President Joe Biden’s administration moved boldly yesterday to solve his most immediate immigration problem at the risk of creating a new target for Republicans who accuse him of surrendering control of the border.

Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security extended legal protections under a federal program called Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that will allow as many as 472,000 migrants from Venezuela to live and work legally in the United States for at least the next 18 months.

With that decision, the administration aligned with the consensus among almost all the key players in the Democratic coalition about the most important thing Biden could do to help big Democratic-leaning cities facing an unprecedented flow of undocumented migrants, many of whom are from Venezuela.

[Jerusalem Demsas: How deterrence policies create border chaos]

In a series of public statements over the past few months, Democratic mayors in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and other major cities; Democrats in the House and Senate; organized labor leaders; and immigrant advocacy and civil-rights groups all urged Biden to take the step that the administration announced yesterday.

Extending TPS protections to more migrants from Venezuela “is the strongest tool in the toolbox for the administration, and the most effective way of meeting the needs of both recently arrived immigrants and the concerns of state and local officials,” Angela Kelley, a former senior adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, told me immediately after the decision was announced.

Despite the panoramic pressure from across the Democratic coalition, the administration had been hesitant to pursue this approach. Inside the administration, as Greg Sargent of The Washington Post first reported, some feared that providing legal protection to more Venezuelans already here would simply encourage others from the country to come. With polls showing widespread disapproval of Biden’s handling of border security, and Republicans rallying behind an array of hard-line immigration policies, the president has also appeared deeply uncomfortable focusing any attention on these issues.

But immigrant advocates watching the internal debate believe that the argument tipped because of changing conditions on the ground. The tide of migrants into Democratic-run cities has produced wrenching scenes of new arrivals sleeping in streets, homeless shelters, or police stations, and loud complaints about the impact on local budgets, especially from New York City Mayor Eric Adams. And that has created a situation where not acting to relieve the strain on these cities has become an even a greater political risk to Biden than acting.

“No matter what, Republicans will accuse the administration of being for open borders,” Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist working with immigrant-advocacy groups, told me. “That is going to happen anyway. So why not get the political benefit of a good policy that so many of our leaders are clamoring for and need for their cities?”

Still, it was revealing that the administration paired the announcement about protecting more Venezuelan migrants through TPS with a variety of new proposals to toughen enforcement against undocumented migrants. That reflects the administration’s sensitivity to the relentless Republican accusation—which polls show has resonated with many voters—that Biden has lost control of the southern border.

As Biden’s administration tries to set immigration policy, it has been forced to pick through a minefield of demands from its allies, attacks from Republicans, and lawsuits from all sides.

Compounding all of these domestic challenges is a mass migration of millions of people fleeing crime, poverty, and political and social disorder in troubled countries throughout the Americas. In Venezuela alone, political and social chaos has driven more than 7 million residents to seek new homes elsewhere in the Americas, according to a United Nations estimate. “Venezuela is a displacement crisis approximately the size of Syria and Ukraine, but it gets, like, one one-thousandth of the attention,” Todd Schulte, the president and executive director of FWD.us, an immigration-advocacy group, told me. “It’s a huge situation.”

Most of these displaced people from nations across Central and South America have sought to settle in neighboring countries, but enough have come to the U.S. to overwhelm the nation’s already strained asylum system. The system is so backlogged that experts say it typically takes four to six years for asylum seekers to have their cases adjudicated. If the time required to resolve an asylum case “slips into years, it does become a magnet,” encouraging migrants to come to the border because the law allows them to stay and work in the U.S. while their claims are adjudicated, says Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a center-left think tank.

Former President Donald Trump dealt with this pressure by severely restricting access to asylum. He adopted policies that required asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while their cases were decided; that barred anyone from claiming asylum if they did not first seek it from countries between their homeland and the U.S. border; and, in the case of the pandemic-era Title 42 rule, that turned away virtually all undocumented migrants as threats to public health.

Fitfully, Biden has undone most of Trump’s approach. (The Migration Policy Institute calculates that the Biden administration has taken 109 separate administrative actions to reverse Trump policies.) And Biden and Mayorkas, with little fanfare, have implemented a robust suite of policies to expand routes for legal immigration, while announcing stiff penalties for those who try to enter the country illegally. “Our overall approach is to build lawful pathways for people to come to the United States, and to impose tougher consequences on those who choose not to use those pathways,” Mayorkas said when he announced the end of Trump’s Title 42 policy.

