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FTR#1383 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: We continue analysis of the ideology of Joshua Haldeman, Elon Musk’s grandfather and a major influence on him and, apparently, “Team Trump.”
A doctrinaire fascist and anti-Semite, Haldeman decamped to South Africa and became a minor luminary in the Apartheid government, a direct offshoot of the German Nazi Party under Hitler.
Haldeman also became obsessed with finding an alleged lost city in the Kalahari Desert that he felt betokened a “white civilization” in Southern Africa.
Key Points of Discussion and Analysis Include: Haldeman’s membership in the technofascist Technocracy movement, similar in many ways to the ideologies of Curtis Yarvin and Benito Mussolini; His membership in another neo-fascist political party, the “Socreds;” Haldeman’s praise in an article in Die Transvaler, a paper edited by Henrik Voerster, a Broederbond member whose paper lauded the Third Reich; Haldeman’s shifting of blame for the Sharpsville massacre to the “International Financiers;” Haldeman’s book targeting mandatory vaccines and fluoridation of the water as part of a vast “International Conspiracy” against health; The similarities between Haldeman’s ideology and that of Brainworm Bobby (Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.); Haldeman’s recommended reading, which includes books by G.K. Chesterton, the head of the Union of British Fascists, founded by Oswald Moseley, whose grandson Louis heads up the UK branch of Apartheid champion Peter Thiel’s Palantir firm.
. . . . He wrote the manuscript for what became “Chariots of the Gods” while managing the Hotel Rosenhügel in Davos. At the hotel’s bar one day, he met the editor of a Swiss science magazine, who introduced Mr. von Däniken to an executive at Econ-Verlag, a Swiss publishing house. Econ-Verlag agreed to print 6,000 copies of what was originally titled “Erinnerungen an die Zukunft,” or “Memories of the Future,” but only after hiring Wilhelm Roggersdorf, who had edited the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, to rework much of it. . . .
1b.“The Canadian roots of Elon Musk’s conspiracist grandpa” By Geoff Leo; CBC; 03/20/2025.
Raised in Saskatchewan, Joshua Haldeman was a tech-utopian, politician and apartheid fan
Joshua Haldeman was just one of thousands of Saskatchewan farmers who lost their land in the drought of the Dirty ’30s.
While that trauma shaped the lives of everyone who went through it, the crisis affected Haldeman in an exceptional way — he never stopped raging at what he perceived were the causes of the Great Depression.
“He would remain leery of financial institutions and other bureaucracies throughout his life, a sentiment that would shape his political philosophy,” says a 1995 academic paper about Haldeman co-written by his son Scott.
Haldeman came to believe that an international communist conspiracy controlled the banks, the media and the universities and was aiming to run the world.
“An ‘Invisible Government,’ working to carry out the objectives of the International Conspiracy, is operating in every country,” he wrote in his book The International Conspiracy in Health, which was published in the mid-1960s. In it, he also said the conspiracy was pushing for the fluoridation of water supplies, mandatory milk pasteurization and mass vaccination programs.
Haldeman dedicated his life to fighting it.
“Only by following the example and guidance of Jesus Christ will man be able to successfully combat the evil forces of the International Conspiracy and achieve the greatness for himself and his country.”
Haldeman thought government was being badly mismanaged and at one point in his career, he embraced the solution proposed by a movement called Technocracy: that government should be run by scientists and engineers, not politicians.
…
Kevin Anderson, a historian at the University of Calgary who has studied the conspiratorial thinking that emerged during the 1930s and ’40s, told CBC there are stunning echoes between that time and today.
He said if he were to read a list of Haldeman’s beliefs in one of his classes today and ask, “When do you think this was written? I bet the more aware students would say, ‘Oh, two years ago — this year.’”
The Canada connection
Haldeman died in a plane crash in 1974, when he was 72 years old.
His grandson, Elon Musk, was just three. Musk would become the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX — and the wealthiest man in the world.
Elon’s mother, Maye, born in Regina in 1948, was one of Joshua and Winnifred Haldeman’s five children.
