Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: Elon Musk’s obsession with rockets and robots sounds futuristic, but “few figures in public life are more shackled to the past” — that’s what historian Jill Lepore has found. Musk’s ideas about “government efficiency” seem to come from his grandfather, a founder of the anti-democratic Technocracy movement of the 1930s. That’s coming up, later in the show. But first: Harvard will not submit to the Trump’s demands – that’s the best news in a long time. David Cole will comment – in a minute.
[BREAK]
Harvard’s president, on Monday afternoon, declared that Harvard will not comply with Trump’s demands to change its academic programs, its admissions policy, and its administration, and to limit student protests, all in exchange for keeping its federal funding. Princeton’s president had already made a similar statement. For comment, we turned once again to David Cole. He recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown. He writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New York Review, and he’s legal affairs correspondent for The Nation. David, welcome back.
David Cole: Thanks for having me, Jon.
JW: The Harvard news is big. As The New York Times pointed out, “Harvard is 140 years older than the United States. It has an endowment greater than the GDP of nearly 100 countries. It has educated eight American presidents. If any institution was going to stand up to the Trump war on academia, Harvard would be at the top of the list.”
The Times headline quoted J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge, saying, “This is of momentous, momentous significance. This should be the turning point in the President’s rampage against American institutions.” For starters here, who is J. Michael Luttig? Is he one of those ‘Marxist maniacs’ that Trump talks about?
DC: Not at all. He is a Republican. He was a Bush appointee to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. One of the leading lights thought to be a possible Supreme Court justice if a vacancy opened up when he was in office, but someone who is willing to stand up against wholly lawless action by the President, unlike sadly so many of his Republican colleagues.
JW: Let me just summarize what Trump demanded of Harvard, laid out in surprising detail in a letter that’s been published. A long set of demands, including that Harvard bring in outside auditors to determine whether each academic department had, quote, “viewpoint diversity.” I don’t think they’re talking here about adding Marxists in the economics department. Trump also demanded that Harvard de-recognize pro-Palestine student groups and expel students involved in a 2023 pro-Palestine protest at the Harvard Business School. Trump also demanded Harvard change its admission process for international students and screen them for “support of terrorism and anti-Semitism.” He also wanted Harvard to immediately report international students to federal authorities if they broke university conduct policy.
Then there was this sweeping thing that Trump wanted to reduce the power held by faculty and administrators who were more committed to activism than scholarship. Trump named several specific departments and programs that he said had to be subject to this external audit. He listed the Divinity School, the Medical School, the School of Public Health, the ed school, and several others, and he said the university had to submit quarterly updates, beginning in June, certifying its compliance. What did you think of this letter?
DC: It’s essentially a hostile takeover or proposes a hostile takeover of Harvard University without any basis in law whatsoever. The core of academic freedom, which is a First Amendment protected right, is that universities have the right to decide what they teach, who teaches, who is admitted, and how they organize and govern student life on campus. That is the central aspect of academic freedom, and so for the administration to come in and say, “We’re essentially going to take over.” It is a remarkable letter. In some sense, I think it made the Harvard decision easier because no one could accept those demands and still call themselves a university. Indeed, today, Columbia’s president, acting president has said that she will not abide by similar demands that the Trump administration has directed towards Columbia University. Even though they agreed to certain initial demands, they’re now drawing the line as well. I think probably motivated by Harvard’s lesson.
I think it’s a huge, huge thing. It also, I think reflects the power of people, the power of activism, because among other things, 800 members of the Harvard faculty wrote to the administration and said, “We fully support a challenge even though this might cause us to lose money and some of us to lose jobs.” That kind of activism makes it easier, I guess, for the president to do the right thing and stand up to the President. I think it’s absolutely critical. Yes, Harvard is older than the United States and yes, it has a huge endowment, but don’t underestimate what it takes to do this. I mean, they have $9 billion of federal funding at issue. That’s not easy to make up. But again, if any institution is going to fight, surely Harvard is best situated to fight, and once they got this letter, especially well situated to fight because it’s so grotesquely unconstitutional. I would predict that not a single judge, even going up to the Supreme Court, would say that this letter is constitutional, not even Justice Thomas.
