History of one Social Crediter

Jill Lepore, a history professor at Harvard who is more prominent, perhaps, as a New Yorker staff writer, has been back in the archives lately. She was looking into the papers of J.N. Haldeman, a little remembered Canadian who was politically active in Saskatchewan in the 1930s and later became national chairman of the Social Credit Party. In 1950 he moved his family to South Africa, where he became a vigorous supporter of apartheid and white colonialism and an "antisemitic conspiracy theorist" and pamphleteer.

His pamphlets, the ones she can find in the archives at least, attacked:  

Jewish bankers, Jewish intellectuals, philanthropic foundations run by Jews, communists, Black leaders, and anyone who supported the overthrow of colonial rule in Africa.

He warned against a “collectivist-internationalist” conspiracy -- “from Kennedy to Kenyatta” -- that was attempting to impose: 

national health insurance and various pharmaceuticals (including fluoride in the water, another conspiracy), all of which he considered “anti-Christian infringements on human liberties.”

Three things interest Lepore about J.N. Haldeman. First, he was Elon Musk's grandfather. Two, she thinks Elon's new biographer should not have passed over Grandpa's views as merely "quirky."  

And third, she observes that Haldeman's writings about malevolent conspiracies taking away the freedoms of decent white people were typewritten, copied in small mimeographed batches, seen by almost nobody, and destined to become extremely scarce. (One sees why the biographer missed them, maybe.) Today, she muses, Haldeman would be able to post them on X and the like  -- where they would live forever and find an international audience of like-minded people and the politicians who cater to them.