Immigration advocates generally express confidence that over time this carrot-and-stick approach will stabilize the southern border, at least somewhat. But it hasn’t yet stanched the flow of new arrivals claiming asylum. Some of those asylum seekers have made their way on their own to cities beyond the border. At least 20,000 more have been bused to such places by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, hoping to produce exactly the sort of tensions in Democratic circles that have erupted in recent weeks.

[Ronald Brownstein: The GOP’s lurch toward extremism comes for the border]

However they have arrived, this surge of asylum seekers has created enormous logistical and fiscal challenges in several of these cities. Adams has been the most insistent in demanding more help from the federal government. But he’s far from the only Democratic mayor who has been frustrated by the growing numbers and impatient for the Biden administration to provide more help.

The top demand from mayors and other Democratic interests has been for Biden to use executive authority to allow more of the new arrivals to work. “There is one solution to this problem: It’s not green cards; it’s not citizenship. It’s work permits,” Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney told me earlier this week. “All these people need work. They wouldn’t be in [a] hotel, they wouldn’t be lying on streets, if they can go to work.”

That answer seems especially obvious, Kenney continued, because “we have so many industries and so many areas of our commerce that need workers: hotels, restaurants. Let them go to work. [Then] they will get their own apartments, they will take care of their own kids.”

The obstacle to this solution is that under federal law, asylum seekers cannot apply for authorization to work until 150 days after they filed their asylum claim, and the government cannot approve their request for at least another 30 days. In practice, it usually takes several months longer than that to receive approval. The Biden administration is working with cities to encourage asylum seekers to quickly file work applications, but the process cannot be streamlined much, immigration experts say. Work authorization through the asylum process “is just not designed to get people a work permit,” Todd Schulte said. “They are technically eligible, but the process is way too hard.”

The inability to generate work permits for large numbers of people through the asylum process has spurred Democratic interest in using the Temporary Protected Status program as an alternative. It allows the federal government to authorize immigrants from countries facing natural disasters, civil war, or other kinds of political and social disorder to legally remain and work in the U.S. for up to 18 months at a time, and to renew those protections indefinitely. That status isn’t provided to everyone who has arrived from a particular country; it’s available only to people living in the U.S. as of the date the federal government grants the TPS designation. For instance, the TPS protection to legally stay in the U.S. is available to people from El Salvador only if they were here by February 2001, after two major earthquakes there.

The program was not nearly as controversial as other elements of immigration law, at least until Trump took office. As part of his overall offensive against immigration, Trump sought to rescind TPS status for six countries, including Haiti, Honduras, and El Salvador. But Trump was mostly blocked by lawsuits and Biden has reversed all those decisions. Biden has also granted TPS status to migrants from several additional countries, including about 200,000 people who had arrived in the U.S. from Venezuela as of March 2021.

The demand from Democrats has been that Biden extend that protection, in a move called “redesignation,” to migrants who have arrived from Venezuela since then. Many Democrats have urged him to also update the protections for people from Nicaragua and other countries: A coalition of big-city mayors wrote Biden this summer asking him to extend existing TPS protections or create new ones for 11 countries.

Following all of Biden’s actions, more immigrants than ever are covered under TPS. But the administration never appeared likely to agree to anything as sweeping as the mayors requested. Yesterday, the administration agreed to extend TPS status only to migrants from Venezuela who had arrived in the U.S. as of July 31. It did not expand TPS protections for any other countries. Angela Kelley, now the chief policy adviser for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that providing more TPS coverage to any country beyond Venezuela would be “a bigger piece to chew than the administration is able to swallow now.”

But advocates considered the decision to cover more Venezuelans under TPS the most important action the administration could take to stabilize the situation in New York and other cities. The reason is that so many of the latest arrivals come from there; one recent survey found that two-thirds of the migrants in New York City shelters arrived from that country. Even including this huge migrant population in TPS won’t allow them to instantly work. The administration will also need to streamline regulations that slow work authorization, experts say. But eventually, Kelley says, allowing more Venezuelans to legally work through TPS would “alleviate a lot of the pressure in New York” and other cities.

Kerri Talbot, the executive director of the Immigration Hub, an advocacy group, points out the TPS program is actually a better fit for Venezuelans, because the regular asylum process requires applicants to demonstrate that they fear persecution because of their race, religion, or political opinion, which is not the fundamental problem in Venezuela. “Most of them do not have good cases for asylum,” she said of the new arrivals from Venezuela. “They need TPS, because that’s what TPS is designed for: Their country is not functional.”

