THURSDAY: What the heck is an "idée fixe?"

THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2025

The several faces of Donald: We seem to recall our sainted mother telling us about the film.

She'd gone to see it the night before. We would have been nine years old at the time. We can't recall what she said:

The Three Faces of Eve

The Three Faces of Eve is a 1957 American drama film based on the book of the same name about the life of Chris Costner Sizemore, which was written by psychiatrists Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley, who also helped write the screenplay. Sizemore, referred to by Thigpen and Cleckley as Eve White, was a woman they suggested might have dissociative identity disorder (then known as multiple personality disorder). Sizemore's identity was concealed in interviews about this film and was not revealed to the public until 1977. 

Joanne Woodward won the Academy Award for Best Actress, making her the first actress to win an Oscar for portraying three personalities (Eve White, Eve Black, and Jane).

For the record, Woodward was only given one (1) statuette.

We saw the film maybe ten years ago, most likely on TCM. As for dissociative identity disorder, here's what the Bible says:

Dissociative identity disorder

Dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder (MPD), is characterized by the presence of at least two personality states or "alters." The diagnosis is extremely controversial, largely due to two opposing models of the disorder. 

[...]

According to the DSM-5-TR, early childhood trauma, typically starting before 5–6 years of age, places someone at risk of developing dissociative identity disorder. Across diverse geographic regions, 90% of people diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder report experiencing multiple forms of childhood abuse, such as rape, violence, neglect, or severe bullying. Other traumatic childhood experiences that have been reported include painful medical and surgical procedures, war, terrorism, attachment disturbance, natural disaster, cult and occult abuse, loss of a loved one or loved ones, human trafficking, and dysfunctional family dynamics.

The full discussion is much, much longer. But so the good book says about this particular syndrome. 

We mention this only to establish the fact that this is an actual clinical diagnosis, included in the DSM. We mention this today for one particular reason:

The invaluable website Rev has created the Rev Transcript Library—a collection of major political tapes and transcripts. The site transcribed President Trump's marathon speech at Tuesday night's National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) dinner.

As you can see by clicking this link, the president went on and on, then on and on and on. He spoke for almost exactly 90 extremely jumbled minutes. 

We decided to skim through the transcript today because we'd seen clips in which he made an array of his standard unusual statements and claims:

The 2020 election was rigged! The money the federal government accrues through the imposition of tariffs comes from the foreign countries in question!

During the Biden years, foreign countries were emptying their insane asylums to flood our nation with the worst of the worst!

In short, all the greatest hits emerged, along with repetitive name-calling directed at Sleepy Joe, Shifty Schiff, and the rest of the standard villains. ("Horseface" went unmentioned.)

The jumbled transcript had the feel of the work of a person who could almost be madman adjacent. We were struck by the crazy feel of the endless series of rants because this same president had seemed so relaxed, in recent days, as he engaged in Q-and-A sessions on Air Force One.

Watching those Q-and-A sessions, it seemed to us that we'd never seen Trump seem so calm and so relaxed. Even after last week's stock market plunge, he seemed to be enjoying every minute of his sudden assault on the world.

Liberation Day had finally come! In its aftermath, he had seemed profoundly sure of himself, preternaturally relaxed. 

Then the other person showed up at the NRCC event. Our journalists obey strict laws against ever discussing such things, but we thought about the Woodward film as we read Rev's transcript:

"Just who are these two different people," we skillfully wondered and asked.

Meanwhile, what the heck is an "idée fixe?" That term does not appear in the DSM, but it's long been a part of psychology talk.

The idées fixes seemed to be running wild at the NRCC event.  For the record, we've long suggested empathy for the afflicted. We think that approach is right on the merits and is best on the politics too.

TRUST: High achievers say the strangest things!

THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2025

Elon Musk, come on down: With substantial regularity, highly accomplished people say the darnedest things.

They may say, and even believe, the darnedest things! Once you step outside their area of achievement, they may even turn out to have a whole bunch of crazy ideas.

Harvard history professor Jill Lepore visited this realm of being in a fascinating guest essay in Sunday's New York Times. Her essay takes us back to the early 1930s—to the start of the Great Depression—but her essay is also as current as our own day's crackpot headlines.

Professor Lepore was back in the past. But she was principally discussing a very important present-day figure. 

Her essay starts as shown below. It then takes us into the realm of badly failed human discernment and stone-cold nutty ideas:

The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk

President Trump has reportedly told cabinet members that Elon Musk may soon leave the administration. If and when he goes, what will he leave behind?

Mr. Musk has long presented himself to the world as a futurist. Yet, notwithstanding the gadgets—the rockets and the robots and the Department of Government Efficiency Musketeers, carrying backpacks crammed with laptops, dreaming of replacing federal employees with large language models—few figures in public life are more shackled to the past.

In Lepore's assessment, Musk isn't simply "shackled to the past." More specifically, Musk seems to be shackled to an array of the past's "failed ideas."

Let's punch up that language. As Lepore lays out the landscape, we'd have to say that DOGEmaster Musk can almost seem to be shackled to a set of borderline crazy ideas. As happenstance would have it, those crazy ideas track back to Musk's maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman—to a man who died when Musk himself was just three years old.

Who the heck was Joshua Haldeman? As we noted yesterday, the leading authority on his life presents this unflattering thumbnail:

Joshua N. Haldeman

Joshua Norman Haldeman (1902-1974) was an American-born Canadian-South African chiropractor, aviator, and politician. He became involved in Canadian politics, backing the technocracy movement, before moving to South Africa in 1950. Over the course of decades, he repeatedly expressed racist, antisemitic, and antidemocratic views. In South Africa he was a supporter of apartheid and promoted a number of conspiracy theories. A pilot since 1948, he died in a plane crash in 1974. Haldeman is the maternal grandfather of businessman Elon Musk.

Haldeman was born in 1902 in Pequot Lakes, Minnesota...[H]is mother studied at E. W. Lynch's Chiropractic School in Minneapolis and earned her D.C. on January 20, 1905. The family then moved to Saskatchewan, where she became the first recorded chiropractor in Canada.

[..]

In 1950, [Haldeman] emigrated with his family to South Africa and settled in the capital Pretoria, where he opened a chiropractic clinic. He served as secretary of the South African Chiropractors Association from 1952 to 1959, after which he was its president until 1969.

He was born in Pequot Lakes, but he grew up in Canada. In that northern land, he became a backer of "the technocracy movement"—a political movement which was briefly influential, despite the highly unusual ideas which lay at the heart of its struggle. 

Haldeman wasn't an industrial giant or a massively accomplished public figure. Today, his famous grandson plainly is. 