JW: Wow.
DC: I mean, it’s really over the top. It does make you wonder what are they thinking in the Trump administration because presumably they had some inkling that Harvard was not going to go along. Then if you want to set yourself up for a good challenge, you make some modest requests, but to make these requests that are without basis that intrude into the very heart and soul of what a university is, is to ask for a court ruling in Harvard’s favor and against the administration. I would bet a lot that that’s what we will see.
JW: Harvard has not yet, as we speak here on Tuesday afternoon, announced that it’s bringing a lawsuit even after the Trump administration said it was going to cut $2 billion in funding. The other 7 billion of the 9 billion turns out to be for the Harvard hospitals in Boston – 2 billion for the university itself is being cut. But as you say, everything points to a lawsuit that the Trump administration seems to be eager to get to the Supreme Court too.
The legal basis they claim is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which deals with protecting, in this case, Jewish students against anti-Semitism. The Trump administration has been claiming that the universities have violated Title VI. You and a group of constitutional law professors wrote in The New York Review about what Title VI requires of universities and what it requires of the government to enforce Title VI. Let’s go over that again.
DC: Sure. I think it’s worth noting that that letter came from a very wide range of scholars, including some of the leading conservative constitutional scholars in this country: Eugene Volokh, Keith Whittington, Richard Epstein, Steve Calabresi, the founder of the Federalist Society — this is a broad spectrum signed on to this letter; and the basic notion is yes, Title VI says that if you receive federal funding, you can’t discriminate on the basis of race or national origin, and you have to respond to incidents of discrimination that occur on your campus or in your federally funded program. If a student says something hateful to another student based on their Jewish identity, that may well be harassment. The school’s not responsible for that. The school’s responsible for adequately responding to that. That is having a complaint process, hearing out the facts and providing an appropriate remedy.
What Title VI says is, if the federal government wants to take money away from an institution based on an assertion of a violation of Title VI, it has to specify what that particular violation is. It has to provide an opportunity for the recipient of federal funding to respond and say, ‘no, we actually responded adequately to that particular incident.’ If it finds that it did not respond adequately, it then has to do a program by program tailored response. If it was a particular program where the discrimination occurred, you could take funding away from that particular program, but only that particular program. Before taking any money away, you’re supposed to notify a congressional committee and provide 30 days. None of this happened. None of this happened with Columbia. None of this happened with Harvard. Instead, the administration waves its arms claiming anti-Semitism, essentially as a pretext for going after universities, without citing specific incidents, without actually saying what the school did that was insufficient to respond to that incident. Without that, it’s very dangerous because of course speech is also presumptively protected.
Private schools generally have policies that protect the free speech of their students, and up to the point that it’s free speech, it should not be punished. If it turns into anti-Semitic or racial harassment, it should be punished. But that is a very difficult line to draw, and if you don’t provide any specifics as to any incident, then you don’t have the facts to determine whether this was actually a protected speech, even if it was hateful, or an act of harassment. The Trump administration has just blown by all of that, waved the flag of anti-Semitism and imposed massive penalties unrelated entirely to the problem that they assert underlies all of this.
JW: Some of the demands made of Harvard and of other schools aren’t about protecting students from anti-Semitism. The ‘viewpoint diversity’ thing, for example — is there any constitutional basis for the federal government imposing ‘viewpoint diversity’ on private universities?
DC: No, quite the contrary. Just as Pepperdine or George Mason can choose to have a conservative-leaning faculty and a conservative curriculum, so UC, Berkeley, or Princeton can choose to have a liberal tilt, or you can choose to have no tilt at all. But the point is that is up to the university. In a free country, the government doesn’t get to determine what speech is permissible and what speech is impermissible on college campuses. Another thing that they demand in that letter is to remove all DEI programs altogether without any finding that any single DEI program violates Title VI. In fact, DEI programs are designed to make sure everyone feels included to avoid problems with racial harassment and the like, and yet the Trump administration demands those be eliminated. This is really just a political attack on universities. It’s another sort of front in Trump’s effort to neutralize the institutions of civil society that he doesn’t like and that might pose opposition to his unlawful means, but I think he’s picked a fight here that he is going to lose. That is a very good thing going forward because this has to stop. This has to stop.