Biden’s authority to expand TPS to more Venezuelans is likely to stand up in court against the nearly inevitable legal challenges from Republicans. But extending legal protection to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans still presents a tempting political target for the GOP. Conservatives such as Elizabeth Jacobs, the director of regulatory affairs and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, have argued that providing work authorizations for more undocumented migrants would only exacerbate the long-term problem by encouraging more to follow them, in the hope of obtaining such permission as well.

Immigration advocates note that multiple academic studies show that TPS protections have not in fact inspired a surge of further migrants from the affected countries. Some in the administration remain uncertain about this, but any worries about possibly creating more long-term problems at the border were clearly outweighed by more immediate challenges in New York and other cities.

If Biden did nothing, he faced the prospect of escalating criticism from Adams and maybe other Democratic mayors and governors that would likely make its way next year into Republican ads denouncing the president’s record on immigration. That risk, many of those watching the debate believe, helped persuade the administration to accept the demands from so many of Biden’s allies to extend TPS to more undocumented migrants, at least from Venezuela. But that doesn’t mean he’ll be happy about this or any of the other difficult choices he faces at the border.

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk, a mere page and a half is devoted to introducing Musk’s grandfather, a Canadian chiropractor named Joshua N. Haldeman. Isaacson describes him as a source of Musk’s great affection for danger—“a daredevil adventurer with strongly held opinions” and “quirky conservative populist views” who did rope tricks at rodeos and rode freight trains like a hobo. “He knew that real adventures involve risk,” Isaacson quotes Musk as having said. “Risk energized him.”

But in 1950, Haldeman’s “quirky” politics led him to make an unusual and dramatic choice: to leave Canada for South Africa. Haldeman had built a comfortable life for himself in Regina, Saskatchewan’s capital. His chiropractic practice was one of Canada’s largest and allowed him to own his own airplane and a 20-room home he shared with his wife and four young children. He’d been active in politics, running for both the provincial and national parliaments and even becoming national chairman of a minor political party. Meanwhile, he’d never even been to South Africa.

What would make a man undertake such a radical change? Isaacson writes that Haldeman had come “to believe that the Canadian government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone soft.” One of Haldeman’s sons has written that it may have simply been “his adventurous spirit and the desire for a more pleasant climate in which to raise his family.” But there was another factor at play: his strong support for the brand-new apartheid regime.

An examination of Joshua Haldeman’s writings reveals a radical conspiracy theorist who expressed racist, antisemitic, and anti-democratic views repeatedly, and over the course of decades—a record I studied across hundreds of documents from the time, including newspaper clips, self-published manuscripts, university archives, and private correspondence. Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead “White Christian Civilization” in its fight against the “International Conspiracy” of Jewish bankers and the “hordes of Coloured people” they controlled.

“Instead of the Government’s attitude keeping me out of South Africa, it had precisely the opposite effect—it encouraged me to come and settle here,” he told a reporter for the South African newspaper Die Transvaler shortly after his arrival. The far-right Afrikaner newspaper treated Haldeman’s arrival as a PR victory for apartheid. (“PRAISES ACTION OF NATIONALIST PARTY REGIME: Canadian Politician Settles In South Africa,” the headline read.)

Musk’s grandfather spelled out his beliefs most clearly in a 1960 self-published book with the weighty title The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa. (Its existence was first reported by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker.) Library databases indicate there is only one copy in the western hemisphere, at Michigan State University, which is where I obtained it. In it, Haldeman wrote that there was:  

a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of White Christian Civilization as she is becoming more and more the focal point, the bulwark, and the subject of attack by anti-Christian, anti-White forces throughout the world.

She will fulfill this destiny if the White Christian people get together; if they realize the forces that are behind these world-wide attacks; if the people will make a study of who are their real enemies and what their methods are; if she will seriously combat the evils of Internationalism that are already taking cancerous roots in our society.

These views were on display before he set out for South Africa. The minor political party that Haldeman had led in Canada was notorious for antisemitism. In 1946, when one of the party’s newspapers printed the fraudulent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—arguably the most consequential conspiracy text in the modern world—he defended the decision, arguing “that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation.” A local rabbi described Haldeman’s political speeches to the local newspaper as “shot through with anti-Semitic talk.”

Before that, he’d been a leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. During World War II, the Canadian government banned the group, declaring it a risk to national security. Haldeman’s involvement with Technocracy continued, though, and he was arrested and convicted of three charges relating to it.

Once he got to South Africa, he added Black Africans to his list of rhetorical targets. “The natives are very primitive and must not be taken seriously,” he wrote back to his hometown Canadian newspaper in 1951. “Some are quite clever in a routine job, but the best of them cannot assume responsibility and will abuse authority. The present government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question.”

