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Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Earlier this month in San Francisco, two friends and I wanted to imbibe strong rum drinks at the bar Smuggler’s Cove, so we used a phone app to summon a car. It arrived without a driver, we climbed into the back seat, and a trivia app entertained us on the way to our destination while distracting us, at least a little bit, from the fact that no one was in the driver’s seat.

The driving was safe and efficient. But at the end of the ride, the car stopped in the middle lane of a three-lane street, forcing us to cross a lane of traffic to reach safety on the sidewalk.

So … not yet ready for prime time, but pretty close.

Are driverless cars the future? Should cities allow them to be tested on the street now? Even in your neighborhood? What about the multiton driverless trucks that the Teamsters want to ban? (I am pro-innovation, but when sober, I also like driving. I hope I’m never forced to give it up.)

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

Laughs, Lies, and Fabulist Hate

Last week, Clare Malone published an article in The New Yorker revealing that the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who came of age as a practicing Muslim in post-9/11 America, made up various stories he has told about bigots engaging in prejudicial or abusive behavior toward him.

For example, in a 2022 Netflix special, he speaks about the reaction to his talk show, Patriot Act. Malone describes the scene from the special:

The big screen displays threatening tweets that were sent to Minhaj. Most disturbing, he tells the story of a letter sent to his home which was filled with white powder. The contents accidentally spilled onto his young daughter. The child was rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be anthrax, but it’s a sobering reminder that Minhaj’s comedic actions have real-world consequences. Later that night, his wife, in a fury, told him that she was pregnant with their second child. “ ‘You get to say whatever you want onstage, and we have to live with the consequences,’ ” Minhaj recalls her saying. “ ‘I don’t give a shit that Time magazine thinks you’re an “influencer.” If you ever put my kids in danger again, I will leave you in a second.’ ”

Powerful stuff. But it didn’t happen, Malone reports:

The New York Police Department, which investigates incidents of possible Bacillus anthracis, has no record of an incident like the one Minhaj describes, nor do area hospitals. Front-desk and mailroom employees at Minhaj’s former residence don’t remember such an incident, nor do “Patriot Act” employees involved with the show’s security or Minhaj’s security guard from the time.

During our conversation, Minhaj admitted that his daughter had never been exposed to a white powder, and that she hadn’t been hospitalized. He had opened up a letter delivered to his apartment, he said, and it had contained some sort of powder. Minhaj said that he had made a joke to his wife, saying, “Holy shit. What if this was anthrax?” He said that he’d never told anyone on the show about this letter, despite the fact that there were concerns for his security at the time and that Netflix had hired protection for Minhaj.

The article describes other similar instances of fabulism, and Minhaj’s explanation for them: The stories are based on “emotional truths” and “the punch line is worth the fictionalized premise.”

The revelations have prompted a lot of journalistic reactions. Few have defended the falsehoods. Yet as Kat Rosenfield put it at UnHerd, “It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this—even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves.” So many observers have had a hard time describing why Minhaj crossed the line, even though most of them are committed to the proposition that something is amiss.

In fact, I’ve yet to see anyone pinpoint what I see as the strongest case against Minhaj’s style. But before I tip my hand, here’s a quick rundown of some alternative indictments. In The New York Times, Jason Zinoman argues, “When stories told about racism, religious profiling or transgender identity are exposed as inventions, that can lead to doubt about the experiences of real people.”

For Nitish Pahwa at Slate, the problem was something to akin to stolen valor:

There are more than enough brown people across the country who’ve actually had their loved ones and livelihoods attacked in those very ways. If those same Americans were fans of Minhaj, it was because he effected a nationwide breakthrough of the truth that many of us have, in fact, been abused in our personal and professional lives thanks to our skin color or faith … The people he claimed to be speaking for were led to believe he really did get it on a visceral, fundamental level. This was a rare public figure who could be a high-profile voice for our fears, who could get people in the highest levels of society to hear and pass on his onstage and offstage anecdotes … Minhaj never even hinted that he was doing a character, or giving voice to stories he’d heard from others, or gesturing toward the broader landscape of Muslim Americans. Minhaj took what real, everyday brown folks were going through and led those people to believe that he’d also been there—earning his fame and plaudits from that very trust, as well as the trust that engendered among those who wished to understand brown Americans.

My own take?

Hate crimes carry an additional legal penalty. And there’s a strong argument in favor of hate-crime enhancements: Robbing or assaulting or murdering someone because they are Muslim or Black or gay sows fear in whole communities, harming many beyond the primary victim. When a person fabricates a hate crime or adjacent acts of bigotry, they do similar second-order harm. The gang-rape hoax that Rolling Stone published in 2014 scared many women on college campuses. Chicagoans who believed Jussie Smollett were frightened at the prospect of MAGA zealots beating Black pedestrians. Obviously, gang rapes and street assaults do happen; nevertheless, fabulist accounts of such incidents cause many to erroneously believe they are a bigger threat, or a different one, than they had previously judged.

