear disaster trainings are so important. 'Over 100 people from the community have volunteered to come out on a Saturday to help us make this as realistic as possible, not only for our folks who are going to have to do this in a real world situation, but also the community that they now know that, hey, we've got this,' said Ray D'Agostino, Vice Chairman of the Lancaster County board of commissioners. Volunteers took part in a screening process — where officials would check them for contamination using radiological meters. 'As we find sources on them, we remove them either with that ends tape or we remove the clothing items that are affected and get them cleaned up so that they are no longer affected,' Haldeman said. D'Agostino says federally required trainings like this have been successful. 'Part of success looks at the idea of, well, how did we do it? What can we do better? What are the things that we can be looking at to know when something would actually happen,' D'Agostino added. Download the abc27 News+ app on your Roku, Amazon Fire TV Stick, and Apple TV devices The next training session like this will take place in October. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CBC
20-03-2025
- Politics
- CBC
The Canadian roots of Elon Musk's conspiracist grandpa
Raised in Saskatchewan, Joshua Haldeman was a tech-utopian, politician and apartheid fan By Geoff Leo Mar. 20, 2025 Joshua Haldeman was just one of thousands of Saskatchewan farmers who lost their land in the drought of the Dirty Thirties. While that trauma shaped the lives of everyone who went through it, the crisis affected Haldeman in an exceptional way — he never stopped raging at what he perceived were the causes of the Great Depression. 'He would remain leery of financial institutions and other bureaucracies throughout his life, a sentiment that would shape his political philosophy,' says a 1995 academic paper about Haldeman co-written by his son Scott. Haldeman came to believe that an international communist conspiracy controlled the banks, the media and the universities and was aiming to run the world. 'An 'Invisible Government,' working to carry out the objectives of the International Conspiracy, is operating in every country,' he wrote in his book The International Conspiracy in Health, which was published in the mid-1960s. In it, he also said the conspiracy was pushing for the fluoridation of water supplies, mandatory milk pasteurization and mass vaccination programs. Haldeman dedicated his life to fighting it. 'Only by following the example and guidance of Jesus Christ will man be able to successfully combat the evil forces of the International Conspiracy and achieve the greatness for himself and his country.' Haldeman thought government was being badly mismanaged and at one point in his career, he embraced the solution proposed by a movement called Technocracy: that government should be run by scientists and engineers, not politicians. Over his lifetime, Haldeman would lead two Canadian political parties (one of which he founded), campaign against Canadian prime ministers William Lyon Mackenzie King and John Diefenbaker, write a book defending South Africa's system of apartheid and spend years flying and driving across the African wilderness with his family — hunting for the Lost City of the Kalahari. Kevin Anderson, a historian at the University of Alberta who has studied the conspiratorial thinking that emerged during the 1930s and '40s, told CBC there are stunning echoes between that time and today. He said if he were to read a list of Haldeman's beliefs in one of his classes today and ask, 'When do you think this was written? I bet the more aware students would say, 'Oh, two years ago — this year.'' The Canada connection Haldeman died in a plane crash in 1974, when he was 72 years old. His grandson, Elon Musk, was just three. Musk would become the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX — and the wealthiest man in the world. Elon's mother, Maye, born in Regina in 1948, was one of Joshua and Winnifred Haldeman's five children. 'Throughout his childhood, Elon heard many stories about his grandfather's exploits and sat through countless slide shows that documented his travels and trips,' wrote Musk biographer Ashlee Vance in his 2015 book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. 'My grandmother told these tales of how they almost died several times along their journeys,' Musk told Vance. 'They were flying in a plane with literally no instruments — not even a radio…. My grandfather had this desire for adventure, exploration — doing crazy things.' 'Maybe that sort of adventurous spirit is in all of [Haldeman's descendants],' Musk said to Vanity Fair in 2015. Like his grandpa, Musk — a citizen of Canada, South Africa and the U.S. — has also taken an interest in politics, having become a senior adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump since his election last year. And, like Haldeman, Musk has tangled with a Canadian prime minister of his own. In early January, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau posted a response on X to Trump mockingly calling Canada the 51st state. (Trudeau announced on Jan. 6 that he was stepping down as prime minister, and has since been replaced by Mark Carney.) In a Jan. 8 post, Musk replied, 'Girl, you're not the governor of Canada anymore, so it doesn't matter what you say.' Last month, thousands of Canadians started signing a petition to have Musk's citizenship revoked for his attempts to 'attack Canadian sovereignty.' 'Canada is not a real country,' he posted on X in reply. (That post has since been deleted.) Eighty years earlier, Musk's grandpa had a much different response when he saw a political movement advocate that the U.S. take over Canada and Greenland by 'force of arms.' He issued a warning against its 'insidious and seditious propaganda.' 