That said, Lepore marvels at the way the modern-day Musk seems to share the peculiar ideas which lay at the heart of his grandfather's movement. He was only three when his grandfather died, but ideas can be hard to kill.

Alas! Highly accomplished public figures—massive achievers like Elon Musk—may turn out to have crazy ideas, and very poor judgment, when you take them outside their narrow lane of accomplishment.

At any rate, what the heck was the long forgotten "technocracy movement?" Below, we'll quote Lepore as she highlights some of the movement's weird proposals. To simplify, the leading authority on the movement provides this overview:

Technocracy movement

The technocracy movement was a social movement active in the United States and Canada in the 1930s which favored technocracy as a system of government over representative democracy and concomitant partisan politics...Technocracy was ultimately overshadowed by other proposals for dealing with the crisis of the Great Depression. The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy...

At that time, plain old "representative democracy" seemed to be failing. This movement proposed handing the reins to a new set of philosopher kings—to the brilliant scientists and engineers who would be able to noodle out the best way to shape the society.

Has this started to sound a tiny bit familiar? In the present day, Dogemaster Musk and his "engineers" have been allowed to intercede in all sorts of federal agencies. They've been applying their technical brilliance—their "expertise"—to the pitifully failed undertakings of elected officials and government employees and others within the deep state.

Some of them may be 19 years old; they may have names like "Big Balls." That said, the theory seems to be that their technical brilliance will overcome any obstacles as they reorder the world in a way which at last makes sense.

Unfortunately, highly accomplished technical people will sometimes turn out to be extremely dumb in all other areas. Musk himself has paraded about with a 3-year-old pendant draped on his neck, making one clownish claim after another, as his DOGE bros have blundered ahead. 

Our journalism seems to lack an established language for reporting the sheer stupidity of this highly accomplished industrialist. That said, how dumb can people of this general type be? 

That brings us to Lepore's remarkable recollection of the highly peculiar dreams and ideas which lay at the heart of the technocracy movement, back in the day when Musk's grandfather believed that he could reinvent the basic shape of the world.

How nutty were the original technocrats? We human beings can have the darnedest ideas! In this passage, Professor Lepore starts to describe the movement which seemed to make sense to Musk's grandfather:

The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk

[...]

Joshua Haldeman [was] a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.

Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants—indeed, all of government—with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members.

Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1.

Technocracy first gained worldwide attention in 1932 but soon splintered into rival factions. Technocracy Incorporated was founded and led by a former New Yorker named Howard Scott. Across the continent, rival groups of technocrats issued a flurry of tracts, periodicals and pamphlets explaining, for instance, how “life in a technocracy” would be utterly different from life in a democracy: “Popular voting can be largely dispensed with.”

Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement “does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.”...Mr. Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: “Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.” Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and “90 percent of the courts could be abolished.”

They wanted to bring on "the technate!" We humans would swap our tired old names for numbers—for new names like X Æ A-12!

Canada and Mexico would be annexed by the United States. Popular voting would go. We'd turn it all over to a group of intellectual giants. They would make the trains ruin on time. They'd make the Coast Guard efficient.

This was a journey back to an ancient idea—to the ancient dream of that philosopher king. The technocrats may have been completely sincere in what they proposed—but were they also perhaps a bit nutty?

Decades ago, in the desperate, darkest moment of the Depression, technocracy seemed, briefly, poised to prevail against democracy...In the four months from November 1932 to March 1933, The New York Times published more than 100 stories about the movement. And then the bubble appeared to burst. By summer [1933], Technocrats Magazine and The Technocracy Review had gone out of print.

[...]

Nevertheless, technocracy endured. Its spectacles grew alarming: Technocrats wore identical gray suits and drove identical gray cars in parades that evoked for concerned observers nothing so much as Italian Fascists. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was a technocracy stalwart. 

So it apparently went. Occasionally, it got even stranger than that, as we'll note tomorrow.

Stating the obvious, the possible sins of the maternal grandfather should not be visited on the highly accomplished grandson. Also, many of the technocrats were almost surely fully sincere in their dreams of this new world order.

That said, we humans can have the darnedest ideas! How nutty did some of these technocrats possibly seem? For a look at the identical suits, you can just click here.

The identical cars may be even stranger. To glimpse the movement's "Grey Fleet," click this, then scroll down.

Tomorrow, we'll show you more from Lepore's essay. For today, we'd suggest this:

Accomplished people may often fail to understand one key fact about themselves: Their high achievement in one specific area doesn't mean that they are "highly stable geniuses" is any other moral or intellectual realm.

In fact, accomplished people may often have the weirdest ideas and make the dumbest possible statements! As a general matter, their powers of reasoning may not be great. Swollen by their sense of self, they may not always be obsessively honest.

So it possibly seems to be in the case of the endless ridiculous claims issued by Elon Musk. Should a sensible American citizen trust the things this rather strange person says and does?

He has said a lot of extremely strange things. Who can a citizen trust?

Tomorrow: Journalistic deference! Within that world, who can a citizen trust?

WEDNESDAY: Human behavior in the raw!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2025

Human behavior ignored: It's an amazing time for the observation of human behavior.

Within the realm of journalism, it's also an amazing time to see human behavior ignored.

We start with last night's Gutfeld! program. All in all, the program wasn't as coarse or as misogynistic as it more typically is, but its first two segments involved a stunning, five-person performance of human mental shortcomings. 

It's hard to critique such Gutfeld! segments on a rapid-fire basis. A lot of transcribing would be required, along with a fair amount of backstory.

Briefly:

In last night's first segment (start here), the relentlessly astonishing host kicked things off by launching one of his astonishing generalizations about what "liberals" are actually like. After his monologue on this topic—lately, this has basically become his only monologue topic—four baboons politely took turns topping what he had just said.

Full disclosure! Until not very long ago, we wouldn't have known that you could get waves of people to stage such dumb, though poisonous, conversations on a TV program. 

Plainly, it's extremely possible to engineer this outcome. The task is accomplished on the Gutfeld! show every night of the week.

(The Five is merely a warm-up.)

In last evening's second segment, the troops took turns assailing Jake Tapper for failing to report President Biden's apparent cognitive decline during his term in office—or for doing something like that.

For the record, a perfectly valid question was plainly lurking there: 

To what extent (if any) did Democratic politicians and mainstream journalists engage in some sort of "cover-up" regarding this apparent problem? The question is perfectly valid—and Tapper has now published a book which is said to explore that very topic! (We haven't read it.) 