Imagine the ripples of fear an Islamophobic bigot would cause––to Muslim Americans, and to Muslim public figures and their families especially––by mailing mysterious white powder to the house of a prominent Muslim comic. Imagine how such an act might chill the speech of some Muslims. The ripples of fear such a bigot would cause are the same ripples that Minhaj himself caused! And that, in my estimation, is the strongest case against Minhaj’s “emotional truths.”

A Debt Unpaid

In The Atlantic, Adam Harris flags an attempt to quantify a particular kind of racial discrimination:

On Monday, the Biden administration sent letters with a clear message to 16 governors: Over the past 30 years, their states have underfunded their historically Black land-grant colleges by hundreds of millions—or, in some cases, billions—of dollars … the first time the federal government has attempted to put a comprehensive number on the financial discrimination against these institutions.

He goes on to note “the exact amounts each land-grant Black college would have received from 1987 to 2020 if the institutions had been funded at the same level per student as the 1862 land grant stipulated.”

For example:

If Alabama A&M University had received its fair share in comparison to Auburn University, which has been dogged for decades by low enrollment figures for Black students, it would have had an additional $527 million over the period; meanwhile, Tennessee State University may have had an additional $2.1 billion if it had received an equitable share of the pie.

“There is now a number attached to the legacy of discrimination at historically Black colleges, at least for the most recent decades,” he concludes. “The lingering question is whether states will actually atone for it.”

Wonder Wall

At Wisdom of Crowds, Damir Marusic makes a claim about an aspect of aging:

I found myself outside of a bar with a friend. As we stood outside on the sidewalk, we remarked how funny it is to see all the people out, walking around, going to one place after another, clearly anticipating a great night ahead. “I remember what that used to be like—that excitement,” I said. “Sure, it was just a bar or a club we were heading to, but it represented a kind of energy.” I personally never went out to bars to meet new people, just to meet up with my people. So that feeling wasn’t so much a sense of possibility at serendipitous encounters with strangers as it was being surrounded by an electric charge. Drinking in loud crowded places amplifies the inherent buzz of alcohol. And for whatever reason, the novelty of that amplified buzz felt like it would never wear off.

But wear off it did. I don’t drink much these days, as it makes me slow the next day. And as I grow older, I don’t want to squander days on useless things like recovery. Beyond being more gun-shy, however, is a more banal truth: it got repetitive. All senses, if overstimulated, dull out. Looking at all the happy buzzing people out on 14th street that night, it struck me that what separated me from them is a sense of wonder. When you’re younger, you have more capacity for it. You don’t recognize patterns quite so well, so you believe that things are more mutable than they are. As you discover the world, it seems limitless, and limitlessly astonishing.

But as you experience more and more of it, you start to figure out how things work. Not in the sense of gaining ultimate and total knowledge—that’s hubris. Hard-won wisdom is the opposite: figuring out what is unknowable, and appreciating how chance works. Still, as the patterns become a little more recognizable, the world becomes a little less enchanted.

How the First Amendment Works

In Politico, Adam Cancryn reports, “Biden officials have felt handcuffed for the past two years by a Republican lawsuit over the administration’s initial attempt to clamp down on anti-vaxxers, who alleged the White House violated the First Amendment in encouraging social media companies to crack down on anti-vaccine posts. That suit, they believe, has limited their ability to police disinformation online.” To which National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke responds, the suit has limited the Biden administration’s speech-policing “as opposed to what?”

He writes:

The First Amendment’s protection of the progenitors of “misinformation” is not an esoteric loophole or a marginal technicality or the remnant of a bygone era. It is not vestigial, or contingent, or the product of a quirky mistranslation. It is one of the foundations of our society. In the United States, it is the authorities, not the citizens, who are cabined by the law. The Constitution grants no enumerated power to the federal government with which it might legitimately police lies, and, as if to make the matter as clear as possible, the Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits such policing. In totalitarian nations, the state is permitted to determine what it considers to be authoritatively true, to disseminate its resolutions across the country, and to punish anyone who dissents. Here, the state must allow individuals to speak irrespective of the contempt in which it holds their opinions. Remarkably, this applies even when the president is a Democrat and the topic is vaccines.