Of course, the sins of the grandfather are not the sins of the grandson, and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise. Joshua Haldeman died when Elon Musk was two years old. And Haldeman’s politics were not universal in the family; Elon’s father Errol Musk, for example, was a member of the Progressive Federal Party, the primary political parliamentary opposition to apartheid. (I reached out to Musk by email but have not heard back.)

But as Musk carries on his own war of words with Jewish institutions—threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League for $22 billion over its complaints about antisemitism on Twitter—it’s worth pausing on his grandfather, a man whose weakness for antisemitic conspiracy theories and devotion to white supremacist ideology drew the worried attention of Jewish groups on two continents.

When Musk tweets that George Soros “appears to want nothing less than the destruction of western civilization”—in response to a tweet blaming Soros for an “invasion” of African migrants into Europe—he is not the first in his family to insinuate that a wealthy Jewish financier was manipulating thousands of Africans to advance nefarious goals.

Joshua Norman Haldeman was born in 1902 in a Minnesota log cabin; the family moved north to Saskatchewan a few years later. His mother, Almeda Haldeman, was the first chiropractor known to practice in Canada. At the time, chiropractic was less than a decade old and still tightly bound to its origins in pseudoscience and spiritualism; its creator D. D. Palmer claimed he had received it from “the other world” and considered it akin to a religion. Chiropractors believed that the vertebral misalignments they treated were the cause of all disease.

Haldeman followed in his mother’s footsteps, but after only a few years, he left chiropractic work temporarily to become a farmer. The move was poorly timed. The stock market crash of 1929 was followed by the beginning of a decade-long drought that hit Saskatchewan in 1930. Haldeman, like many of his neighbors, lost the farm.

The terrible conditions in Canada’s western prairies made it a hotbed for radical political movements on both the right and left, each promising a root-and-branch restructuring of society. At various times, Haldeman found himself entranced by the promises of several very different movements. The first was on the political left. The Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was an amalgam of various socialist, labor, and farmer groups that advocated greater state involvement in the economy to alleviate Depression-era suffering. Haldeman was one of the federation’s strongest supporters in the mid-1930s, becoming the local party chairman for the Canadian equivalent of a congressional district.

But around 1936, he moved to the provincial capital, Regina, and fell into an entirely different political philosophy — one that believed democracy had failed as a political philosophy and needed a scientific replacement.

Technocracy as an idea came into public view in one of the most politically perilous moments of 20th-century American history: the four months between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election as president in November 1932 and his taking office in March 1933. The Bonus Army (thousands of World War I veterans demanding benefits) had been violently rousted from its occupation of Washington only months before; the machinations of the Business Plot (an abortive scheme to overthrow FDR) were only months away. Herbert Hoover had been defeated soundly at the polls, but he’d spend his last few months in office trying to sabotage what would become the New Deal. Some Americans craved a strongman to take control.

Into that maelstrom came a renowned scientist and engineer named Howard Scott. With a doctorate from the University of Berlin, he’d commanded complex projects around the globe, from British munitions plants to industrial projects for U.S. Steel. Scott and a small group of fellow engineers and scientists had made a diagnosis of civilization’s ills and a prescription for a relief. The current capitalist system, they said, was irrevocably broken, and—as one magazine summarizing the movement put it—“we are faced with the threat of national bankruptcy and perhaps general chaos within eighteen months.” Scott described the solution in the language of an engineer—a civilization “operated on a thermo-dynamically balanced load.”

Scott’s Technocracy Incorporated called for the destruction of all current governments on the continent, to be replaced by the “Technate of North America,” a new entity to be run by engineers and scientists. In calling for the abolition of all existing government, the Technocrats advocated what they liked to call a “functional control system” modeled on the telephone network and other large corporations. (AT&T, they noted, wasn’t a democracy either.) The Technate would measure the total energy output of the continent and annually allot to each citizen a set number of Energy Certificates, which would replace money. “It will be impossible to go into debt and, likewise, impossible to save income for the future,” one Technology Inc., brochure from the period says “It would be impossible to sell anything.”

That sort of radical rationing would be acceptable because—once scientific principles governed the entire economy, and the tech guys were running everything—it would become so profoundly productive that life would become mostly leisure. Technate residents could expect to work only between ages 25 and 45, and even then only four hours a day, 165 days a year. After 45 came retirement, when they could “do whatever they wish for the rest of their lives, and still enjoy full consuming privileges,” a Technocracy Inc. pamphlet promised.