The question is perfectly valid! That said:

From the anthropological perspective, the Gutfeld! show is an invaluable resource. It's an invaluable resource in the way it presents groups of people who can't or won't explore valid questions without instantly turning to tribal invective and abandoning anything resembling coherent analytical procedures.

(Professor Brabender's famous thesis: "Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.")

During last evening's second segment, the baboons proceeded to savage Tapper without explaining the basis on which they were claiming that he had engaged in some such cover-up. One small glimmer did emerge when one of the helpers offered a slender reference.

For a reason you'll have to discern by watching the tape of the full segment, at issue was a basic question: Who was more at fault in this cover-up, Tapper or Tim Walz? In the following comment, we were given our only glimpse of what Tapper is specifically alleged to have done:

COMPAGNO (4/8/25): Respectfully to Governor Walz, he's not that smart. I mean, that's the whole point.

[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]

COMPAGNO: This is why—this is why my answer to the game is, Jake Tapper's worse, a million percent. Because Walz has always been that way. What you see is what you get. 

But Jake Tapper—we watched when he excoriated poor Lara Trump, who was incredible at defending what we all knew, which was seeing President Biden's mental acuity totally decline right before our very eyes, and he sat there [on] his high horse and just skewered her—tried to—and anyone else who came on. 

And now he thinks he has the wherewithal to be able to question the cover-up? The cover-up was him!

The cover-up was Jake Tapper! He's a million percent worse than Walz—but what had Tapper done?

According to the Fox New Channel's routinely irate Emily Compagno, he had excoriated Lara Trump for having asserted "what we all knew" about President Biden's decline. He had tried to skewer her, along with "anyone else who came on."

So read the indictment concerning the one slender charge. When we sat down and googled it up, this is what we found:

Somewhat surprisingly, the (very brief) incident in question occurred during the 2020 campaign! At that time, did everyone think that "President Biden" was in some obvious cognitive decline?

We'd be surprised to learn that the answer is yes. Given the trivial nature of the incident in question, we aren't going to try to google that.

The background to the attempted skewering incident was this:

Back in 2020, Lara Trump had made a somewhat snarky remark about Candidate Biden's public speaking. Tapper apparently thought she'd been making fun of Biden's lifelong stutter, which had started being discussed in 2019.

When Tapper challenged the comment, Lara Trump said that she'd actually been talking about what she believed to be a mental decline.  Tapper didn't seem to believe her.  With that, the skewering ended

(For ourselves, we'd assume that actually was what Lara Trump had meant.)

This was a very minor event, from a time when Biden's possible or apparent cognitive decline wasn't anything like the widespread topic it would later become. That said, such minor offenses never die at times of heartfelt tribal warfare, especially among the perpetually furious. 

And so it came to pass that when the topic of Tapper's book was announced in late February, Lara Trump swung into action, recalling the 2020 incident all over again. For one news report, click here.

Last night, the children pounded away at Tapper for his abhorrent behavior.  A basic anthropological finding came into view:

Some people can't explore a valid question without going straight for the tribal jugular. 

Simply put, they don't seem to have what it takes. Also, they're being paid.

As of the 2024 campaign, what did Tapper know, if anything, about Joe Biden's apparent or alleged decline? It would be interesting to see that question asked and answered.

That said, Homie don't play it that way on the Gutfeld! program. The Gutfeld! show is human dumbness all the way down, plus dimwitted tribal aggression. 

On most nights, it's also a cesspool of sexual insult and undisguised misogyny.

We never knew that you could pay people to go on TV and be so remarkably dumb. As it turns out, it's an easily accomplished task. This show is a lesson every night—one other orgs won't discuss.

TRUST: He hailed from our neighbor to the north....

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 2025

...where he had some peculiar ideas: As we noted yesterday, Johnny Carson was one of the first to pose the important question. In fairness, his wording was slightly off:

Who Do You Trust?

Who Do You Trust? [was] an American television game show.

...[T]he show premiered in prime time on CBS in January 1956 and was hosted by Edgar Bergen. The show lasted in this form until March 1957. In September of that year, the show was revamped as a daytime program, and Johnny Carson was installed as host. 

The show was the start of Carson's career on network TV. His next stop was the Tonight show.

"Who Do You Trust?" was the name of that show. Our question is slightly different. All this week, we're asking these questions. 

Who can an American citizen trust? As a citizen, who should you trust?

"Trust but verify," President Reagan famously said. He was speaking about the Soviet Union, but the advice is quite good here at home.

In theory, no public official, journalist or professor should ever be trusted completely. But at some point, a citizen has to make a basic general assessment:

As a general matter, who can you pretty much trust? A corollary question might go like this:

Who can't you trust in any way? Who can't you sensibly trust at all?

For the record, we're speaking here about trusting someone's overall judgment—about trusting some public figure's intellect, wisdom, honesty. For today, we'll let ourselves focus on one public figure:

Should you trust—can a sensible person trust—the judgment of Elon Musk?

Musk is—and Musk has been—a very important person. Forget his current performance at DOGE. All the way back in 2021, Time magazine hailed him as its Person of the Year.

The sponge bath started as shown:

Elon Musk: 2021 TIME Person of the Year

The richest man in the world does not own a house and has recently been selling off his fortune. He tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun; he drives a car he created that uses no gas and barely needs a driver. With a flick of his finger, the stock market soars or swoons. An army of devotees hangs on his every utterance. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable. Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops.

That was the start of the fluff-infested fiddle-faddle about this swinger of birches. Please don't blame the journalists for this (Ball, Kluger and de la Garza). That's the type of silliness their editors demand in such essays.

That said, riddle us one peculiar disclosure. With apologies for the inanity, Time magazine's Person of the Year "likes to live-tweet his poops?"

Quickly, the journalists supported their surprising claim. before resuming their lionization. Also, the journalists reported that Musk had only been doing that "lately."  

Still, however accomplished this person may be in several technological / entreprenurial areas, can you actually trust that guy? Can you trust his overall judgment?

That was December 2021. Joe Biden sat in the White House. The pandemic had largely relented.

Now we're engaged in a great civil war, and the fellow who had "recently been selling off his fortune" has become a major political / policy player. In that role, he keeps saying the darnedest things. Can sensible people trust a person who says—or suggests or implies or seems to suggest—such peculiar things as these?

Apparent claims by Musk:
Something approaching twenty million people over the age of 120 are being sent monthly checks by the Social Security Administration.

The federal government paid (or perhaps was only "charged") a billion dollars for "a simple online survey" which should have cost $10,000. "Mind-blowing," the gentleman said.

Thanks to the intervention of DOGE, the White House stopped USAID from sending $50 million worth of condoms to the Gaza Strip—presumably, to Hamas.