“Throughout his childhood, Elon heard many stories about his grandfather’s exploits and sat through countless slide shows that documented his travels and trips,” wrote Musk biographer Ashlee Vance in his 2015 book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.
“My grandmother told these tales of how they almost died several times along their journeys,” Musk told Vance. “They were flying in a plane with literally no instruments — not even a radio…. My grandfather had this desire for adventure, exploration — doing crazy things.”
“Maybe that sort of adventurous spirit is in all of [Haldeman’s descendants],” Musk said to Vanity Fair in 2015.
Like his grandpa, Musk — a citizen of Canada, South Africa and the U.S. — has also taken an interest in politics, having become a senior adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump since his election last year. And, like Haldeman, Musk has tangled with a Canadian prime minister of his own.
In early January, then-prime minister Justin Trudeau posted a response on X to Trump mockingly calling Canada the 51st state. (Trudeau announced on Jan. 6 that he was stepping down as prime minister, and has since been replaced by Mark Carney.)
…
Last month, thousands of Canadians started signing a petition to have Musk’s citizenship revoked for his attempts to “attack Canadian sovereignty.”
“Canada is not a real country,” he posted on X in reply. (That post has since been deleted.)
Eighty years earlier, Musk’s grandpa had a much different response when he saw a political movement advocate that the U.S. take over Canada and Greenland by “force of arms.” He issued a warning against its “insidious and seditious propaganda.”
“The Canadian people and the Canadian government must take positive action now as a measure of national safety,” Haldeman wrote in the Apr. 5, 1945, edition of the Canadian Social Crediter magazine.
…
Gophers and scurvy
Joshua Haldeman was born in a log cabin in Minnesota in 1902 and raised in Waldeck, Sask., near Swift Current.
According to the CSC biography, Haldeman “became quite skilled in bronco horseback riding, boxing, wrestling and exhibition rope spinning.”
His mother, Almeda, recognized by many as Canada’s first chiropractor, ran a strict home, allowing “no one in her house to drink, smoke, use improper language or tell shady stories,” according to Erik Nordeus’s book The Engineer: Follow Elon Musk on a Journey from South Africa to Mars. “Playing cards and medicines were also prohibited.”
Haldeman attended nine colleges and universities, including Moose Jaw College and Regina College, according to the academic paper written by his son Scott. Scott Haldeman declined CBC’s request for an interview, but did answer some questions by email.
Haldeman concluded his chiropractic training in 1926. Throughout his life, Haldeman was a leader in the chiropractic industry, taking board positions in provincial and national associations and pushing for new legislation.
But in the mid-1920s, instead of taking up chiropractic, he began farming.
His timing was not ideal. He lost his farm during the 1930s after he was unable to keep up with loan payments.
…
“Stewed gopher, canned gopher, gopher pie” were “not infrequently” on the menu at that time, wrote Curtis McManus in his book Happyland: The History of the ‘Dirty Thirties’ in Saskatchewan.
…
Errol Musk, Elon’s father, told CBC in an interview earlier this year that he remembers Haldeman speaking about his frustration with Saskatchewan’s rail system, which had a difficult time getting food from the farm to those who needed it.
“He pointed out to me about how the Depression was man-made,” said Errol Musk. “In other words, it was planned…. a plan to screw up the world in favour of certain people.”
Anderson said people in Saskatchewan at the time had an understandable fear of “global forces that feel completely out of everybody’s control.”
…
A government without politicians
Haldeman’s political activism began in 1928 when, at 26, he joined a couple of left-leaning farmers organizations.
In 1933, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) was formed with the signing of the Regina Manifesto, which called for the eradication of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist state. (The CCF was the forerunner of today’s NDP.) The next year, Haldeman joined the CCF and took on leadership roles in the party, according to the paper written by Scott Haldeman.
“[The CCF] promoted the abolition of the profit system and the establishment of a planned economy,” wrote Joshua Haldeman’s secretary Vivan Doan in a letter to Scott cited in the paper. “He worked tirelessly for this new party.”