The frame that both the Biden administration and Politico have adopted is thus defective. The White House has not “felt handcuffed”; it is handcuffed. The limits on its power are not the consequence of “a Republican lawsuit”; the Republican lawsuit is meant to uphold the constitutional limits on its power. Biden’s compliance with the ruling has not given those whom he disdains “more space to promote their views”; that space existed beforehand and was being temporarily invaded by the executive branch. Throughout, Politico implies that those who have benefited from the verdict are not really exercising their rights: The lack of force, the outlet sneers, has allowed them to “tout themselves as free speech warriors.” But there’s no “tout themselves” about it. They are free-speech warriors. They’re engaged in “free speech,” which, in America, includes misinformation, and they’re “warriors” because the government is trying to shut them up. That the content of their speech is often preposterous is no more important to the case than it would be if it were “hateful.” There are no classes of expression in the First Amendment.

Provocation of the Week

In The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey writes:

Being vegan means forgoing many of life’s pleasures—cheeseburgers, peppermint ice cream, warm sourdough with cold butter. It means absenting yourself from your own culture—not taking the piece of birthday cake, not going to the amazing new restaurant. It means constantly feeling like you are failing, given the difficulty of avoiding animal products in a world where animals are a commodity. It means living in a way that makes other people feel judged and uncomfortable. It is exhausting, abstemious, weird. One paper found that omnivores view vegans more negatively than any other stigmatized group except for drug addicts.

It is not surprising that the share of people forgoing animal products has barely changed since at least the late 1990s. Just 5 percent of Americans say they are vegetarian, and only a sliver of the population, perhaps 1 percent, truly never eats meat. Globally, the number of animals consumed per capita has nearly doubled in the past five decades, as has the share of animals raised in confined, industrial environments.

DxE believes it can change that, not by turning omnivores into vegans but by turning vegans into vegan activists. It has attracted thousands of donors and participants, mostly Millennials and Gen Zers, over its 10 years of existence. (There’s no formal membership count, as there’s no formal membership process.) But it has also amassed plenty of detractors, who see the group as cultish and its activities as pointless and obnoxious. Social change is hard enough for movements that don’t ask people to give up anything, let alone their grandmother’s brisket …

Focusing on radicalizing vegans rather than converting meat-eaters allowed DxE to embrace a revolutionary message: “Animal liberation in one generation!” rather than “Try out meatless Monday!” But the activists adopted some tactics that were unpopular even with vegans. In addition to targeting big grocery chains, DxE went after small businesses devoted to slow food and humane meat, including Chez Panisse, the beloved originator of California cuisine. The group stopped weekly protests outside a revered Berkeley butcher shop only when the owners agreed to put up a sign reading “Animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust.” (The owners described this as “extortion.”)

Read the rest for some harrowing scenes of animal abuse by factory farms and an interesting exploration of what drives radical activism even when, as here, it may be ineffective or even counterproductive.

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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.

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In recent years, a massive selection of new drinks has popped up on the market, including a spate of alcoholic seltzers and a bunch of no-alcohol options. To discuss the state of beverages ahead of the long weekend, I convened a roundtable with our health and technology writers Amanda Mull, Ian Bogost, and Charlie Warzel.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Retailers bet wrong on America’s feelings about stores. The other work remote workers get done America needs hunting more than it knows.

Throwing Drinks at the Wall

Lora Kelley: Why are there so many drinks on the market right now?

Amanda Mull: Part of it is the economics of the drinks industry. There’s pretty low overhead relative to a lot of other food categories. One of the biggest costs is shipping, but everything else that goes into making a beverage—the ingredients, one of which is just water; the ability to find a manufacturer; the shelf life—is pretty favorable. So profit margins are better than in other areas of packaged food. It’s a friendly area to get into.

Also, in a lot of consumer categories, trying to switch someone from one product to another is a really expensive and difficult enterprise. But in beverages, you have a lot of people in a very large market who are open to and actively seeking new options.

Ian Bogost: The global nonalcoholic beverage market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. If you can capture a very tiny fraction of this enormous market, it can be extremely lucrative.

Charlie Warzel: I read some Kantar market research that found that the number of “beverage occasions” has remained static, at about 35 a week, but the way that people are consuming their beverages is different, and what they want out of them is different. It seems there is a shift toward emotional experiences with beverages. People aren’t drinking beverages more frequently, necessarily, but how we’re doing it has changed.

I moved away from New York City in 2017. Going into a bodega in 2023 in New York City now, from a beverage standpoint, is a truly mind-blowing experience. It feels like being a kid at a toy store. I have so many different options—this one might soothe me; this one sort of tastes like a root-beer float.