Most recently, we'll cite his claim about all the immigrants with all the Social Security numbers. For Poynter's April 4 debunking of this claim, click here for this report:

Immigrants can get Social Security numbers legally. Musk says that’s ‘crazy’

Billionaire businessman and White House adviser Elon Musk and his colleague, venture capitalist Antonio Gracias, said they uncovered “crazy” information about Social Security and immigrants.

“This is a mind-blowing chart,” Musk said at a March 30 campaign event for the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, pointing to data that showed the number of noncitizens who received Social Security numbers from 2021 to 2024. The chart showed a jump from about 270,000 in fiscal year 2021 to more than 2 million in fiscal year 2024.

“This literally blew us away, like we went there to find fraud, and we found this by accident,” said Gracias, who has been working with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Gracias thanked government workers who he said “took a risk to show us these numbers.”

Both men portrayed the data as nefarious and previously unknown.

Gracias’ remarks gave the false impression that all noncitizens who received Social Security numbers during that timeframe are in the U.S. illegally and receiving federal benefits. He said, without presenting evidence, that the 5.5 million people represented in the chart received Social Security numbers after illegally crossing the border, applying for asylum and receiving a work permit. He added that those people were receiving Social Security benefits and some were registered to vote and had voted. (Only U.S. citizens can vote in federal elections.)

Musk also tied the data to his false claim that former President Joe Biden’s administration had a “large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States.” We previously rated that Pants on Fire!

But this data is neither nefarious nor secretive. It’s evidence of the Social Security system working as intended by law.

The fact-check continues from there, and there is no paywall. That said, Whatever! For whatever reason, this sems to be the peculiar way this Person of the Year tends to play.

For whatever reason, such statements, insinuations and suggestions seem to emerge from Musk like the traditional "showers of rain." So does the endless name-calling, along with the endless "puerile expressions" (Time), such as the tweeting of bowel movements.

So how about it? Can a sensible citizen trust the person in question? Musk is highly accomplished in certain technological areas. But should citizens trust his various statements about political matters? Should we the people trust his various assessments?

Should citizens trust the sayings of DOGEmaster Musk? We think the answer is blindingly obvious. Millions of people disagree with our assessment—and the major organs of Blue America are largely taking a pass on this important question.

That said, a guest essay in Sunday's New York Times traced the history of some of Musk's apparent ideas. The essay was written by Jill Lepore, the Harvard history/law professor. It appeared beneath this headline:

The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk

In her fascinating essay, Professor Lepore tracks those "failed ideas" back a full century, just past the onset of the Great Depression. Remarkably, the peculiar ideas can even be said to track back to Musk's maternal grandfather!

With that, an immediate disclaimer:

Thee's little reason to believe that Musk was directly influenced by the person in question. Hs maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, died at the age of 75 when Musk was just three years old.

That said, the "failed ideas" are very strange, though they're strange ideas of a certain type. Also, they seem to run all through the peculiar behavior of Musk himself. To offer a bit of instant background, here's a quick thumbnail concerning his rather unusual grandfather:

Joshua N. Haldeman

Joshua Norman Haldeman (1902-1974) was an American-born Canadian-South African chiropractor, aviator, and politician. He became involved in Canadian politics, backing the technocracy movement, before moving to South Africa in 1950. Over the course of decades, he repeatedly expressed racist, antisemitic, and antidemocratic views. In South Africa he was a supporter of apartheid and promoted a number of conspiracy theories. A pilot since 1948, he died in a plane crash in 1974. Haldeman is the maternal grandfather of businessman Elon Musk.

[..]

In 1950, he emigrated with his family to South Africa and settled in the capital Pretoria, where he opened a chiropractic clinic. He served as secretary of the South African Chiropractors Association from 1952 to 1959, after which he was its president until 1969.

That's a rather unflattering thumbnail. In her essay, Professor Lepore focuses on the long-forgotten "technocracy movement," with its substantial array of peculiar behaviors and bizarre ideas.

Tomorrow, we'll scroll through Lepore's recollection about the technocracy movement, which was briefly influential. In the main, one key point will prevail:

People with substantial technological abilities may be borderline nuts about pretty much everything else. Their overall judgement may be remarkably poor. This is an important framework within which the American citizen might consider the behaviors of Musk.

Haldeman hailed from our neighbor to the north. He had many peculiar ideas.

Arrested in Canada, he eventually decamped to the south. He emigrated to South Africa, where his highly influential grandson was born.

Who can we the people trust? Should we trust the various claims of Elon Musk? 

Tomorrow: People who are highly accomplished may believe the darnedest things!

Bret Stephens publishes sacred words!

TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2025

There are no disposable people: This afternoon, during a brief medical sojourn, we had a chance to retreat, once again, inside Francine Prose's book:

HarperCollins Publishers
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
By Francine Prose

“Prose’s book is a stunning achievement. . . . Now Anne Frank stands before us. . . a figure who will live not only in history but also in the literature she aspired to create." Minneapolis Star Tribune

We even found ourselves asking this: 

Have we ever read a better book? More on that below.

Returning to our sprawling campus, we were lucky enough to encounter Bret Stephens' new column. These are extremely dangerous times, but they may help us recall the essentials. 

Stephens starts as shown:

The Destruction of the American Ideal

Even by the ugly standards of this administration, the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia stands out.

A Salvadoran migrant and metal worker in Maryland with no criminal record other than traffic violations and illegal entry into the country, he was arrested by immigration authorities in March and deported to one of the notorious prisons of his homeland, in contravention of a U.S. immigration judge’s order. The government acknowledged the “administrative error”—an Orwellian euphemism for a Kafkaesque nightmare—but petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a federal judge’s order requiring his return on Monday. The same day, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the lower court’s order so it can have time to consider the case.

Abrego Garcia was an unimportant person when he was deported—except, of course, to his wife and son and two stepchildren. He is the subject of an accusation that he belonged to the MS-13 gang—but there is only flimsy evidence and no proof. The entire edifice of American justice is built on the conviction that there is no guilt without proof beyond reasonable doubt—and that there is no unimportant person, at least not in the eyes of the law.

"There is no unimportant person!" The statement is quite direct. On the Fox News Channel program The Five, Jesse Watters expressed a different point of view. 

Speaking of another deportee, one who is quite likely wholly innocent, the exasperated "silly boy" offered this to Jessica Tarlov:

"It's just a gay barber."

In the (correctable) squalor of the program in question, he was a disposable person.