By 1936, Haldeman had moved to Regina and established his chiropractic office.
Around that time, Howard Scott — a 6’5” man with broad shoulders and a magnetic personality — began delivering fiery lectures across Western Canada. The New York-based engineer and political visionary was the leader of Technocracy Inc., an organization promoting his plan for an economy run by experts, not politicians.
…
The movement began in the United States in the 1930s. By 1940, it was sweeping across Western Canada. Technocrats were known for wearing identical grey uniforms and saluting one another in what The Daily Province called “Technocrat fashion — right hand raised smartly to eye-level.”
Haldeman quickly became entranced by the movement and took up a leadership role. In a July 1940 article in Technocracy Digest, he argued that advances in technology and global affairs had made it possible to create a utopian society in North America.
…
‘A scientific Frankenstein’
The Canadian government was not swayed by Technocracy’s rhetoric. In June 1940, it declared Technocracy an illegal and subversive organization.
“The literature of Technocracy discloses, in effect, that one of its objectives is to overthrow the government and constitution of this country by force,” said prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie-King in a July 16, 1940, speech in the House of Commons.
Haldeman was apparently not intimidated by this move. He placed an ad in the Regina Leader-Post promoting Technocracy and calling the government’s move an “unjustified…. political blunder.”
A few months later, he was arrested and charged with stirring up disloyalty to the King and undermining Canada’s prosecution of the Second World War. He was found guilty in a downtown Regina court.
Shortly after his arrest, Haldeman left the movement, after coming to the conclusion it had become treasonous. His son Scott wrote that Haldeman became disillusioned when Technocracy flipped from opposing communism to supporting “complete economic and military collaboration with Soviet Russia.”
…
In an April 1945 article in the Canadian Social Crediter, Haldeman warned that Technocracy had become “a scientific Frankenstein.”
He wrote that since his departure, the organization had begun pushing for the U.S. to take over Canada and Greenland “either by purchase, negotiation or by force of arms” – a position advocated by Howard Scott, who argued for isolationism and a strong continental defence.
Haldeman warned that Quebec and what is now Mexico were being targeted in particular. He quoted Scott as arguing “that these alien cultures on the continent of North America be annihilated. Assimilation is out of the question.”
Haldeman warned “Technocracy Inc. is conspiring against the British Empire — against the sovereignty of Canada.”
A maverick
Haldeman was a bit of a maverick throughout his life — confident in his own apprehension of issues.
“He never had any person that would be considered a spiritual guide,” Scott Haldeman told CBC in an email. “He felt he knew the Bible better than any minister and only went to church for weddings and funerals.”
After Technocracy, Haldeman decided he would start his own political party, Total War and Defence. In his 1941 book, Total War and Defence for Canada, which was his manifesto for this new party, he argued for a policy of total conscription to support our British allies during the Second World War.
He called for the conscription of “every employable man and woman between the ages of sixteen and sixty” and “all natural resources, all industrial equipment and all property,” including “all bank deposits and private holdings of money.”
His movement did not catch on.
His next stop was the Social Credit Party, a rapidly growing political movement that formed government in Alberta in 1935 and held it until 1971.
Social Credit advocated low taxes, minimal regulation and free markets. But it doesn’t fit neatly into the modern left-right political divide. Social Credit wanted governments to give money directly to consumers in order to combat inherent inequity in the market.
Haldeman quickly rose through the ranks, becoming leader of the Social Credit Party of Saskatchewan in 1945 and the chair of the national party’s council in 1946.
During his political tenure he ran, unsuccessfully, against three giants of Canadian politics. In the 1945 federal election, he faced Liberal prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie-King in a Prince Albert riding. In 1948, Haldeman led Social Credit in a provincial campaign against Tommy Douglas and the CCF. Social Credit lost, receiving just eight per cent of the vote.
…
Haldeman campaigned as the Christian alternative to godless communists.