It’s not difficult to imagine the appeal of such a vision in the darkest hours of the Great Depression—especially when laid out by a genius engineer like Scott. There was a problem, though: Howard Scott was not a genius engineer. A reporter quickly discovered that he’d invented nearly his entire backstory. (Among his other tall tales: that he’d been a football star at Notre Dame; that he’d once had to flee Mexico after shooting the local archbishop; and that he’d caused a riot in Montreal by punching some Jesuits who’d shoved his girl off a sidewalk.)

Others began to point out holes in his Technate plans. Not long after becoming a true national phenomenon—The New York Times ran 120 stories on technocracy in that four-month period—Scott and his movement were mostly forgotten. As the political theorist Langdon Winner later wrote, “In its best moments Technocracy Inc. was an organi­zation of crackpots; in its worst, an inept swindle.”

But Howard Scott kept pushing his ideas, and they found a fan in Joshua Haldeman—even as Technocracy Inc. grew stranger with time. Its members began showing up for events in identical gray uniforms and saluting one another in ways that to some observers—in an era of Brownshirts and Blackshirts—had “the tone of an incipient Fascist movement.” (Later, after Pearl Harbor, Scott issued a press release suggesting he be named continental dictator.)

Scott also convinced members that they should begin referring to themselves by a number, not just a name. At one rally, a speaker was announced simply as “1x1809x56.” Haldeman, for his part, became 10450-1. (According to newspaper accounts at the time, the number is derived from Regina’s latitude and longitude.) He became first the local head of Technocracy in his part of Saskatchewan, then the organization’s top man in Canada. Writing in the group’s magazine in 1940, Haldeman/10450-1 predicted a coming “smashup” in society. “Technocracy Inc. is preparing for a New Social Order that is to come,” he wrote. “If you are a Technocrat, are you doing all that you can to extend the Organization and discipline yourself to meet its objectives?”

Technocracy Inc. today might seem more odd than threatening. But the arrival of World War II changed perceptions within the Canadian government. Technocracy issued an isolationist statement proclaiming it was “unequivocally opposed to the conscription of the manpower of Canada for any war anywhere off this continent." Scott bragged publicly that his group was influential enough that the government could not go to war “without permission of this organization.” And Technocracy declared itself the continental government-in-waiting for the imminent collapse of the current system.

In 1940—using the same war powers under which it had banned the country’s major communist and fascist parties—the Canadian government banned Technology Incorporated as a threat to national security. (The United States did not follow suit—not officially, at least. But when Haldeman tried to drive across the border to give a speech in Minnesota a few months later, he was stopped and blocked from entry, despite being born a U.S. citizen.)

Shortly after the ban took effect, Haldeman took out an ad in the Regina newspaper defending Technocracy’s patriotism and impugning the government’s.  Days later, Canadian police raided 12 buildings in Regina related to illegal organizations, including Technocracy. It’s likely, though not certain, one of those was Haldeman’s home. And in October 1940, he was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Vancouver. He faced charges of “distributing and publishing documents likely or intended to interfere with the efficient prosecution of the war, and likely to cause disaffection to His Majesty.” He was convicted on all counts, earning a fine of $100 plus court costs, or two months in jail.

After his conviction, Haldeman set out to start his own political party, which he called Total War & Defence, but it gained little traction. By 1944, he’d shifted his allegiance to another odd spawn of western Canada’s Depression-era radical ferment—the Social Credit Party.

Haldeman’s next intellectual North Star was a man named Clifford Hugh Douglas, the Scottish creator of the economic concept of social credit. Like Scott, Douglas was an engineer with a plan to revolutionize society. And also like Scott, Douglas seems to have concocted much of his past. (He claimed to have been the chief engineer of the British Westinghouse Company in India; the company could find no record of his having worked for it. He claimed to have led an important engineering project for the British postal service; records showed he was a low-level employee who was laid off mid-project.)

Douglas believed there was an innate imbalance in the financial system of his day: Workers were not paid enough to consume all the goods they produced. There was always a gap, which he considered waste. His solution was the issuance of a sort of government-created scrip to all citizens—something akin to a universal basic income—that would close the purchasing-power gap.

As with technocracy, the appeal of such an idea in the midst of the Great Depression is obvious. But again, social credit’s utopian economic philosophy came with a political one. Douglas saw social credit and democracy as incompatible. He advocated ending the secret ballot, making all votes public — and then taxing citizens differently depending on who they voted for. He also called for the abolition of political parties and considered majority rule a form of despotism; instead, the work of governance should be left to the experts.