There is no unimportant person! We feel lucky to have been able to encounter that statement today. In the squalor of the last week, we've been thinking of the start of the Yevtushenko poem, if only in translation:

People 
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

[...]

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

And so on from there.

No people are uninteresting, Yevtushenko said, thinking of the millions of people who died in the Soviet gulag. Then too, there was the aforementioned Frank, who we've long regarded, for no reason we can explain, as a sacred person.

Stephens mentioned Kafka; we'll see him and raise him one. As we noted on Saturday, Philip Roth once referred to Anne Frank in this way:

"She was a marvelous young writer...The ardor in her, the spirit in her—always on the move, always starting things . . . she's he's like some impassioned little sister of Kafka's, his lost little daughter." 

Looking through Prose's book again, we thought of a different comparison. She seems to us like a more sacred version of our own native county's Thoreau.

Here's the impassioned little sister of Kafka, as quoted in Prose's book, even as she's thinking ahead to the decency and the fun of life after liberation:

"Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the 'Secret Annex.' The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story. But, seriously, it would be quite funny ten years after the war if we Jews were to tell how we lived and what we ate and talked about here." 

We thought of Middlesex County's Thoreau, right at the start of his most famous volume:

Walden

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book.

How did they live and what did they eat! One was allowed to return to civilized life. One was "arrested," then sent away to an especially demented, deranged type of prison.

Could it be, at a time like this, that we will remember first principles? Stephens makes a simple statement today:

There are no disposable people.

TUESDAY: We humans will fight and claw and scratch...

TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2025

...right through to the bitter end: A crazily tribal juncture like this may produce a remarkable set of anthropology lessons. 

Watching The Five, then watching Gutfeld!, is a lesson like few others. So too with what Scott Jennings—to all appearances, a good, decent person—said last night on CNN.

The situation starts with one of President Trump's recent unusual statements. Taking questions on Air Force One this past Sunday, he made a striking suggestion. 

The question: Now that the ice has been broken, would he be willing to ship prisoners who are American citizens into El Salvador's gulag-adjacent prison? 

"I love [the idea]," the thoughtful president said:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (4/6/25): I love that. If we could take some of our 20-time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head and then purposely run people over in cars, if [the Central American strongman] would take them, I would be honored to give them. 

I don’t know what the law says on that, but I can’t imagine the law would say anything different. If they can house these horrible criminals for a lot less money than it costs us, I’m all for it but I would only do according to the law.

We'd be getting a very good price, the sitting president basically said, this echoing Brian Kilmeade.

The president continued to state this view as people continued to ask him. Although he said he loved this rather unusual idea, he said he could only engage in this practice depending on "what the laws says."

For the record, the Constitution says one or two things about "cruel and unusual punishment." Be that as it may, there things stood until last night, when Abby Phillip raised the topic on CNN NewsNight.

Scott Jennings has become a person who can sometimes (not always) be slow to relent. To watch videotape of the fuller attempt at discission, you can just click here. But eventually, this is what was said:

PHILLIP (4/7/25): So you’re saying, "What’s wrong with sending Americans to a prison in El Salvador?"

JENNINGS: I’m saying what's—

PHILLIP: Is that what you’re saying?

JENNINGS: I’m saying, "What’s wrong with sending people who are convicted of violent crimes to prison?" Period!

PHILLIP: No, no, no. That’s not what he said. He said he’s going to send them to a prison—

JENNINGS: Yeah. So?

PHILLIP: The vice president called it a gulag in El Salvador. Is that OK with you?

JENNINGS: If you—if you are convicted of a violent crime in this country, and a court finds you guilty of whatever, those things he just listed, and it’s—and it’s OK by the law, which he said at the end of his answer, I mean—

PHILLIP: How is it OK by the law to extradite Americans to a foreign country for crimes they committed here?

Quickly, did Vance really call it "a gulag?" We think Phillip misunderstood what he said.

That said, the yes/no continued a bit from there. Let's move directly to the main anthropology lesson: 

For now, let's abandon the question concerning what's "OK by the law." To our ear, Jennings seemed to be saying that this new approach to crime and punishment would be OK by him!

There is, of course, no ultimate way of saying what's OK, and what isn't OK, in some such region of the realm. Given the nature of that particular Central American lockup, we think it's remarkable that Jennings wouldn't or couldn't simply say that this seems like an odd idea.

That seems odd all by itself. But the core of today's anthropology lessons came when Jennings finally retreated to this:

JENNINGS: I know—I know you want all the illegals and all the violence [violents?] out of jail. I know that.

Was someone saying that they wanted to let everyone out of jail? It's hard to believe that Jennings really thought that, but this is where hard tribal division can take our human minds.

A similar rhetorical play is general over the Fox News Channel and the Trump administration. If a person says he wants to see migrants afforded due process before they're shipped to a violent gulag, the Fox News employee will simply assert that all the detainees are vicious / violent / terrorist murderers., end of discussion.

Routinely, they will seem to believe that their hot insistence on this claim ends the need for any possible further debate. Judge Jeannine, come on down! 

Sad! "Due process" is designed as a way to separate out those who aren't vicious / violent / terrorist murderers. Quite routinely, the Fox News pundit—or the young White House spokesperson—will simply insist that all the detainees are vicious rapists! End of discussion right there!

(They don't need your stinkin' due process! They know what due process would yield.)

"Man [sic] is the rational animal," Aristotle is widely said to have said. If he meant what it may sound like he meant, we will only remind you of this:

Aristotle never saw the behavior of us the persons in this remarkably tribal time—in this age in which "the democratization of media" has been fueled by "segregation by viewpoint."

At such times, segregated by tribe, we humans are inclined to resist the most obvious points. We're inclined to balk at the most obvious points right through to the very end.

That's the way we humans are wired. Every top expert says this!

TRUST: Can you believe the things you're told...

TUESDAY, APRIL 8, 2025

...by billionaire volunteers? Johnny Carson was one of the first to raise one form of the question. He did so at the start of his career:

Who Do You Trust?

Who Do You Trust? [was] an American television game show.

Under the title Do You Trust Your Wife?, the show premiered in prime time on CBS in January 1956 and was hosted by Edgar Bergen. The show lasted in this form until March 1957. In September of that year, the show was revamped as a daytime program, and Johnny Carson was installed as host. 

This version aired from September 30, 1957, to November 15, 1957, at 4:30 pm Eastern on ABC, and from November 18, 1957, to December 27, 1963 at 3:30 pm Eastern. The title was changed to Who Do You Trust? on July 14, 1958.

We were only nine years old when Carson took over, but we could already see he was funny. 