JW: There has been one Harvard lawsuit already filed, not by the university itself, but by faculty members. This was on Friday. The AAUP in Harvard’s chapter of the AAUP filed a lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration, “from demanding that Harvard University restrict speech and restructure its core operations” or face funding cuts. This was based on the First Amendment, which they said does not permit government officials use the power of their office to silence critics and suppress speech they don’t like. Sort of what you’ve been saying here. This is a lawsuit brought on behalf of Harvard faculty members saying they have “a constitutional right to speak, teach and conduct research without fearing the government will retaliate against their viewpoints by canceling grants.” What’s the future of that case and how would it compare to one brought by the university itself?
DC: That lawsuit is very similar to one that AAUP filed with respect to the Columbia situation as well. The idea is the First Amendment principle of academic freedom protects two sort of interests. It protects the institutional interests of universities to make decisions about what they teach, who they admit, et cetera. But it also protects the rights of faculty, of professors, of teachers to teach what they want to teach, to write what they want to write within the bounds of professional standards and meeting the curricular needs, et cetera. The First Amendment rights extend both to the university and to the faculty. It’s essentially the same claim that the faculty will be making, except here, the faculty and the administration will be on the same side. That may turn out to be the case in Columbia as well because it sounds like Columbia is now shifting sides. But in the Columbia situation where Columbia had initially agreed to go along, the faculty were saying their agreeing to go along doesn’t absolve the Trump administration of a claim that it violated the First Amendment rights of the faculty by putting pressure on the university.
The best case for that is a case I argued, my last case I argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the ACLU, which was NRA v. Vullo, which involved an effort by the democratically controlled Governor Cuomo in New York to go after the NRA by getting third parties to punish the NRA because the governor didn’t like the political views of the NRA. The Supreme Court unanimously said you can’t do that. Trump can’t go after Columbia in a way that violates the First Amendment rights of faculty. I think those cases will ultimately – the Harvard cases will probably stand or fall together.
JW: These cases are focusing on the withdrawal of federal funding. Is that the best way to focus the issue of academic freedom in these cases?
DC: That is the way that the Trump administration is seeking to attack academic freedom. It is using the power of the purse. It would be a still more outrageous exercise if they passed a law saying Congress gives the President the power to decide what Harvard should teach and who it should hire, and whether it has ‘viewpoint diversity’. That would be a direct regulation. This is not a direct regulation. It’s simply saying, “Hey, if you don’t do what we want you to do, we’re going to take our money and run.” The Supreme Court has said, actually in a decision written by Chief Justice Rehnquist, that in the area of academic institutions, even public universities, even the University of California, the University of Michigan, which are our state institutions, the political branches cannot interfere with their academic decisions simply because they are funded by the government.
The government providing funding does not give it the power to use that funding as leverage to try to intrude on the institutional autonomy of the university, and that’s exactly what Trump is seeking to do here. When he’s saying, I’m going to potentially take $7 million of medical school funding to complain about something that the education school did or the law school did, or the fact that you have DEI at the undergraduate level,’ that is essentially using government money as leverage to try to compel these entities to do the government’s bidding. The Supreme Court, again, Chief Justice Rehnquist, one of the most conservative members of the court in my lifetime, said you can’t do that. Even with respect to public universities, you surely can’t do it with respect to private.
JW: ‘You can’t do that’: David Cole, former legal director of the ACLU, now the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. David, thanks for all your work – and thanks for talking with us today.
DC: Thank you, Jon.
[BREAK]
Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk about Elon Musk. They say he has to leave his job as a “special government employee” by May 30th. And he says he wants to return to work on his true passions, rockets and robots. That sounds futuristic. But “few figures in public life are more shackled to the past” – that’s what Jill Lepore has found. She’s a professor of history and law at Harvard, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and an award-winning historian. Her most recent book is the international bestseller, These Truths: A History of the United States – we talked about it here. And she hosts a terrific podcast, “X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” Jill Lepore, welcome back.
Jill Lepore: Hey, thanks so much for having me.