“The trouble with politics is that Christianity has been left out,” said Haldeman in an April 1948 address on CBC Radio, transcribed in the Canadian Social Crediter.
A 1948 confrontation at Regina City Hall put Haldeman in the midst of a political conflict that has echoes of our modern politics. He had been invited to a party leaders’ forum by the Regina Housewives League to discuss their proposal for national price controls.
Haldeman criticized their idea as a “strictly socialist resolution” and accused the league of being “a front for the communist organization.”
According to the Regina Leader-Post, “Dr. Haldeman was repeatedly interrupted by ‘boos’ and catcalls.”
“I am making a speech here,” Haldeman replied. “Isn’t there still freedom of speech in Regina?”
‘Home-baked fascism’
In 1946, Haldeman found himself in the midst of a national scandal, after the Quebec wing of Social Credit published the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
A Saskatoon Star Phoenix editorial said Social Credit was cooking up “home-baked fascism” by promoting a fraudulent document that “purports to reveal a plot [by Jews] to dominate the world.”
This reinforced Social Credit’s reputation as an antisemitic organization — which can be traced back to its founder, Clifford Hugh Douglas, also known as “Major Douglas.”
“The Jew has no native culture and always aims at power without responsibility. He is the parasite upon, and corrupter of, every civilisation in which he has attained power,” Douglas wrote in a 1939 edition of the party’s magazine.
Haldeman, as the chairman of the National Social Credit Association, responded in a letter to the editor of the Star Phoenix. He said “Social Credit is absolutely opposed to antisemitism,” adding, “the great mass of the Jewish people in Germany suffered greatly and our full sympathy goes out to them.”
But he also defended the publishing of the Protocols. He said whether the document was fraudulent “is not the point.”
“The point is that the plan as outlined in these protocols has been rapidly unfolding in the period of observation of this generation,” Haldeman wrote, noting the conspiracy this book supposedly revealed was executed “by international financiers, many but not all of them, Jewish.”
In a 1947 letter to the editor of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, Rabbi Irwin Gordon expressed skepticism about Haldeman’s disavowal of antisemitism.
“Doctor Haldeman must have a short memory as well if he does not remember his own speeches shot through with antisemitic talk,” Gordon wrote. “Doctor Haldeman’s over-interest in clearing the party and himself from the charge of antisemitism and anti-Canadianism will not fool the people.”
Even Alberta’s Social Credit premier thought the party had an antisemitism problem. In a letter to a national leader after the Protocols incident, Premier Ernest Manning (father of Preston Manning, founder of the Reform Party of Canada) took aim at the organization’s magazine, the Canadian Social Crediter.
“No one who values their name or their influence is going to get behind a publication which contains little but negative and destructive criticism flavoured with ‘Jew-baiting,’” Manning wrote, demanding that Haldeman, as party chairman, clean things up.
South Africa move prompted by prophecies
In the midst of his frenetic political career, Haldeman made time to start a family.
In 1942, he took up dancing and a few months later married his instructor, Winnifred Fletcher. (This was his second marriage. He married Eve Peters in 1934 and they had one child together — Joshua Jerry Noel Haldeman — but the couple divorced by 1937.)
…
The couple had five children, including twins Maye and Kaye in 1948.
That same year, Haldeman got his pilot’s licence and bought a plane that enabled him to run his chiropractic business alongside his political career. The girls flew with their dad so often that newspapers began referring to the family as “the Flying Haldemans.”
…
By mid-1949, Haldeman started looking for a new home, a search inspired in part by two prophecies, according to a biography of his son Scott.
“Josh relates an experience with a ‘medium’ [spiritualist] in 1936 who told him he must practice in Regina for 14 years and then, ‘move to a city in a faraway place,’” says the book, The Journey of Scott Haldeman, written by Reed Phillips.
It goes on to say that once his 14 years were up in Regina, “everything fell into place.”
“After speaking with an Anglican minister from South Africa at an International Trade Fair in Toronto, Joshua became convinced that South Africa was that ‘faraway place,’” the book says.
So what did that minister say?