Decades earlier, Robert Frost had raised the basic issue in a somewhat obscure poem, a poem said to be about the world's treatment of his mother.  As we've noted before, the question of trust was raised here:

The Lovely Shall Be Choosers

The Voice said, "Hurl her down!"

The Voices, "How far down?"

"Seven levels of the world."

"How much time have we?"

Take twenty years...

[...]

Then send some one with eyes to see
And wonder at her where she is,
And words to wonder in her hearing how she came there,
But without time to linger for her story.
Be her last joy her heart's going out to this one
So that she almost speaks.
You know them—seven in all."

"Trust us," the Voices said.

She'd been hurled down seven levels of the world, On the brighter side, she hadn't been thrown into a strongman's gulag, never to be heard from again. 

At any rate, Send some one to wonder at her where she is? 

"Trust us," the Voices said, at the end of the poem. Today, people occasionally wonder where the recently disappeared from our own struggling nation might be.

Whatever that answer might be, this raises the question we'll explore all this week. In the present circumstance, whose statements and claims—whose representations and allegations—can an overwhelmed citizen trust?

Carson and Frost had different ideas with respect to such questions. Yesterday, we asked if we can trust the statements made by the volunteer who went on the Fox News Channel last Wednesday morning and made the statements correctly described in this online Fox News report:

DOGE volunteer credits Trump for unprecedented effort to curb 'jaw-dropping' Social Security fraud

[...]

Musk and [Antonio] Gracias revealed over the weekend during a get-out-the-vote rally in Wisconsin that millions of noncitizens received Social Security numbers during former President Joe Biden's tenure. The pair shared a chart showing a steady year-over-year increase, reaching more than 2 million in FY 2024, which ended on Sept. 30.

FY23 saw roughly 1 million noncitizens issued Social Security numbers, as did FY25, which began in October and will end in September of this year. 

"We found that there were just about five-plus million of them that came to the country as illegals, were given various forms of parole or allowing [in] the country, and they got through an automatic system, Social Security numbers, so they could get into our benefit systems," Gracias said. 

"And we tracked that through and found that they were on benefit programs," he noted. "And just because we were curious, we then looked to see if they were on the voter rolls, and we found in a handful of cooperative states that there were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted."

Gracias said that DOGE confirmed 1.3 million individuals who secured a fraudulent Social Security number received Medicare benefits, too. 

That's what the volunteer told Steve Doocy on last Wednesday's Fox & Friends. Given the current rules of the game, Doocy was suitably blown away by what the volunteer said.

As we noted yesterday, the volunteer was Antonio Gracias, a multibillionaire private equity investor and a close friend of Elon Musk. There's nothing automatically "wrong' with either of those states of being—but yesterday, we posed this question:

Can you trust the various things you're told by Gracias and Musk?

More specifically, we posed this question:

Can you trust the statements and suggestions launched by Gracias concerning the acquisition   of Social Security numbers by millions of non-citizens? Also, concerning the alleged discovery that 1.3 million such non-citizens—possibly by some such "illegals"—are siphoning oodles of money, in an inappropriate way, from one of this nation's major benefit systems?

Can you trust the things this volunteer says? We'll start with this minor observation:

Yes, that's what he said! As you can see by clicking here, this is what Gracias said to the suitably slack-jawed Doocy:

Antonio Gracias on Fox & Friends, 4/2/25:

DOOCY (4/2/25): So let me ask you this, Antonio. Have you figured out— You saw these millions of people, non-citizens, on the Social Security rolls. Did they get benefits?

GRACIAS: Yes, we actually tracked them into the benefits programs. We found them in all the benefits programs. And one statistic for you, we found 1.3 million of them on Medicare [sic].

DOOCY: Wow!

GRACIAS: Yeah.

Oops! As we noted yesterday, Gracias is new to the services being provided by DOGE. With respect to his current volunteer work, he hails from a substantially different "level of the world."

In his presentation to Doocy, Gracias claimed or said or alleged that he and "Elon," as Doocy called him, had found 1.3 million non-citizens "on Medicare."

In fact, the alleged program in question is actually Medicaid. That may have been the volunteer's inexperience showing through. Or it may have been a simple slip of the tongue.

People do make mistakes! That said, a cadre of billionaire volunteers are now exploring levels of the world which are quite new to them.  Can we trust the various things they say or perhaps suggest? 

Can we assume that their statements and insinuations are actually accurate? Can we assume that their statements, and their insinuations, aren't misleading or just plain false?

We ask this question for obvious reasons. Gracias has pledged his troth to Musk, but Musk is the rather peculiar person who launched the claim (and/or the insinuation) that as many as 20 million dead people—people over the age of 120!—are still being sent Social Security checks. 

(That suggestion is now being sanded down. But Musk is still out there making it.)

Also, Musk is the person who instantly said this to the suitably gobsmacked Bret Baier:

BAIER (3/28/25): For you, what's the most astonishing thing you've found out in this process?

MUSK: The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government. It is astonishing. It’s mind-blowing. Just—we routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more. Casually.

You know, for example, like the simple survey that was—literally, a ten-question survey. You could do it with SurveyMonkey—it would cost about $10,000. The government was being charged almost a billion dollars for that.

BAIER: For just a survey!

MUSK: A billion dollars for a simple online survey, "Do you like the National Park?" 

As it turned out, that claim was almost surely bogus too. Not that any major Blue American news org bothers itself with such trivial matters at this point in time.

Can you trust the general thrust of what Gracias told Steve Doocy? If you watch the full interview, starting here, we would suggest the following:

Insinuations to the side, we'll suggest that Doocy seems to know that those "illegals" obtained those Social Security numbers in a thoroughly lawful manner. We'd also suggest that the term "illegals," or "illegal immigrants," gets thrown around in ways which are governed by very few semantic regularities.

For today, we ask you this:

Did Gracias and Elon actually discover that 1.3 million "non-citizens" are actually "on Medicaid?" (Not "on Medicare," as the volunteer mistakenly said.)

Correcting for the novice's irrelevant error, are that many non-citizens on Medicaid in some illegal way? As far as that goes, are that many non-citizens actually on Medicaid in any way at all? 

The volunteers keep making that claim, but are such statements accurate? We don't know how to answer such questions, nor will any major Blue org ever attempt to say. 

In fairness, the zone is currently being flooded on a daily basis. It would be hard for a news org to keep up with the flood of representations, even if a news org wanted to try. 

(We see no sign that any such news org does.)

Can you trust the various things these billionaire volunteers say? Given the fact that they're out of their element, can you assume that they aren't making simple mistakes? 

Also, given the fact that we're all human beings, can you assume that they aren't simply being less than obsessively honest?