'The Canadian people and the Canadian government must take positive action now as a measure of national safety,' Haldeman wrote in the Apr. 5, 1945, edition of the Canadian Social Crediter magazine. That was just one of many moments of political drama in Haldeman's remarkable journey. His views were shaped in Saskatchewan during a time of notable similarities to our own — an unstable stock market, punitive tariffs, rising racial tensions driven by mass immigration, a dramatically shifting world order and a public debate often influenced by conspiracy theories and suspicion. Gophers and scurvy Joshua Haldeman was born in a log cabin in Minnesota in 1902 and raised in Waldeck, Sask., near Swift Current. According to the CSC biography, Haldeman 'became quite skilled in bronco horseback riding, boxing, wrestling and exhibition rope spinning.' His mother, Almeda, recognized by many as Canada's first chiropractor, ran a strict home, allowing 'no one in her house to drink, smoke, use improper language or tell shady stories,' according to Erik Nordeus's book The Engineer: Follow Elon Musk on a Journey from South Africa to Mars. 'Playing cards and medicines were also prohibited.' Haldeman attended nine colleges and universities, including Moose Jaw College and Regina College, according to the academic paper written by his son Scott. ScottHaldeman declined CBC's request for an interview, but did answer some questions by email. Haldeman concluded his chiropractic training in 1926. Throughout his life, Haldeman was a leader in the chiropractic industry, taking board positions in provincial and national associations and pushing for new legislation. But in the mid-1920s, instead of taking up chiropractic, he began farming. His timing was not ideal. He lost his farm during the 1930s after he was unable to keep up with loan payments. The horror of that time in Saskatchewan is difficult to comprehend. This helps paint the picture. 'Stewed gopher, canned gopher, gopher pie' were 'not infrequently' on the menu at that time, wrote Curtis McManus in his book Happyland: The History of the 'Dirty Thirties' in Saskatchewan. The tragedy began with the 1929 stock market crash and was exacerbated by an extended drought — the 'Dust Bowl.' Two-thirds of the population was forced onto social assistance and dozens of people died from starvation, rickets and scurvy. Errol Musk, Elon's father, told CBC in an interview earlier this year that he remembers Haldeman speaking about his frustration with Saskatchewan's rail system, which had a difficult time getting food from the farm to those who needed it. 'He pointed out to me about how the Depression was man-made,' said Errol Musk. 'In other words, it was planned…. a plan to screw up the world in favour of certain people.' Anderson said people in Saskatchewan at the time had an understandable fear of 'global forces that feel completely out of everybody's control.' That fear launched the creation of a series of populist political movements on the right and the left. A government without politicians Haldeman's political activism began in 1928 when, at 26, he joined a couple of left-leaning farmers organizations. In 1933, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was formed with the signing of the Regina Manifesto, which called for the eradication of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist state. (The CCF was the forerunner of today's NDP.) The next year, Haldeman joined the CCF and took on leadership roles in the party, according to the paper written by Scott Haldeman. '[The CCF] promoted the abolition of the profit system and the establishment of a planned economy,' wrote Joshua Haldeman's secretary Vivan Doan in a letter to Scott cited in the paper. 'He worked tirelessly for this new party." By 1936, Haldeman had moved to Regina and established his chiropractic office. Around that time, Howard Scott — a 6'5' man with broad shoulders and a magnetic personality — began delivering fiery lectures across Western Canada. The New York-based engineer and political visionary was the leader of Technocracy Inc., an organization promoting his plan for an economy run by experts, not politicians. These techno-utopians wanted to put scientists in charge — and their ideas still hold sway in Silicon Valley 'Politics is the natural approach of morons,' Scott said during a December 1935 speech, according to the Regina Leader-Post. 'Socialist, communist, fascist, liberal, conservative, Republican or Democrat — they all stink alike.' The movement began in the United States in the 1930s. By 1940, it was sweeping across Western Canada. Technocrats were known for wearing identical grey uniforms and saluting one another in what The Daily Province called 'Technocrat fashion — right hand raised smartly to eye-level.' Haldeman quickly became entranced by the movement and took up a leadership role. In a July 1940 article in Technocracy Digest, he argued that advances in technology and global affairs had made it possible to create a utopian society in North America. 'No other country has anything that the North American people either want or require,' he wrote, owing to the continent's relative isolation from the rest of the world and its abundance of resources and expertise. 'It is possible to build this new order of mankind, this new America, here and now.' Scott promised that under Technocracy, problems like crime, class distinctions and debt would be things of the past. Only people between 25 and 45 would be expected to work, and only four hours a day, four days a week. After that, they could 'do whatever they wish for the rest of their lives,' Scott said. 'A scientific Frankenstein' The Canadian government was not swayed by Technocracy's rhetoric. In June 1940, it declared Technocracy an illegal and subversive organization. 'The literature of Technocracy discloses, in effect, that one of its objectives is to overthrow the government and constitution of this country by force,' said prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie-King in a July 16, 1940, speech in the House of Commons. Haldeman was apparently not intimidated by this move. He placed an ad in the Regina Leader-Post promoting Technocracy and calling the government's move an 'unjustified…. political blunder.' A few months later, he was arrested and charged with stirring up disloyalty to the King and undermining Canada's prosecution of the Second World War. He was found guilty in a downtown Regina court. Shortly after his arrest, Haldeman left the movement, after coming to the conclusion it had become treasonous. His son Scott wrote that Haldeman became disillusioned when Technocracy flipped from opposing communism to supporting 'complete economic and military collaboration with Soviet Russia.' That wasn't his only beef with the movement. In an April 1945 article in the Canadian Social Crediter, Haldeman warned that Technocracy had become 'a scientific Frankenstein.' He wrote that since his departure, the organization had begun pushing for the U.S. to take over Canada and Greenland 'either by purchase, negotiation or by force of arms' – a position advocated by Howard Scott, who argued for isolationism and a strong continental defence. Haldeman warned that Quebec and what is now Mexico were being targeted in particular. He quoted Scott as arguing 'that these alien cultures on the continent of North America be annihilated. Assimilation is out of the question.' Haldeman warned 'Technocracy Inc. is conspiring against the British Empire — against the sovereignty of Canada.' A maverick Haldeman was a bit of a maverick throughout his life — confident in his own apprehension of issues. 