Why Does Trump Want to Invade Canada?
Most newspaper coverage about Trump and Canada will say that he wants to “annex” Canada, but I find that excessively euphemistic. Less than 10% of Canadian citizens want to be a part of the United States. So when Trump says he wants to make Canada the 51st state, that means he is willing to do it by invasion if he doesn’t get his way.
Trump may have his own private crazy reasons for wanting to invade Canada. It could be as petty as his jealousy over Melania trying to kiss Justin Trudeau on both cheeks. But I think there’s another potential reason that hasn’t been adequately explored: It could be Elon Musk’s idea.
Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather was a far-right Canadian political activist named Joshua N. Haldeman. Haldeman was born in Minnesota, but after growing up in Canada, he became a chiropractor, a profession notorious for having a lot of quacks and cranks before the 1970s.
Haldeman was no exception in this regard & his crankery extended beyond medical matters to politics as well. From 1936 to 1941, Haldeman was the top Canadian leader in an organization called Technocracy, Inc. Technocracy Inc. argued that you could solve all the problems caused by the Depression by simply getting rid of democracy and handing over control of society to scientists and engineers.
In the past, Elon Musk has signaled that he supports his Grampa Haldeman’s vision of antidemocratic Technocracy, even before he publicly came out as a far-right Trump supporter. In 2019, when Elon Musk was still publicly supporting Democratic candidates on Twitter, he posted a cryptic tweet on Twitter that said, “Accelerating Starship development to build the Martian Technocracy.” By framing Technocracy in sci-fi terms, Musk hid his true antidemocratic goals for building Technocracy in America.
Another signal of Elon Musk’s belief in Technocracy is the odd names he gave to his children with the Canadian pop star Grimes. In the 1930s and 1940s, members of Technocracy Inc. would often substitute their original names with numbers or letters of the alphabet. Elon Musk’s own grandpa was known within the Technocracy movement as 10450-1. Similarly, Elon Musk’s three children with Grimes are named X Æ A-Xii (also known as X), Exa Dark Sideræl (also known as Y), and Tau Techno Mechanicus (also known as Tau).
The other weird connection between the Technocracy Inc. movement of the 1930s and 1940s and today’s politics is that Technocracy Inc. favored fusing the United States, Greenland, and Canada into a single country known as “the Technate.” The illustration below is a rare collector’s item found by a dealer in Boston who specializes in unusual maps. Now that I look at the map, I see that the 1940s version of the Technate also includes Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, and parts of South America, but these parts of the world tend to get disregarded by Donald Trump in his desire to “annex” Canada and Greenland. I suspect that Donald Trump’s desire is to recreate the Technate but keep out the parts of the map where he thinks there are too many nonwhite people.
Before 1941, Technocracy Inc. in Canada was isolationist about World War II with a pro-German bias but not officially supporting the Nazis. They viewed Hitler as “an expression of the will of the German people,” even though they claimed not to support Hitler themselves. After 1941, Technocracy Inc. in the United States pledged to support the American war effort including America’s temporary wartime alliance with the Soviet Union. According to a biographical timeline about Joshua N. Haldeman published by Scott Haldeman (presumably one of Elon’s cousins) for a Canadian chiropractic journal, Haldeman broke off from Technocracy Inc. because he opposed any alliance with the Soviet Union, no matter how temporary.
After leaving Technocracy, Inc., Haldeman founded a new organization he called Total War and Defence. At this point, Haldeman was still nominally supporting Canada in its war against the Germans, but he was using at a pretext to double down on his anti-democratic vision of a society ruled entirely by scientists and engineers.
This is why it is important that Elon Musk self-identifies as an “engineer” despite having no engineering degree. He self-identifies as an engineer because he supports the same Technocracy Inc. politics of his grandfather. He believes that his own delusional self-image as an engineering genius gives him the right to rule over you and me.