JW: Just to review where Musk stands this week, he says he’s reduced his goal as head of DOGE from cutting $2 trillion of federal spending to cutting $150 billion, that’s 85% less. But The New York Times says that more than half of the $150 billion they claim is not documented. Elon Musk’s approval ratings keep going down, and so do his personal Tesla stock holdings, which have lost something like $121 billion since January 1st. While he was losing $121 billion, you were doing research.
JL: [LAUGHTER] At no profit to anyone.
JW: Profit to us – because you found that many of Musk’s ideas about politics and economics, including the obsession with cutting what he calls “waste,” seemed to come from his grandfather. Who was Elon Musk’s grandfather?
JL: Elon Musk’s grandfather was something of a kook named Joshua Haldeman. I certainly don’t have any evidence that Musk’s ideas came from his grandfather. He shares many of his grandfather’s ideas. What the traffic between them intellectually has been or was or is, none shall know.
Haldeman died in 1974 in a plane crash when Musk was just a toddler. But he was very much a larger-than-life character, much celebrated in the family lore. He was born in the United States in Minnesota and moved – spent most of his early adult life in Canada where he was a farmer, and a chiropractor, an alternative health practitioner. Most of all an aviator. He also though worked as a cowboy at the rodeo. Much of an adventurer. Something of that same Musk spirit of adventure and technical prowess – very proud of his flying. He was known as the Flying Haldeman.’
All of that you can find out about even in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk, well, what a wonderful, quirky, eccentric his grandfather was, what a delightful adventurer.
But, in fact, Haldeman was a frantic, frenzied conspiracy theorist. He came to his political awakening in the 1930s in opposition to the New Deal in the United States. And to the very idea of democracy became a leader of a movement known as Technocracy with a capital T. He was affiliated with a branch known as technocracy Incorporated that, by the end of the 1930s, was banned as an illegal organization in Canada, and had become wildly out of favor in the United States.
But in 1940, for instance, when Haldeman tried to enter the US from Canada, for a six-week technocracy speaking tour, he was banned at the border — I believe most likely due to a new statute passed during the breaking out of war in Europe that banned Technocracy as an illegal organization in Canada, and the United States prohibited the immigration of people who might be a public menace.
He then became a leader and the national party chairman of the Social Credit party, an infamously anti-Semitic political party in Canada; failed to win electoral office, and became infatuated with the idea of moving to South Africa after South Africa formally announced the policy of apartheid in 1948. He moved his family to South Africa in 1950. That’s why Elon Musk was born in South Africa in Pretoria in 1971.
But through the ’50s and ’60s Haldeman was a prolific pamphleteer, a conspiracy theorist who wrote in support of the apartheid regime, and decried government waste and excess, and called for eliminating government spending, and described the idea of racial equality as a form of brainwashing that was coming out of universities.
JW: Wow. It’s—
JL: [LAUGHTER] I spent a lot of time with this guy.
JW: It’s the whole thing. Of course, everybody’s heard of technocracy — rule by the experts — but I had no idea, until I read your piece, that technocracy was a political movement in the ’30s, based on the fact that the Depression had occurred, and that showed, they said, the weakness of democracy. And as you say, the rise of the New Deal refuted that idea, at least in popular view. But was technocracy really significant as a political movement in the early ’30s? One of the things you did was count articles about the technocracy movement in The New York Times. What did you find?
JL: Looking back, it gives the impression of a flash in the pan because it’s bursting on the scene was so sudden, and then it’s so suddenly flickered out. It really gained attention in 1930, 1931. Offices of Technocracy Incorporated were established in New York in 1931. And then, recall that democracies are falling all over the world in the early 1930s with the onset of the Great Depression as a global financial collapse. New fragile democracies in Europe are collapsing. Fascists are making the case that democracy is inadequate to the challenges of the industrial economic order and that only a strongman can lead a country through these tumultuous waters. There is a lot of sense that democracy won’t survive in the United States. I mean, the public debate in the United States in the 1930s is ‘what is the future of democracy in America?’ It is a powerful and important, in fact, frankly riveting debate. If you go back and read, it’s eerily familiar to a lot of the conversations Americans are having today about the nature of democracy: its fragility, what is required to instill democratic behavior in a new generation in the face of such challenges.