'He never had any person that would be considered a spiritual guide,' Scott Haldeman told CBC in an email. 'He felt he knew the Bible better than any minister and only went to church for weddings and funerals.' After Technocracy, Haldeman decided he would start his own political party, Total War and Defence. In his 1941 book, Total War and Defence for Canada, which was his manifesto for this new party, he argued for a policy of total conscription to support our British allies during the Second World War. He called for the conscription of 'every employable man and woman between the ages of sixteen and sixty' and 'all natural resources, all industrial equipment and all property,' including 'all bank deposits and private holdings of money.' His movement did not catch on. His next stop was the Social Credit Party, a rapidly growing political movement that formed government in Alberta in 1935 and held it until 1971. Social Credit advocated low taxes, minimal regulation and free markets. But it doesn't fit neatly into the modern left-right political divide. Social Credit wanted governments to give money directly to consumers in order to combat inherent inequity in the market. Haldeman quickly rose through the ranks, becoming leader of the Social Credit Party of Saskatchewan in 1945 and the chair of the national party's council in 1946. During his political tenure he ran, unsuccessfully, against three giants of Canadian politics. In the 1945 federal election, he faced Liberal prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie-King in a Prince Albert riding. In 1948, Haldeman led Social Credit in a provincial campaign against Tommy Douglas and the CCF. Social Credit lost, receiving just eight per cent of the vote. In the 1949 federal election, he lost to John Diefenbaker in a Regina district. (Eight years later, Diefenbaker became prime minister.) Haldeman campaigned as the Christian alternative to godless communists. 'The trouble with politics is that Christianity has been left out,' said Haldeman in an April 1948 address on CBC Radio, transcribed in the Canadian Social Crediter. A 1948 confrontation at Regina City Hall put Haldeman in the midst of a political conflict that has echoes of our modern politics. He had been invited to a party leaders' forum by the Regina Housewives League to discuss their proposal for national price controls. Haldeman criticized their idea as a 'strictly socialist resolution' and accused the league of being 'a front for the communist organization.' According to the Regina Leader-Post, 'Dr. Haldeman was repeatedly interrupted by 'boos' and catcalls.' 'I am making a speech here,' Haldeman replied. 'Isn't there still freedom of speech in Regina?' 'Home-baked fascism' In 1946, Haldeman found himself in the midst of a national scandal, after the Quebec wing of Social Credit published the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A Saskatoon Star Phoenix editorial said Social Credit was cooking up 'home-baked fascism' by promoting a fraudulent document that 'purports to reveal a plot [by Jews] to dominate the world.' This reinforced Social Credit's reputation as an antisemitic organization — which can be traced back to its founder, Clifford Hugh Douglas, also known as 'Major Douglas.' 'The Jew has no native culture and always aims at power without responsibility. He is the parasite upon, and corrupter of, every civilisation in which he has attained power,' Douglas wrote in a 1939 edition of the party's magazine. Haldeman, as the chairman of the National Social Credit Association, responded in a letter to the editor of the Star Phoenix. He said 'Social Credit is absolutely opposed to antisemitism,' adding, 'the great mass of the Jewish people in Germany suffered greatly and our full sympathy goes out to them.' But he also defended the publishing of the Protocols. He said whether the document was fraudulent 'is not the point.' 'The point is that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation,' Haldeman wrote, noting the conspiracy this book supposedly revealed was executed 'by international financiers, many but not all of them, Jewish.' In a 1947 letter to the editor of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Rabbi Irwin Gordon expressed skepticism about Haldeman's disavowal of antisemitism. 'Doctor Haldeman must have a short memory as well if he does not remember his own speeches shot through with antisemitic talk,' Gordon wrote. 'Doctor Haldeman's over-interest in clearing the party and himself from the charge of antisemitism and anti-Canadianism will not fool the people.' Even Alberta's Social Credit premier thought the party had an antisemitism problem. In a letter to a national leader after the Protocols incident, Premier Ernest Manning (father of Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party of Canada) took aim at the organization's magazine, the Canadian Social Crediter. 'No one who values their name or their influence is going to get behind a publication which contains little but negative and destructive criticism flavoured with 'Jew-baiting,'' Manning wrote, demanding that Haldeman, as party chairman, clean things up. South Africa move prompted by prophecies In the midst of his frenetic political career, Haldeman made time to start a family. In 1942, he took up dancing and a few months later married his instructor, Winnifred Fletcher. (This was his second marriage. He married Eve Peters in 1934 and they had one child together — Joshua Jerry Noel Haldeman — but the couple divorced by 1937.) Fletcher grew up in Moose Jaw and, as a teenager, had been a reporter at the Moose Jaw Times Herald. She later established the Haldeman School of Dance, which was the first ballet company in Saskatchewan. The couple had five children, including twins Maye and Kaye in 1948. That same year, Haldeman got his pilot's licence and bought a plane that enabled him to run his chiropractic business alongside his political career. The girls flew with their dad so often that newspapers began referring to the family as 'the Flying Haldemans.' 