Tomorrow, we'll continue to explore this question, turning to this remarkable guest essay by Professor Lepore in Sunday's New York Times. For today, we'll merely show you something we stumbled upon yesterday as we continued to google around.

In yesterday's report, we noted that Gracias had made some of these claims about "non-citizens" being "on Medicaid" on the All-In podcast. We showed the way the leading authority described that widely-viewed entity.

Later, we also came across this report in Mediaite. Sam Harris, a well-known figure, had dropped a bomb on Joe Rogan—but also on that other podcast:

Sam Harris Drops Brutal Takedown of Joe Rogan

Podcast host and political commentator Sam Harris dropped a scorched earth takedown of fellow podcasters Joe Rogan and Dave Smith on Sunday, accusing them of regularly flubbing facts, helping to fracture the U.S. politically, and recently platforming World War II revisionists.

“Joe is a genuinely good guy who wants good things for people, but he is honestly in over his head on so many topics of great consequence, right?” Harris began.

[...]

During his lengthy monologue, Harris also took swipes at Lex Fridman and the All-In podcast, which, along with Rogan, are part of the so-called “manosphere” of new media that helped President Donald Trump win reelection.

Say what? Harris had dropped a bomb on the All-In podcast? In his report for Mediaite, Alex Griffing now included a clip in which another observer had said that Harris criticized the All-In podcast for its alleged recitation of "Kremlin talking points!"

Is that podcast part of the manosphere? Does it traffic in any such talking points?

We don't have the slightest idea. Summarizing, we would offer this:

"Who Do You Trust?' Johnny Carson once asked. 

"Trust us," the Voices had already said. 

That said, who can we trust in the present day? Tomorrow, we'll return to the 1930s to see how crazy the thought processes of certain types of volunteers can actually turn out to be! 

Tomorrow: Jill Lepore draws on the past

MONDAY: 60 Minutes steps up to the plate!

MONDAY, APRIL 7, 2025

Where human discourse begins: 60 Minutes has been earning its stripes in recent weeks. 

Last night, the program started with a deeply informative look at life among the dying and wounded of Gaza. For transcript and video of the segment, you can just click here:

Gaza's children struggle with life-changing injuries from ongoing Israel-Hamas war

Dr. Samer Attar is an orthopedic surgeon in Chicago, a professor of surgery at Northwestern, and recently, among the brave volunteers fighting for life in the war in Gaza. 

Gaza is 25 miles long and home to two million Palestinians, descendants of those displaced in the 1948 creation of Israel. Gaza is ruled by a terrorist group called Hamas. And in 2023, Hamas attacked Israel—an atrocity—that, Israel says, killed 1,200 civilians, including 40 children, and captured 251. 

Israel's war to free its hostages and defeat Hamas has killed an estimated 50,000 Palestinians, 15,000 of them children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. The U.N. says 92% of Gaza housing has been damaged. 

Last week on 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl reported on the trauma and torture suffered by Israeli hostages. Tonight, we have the story of the desperate fight to save Gaza's civilians through the charity of nations and the mercy of volunteers like Samer Attar.

That's Dr. Attar battling a stalled heart...

We always marvel at the work of people like Dr. Attar. Last week, 60 Minutes explored "the trauma and torture suffered by Israeli hostages." Last night, it was the suffering of paramedics—and the death and suffering of children—inside the borders of Gaza. 

That was the program's first report. For transcript and tape of last night's second report, you can just click this:

U.S. sent 238 migrants to Salvadoran mega-prison; documents indicate most have no apparent criminal records

Three weeks ago, 238 Venezuelan migrants were flown from Texas to a maximum security prison in El Salvador.

That country's president offered to take them and the Trump administration used a law not invoked since World War II to send them—claiming they are all terrorists and violent gang members.

The government has released very little information about the men. But through internal government documents, we have obtained a list of their identities and found that an overwhelming majority have no apparent criminal convictions or even criminal charges. 

They are now prisoners...

That's the headline and the start of the transcript. Just for the record, "prisoners" is barely the word.

Eventually, the transcript says this about the people who were shipped to that "maximum security prison"—to a prison which may function more like a gulag, like a brutal gulag at that:

In October, Tom Homan, who is now the White House border czar, told 60 Minutes the Trump administration's mass deportation plan would start by removing the worst of the worst.

HOMAN (on videotape): We're gonna prioritize those with convictions. We're gonna prioritize national security threats. We have to do that. You gotta get the worst first.

But are they the worst? The Trump administration has yet to release the identities of the Venezuelan men it sent to El Salvador last month. We obtained internal government documents listing their names and any known criminal information. We cross referenced that with domestic and international court filings, news reports and arrest records whenever we could find them.

How about it? Are these men the worst of the worst? Is it even possible that some of these frog-marched, disappeared people aren't guilty of any kind of misconduct at all?

Everything is always possible, until it's shown that it isn't. Here's what 60 Minutes says it found when it says it conducted a search:

At least 22% of the men on the list have criminal records here in the United States or abroad. The vast majority [of the 22%] are for non-violent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing. About a dozen are accused of murder, rape, assault and kidnapping. 

For 3% of those deported, it is unclear whether a criminal record exists. 

But we could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans—179 men—now sitting in prison.

In response to our findings, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said many of those without criminal records, quote "are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more. They just don't have a rap sheet in the u.s."

Border Czar Tom Homan said immigration agents spent hours conducting rigorous checks on each of the men to confirm they are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang President Trump campaigned on eradicating.

According to 60 Minutes, they could establish that only a dozen of these men had been accused of murder / rape / assault / kidnapping. They said they could find no pre-existing criminal records for 75 percent of these people.

Are these men really the worst of the worst? Is it possible that some, perhaps many, of these people aren't bad actors at all?

Obviously, yes, such things are possible. For now, CBS says it conducted a search, and that's what CBS says it found. 

In a rational and even a moral world, that would represent a starting point for a serious public discussion. That said, it's unlikely that we'll see any such discussion here. 

For one thing, the current administration is "flooding the zone" with one event after another. This makes it hard for any topic to receive a full dose of attention.

Also, we don't live in any such rational / moral world at the present time. Our culture, such as it ever was, is withering away on the vine. 

On the journalistic end, we're living inside a tribal corporate Babel. As one part of this system, people are paid to go on TV and recite bogus claims and they go on TV and they do it.

60 Minutes has been doing good work. It's the kind of thing which could make a person start to admire and respect a given nation's imperfect attempt at creating an admirable culture.

TRUST: "Trust us," the various magnates have said!