Why was Douglas so skeptical of the secret ballot and majority rule? Because he viewed them as tools of a global Jewish conspiracy whose tentacles infested every corner of society. He was a virulent antisemite who consistently traced the rot in the financial system to a single source: Jews. He cited the Protocols frequently as an accurate blueprint for the actions of the “World Plotters,” whom he saw as at war with Christian civilization.

“The Jew has no native culture and always aims at power without responsibility,” Douglas wrote in Social Crediter magazine in 1939. “He is the parasite upon, and corrupter of, every civilisation in which he has attained power.” Douglas even, bewilderingly, considered Nazi Germany to be a creation and instrument of Jewish power. (He occasionally argued that Hitler was a secret Rothschild.)

Douglas never had any economic training, and his ideas have generally been dismissed by those who do. But they were a phenomenon on the Canadian prairie. A charismatic Baptist radio preacher named William “Bible Bill” Aberhart became a convert to Douglas’s ideas about social credit and began blasting the province of Alberta’s airwaves with its promises. He founded a new Social Credit Party and ran a set of candidates in the 1935 provincial elections. To his — and everyone’s — shock, Social Credit won 56 of the legislature’s 63 seats and Aberhart was suddenly Alberta’s premier.

Putting Douglas’ ideas into practice proved to be a challenge. Aberhart’s government tried issuing a sort of social credit it called “prosperity certificates,” but it was a flop. The Social Credit Party (Socreds for short) quickly transitioned into a mostly normal conservative party — with an extra dose of Christianity from Bible Bill and of antisemitism from Douglas. It became standard Socred rhetoric to rail against the Money Power and World Finance and International Bankers — with some members more explicit than others about their targets.

These developments were of significant concern to the Canadian Jewish Congress, the country’s major advocacy group for Jews. Louis Rosenberg, the Congress’ research director, described Douglas as someone who "mumbles mysteriously about the long discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion and spices his stew…with a little anti-semitic paprika to taste…”

And meanwhile, in Saskatchewan, Joshua Haldeman was enjoying a quick rise within the Social Credit Party. In 1945, he was elected head of the provincial party; a year later, he was named chairman of its national council, the party’s top position. That put him at the center of public disputes over the antisemitism in its ranks.

One such case centered on a man named John Patrick Gillese, who edited the party’s national newspaper, the Canadian Social Crediter. He was a vigorous antisemite who regularly expressed those opinions in the newspaper, over which he had complete control. He complained in a memo that the party spent too much time “continually explaining that we are not anti-Semitic, that we are not fascist.” Gillese didn’t like to be put on the defensive, he wrote.

The party’s top elected official, Alberta Premier Ernest Manning, expressed concern that Gillese’s antisemitism was hurting the party, and demanded that Haldeman oust him from the newspaper. Haldeman rejected the idea, saying he and his fellow Socreds leader Solon Low agreed that “Johnny Gillese should be retained as editor.” Low then wrote Gillese a note complaining about Manning’s efforts: “Please do not worry about the situation. Just go right ahead and continue doing a good job and I'll fight the battle to prevent our being completely muzzled and rendered incompetent.”

The Socreds took another hit in 1946, when it came out that the party’s Quebec branch was publishing excerpts of the Protocols. A Saskatchewan newspaper, the Star-Phoenix, editorialized against the scandal, calling it “home-baked fascism” and calling the concept of social credit “related directly to the authoritarian ideology of Adolf Hitler and others of his ilk.”

Haldeman replied in a series of letters to the editor in which he claimed the Social Credit Party was not antisemitic—while saying some rather antisemitic things—including the outrageous claim that Hitler had been installed as German fuhrer by “money…supplied by international financiers, many but not all of them, Jewish.” He claimed that Jews created antisemitism to generate sympathy. And in multiple letters, Haldeman argued that whether or not the Protocols were fake was beside the point — the ideas they contained were true, even if they were a forgery. “The point is that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation,” he wrote. “This should be fair warning to all of us.”

Haldeman’s letters generated a few angry responses from his fellow citizens. The Canadian Jewish Congress monitored the situation closely.

“Haldeman was all about dog-whistle politics,” Janine Stingel, a historian who wrote a book about antisemitism in Canada’s Social Credit Party, told me. “He wouldn’t say ‘Jew,’ but he’d say everything short of it. He knew what he was saying, and his base knew what he was saying.”

While active in the Social Credit party, Haldeman ran for the federal parliament twice and the Saskatchewan legislature once. He lost badly each time. He began to see communists behind every corner. (He was once shouted down at a gathering of Regina housewives for calling the group “merely a front for the Communist organization.”) He found himself unable to revive the fortunes of the Social Credit Party. In 1949, he resigned his post. He was ready for a different move.