And in that moment, especially in 1932, late 1932, before FDR is elected, there’s just a wave of press attention, fascination with technocracy as a possible solution. And technocrats have a program that simply says, “There should be no more banks, there should be no more money, there should be no more politicians, no more politics, no more government. We instead should recognize that the best and the brightest minds of our world today are the scientists and engineers, and they alone can understand the way to organize society. And we should simply yield control of, not just the United States but ultimately Canada and Mexico and to what would be called the North American Technate.” There were 120 stories about the technocracy movement in a matter of a few months, the end of 1932, beginning of 1933.
JW: 120 stories about technocracy in The New York Times from November of ’32 to March 1933. What happened in March 1933 that put an end to this fascination with Technocracy?
JL: Really it was not only the election of FDR but the program that FDR implemented with great dispatch. Immediately after his inauguration on March 4, 1933, he had promised to give Americans a new deal and he delivered it. With his first of his fireside chats just a few days away he called for a three-day banking holiday to consolidate the banking system. And implemented in his first 100 days an extraordinary number, not only of executive orders, which we often recall, but a vast amount of legislation that he got through Congress to write the economy. So technocracy then looked like a complete joke. And the revelation that it continued was not much noticed partly because those who were stalwarts like Haldeman were just so kooky.
JW: One of the grandfather’s key ideas was that the West had been subject to “intensive mass mind-conditioning experiments.” Your podcast has a fantastic episode on this whole idea. Because, of course, Elon Musk’s rationale for taking over X was basically the same idea. Let’s talk about that for a minute.
JL: There’s a certain sort of person, you and I have met this person, who can really only understand the fact that most people disagree with him as evidence that those people are deluded, right? They have false consciousness, have been brainwashed, have taken whatever, it’s the red pill or the blue pill, I can’t ever remember which is the Matrix pill that is involved in this trope. It’s a personality type: ‘I’m always right. And if I’m alone in my views, that must be because the rest of you have been brainwashed.’ That was Haldeman, that is Musk.
What’s so fascinating to me is how differently that operates in their two lives. Remember, 1958 is The Manchurian Candidate. There’s just a lot of concern in the 1950s about brainwashing. And real concern about – with the treatment of US prisoners of war by the Chinese during the Korean War, I think they’re actually genuine concerns about methods of torture that are about indoctrination. “But there’s a popular culture spillover, and Haldeman is really wrapped up in that. Which he comes to believe that any critic of apartheid, anyone who possibly believes that apartheid was morally wrong, has been brainwashed. What he does is he types up these pamphlets. One of them is called ‘The International Conspiracy of the World Dictatorship.’ Oh, there’s one about world health. And he has this newsletter called ‘Survival’ that is about the survival of the white race. And he types them up and mimeographs them, he offers them for sale. He must have mailing lists and such that he’s dealing with. There are only three copies of these things that survived.
JW: Yeah, I was going to ask, how did you find these? Were these in Widener Library?
JL: No, they’re not in Widener Library. This was fascinating to me. I knew a lot about Haldeman. I did the series about Musk in 2021 for the BBC when no one was paying attention to Musk. And I was surprised that no one had paid attention to his South African origins. I think most people who ever gave a thought about Musk didn’t even know he was from South Africa, and that was interesting to me. So I found out a bunch of stuff about Haldeman.
And then a few years later I was asked to review Walter Isaacson’s big doorstop biography of Musk. And I really admire Isaacson, but the book was extraordinarily surprising to me in its lack of criticism of an account of Musk’s life that was given by Musk and some CEOs in Silicon Valley, many of whom – Isaacson talked to a lot of people. But, for instance, he allows Musk to present his grandfather as this exciting, reckless adventurer and doesn’t inquire into that.
And so, I thought, there’s got to be more about this Haldeman guy. And I dug a little bit deeper, just looking at the uniform catalog of all books and all libraries around the world, and I found a few copies exist of some pamphlets that he had written. And they exist only in collections of far-right conspiracy propaganda that are held by a few really important research institutions.