Ian: The precursors to this situation we’re in are also worth mentioning. The rise of bottled water is, of course, huge—people shifted from thinking of hydration as drinking from a fountain to picking up water as a packaged good. And then there was the Starbucks-ification of coffee. The third thing is, the number of impulse-purchase opportunities has massively increased both in stores and everywhere else, including in places that wouldn’t have sold you a beverage in the past. And the fourth thing is just market segmentation and lifestyle marketing in general. Now you can feel you’re the kind of person who would try Charlie’s calming beverage or root-beer beverage or the CBD drink or whatever it is. You are marking identity with much greater willingness and self-consciousness than just having a brand affiliation.

Lora: Is this much variety good for consumers? For example, who would something like a nonalcoholic White Claw—which is said to be coming next year—be for?

Amanda: We’re in a period of a lot of brands, both established and upstarts, throwing things against the wall to see what sticks. When companies can detect changing habits among people, there is this real rush to figure out what products address those new desires.

Charlie: Throwing stuff at the wall may also be an attempt to capture a weird bit of cultural virality. When Liquid Death was first announced, it was this weird start-up water, but it became a very successful brand. You laugh at it, then you’re buying it. It would be truly unhinged to be walking around at work with a nonalcoholic White Claw. But maybe that will take off among a strange segment of consumers, or get popular on TikTok.

Ian: Brand value, and brand management, used to be much more conservative than it is today. It was unthinkable—even in the 1990s, when there were a lot of new drinks—for a brand with the recognition of White Claw to imagine undermining that by confusing the consumer about their value proposition. Instead, what a beverage company would have done is launch a different brand. For whatever reason, there’s now a willingness to experiment with brand properties. Social media is definitely a part of it.

As for whether this is good for consumers: It’s absolutely bad to have all of these packaged goods and all the plastic. But capitalism says that choice is always good for consumers. On the one hand, you’re like, Maybe there’s too much choice. But then you think about all the parts of the economy where you have almost no choice or no choice at all. If there was only one drink or three drinks, that would be worse.

Lora: To what extent have we reached peak beverage? Will the market keep growing?

Amanda: Generally, in consumer markets, when you see this quick expansion in the players and the products, you eventually do see a shakeout. There is stuff that just won’t work: It won’t be sustainable on a revenue basis; it won’t find a market; it won’t have a viral moment. So I think it will shake out eventually. I don’t know if we’re there yet.

I think there’s probably still room to grow, especially with growing interest in low-alcohol or no-alcohol drinks. And I think there’s probably room left in the athletic-hydration market, which expands out into the hangover market. Over the course of industrialized-beverage history, I don’t know if there’s ever been a period of real contraction. It just keeps growing.

Ian: I don't think there’s peak beverage. The universe expands.

Charlie: Look at the change in habits around drinking alcohol. There are people that are saying, “It’s very clear that alcohol is very bad for you; we should be drinking less.” But for many people, that means adding more things to their arsenal of drinking.

I keep Athletic Brewing IPAs in my fridge, and I also, on occasion, will have a regular IPA. Now I am buying two different things. In my own life, I see how my beverage universe has expanded just because I have a slight change in my own habits and preferences.

Lora: Before we go, what are you all drinking right now?

Amanda: I have a lemon-lime Liquid I.V. in like 35 ounces of water.

Ian: This is just coffee out of our office espresso machine.

Charlie: I don’t have it on me, but this summer, I discovered the Waterloo brand of seltzers, and it’s a revelation. It’s the beverage of the summer.

Ian: A year or two ago, I became a pure LaCroix drinker. I kind of burned through the flavored LaCroix, and now I’m almost exclusively a plain-seltzer drinker. It feels like getting back to basics.

Related:

Drinking water is easy. Just add stuff to it. All soda is lemon-lime soda.

Today’s News

The August jobs report showed steady hiring and increased unemployment in the U.S. Russia has placed its new nuclear-weapons system, the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, on combat duty. Hong Kong and Guangdong canceled flights and evacuated almost 800,000 people to prepare for the arrival of Typhoon Saola.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman asks: Could AI ever write like Stephen King and Margaret Atwood?

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Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The Supreme Court Justices Are Just Like Anyone Else

By Adriane Fugh-Berman

What do some Supreme Court justices and physicians have in common? Both take gifts from those who stand to profit from their decisions, and both mistakenly think they can’t be swayed by those gifts.

Gifts are not only tokens of regard; they are the grease and the glue that help maintain a relationship. That’s not always unhealthy, but it’s important to note that gifts create obligation. The indebtedness of the recipient to the giver is a social norm in all cultures, and a basic principle of human interaction—something the French sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote about in his classic essay The Gift.

This sense of reciprocity is subconscious and powerful, and doesn’t necessarily require a quid pro quo. In other words, a material gift need not be reciprocated as a material gift, but may be reciprocated in other ways, including a more favorable bent toward a company, a group, or a person.

Read the full article.

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Watch. Meryl Streep is giving yet another killer performance in Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building (streaming on Hulu).

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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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