'In Canada, they thought we were crazy because my parents would fly around in their single-prop canvas plane with their small children,' Maye Musk wrote in her 2019 book, A Woman Makes a Plan. She didn't respond to CBC's request for an interview. By mid-1949, Haldeman started looking for a new home, a search inspired in part by two prophecies, according to a biography of his son Scott. 'Josh relates an experience with a 'medium' [spiritualist] in 1936 who told him he must practice in Regina for 14 years and then, 'move to a city in a faraway place,'' says the book, The Journey of Scott Haldeman, written by Reed Phillips. It goes on to say that once his 14 years were up in Regina, 'everything fell into place.' 'After speaking with an Anglican minister from South Africa at an International Trade Fair in Toronto, Joshua became convinced that South Africa was that 'faraway place,'' the book says. So what did that minister say? Haldeman's 1960 book, The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and The Menace to South Africa, begins this way: ''SOUTH AFRICA WILL BECOME THE LEADER OF WHITE CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD' was the prophetic and emphatic statement of an Anglican Minister in Toronto, Canada, 1949. He had lived many years in South Africa.' A new life for Haldeman The Haldemans' move to South Africa made news across Canada, with a Sept. 11, 1950, article noting the family was leaving behind a 'thriving practice as a chiropractor,' Winnifred's dance school and a 20-room home in Regina, to 'stake everything on this new venture.' They settled with their five children in Pretoria, where they enjoyed warm weather and hired help. 'We have two native (Negro) garden boys in the summer and one in the winter and a native girl,' according to an article Haldeman wrote that was published in the Aug. 6, 1951, edition of the Regina Leader-Post. 'The natives are very primitive and must not be taken seriously. We get quite a bang out of them and they are really quite useful,' he wrote. 'It takes three natives to do the work of one white man.' In 1948, the National Party swept to power in South Africa and immediately began implementing its program of apartheid, a policy of racial segregation. Months after arriving, Haldeman told South Africa's Die Transvaler newspaper 'instead of the government's attitude keeping me away from South Africa, it has actually encouraged me to settle here.' 'White man…. the most difficult to control' In his 1951 Regina Leader-Post article, Haldeman defended apartheid. 'Some [African natives] are quite clever in a routine job, but the best of them cannot assume responsibility and will abuse authority,' he wrote. "The present government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question.' On March 21, 1960, police fired submachine guns on a crowd of Black people protesting apartheid in Sharpeville, South Africa, killing 69 and wounding more than 180 others. It came to be known as the Sharpeville massacre, 'one of the first and most violent demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa,' according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. A few weeks later, Haldeman published his book The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Government and Menace to South Africa, writing in such a hurry that the introduction said 'due to the present urgency this brief has been rushed and typographical errors must be excused.' Haldeman said the leaders of the Black protest movement hope, 'with the support of the Internationalists, to oust the white man, who has in a few years brought their people from primitive savagery to a great measure of peace and security.' 'An unconditional propaganda warfare is carried on against the white man because the white man's integrity, initiative and independence make him the most difficult to control,' he wrote. Haldeman opposed the state mandating systems like compulsory medication on the white population, but had a different standard for the Black population. 'The State has the right to do for them what it thinks is best, the same rights as the parents have for their children,' he wrote in The International Conspiracy in Health. (Both of Haldeman's International Conspiracy books were first reported on by Harvard historian Jill Lepore in a 2023 article in The New Yorker.) 'The Great Farini' Shortly after his arrival in South Africa, Haldeman was swept up in the 'lost city' craze. Hermann Wittenberg, a professor at South Africa's University of the Western Cape, says in the late 1800s and early 1900s, white amateur archeologists and explorers discovered ruins, monuments and sculptures of ancient African civilizations. He said because of widespread racism, these explorers — even more progressive, liberal explorers — believed 'that Black Africans, Bantu-speaking peoples, are primitive, not capable of any civilizational attainments. The best they can do is build mud huts, you know?' As a result, they theorized that these civilizations, which exhibited some sophistication, must have been built by non-Africans. 