Haldeman’s 1960 book, The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and The Menace to South Africa, begins this way:
“‘SOUTH AFRICA WILL BECOME THE LEADER OF WHITE CIVILIZATION IN THE WORLD’ was the prophetic and emphatic statement of an Anglican Minister in Toronto, Canada, 1949. He had lived many years in South Africa.”
A new life for Haldeman
The Haldemans’ move to South Africa made news across Canada, with a Sept. 11, 1950, article noting the family was leaving behind a “thriving practice as a chiropractor,” Winnifred’s dance school and a 20-room home in Regina, to “stake everything on this new venture.”
They settled with their five children in Pretoria, where they enjoyed warm weather and hired help.
“We have two native (Negro) garden boys in the summer and one in the winter and a native girl,” according to an article Haldeman wrote that was published in the Aug. 6, 1951, edition of the Regina Leader-Post.
“The natives are very primitive and must not be taken seriously. We get quite a bang out of them and they are really quite useful,” he wrote. “It takes three natives to do the work of one white man.”
In 1948, the National Party swept to power in South Africa and immediately began implementing its program of apartheid, a policy of racial segregation.
Months after arriving, Haldeman told South Africa’s Die Transvaler newspaper “instead of the government’s attitude keeping me away from South Africa, it has actually encouraged me to settle here.”
“White man…. the most difficult to control’
In his 1951 Regina Leader-Post article, Haldeman defended apartheid.
“Some [African natives] are quite clever in a routine job, but the best of them cannot assume responsibility and will abuse authority,” he wrote. “The present government of South Africa knows how to handle the native question.”
On March 21, 1960, police fired submachine guns on a crowd of Black people protesting apartheid in Sharpeville, South Africa, killing 69 and wounding more than 180 others. It came to be known as the Sharpeville massacre, “one of the first and most violent demonstrations against apartheid in South Africa,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
A few weeks later, Haldeman published his book The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Government and Menace to South Africa, writing in such a hurry that the introduction said “due to the present urgency this brief has been rushed and typographical errors must be excused.”
Haldeman said the leaders of the Black protest movement hope, “with the support of the Internationalists, to oust the white man, who has in a few years brought their people from primitive savagery to a great measure of peace and security.”
“An unconditional propaganda warfare is carried on against the white man because the white man’s integrity, initiative and independence make him the most difficult to control,” he wrote.
Haldeman opposed the state mandating systems like compulsory medication on the white population, but had a different standard for the Black population.
“The State has the right to do for them what it thinks is best, the same rights as the parents have for their children,” he wrote in The International Conspiracy in Health. (Both of Haldeman’s International Conspiracy books were first reported on by Harvard historian Jill Lepore in a 2023 article in The New Yorker.)
‘The Great Farini’
Shortly after his arrival in South Africa, Haldeman was swept up in the “lost city” craze.
Hermann Wittenberg, a professor at South Africa’s University of the Western Cape, says in the late 1800s and early 1900s, white amateur archeologists and explorers discovered ruins, monuments and sculptures of ancient African civilizations.
He said because of widespread racism, these explorers — even more progressive, liberal explorers — believed “that Black Africans, Bantu-speaking peoples, are primitive, not capable of any civilizational attainments. The best they can do is build mud huts, you know?”
As a result, they theorized that these civilizations, which exhibited some sophistication, must have been built by non-Africans.
“They would have imagined that this was some ancient northern, Western, Mediterranean civilization which had built these things. And they thought there was a whole string of these things in southern Africa, including that Kalahari thing,” said Wittenberg.
“That Kalahari thing” became Haldeman’s obsession: the legend of the Lost City of the Kalahari, which was allegedly discovered by William Hunt in 1885.
Hunt, who came to be known as “The Great Farini,” was a Canadian circus performer who became famous in the 1860s for crossing Niagara Falls on a tightrope — once with a washing machine on his back and another time with a sack over his entire body.
Farini, who was also the inventor of the “human cannonball’ performance, became a promoter of “freak shows,” featuring a girl he called Krao and deemed the Missing Link.