The Haldemans’ 1950 move to South Africa seemed to come out of nowhere. He’d become something of a provincial celebrity for all his constant buzzing from town to town by plane for political appearances. (And, oddly, for his reddish beard—unusual in that clean-shaven era and mentioned in nearly every newspaper story about him.)

In her memoir, Haldeman’s daughter Maye Musk—Elon’s mother, who was two years old at the time of the move—ascribes the decision to her parents having “met missionaries who had been to South Africa, who had told them how beautiful it was.” In a biography of Maye’s brother Scott (who himself became a prominent chiropractor), Haldeman’s decision was prompted by “speaking with an Anglican Minister from South Africa at an International Trade Fair in Toronto.”

In fact, that conversation seems to have been so meaningful to Haldeman that he references it in prominently in The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa. The book’s opening epigraph is attributed to “the prophetic and emphatic statement of an Anglican Minister in Toronto, Canada, 1949” who “had lived many years in South Africa”:

“SOUTH AFRICA WILL BECOME THE LEADER OF WHITE CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD.”

In Isaacson’s biography of Musk, he writes that South Africa in 1950 “was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.” But in reality, apartheid was only then being established.

The two most foundational apartheid laws—one forcing all South Africans to register their race with the government and the Group Areas Act, which segregated housing in urban areas—weren’t enacted until July 1950, less than a month before Haldeman announced his move there. In other words, Haldeman was choosing to move into a system of regimented racial subjugation just being born.

When Haldeman gave an interview to Die Transvaler, he was speaking to perhaps the most extremist publication in the country, one that held a special animus for Jews, and whose founding editor Hendrik Verwoerd was known as the architect of apartheid. The paper regularly railed against “British-Jewish imperialism” and blamed election losses on “the money of organized Jewry.”

When a rival newspaper in 1941 accused Die Transvaler and Verwoerd of pushing Nazi propaganda and running falsified news stories, Verwoerd sued its editor for libel—and lost, with the judge ruling that “he did support Nazi propaganda, he did make his paper a tool of the Nazis in South Africa, and he knew it."

The Die Transvaler article caught the attention of Jews in South Africa who worried about Haldeman’s splashy arrival, even prompting the secretary general of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies to write to a counterpart in Montreal: “A few weeks ago a paper… carried a story about the arrival of a new immigrant who had been associated with the Social Credit Movement in your country. Knowing that that Movement has from time to time rather favoured anti-Jewish policies, I thought I should enquire from you whether you have any information on this person.”

After a few years in South Africa, Haldeman popped up in the news again for his founding (with wife Winnifred) of the Pretoria Pistol Club, which promoted gun ownership and training for housewives. But it does not appear that he was particularly active in far-right political groups in South Africa, at least not as a prominent leader. Milton Shain, a leading historian of the South African Jewish community and the author of Fascists, Fabricators and Fantasists: Antisemitism in South Africa from 1948 to the Present, said he doesn’t remember coming across Haldeman’s name in his decades of research into antisemitic groups of the period. But he said the coded antisemitic language in Haldeman’s interview in Die Transvaler would have easily stood out to Jews who would have “noted Haldeman's concern about 'international financial interests' — a discourse common among the white far-right in South Africa.”

A few months after settling down in Pretoria, Haldeman wrote an essay for his old hometown paper, the Regina Leader-Post, on his new life there. He described the lives of Black South Africans under apartheid as happy, contented, and leisurely.

“We have two native (Negro) garden boys in the summer and one in the winter and a native girl…” Haldeman wrote. “We give them food and a lot of their clothing and pay them from $10 to $15 [Canadian] a month.” For that sum, Haldeman declared that “Black labor in South Africa industry is found to be the most expensive labor in the world.” (Average income in Canada in 1950 was about $225 a month.) He went on to say that, “it is impossible to make a native work hard. It takes three natives to do the work of one white man and the white people here work about half as hard as Canadians.” With this state of affairs, Haldeman wrote, Black South Africans were “happy and contented…unless stirred up and stirring them up is almost an impossible job.”

Haldeman also encouraged Canadians to follow his lead: “This country seems to have unlimited opportunities for development. The Rhodesias and South Africa could easily stand 50 million white people. We flew over hundreds of miles in which we could scarcely see even a native hut.”