'They would have imagined that this was some ancient northern, Western, Mediterranean civilization which had built these things. And they thought there was a whole string of these things in southern Africa, including that Kalahari thing,' said Wittenberg. "That Kalahari thing' became Haldeman's obsession: the legend of the Lost City of the Kalahari, which was allegedly discovered by William Hunt in 1885. Hunt, who came to be known as "The Great Farini," was a Canadian circus performer who became famous in the 1860s for crossing Niagara Falls on a tightrope — once with a washing machine on his back and another time with a sack over his entire body. Farini, who was also the inventor of the "human cannonball' performance, became a promoter of 'freak shows,' featuring a girl he called Krao and deemed the Missing Link. P.T. Barnum once called Farini 'the most talented showman' he knew, according to Shane Peacock's book The Great Farini: The High-Wire Life of William Hunt. The showman was also an explorer and storyteller. As the story goes, in 1885, Farini travelled to Africa and led an expedition across the Kalahari Desert. In a book he wrote about his travels (Through the Kalahari Desert), Farini claimed he had chanced upon the runes of an ancient city: A relic, may be, of a glorious past, A city once grand and sublime, Destroyed by earthquake, defaced by the blast, Swept away by the hand of time. According to Maye Musk, Haldeman read Farini's book and became transfixed. In 1953, Haldeman began taking regular trips into the desert with his wife and five children to hunt for the lost city. 'My father wanted to try to follow Farini's path,' Musk wrote in her autobiography. 'And that became our July vacation. Now I think: Can you imagine taking five little kids to the desert for three weeks?' Musk wrote that her family's motto was 'live dangerously, carefully.' But she also described a scene where lions wandered into the family's camp. 'My father got into the car to chase them away and the lions made their way up the sand dune next to the camp and then spent the morning watching us.' Lost city searches 'always about white people:' expert Haldeman's youngest son, Lee, has inherited his father's passion for the lost city, having written two books on the topic. He dedicated Finding Farini's Lost City of the Kalahari to his parents. 'They completed sixteen searches for the fabled ruins,' he wrote. 'There are no others in the history of this mystery that believed Farini's story as intensely, or who dedicated so much time, money, and effort to look for this fabled City.' Lee Haldeman declined CBC's request for an interview. Wittenberg agreed with the assessment, calling Haldeman 'the undisputed Farini devotee of his time.' As for the motivation behind Haldeman's fixation, Elon Musk biographer Erik Nordeus wrote that 'it's unclear… why he became interested in finding [the lost city] but he did everything he could to find it.' Jean-lo ï c Le Quellec, author of The White Lady and Atlantis: Ophir and Great Zimbabwe: Investigation of an Archaeological Myth, says Haldeman's lost city search was part of a well-established cultural phenomenon. He said there are more than 1,000 books on the topic of lost civilizations between the mid-19th century and 1940, 'and none of them is about the search for or discovery of a 'lost black tribe.' They are always about white people,' he wrote in an email to CBC. Le Quellec, director of research at France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, mentions Haldeman in his 2016 book, but had no idea of his connection to Musk until CBC reached out. 'I don't know if Haldeman was explicitly looking for evidence of an ancient white presence, but this was very generally the case in his time, and for decades,' Le Quellec wrote. He said these stories were used by colonists throughout Africa as a means of claiming historical legitimacy for their actions. 'The main motivation of the authors and explorers was to demonstrate the existence of an ancient white (European, Sumerian, Egyptian or Cretan) presence in Africa, in order to justify colonization in general, and apartheid in the case of South Africa,' he said. 'The Lost City of Kalahari is just one example among many of this type of approach.' Like Le Quellec, Wittenberg also wrote about Haldeman without knowing his connection to Musk. In his PhD thesis, The Sublime, Imperialism and the African Landscape, Wittenberg noted that explorer Doreen Tainton, a contemporary of Haldeman, believed that the Indigenous Black people of South Africa were incapable of building the sort of intricate architecture described by Farini in his book. That led her to ask 'who, then, were these long dead builders?' In answering her own question, she suggested they could have been Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians or Arabs. Wittenberg noted that just like Tainton, Haldman was also open to the notion that the lost city was not of Indigenous origin, writing that Haldeman believed 'this would be a major archaeological find, if it could be located, as it would show that the Egyptians were this far south.' In an interview with CBC, Wittenberg said 'Egyptians were not seen as African at the time. The general sort of idea was that Egyptians were some sort of Mediterranean civilization…. It was seen as not part of Africa, but it was seen as a European type of civilization.' A plane crash Despite his years of searching, Haldeman was unable to locate the lost city. On Jan. 13, 1974, Haldeman died in a plane crash along with his son-in-law Peter Rae, according to Die Transvaler newspaper. It was front page news, featuring a photo of the overturned plane. 'One of South Africa's most famous chiropractors and adventurers…. died yesterday morning,' the article says. 'The suspicion exists that they wanted to carry out an emergency landing,' but 'there were power lines that prevented the alleged emergency landing and the plane crashed nose first.' In a separate article, the paper reflected on Haldeman's Kalahari obsession, noting he 'never allowed himself to be convinced that he was looking for something that might not exist.' The paper said Haldeman's trust in Farini's integrity drove him, even as other explorers concluded the circus performer's story was false. Wittenberg said in the decades since the lost city craze, archeology, geology and ethnology have shown that genuine African ruins are, in fact, of Indigenous Black origin. And, he says, legends like the Lost City of the Kalahari have been largely abandoned — though not entirely. 'Myths are myths because they don't die,' he said. 