P.T. Barnum once called Farini “the most talented showman” he knew, according to Shane Peacock’s book The Great Farini: The High-Wire Life of William Hunt.
The showman was also an explorer and storyteller.
As the story goes, in 1885, Farini travelled to Africa and led an expedition across the Kalahari Desert. In a book he wrote about his travels (Through the Kalahari Desert), Farini claimed he had chanced upon the ruins of an ancient city:
A relic, may be, of a glorious past,
A city once grand and sublime,
Destroyed by earthquake, defaced by the blast,
Swept away by the hand of time.
According to Maye Musk, Haldeman read Farini’s book and became transfixed. In 1953, Haldeman began taking regular trips into the desert with his wife and five children to hunt for the lost city.
“My father wanted to try to follow Farini’s path,” Musk wrote in her autobiography. “And that became our July vacation. Now I think: Can you imagine taking five little kids to the desert for three weeks?”
…
Lost city searches ‘always about white people:’ expert
Haldeman’s youngest son, Lee, has inherited his father’s passion for the lost city, having written two books on the topic. He dedicated Finding Farini’s Lost City of the Kalahari to his parents.
“They completed sixteen searches for the fabled ruins,” he wrote. “There are no others in the history of this mystery that believed Farini’s story as intensely, or who dedicated so much time, money, and effort to look for this fabled City.” Lee Haldeman declined CBC’s request for an interview.
Wittenberg agreed with the assessment, calling Haldeman “the undisputed Farini devotee of his time.”
As for the motivation behind Haldeman’s fixation, Elon Musk biographer Erik Nordeus wrote that “it’s unclear… why he became interested in finding [the lost city] but he did everything he could to find it.”
Jean-loïc Le Quellec, author of The White Lady and Atlantis: Ophir and Great Zimbabwe: Investigation of an Archaeological Myth, says Haldeman’s lost city search was part of a well-established cultural phenomenon.
He said there are more than 1,000 books on the topic of lost civilizations between the mid-19th century and 1940, “and none of them is about the search for or discovery of a ‘lost black tribe.’ They are always about white people,” he wrote in an email to CBC.
Le Quellec, director of research at France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, mentions Haldeman in his 2016 book, but had no idea of his connection to Musk until CBC reached out.
“I don’t know if Haldeman was explicitly looking for evidence of an ancient white presence, but this was very generally the case in his time, and for decades,” Le Quellec wrote.
He said these stories were used by colonists throughout Africa as a means of claiming historical legitimacy for their actions.
“The main motivation of the authors and explorers was to demonstrate the existence of an ancient white (European, Sumerian, Egyptian or Cretan) presence in Africa, in order to justify colonization in general, and apartheid in the case of South Africa,” he said. “The Lost City of Kalahari is just one example among many of this type of approach.”
Like Le Quellec, Wittenberg also wrote about Haldeman without knowing his connection to Musk.
In his PhD thesis, The Sublime, Imperialism and the African Landscape, Wittenberg noted that explorer Doreen Tainton, a contemporary of Haldeman, believed that the Indigenous Black people of South Africa were incapable of building the sort of intricate architecture described by Farini in his book.
That led her to ask “who, then, were these long dead builders?” In answering her own question, she suggested they could have been Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Egyptians or Arabs.
Wittenberg noted that just like Tainton, Haldman was also open to the notion that the lost city was not of Indigenous origin, writing that Haldeman believed “this would be a major archaeological find, if it could be located, as it would show that the Egyptians were this far south.”
In an interview with CBC, Wittenberg said “Egyptians were not seen as African at the time. The general sort of idea was that Egyptians were some sort of Mediterranean civilization…. It was seen as not part of Africa, but it was seen as a European type of civilization.”
A plane crash
Despite his years of searching, Haldeman was unable to locate the lost city.
On Jan. 13, 1974, Haldeman died in a plane crash along with his son-in-law Peter Rae, according to Die Transvaler newspaper. It was front page news, featuring a photo of the overturned plane.