Although I then did find a private collector of anti-Semitica, which is a genre of literature I’d never even heard before. A bibliographer who collects this stuff in order to document the depths of antisemitic literature. And he had some Haldeman tracks that he scanned and sent to me. And that’s what generally happened to that stuff in, say, 1960.
That stuff, once Twitter existed, is replicated, finds an audience, is duplicated, is amplified by algorithms, brings new people into its set of ideas. So you can have a kooky set of ideas in 1960, as Haldeman did in South Africa, and they die with you. Your family might destroy those papers. Some people that you mailed your screeds to, maybe they are kept – folded in someone’s books and someone will one day come across them. But they don’t get amplified, and propagated, and distributed the way the ideas of far-right extremists do online. Even online beginning with the early internet in the late 1990s.
JW: And Musk said, as the rationale for taking over Twitter, that he wanted to “fight the woke mind virus,” almost exactly the same words as his grandfather’s. On your podcast about this, you have him defining the “woke mind virus” as “communism.”
JL: The thing about Musk, he changes his mind all the time and he’s always moving from project to project. I mean, it’s part of the serial entrepreneur sensibility, right, you’re moving and moving and moving forward all the time. So he gives different answers to why he bought Twitter, right? It wasn’t for the money, it hasn’t been a great money investment for him. But he said in one interview “Well, look, wokeism is basically communism rebranded, and I bought Twitter to halt the advance of communism.”
In an interview with Jordan Peterson he said he bought Twitter “to stop the woke mind virus,” by which he meant specifically ideas about trans rights. He was referring to a family story. Musk has at least 14 children, as you know. But one of his older children in 2020 had sought puberty blockers which required parental consent. This was during the pandemic. Musk apparently, as he reports, reluctantly gave that consent — only to, as he told Peterson, see “the woke mind virus kill” his son. His daughter, Vivian Wilson, has a very different account of what happened in their relationship. But it is surely some part of what was going on for Musk.
JW: This story is told on the cover of Teen Vogue magazine — this month I believe.
JL: Vivian Wilson has started giving a number of interviews.
JW: Getting back to technocracy. Technocracy proposed an alternative to democracy in the early ’30s, was defeated pretty easily. You mentioned the United States today has some parallels to that period in the debate over democracy that we had in the early ’30s. The enemies of democracy in America today seem to be doing a lot better than they did in 1933. I wonder if you could talk about that a little more.
JL: The way that the founder of Technocracy Inc. described the failure of the movement was that it lacked a theory for the assumption of power. If you don’t believe in elections, how are you going – you have to gain power by force. I guess you could buy power, right, by money or by arms, and the technocrats had neither. They lost favor. I mean, no one was going to install them. Muskism as an ideology, which I think is the ideology that is shared by many people in Silicon Valley, it’s not really just about Musk. I think it’s, in some ways, a problem to fixate on Musk.
I think that Muskism does have a theory of the assumption of power. It relies on the fragility of our institutions. It relies on the corruption of our democratic system of free and fair elections, especially since the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizen United. No person in human history has ever spent as much to install a national elected executive as Musk spent to get Trump elected. I don’t dispute that Trump was fairly elected, but I do not think that a democracy can really survive that unimpeded campaign spending. And it was rewarded with an extraordinary amount of power given to Musk by Trump.
This was a tough winter here in New England. We had a lot of snow, even late in the season. Even last week we had six inches of snow. Driving down these lonely, quiet roads in New England, these tree-lined roads in the middle of nowhere, you’ll just see some old woman standing by the curb holding a sign that says, “I did not elect Elon Musk.” Out there in the rain and the snow just – a car comes by once every seven or eight minutes, and she’s just standing there.
I think there’s just a real courage and conviction among Americans who may love Trump, may have voted for Trump once or twice, really care about his agenda and the promises he made to voters, but Musk represents something different that I think Americans ultimately, if not as quickly as they rejected technocracy in 1933, will finally triumph over.
JW: Jill Lepore, she wrote about the failed ideas that drive Elon Musk for The New York Times op-ed page. And she talks about them in her terrific podcast, “X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” Jill, thanks for all your work and thanks for talking with us today.
JL: Thanks a lot.