If Elon Musk were simply absorbing his grandfather’s technocratic politics, that would be dystopian enough, but there’s also the anti-Semitism and white supremacy that comes with it. When Elon Musk’s grandfather started Total War and Defense with no backing from Technocracy Inc., he found that he couldn’t get any followers. By 1943, Joshua N. Haldeman folds up his Total War and Defense organization and joins the Social Credit Party instead.
After joining the Social Credit Party, Haldeman’s philosophy takes a much darker, more overtly anti-Semitic turn. According to this doctoral thesis I found, the Social Credit Party was highly anti-Semitic all the way up to its upper levels of leadership. The founder of the party C.H. Douglas viewed Jews as “implacably anti-Christian.” Haldeman was the top leader of the Social Credit Party for the province of Saskatchewan. In addition, Haldeman served as a member of the top policy council for the Social Credit Party. As a member of that council, Haldeman defended a notorious anti-Semite named John Patrick Gillese who edited the party’s national newspaper, the Canadian Social Crediter, and made sure that Gillese was retained as the editor.
While Haldeman was a leader in the Social Credit Party, he also defended the anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In his defense, Haldeman conceded that he did not care whether the Protocols were true or not, because he believed that the Protocols described events that had actually happened, which made the question of whether it was a forgery completely irrelevant to him. In this sense, Haldeman’s amoral defense of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery is extremely similar to how his grandson Elon justifies disinformation that is personally beneficial to him.
I found another Substack post about Joshua Haldeman with a photo of Elon Musk’s granddad engaged in a 1947 publicity stunt promoting the Social Credit party. Haldeman is depicted here with a pennant that features a sun cross, a symbol associated with the Norwegian version of the Nazi Party.
Three years later, in 1950, Haldeman decided to move to South Africa because he thought Canada was too soft, liberal, and decadent. Haldeman most definitely did not move to South Africa for economic or social reasons. Haldeman was already quite wealthy as the most prominent chiropractor in Canada at the time, including serving in several professional associations and as president of a chiropractic college. Haldeman could have lived happily as a wealthy chiropractor, but he chose to throw all of that away because of his commitment to white supremacy and South Africa’s apartheid regime.
When Haldeman finally made the move to South Africa, the headline of a far-right Afrikaner newspaper publicized the move as a PR victory for apartheid (“PRAISES ACTION OF NATIONALIST PARTY REGIME: Canadian Politician Settles in South Africa,”). In addition, according to the official family history of the Haldemans (Elon’s cousins), one of the first things that Haldeman did when he got to South Africa was to create the Pretoria Pistol Club, one of the many sport shooting clubs in the country that also enforced apartheid at the barrel of a gun.
In an interview with the UK Mirror, Elon’s father Errol Musk said of Elon’s grandparents, the Haldemans, “They used to support Hitler and all that stuff.” Errol also added that the Haldemans were “very fanatical about apartheid.” But I think the most important part of Errol Musk’s interview is how he depicted Elon’s turn to far-right politics as proof that Elon is once again embracing his South African heritage. When Elon feigned liberalism, Errol viewed it as a betrayal, “turning away from South Africa and their roots, which included me.” But now that Elon has come out publicly as far-right, Errol concluded, “Finally, Elon was embracing his heritage and his destiny.”
Elon Musk and DOGE try to present themselves as an embodiment of rational, “lowercase t” technocracy that is only interested in efficiency, but in reality, the roots go all the way back to the U.S.-Canadian proto-fascist organization, Technocracy, Inc. Despite what the name might have you believe, there is no shred of technocratic rationality in Technocracy, Inc. Its roots are in an anti-democratic philosophy that eventually led Elon Musk’s grandfather and eventually Elon himself into anti-Semitism and white supremacy. Through his immense wealth and his flattery of Donald Trump, Elon Musk now finally has the opportunity to put this insane philosophy into place.
I call it insane, because it is insane. Sometimes, you or I might feel like we are losing our minds merely by talking about it, but do not despair. You are not losing your mind or your sanity. It is the people who run our country who have their lost minds & you have every right to warn the rest of your community about it.