Over the years, Haldeman’s conspiratorial beliefs seemed only to deepen. On March 21, 1960, thousands of Black South Africans gathered at a police station in the township of Sharpeville to protest the latest cruelty of apartheid. Henrik Verwoerd, the former Die Transvaler editor, was now prime minister and had tightened a pass system that sharply limited the movements of Black residents. The protesters were there without their passbooks, offering themselves up for arrest en masse. After attempts to clear the crowd failed, police opened fire on the unarmed crowd. In all, 69 protesters were killed and roughly another 180 wounded. Ten of the dead were children. A police commander on scene later justified the shooting by saying that “the native mentality does not allow them to gather for a peaceful demonstration. For them to gather means violence.”

The world recoiled at the Sharpeville massacre. Days later, the United Nations passed Resolution 134, the body’s first official condemnation of apartheid and the beginning of decades of diplomatic isolation.

Joshua Haldeman, meanwhile, decided to head for the typewriter. A few weeks later, in May 1960, he self-published a 42-page response to Sharpeville entitled The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa. In it, Haldeman predicted that there would soon be “an outside invasion by hordes of Coloured people.” He blamed the international media for paying too much attention to the African National Congress and other anti-apartheid groups. And he repeatedly returned to the “International Conspiracy” pulling the strings behind it all, sometimes shorthanded as “the Conspiracy” or “the Internationalists,” whom he complained controlled the press and the medical profession.

Like many of his old Social Credit colleagues, Haldeman is careful to talk about “International Finance” without speaking openly about “Jews.” By my count, he only slips twice in the book: once referring to communism as a “Jewish moral philosophy for the more equitable distribution of scarcity” and once caustically labeling the London School of Economics (a frequent target) “the Zion of Economists.” But the names to whom he attributes this global control ring throughout: Jacob Henry Schiff, Paul Warburg, Harold Laski, Herbert Lehman, Ernest Cassel, Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Samuel Bronfman, and above them all, Mayer Rothschild, whose family he blamed for the French Revolution, the American Civil War, the rise of Mussolini, and an untold number of assassinations.

Like many antisemites, Haldeman saw natural allies in two seemingly opposing forces: communism and capitalist financiers. “Moscow and Wall Street always work hand in hand at the conspiracy to form a World Government under their control,” he writes in his book.

In Haldeman’s telling, the International Conspiracy was even behind the anti-apartheid forces both within and outside South Africa. He said they had sparked the Sharpeville “riot” on purpose to make money on the South African stock market drop that came in its wake. Haldeman consistently argues that Black South Africans are happy with their position under apartheid, even grateful for “the protection of the White people,” and that international meddlers are to blame for riling up opposition. “They know that the White man has done so much for them,” he wrote.

Haldeman closes the book with recommended reading, and the scale of his radicalism can also be judged by what he suggests. He praises the magazine of the League of Empire Loyalists, a British group led by the antisemite A. K. Chesterton, a former leader of the British Union of Fascists. The league later evolved into the fascist party National Front.

He also recommends readers subscribe to the South African Observer, a Jew-hating monthly whose editor S.E.D. Brown held Haldemanesque views (South Africa had been “marked out…as an enemy because it is a bastion of white conservatism; because it believes in national sovereignty and western Christian civilization”). Shain said he considers Brown the “high priest” of anti-Jewish fantasists of the apartheid years.

And he pushes The New Times, the publication of the Australian League of Rights, whose pro-social credit editor published books like The International Jew, an annotated version of the Protocols, “168 pages of anti-Jewish venom.” In the United States, Haldeman recommends The American Mercury, the antisemitic magazine that employed George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.

At some point after The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa, Haldeman self-published one more book: a sequel of sorts, titled The International Conspiracy in Health. In it, he rails against health insurance mandates, vaccines (which “the promoters of World Government have always been behind”), and fluoride in the water (part of the “brain-washing programme of the Conspiracy”). By then, he was getting near retirement age. In 1974, while practicing landings in his plane, Haldeman didn’t see a wire strung between two poles. It caught his plane’s wheels, which caused it to flip, and Haldeman was killed. He was 71; his grandson Elon Musk was 2.

What attention Joshua Haldeman has gotten in recent years has mostly been tied to what Musk called his “real adventures,” the ones that “involve risk.” He flew his little plane all across Africa and the world; he went on a dozen journeys to the Kalahari Desert to find a “lost city” that appears to have been dreamed up by a Canadian conman.

But his legacy involves a lot more than adventuring. Joshua Haldeman had a weakness for men with fuzzy credentials and big-picture plans to turn society upside down. He believed in shadowy forces that were out to destroy civilization and manipulated the masses into doing their bidding. He believed that a good chiropractor could cure any disease, but vaccines were a front for totalitarianism. And he believed democracy was for the few, not the many.