“One of South Africa’s most famous chiropractors and adventurers…. died yesterday morning,” the article says. “The suspicion exists that they wanted to carry out an emergency landing,” but “there were power lines that prevented the alleged emergency landing and the plane crashed nose first.”
In a separate article, the paper reflected on Haldeman’s Kalahari obsession, noting he “never allowed himself to be convinced that he was looking for something that might not exist.” The paper said Haldeman’s trust in Farini’s integrity drove him, even as other explorers concluded the circus performer’s story was false.
Wittenberg said in the decades since the lost city craze, archeology, geology and ethnology have shown that genuine African ruins are, in fact, of Indigenous Black origin. And, he says, legends like the Lost City of the Kalahari have been largely abandoned — though not entirely.
“Myths are myths because they don’t die,” he said. “They have a particular longevity. They’re not killed off by fact, you know?”
According to Nordeus’s book, after Farini’s death, Haldeman wrote to his family, saying “We do not feel he made the Lost City up as we have confirmed everything else in the book.”
For much of his life, Haldeman was captivated and driven by mysteries — a shadowy group of international communists conspiring to control the world and an elaborate ancient city, lost to the sands of time.
And he believed in them to the very end.
1b. The brilliant Pterrafractyl has noted in a comment that Musk’s father Errol admitted that Joshua Haldeman had been a member of the Canadian Nazi Party.
In a separate interview in November, Errol revealed that his son Elon’s maternal grandparents were Hitler-supporting members of the Canadian Nazi Party who moved to South Africa because they strongly approved of the racist apartheid regime.
Here’s Elon’s father casually saying Elon’s maternal grandparents were in the Nazi party in Canada, supported Hitler, and moved to South Africa because they strongly admired the Apartheid regime. ????? pic.twitter.com/LjI57S7gne
— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 21, 2025
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 possess 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 the 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 another factor was 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, anti-Semitic, and antidemocratic 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 that 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 anti-Semitism. 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 2 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.)
…
******
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; D. D. Palmer, its creator, claimed that 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 the 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 for 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 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 would 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, including British munitions plants and 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 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 Technocracy Inc. brochure from the period says. “It would be impossible to sell anything.”
…
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 that 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 Technocracy 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 having been 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, that 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 and 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 of 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 whom 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 anti-Semite 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.
…
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 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’s ideas into practice proved to be a challenge. Aberhart’s government tried issuing a sort of social credit it called “prosperity certificates,” but that 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 anti-Semitism 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.
…
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 anti-Semitism 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 anti-Semite 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 anti-Semitism was hurting the party and demanded that Haldeman oust him from the newspaper. Haldeman rejected the idea, saying that 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 maintained that the Social Credit Party was not anti-Semitic—while saying some rather anti-Semitic things, including the outrageous claim that Hitler had been installed as German führer by “money … supplied by international financiers, many, but not all of them, Jewish.” He claimed that Jews created anti-Semitism to generate sympathy. And in multiple letters, Haldeman argued that whether 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.”
…
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. Haldeman had 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 2 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 refers to it 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.”
…
After a few years in South Africa, Haldeman popped up in the news again for his founding (with his wife, Winnifred) of the Pretoria Pistol Club, which promoted gun ownership and training for housewives. But he does not appear to have been particularly active in far-right political groups in South Africa, at least not as a prominent leader. Milton Shain, a prominent 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 anti-Semitic groups of the period. But he said the coded anti-Semitic 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.
…
******
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. Hendrik 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 unarmed crowd failed, police opened fire. In all, 69 protesters were killed and roughly another 180 wounded. Ten of the dead were children. A police commander on the 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 The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship and the Menace to South Africa, a 42-page response to Sharpeville. 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 slips only 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 anti-Semites, 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 after it. 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 anti-Semite 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 that 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 Haldeman pushes The New Times, the publication of the Australian League of Rights, whose pro-social-credit editor published books such as 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 anti-Semitic 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.
…
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Uncle Sam and The Swastika
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