'They have a particular longevity. They're not killed off by fact, you know?' According to Nordeus's book, after Farini's death, Haldeman wrote to his family, saying 'We do not feel he made the Lost City up as we have confirmed everything else in the book.' For much of his life, Haldeman was captivated and driven by mysteries — a shadowy group of international communists conspiring to control the world and an elaborate ancient city, lost to the sands of time. And he believed in them to the very end. Top image: Maye Musk/X Footer Links My Account Profile CBC Gem Newsletters Connect with CBC Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Mobile RSS Podcasts Contact CBC Submit Feedback Help Centre Audience Relations, CBC P.O. Box 500 Station A Toronto, ON Canada, M5W 1E6 Toll-free (Canada only): 1-866-306-4636 TTY/Teletype writer: 1-866-220-6045 About CBC Corporate Info Sitemap Reuse & Permission Terms of Use Privacy Jobs Our Unions Independent Producers Political Ads Registry AdChoices Services Ombudsman Public Appearances Commercial Services CBC Shop Doing Business with Us Renting Facilities Accessibility It is a priority for CBC to create a website that is accessible to all Canadians including people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive challenges. Closed Captioning and Described Video is available for many CBC shows offered on CBC Gem. About CBC Accessibility Accessibility Feedback © 2025 CBC/Radio-Canada. All rights reserved. Visitez
Vox
24-02-2025
- Business
- Vox
Elon Musk's worldview is eerily similar to his authoritarian grandad's
Elon Musk might be the most powerful man in America. Donald Trump has put his patron in charge of the federal bureaucracy, allowing Musk to tailor the administrative state to his whims, which are far-reaching and almost certainly unconstitutional. The tech mogul has shuttered a government agency in defiance of Congress's will, orchestrated mass layoffs at myriad other bureaus, and threatened to cancel payments that he deems illegitimate. Musk lacks Trump's official powers, of course. But his vast wealth — and the primary challengers it could fund — strikes fear into the hearts of Republican lawmakers, and threatens to upend key state-level elections. Meanwhile, through his control of X, Musk is driving news cycles in nations the world-over. All this invites the question: What motivates Musk's pursuit of personal power, and his apparent contempt for constitutional constraints upon it? On some level, this query is unanswerable (no one can know with certainty what motivates Musk, not even Musk). On another, the answer may seem straightforward (Musk is not shy about broadcasting his grandiose ambitions to colonize Mars, save America from the 'woke mind virus' etc.). But as I've been forced to contemplate Musk's worldview in recent weeks, I've found myself thinking a lot about another man who despised social justice movements, evinced disdain for liberal democracy, and dreamed of reorganizing government with a cabal of likeminded, tech-savvy elites: Joshua N. Haldeman, a prominent 20th-century chiropractor, aviator, politician, conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite — who was also Musk's maternal grandfather. Haldeman's belief system shifted markedly over the course of his life. But throughout his political evolution, he gravitated toward a few core premises — a set of hateful and anti-democratic ideas that bear a striking (and disconcerting) resemblance to those of his grandson. In saying this, I do not mean to assert that Musk's views are identical to Haldeman's, nor even that the billionaire's ideology was necessarily influenced by that of his grandfather. Such influence is conceivable: Although Haldeman died when Musk was a child, he has spoken reverentially of his grandfather and was close with his maternal grandmother, Winnifred Haldeman. And Musk's father has suggested that she shared some of her husband's extremist views. This said, there's no direct evidence that Musk ever took an interest in his grandfather's politics. Nevertheless, I think the similarities between Musk's political ideas and his grandfather's are worth noting, if only because they illustrate the timeless appeal — an enduring dangers — of their peculiar brand of conspiratorial elitism. Toward the tail end of the Great Depression, Haldeman joined a radical — and radically strange — political movement called Technocracy Incorporated. The brainchild of the eminent engineer Howard Scott, Technocracy Incorporated argued that both democracy and market capitalism has grown obsolete. As the group explained in its 1939 pamphlet, 'Technocracy in Plain Terms,' a citizen's vote 'has positively no effect on the actual operation of the country, for the country is not run by politicians anyway.' Yet in the name of this fraudulent democracy, society was allowing incompetent politicians to grossly mismanage the economy. Meanwhile, capitalism had been rendered inoperative by its own development. Technology was rapidly condemning workers to permanent unemployment — and rendering businesses unprofitable — by exponentially increasing productivity and output. At one point, Scott warned that 'computers' were soon 'going to do away with your accountants and your engineers, and it is also going to do away with your executives, as well as the blue collar and the white collar.' Neither the electorate nor the price system was fit to govern economic life in this new world. Together, they were propelling humanity toward catastrophe. And yet, the Technocrats argued, if we simply entrusted governance to a small group of tech-savvy elites — led by 'the Great Engineer' — the people of North America could immediately know untold abundance, while working only part-time and retiring by age 46. Scott's organization married this utopian economic vision to bizarre internal aesthetics and practices, reminiscent of both futuristic fiction and contemporary fascism. Members of Technocracy Incorporated wore identical gray uniforms, drove gray cars, and saluted each other as though fellow soldiers. They also referred to one another by number instead of name (one went by '1x1809x56'). Haldeman, a man of science fascinated by novel technologies, took to Technocracy enthusiastically, adopting the moniker '10450-1,' and quickly becoming the leader of the organization's Canadian branch (Musk's decision to name one of his children 'X Æ A-12' is reminiscent of Technocracy's practices). In 1940, he warned his fellow technocrats that the 'smashup' of society was imminent and that all must prepare for the 'New Social Order.' As World War II drew to a close, however, Haldeman abandoned Technocracy for a similar but distinct — and decidedly more hateful — political party. The Social Credit Party shared many of Technocracy Incorporated's defining characteristics. Both were founded by engineers who wished to revolutionize government amid the ravages of the Great Depression. Both argued that technological progress had made shared prosperity possible, if only experts were given more sovereignty over the economy. And both contended that representative democracy was hopelessly corrupt and dysfunctional. In the estimation of Social Credit's founder, C.H. Douglas, voters weren't competent to make judgments about economic policy, and so authority over such matters needed to be transferred to the experts who actually ran productive enterprises, whether government agencies or private businesses. Elected officials would hold these experts accountable for delivering results, but only after giving them free reign to maximize output as they saw fit. This made Social Credit's brand of expert-rule a bit less authoritarian than Technocracy Incorporated's. Yet the former party's indictment of conventional democracy was markedly more fascistic. To Social Credit, the problem with traditional republican government wasn't merely that voters lacked elite engineers and managers' tech savvy and expertise, but rather, that the public's ignorance enabled 'international Jewish finance' to dominate government through its control of the bureaucracy. 'The Jew has no native culture and always aims at power without responsibility,' Douglas explained in Social Credit's magazine in 1939. 'He is the parasite upon, and corrupter of, every civilisation in which he has attained power.' Only Social Credit's novel system of government could save Christian civilization from the Jewish bankers' plot and deliver economic utopia. For Musk's grandfather, Social Credit's virulent anti-Semitism seems to have been a feature not a bug. Haldeman became the head of Saskatchewan's Social Credit Party in 1945, and ascended to its national chair a year later. In 1946, the party's Quebec branch received widespread criticism for publishing excerpts of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' a forged document purporting to detail a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. As Joshua Benton reported in The Atlantic, Haldeman swiftly rallied to his party's defense. In a series of letters to a Saskatchewan newspaper, Musk's grandfather argued that whether The Protocols were a forgery was beside the point since 'the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.' Haldeman ran for both provincial and federal offices under the Social Credit banner and lost every election in a landslide. By 1949, he resigned from the party's leadership. Within a year, he would fall in love with a different utopian political project, one that had just managed to actually secure state power — South African apartheid. In 1949, Haldeman had a conversation with an Anglican minister in Toronto that would change the course of his life. In Haldeman's own account, that holy man persuaded him that South Africa would 'become the leader of white civilization in the World.' Musk's grandfather evidently decided that he wished to be a part of that glorious project. Haldeman moved his family to Pretoria in 1950, the same year that South Africa's government required all residents to register their race with the state and segregated urban housing. Shortly thereafter, in a letter to a Canadian newspaper, Haldeman made his enthusiasm for apartheid plain. He wrote that Black South Africans were 'quite clever in a routine job, but the best of them cannot assume responsibility and will abuse authority,' and 'The present government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question. They are endeavoring to make the natives as independent and self-supporting as possible.' In Haldeman's assessment, 'talk of a native uprising in Africa is purely Communist wishful thinking.' A decade later, in the face of just such an uprising, Haldeman's defense of apartheid grew more conspiratorial. In response to growing international condemnation of the apartheid regime, he penned a short tract entitled, The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa . As the New Yorker's Jill Lepore has documented, that booklet read in part, 'Every day the brain-washers repeat and emphasize the things they want us to believe. As examples 'The Natives are ill-treated,' 'underpaid,' 'underprivileged,' 'separate development is wrong,' 'apartheid is un-Christian.' For Haldeman, the brainwashers consisted of a cabal of Jewish bankers, intellectuals, and philanthropies, which were puppet-mastering the uprisings in South Africa and plotting 'an outside invasion by hordes of Coloured people.' Absent the agitations of this 'international conspiracy,' Black South Africans would be well-reconciled to apartheid, Haldeman argued, because they had heretofore recognized that the white minority was more competent at managing the economy and facilitating innovation. 'The facts of history show that the White man has always developed the country he inhabits to the benefit of all concerned,' he wrote, while the 'Black people of Africa have been in close contact with civilization from the earliest times but, on their own, built nothing and discovered nothing, not even the wheel.' Haldeman's politics clearly evolved over time. But there are a few core premises that Technocracy Incorporated, The Social Credit Party, and his brand of pro-Apartheid evangelism held in common. All three: deemed conventional democracy hopelessly corrupt and defective (Social Credit and Haldeman's pro-apartheid tracts both attributed democracy's woes specifically to the ignorance of the masses and malevolence of the Jewish financers who manipulated them); insisted that power should be concentrated in the hands of an intellectually superior minority (master engineers, scientific experts, and businessmen in the case of Technocracy and Social Credit, white South Africans in the case of Apartheid evangelists), on the grounds that this elite was best qualified to deliver economic progress; and believed that the stakes of allowing this elite to rule were extraordinarily high: If governance were entrusted to conventional democracy, then either economic ruin (in the vision of Technocracy Incorporated and Social Credit) or the collapse of 'white Christian civilization' and establishment of a 'world dictatorship' (in the view of Haldeman's pro-apartheid tract) would follow. By contrast, in all three belief systems, the sustained leadership of the intellectual elite promised to deliver awe-inspiring economic progress, if not utopia. I believe that Musk's recent words and deeds reflect all three of these thought patterns. To be sure, now that Musk has assumed extraordinary authority over government through the electoral process, he regularly proclaims his commitment to democracy. But before the 2024 election's outcome was certain, he repeatedly suggested that the machinations of Jewish financiers — and the mass immigration of credulous 'illegals' — were on the cusp of rendering American democracy irrevocably corrupt and dysfunctional. 'The Dems have imported massive numbers of illegals to swing states,' Musk posted on X in October. 'Their STATED plan is to give them citizenship as soon as possible, turning all swing states Dem. America would then become a one-party, deep blue socialist state.' In other remarks, Musk has described the conspiracy against America in terms evocative of his grandfather's warnings about the plot against South Africa. In November 2023, an X user lamented that 'Jewish communities' had been pushing 'hatred against whites,' and flooding Western countries with 'hordes of minorities.' Musk replied, 'You have said the actual truth.' Musk described this post as a 'mistake.' Yet it is of a piece with other statements that he has refused to disavow. Earlier in 2023, Musk likened the Jewish financier and Democratic donor George Soros to the X-Men supervillain Magneto, declaring that Soros 'hates humanity.' Musk proceeded to justify this claim by asking, 'Does the public realize that Soros wants open borders?' an apparent reference to the far-right conspiracy theory that Soros seeks to 'replace' America's white majority with masses of easily manipulated nonwhite immigrants. It seems clear then that Musk's anxieties about democracy's vulnerabilities to conniving financiers and credulous, nonwhite hordes resemble those of his grandfather. Whether he shares the younger Haldeman's enthusiasm for technocracy is less obvious. Certainly, in his present role, Musk portrays himself as fighting to take power away from the administrative elite, and return it to the people. Yet in actual practice, Musk has claimed for himself and his small-team of expert coders the authority to override or subvert laws duly passed by the people's representatives. Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has sought to fire civil servants, block spending, dissolve government agencies, and bribe federal workers into resigning, all in defiance of Congress's will. Further, Musk's downsizing of federal agencies threatens to transfer power away from a democratically accountable government and toward private sector firms run by tech-savvy elites, on an autocratic basis. After the Federal Aviation Administration laid off workers responsible for air safety this month, the government announced that Musk's SpaceX rocket company would be helping the administration 'envision' a new and improved air traffic control system. And Musk is emphatic that increasing the authority of both DOGE and his personal companies would bring extraordinary technological progress — while limiting the power of his genius engineers, or allowing his political opponents to win democratic elections would mean national bankruptcy and the end of civilization, if not of humanity itself. As Musk put the point in September, 'The Department of Government Efficiency is the only path to extending life beyond Earth.' It is not hard to get from these premises to the conclusion that ensuring the power of Musk and similarly brilliant elites is more important than democracy or the rule of law. Judging by Musk's actions, he may have already reached that determination. None of this is to say that Musk shares all of his grandfather's beliefs. For all of his outbursts and illiberal actions, he has never forthrightly endorsed white supremacy or authoritarian rule, as Haldeman did. One reason for doubting that Musk inherited his penchant for right-wing authoritarianism is that he came by his extremism only recently. A decade ago, Musk was, by his own account, a moderate Democrat. It's plausible that, like so many other Americans, he was simply radicalized by the combination of Covid, culture wars, and social media addiction. Yet the overlap between Musk's current outlook and his grandfather's is notable, even if the latter did not shape the former. Either way, the similarities indicate that, across generations, a certain kind of man —- intellectually gifted, tech-savvy, and maniacally ambitious — can be vulnerable to hateful and authoritarian ideas. Democracy's flaws are real. And it is easy for self-assured, technically proficient elites to look at those flaws — and then at humanity's unrealized technological potential — and conclude that their society could achieve utopia, if only people like themselves were liberated from the tyranny of the credulous masses (and the bad elites who manipulate them). But Haldeman's example illustrates the folly of such thinking. In reality, elites who seek authoritarian power are rarely as competent as they claim, or believe themselves to be. Scott, the genius engineer who wished to bring Technocracy to America, was in actuality not a brilliant scientist, so much as a serial fabulist. Douglas, the founder of Social Credit, also seems to have fabricated his sterling professional credentials. Meanwhile, the apartheid government's claim that it governed in the interests of all residents — and that Black South Africans welcomed their subjugation — is now almost universally recognized as an abominable lie. Musk is doubtlessly a gifted business executive. But his purported expertise about the federal bureaucracy, and how to increase its efficiency, is utterly fraudulent. And the hazards of concentrating power in the hands of an arrogant pseudo-expert are increasingly apparent; in recent days, DOGE has accidentally fired (and then hastily attempted to rehire) workers responsible for ensuring the safety of America's skies, nuclear weapons, and food. Few would defend Joshua Haldeman's political ideas today. With any luck, his grandson's will be similarly disdained in the future. See More: Elon Musk Influence Politics Technology