MONDAY, APRIL 7, 2025

But what if the magnates are nuts? We'll start the week with something which may not strike you as crazy. It involves some brand-new claims from one of the persons we've been instructed to trust.

Our exploration starts at 7:04 a.m. on Sunday's Fox & Friends Weekend program. As we start, the friends were lauding the performance of DOGE.

Serving as news reader, Chanley Painter was delivering the day's headline reports. She played videotape of a statement by Antonio Gracias, a new figure at DOGE. 

Painter seems to have misstated who this new figure is. Then, she and the trio of friends began to react in the manner shown:

PAINTER (4/6/25): This comes as the head of DOGE's border team reveals a shocking number of illegal immigrants on Medicaid. Watch:

GRACIAS (videotape): So we mapped it through to the benefit programs. We found in the benefit programs that every benefit was being accessed by these people. You know, 1.3 million of them are on Medicaid right now. today. And by the way it's just ramping, just starting...  

PAINTER: And he goes on to say that, of the 1.3 million illegals currently claiming Medicaid, that comes to an estimate cost of about $6.5 billion, guys. 

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Wow, Chanley! Thank you for that excellent report. 

As usual, Campos-Duffy was blown away by the latest claim.

For the record, that excellent report by Painter almost surely wasn't. We know of no reason to believe that Gracias is "the head of DOGE's border team," though we're not sure it actually matters.

Who is this new figure at DOGE? Last Sunday night, in a Wisconsin political rally, Elon Musk introduced him to the crowd in the manner shown:

Musk Town Hall in Wisconsin (Sunday, March 30)

MUSK (3/30/25): So a number of friends of mine have actually joined the government in order to help with this process...I'd like to welcome my friend Antonio Gracias to the stage. Antonio is helping out with the Social Security, so just trying to review Social Security where you may have heard that we found 20 million dead people marked as alive in the Social Security database. 

This is so crazy.

"This is so crazy," Musk told the crowd, as he repeated the latest sanded-down version of the "20 million dead people" claim.

"This is so crazy," the magnate said. But what if the magnate is nuts?

At any rate, Gracias is a friend of Musk's, the magnate told the crowd. There seems to be little doubt about that. This is what the New York Times had already reported on March 14:

A Close Elon Musk Friend Joins His Effort on Social Security

A private equity investor who is one of Elon Musk’s closest confidants has taken a new role in the Social Security Administration, a development that could be politically combustible given the program’s popularity with voters and Mr. Musk’s apparent intent to make major changes at the agency.

The investor, Antonio Gracias, who has served on the boards of Mr. Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, has started a job at the administration as part of the Musk-led cost-cutting effort known as the Department of Government Efficiency, according to documents seen by The New York Times and two people informed about his appointment.

Of the more than 50 people who have joined Mr. Musk in Washington, almost none have as extensive a history with him as Mr. Gracias. The men met around two decades ago and in that time, Mr. Gracias has become one of Mr. Musk’s most trusted advisers.

[...]

Nine DOGE members have arrived at the Social Security Administration in recent days. They include Mr. Gracias and two other men who work at his investment firm, Valor Equity Partners.

Mr. Gracias met Mr. Musk through David Sacks, a venture capitalist who is now himself a top Trump administration official. He was an early believer in Tesla, and personally lent Mr. Musk $1 million in the company’s early days, according to testimony from Mr. Gracias in a recent court case. The men and their families have vacationed together in the Bahamas and gone skiing in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

As Mr. Musk’s career and wealth flourished, so did that of Mr. Gracias, who has tied his personal brand to the world-famous entrepreneur. Valor has invested in at least five of Mr. Musk’s companies. In 2022 when Mr. Musk bought the social media platform X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion, he tapped Mr. Gracias to manage the finances of the transaction.

[...]

Mr. Gracias has undergone a political reinvention. He attended the September 2016 presidential debate as a supporter of Hillary Clinton, and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign in 2020. Now, he largely backs Republicans: He gave millions to David McCormick during his 2022 and 2024 Senate runs in Pennsylvania and donated $1 million to Mr. Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC.

At times, Mr. Gracias’s language has been bolder than Mr. Musk’s. In the February podcast episode, he said Mr. Musk’s declaration that 10 percent of the federal budget was probably fraud “might be low.” He has also claimed that the country was flirting with becoming a “kleptocracy” and a “Latin American-style autocracy.”

There's nothing "wrong" with any of that. None of that means that the allegations reported by Painter somehow just have to be false.

That said, Gracias doesn't seem to be "the head of DOGE's border team." According to Forbes, Gracias is a multibillionaire too—and he seems to be all in on Musk!

With that, let's return to what people were told if they were watching Fox & Friends Weekend. As we started to show you above, after Painter delivered the mail, the three friends responded as shown:

PAINTER (4/6/25): This comes as the head of DOGE's border team reveals a shocking number of illegal immigrants on Medicaid. Watch:

GRACIAS (videotape): So we mapped it through to the benefit programs. We found in the benefit programs that every benefit was being accessed by these people. You know, 1.3 million of them are on Medicaid right now. today. And by the way it's just ramping, just starting...  

PAINTER: And he goes on to say that of the 1.3 million illegals currently claiming Mediacod,that comes to a estimate cost of $6.5 billion, guys. 

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Wow, Chanley! Thank you for that excellent report. 

That is no chump change, you guys! $6.5 billion spent on 1.3 million illegals who should not be on Medicaid? That's incredible.

HURT: And if you care about Medicaid, don't you want to keep it solvent?...It makes no sense. If you care about these things, then you would like to keep them solvent. 

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Yeah.

JENKINS: I got to tell you, I hope DOGE goes deep on this. Because I think that number is significantly lower than the reality—

CAMPOS-DUFFY: Me too. I think the same thing.

So it went, as prescribed by the rules. As we've often noted, the various friends always "think the same thing" about whatever has been said on this imitation of a "cable news" program.

As always, the three friends all agreed with each other. Let's remember to say their names:

Fox & Friends Weekend: Sunday, 4/6/25
Rachel Campos-Duffy: regular co-host
Charlie Hurt: regular co-host
Griff Jenkins: substitute co-host

Inevitably, all three friends were blown away by what Gracias had said. Also, by what Painter said that Gracias said—but what had he actually said?

Painter seemed to be working from a brief, brand-new report by the Daily Mail. It quoted something Gracias had said on a certain podcast, after which it may have added to what he actually said.

Rightly or wrongly, this report does describe Gracias as "the head of DOGE's border team." Everything is always possible, but we've seen no sign, anywhere else, that this new arrival at DOGE has been assigned to some such post.

That said, here's the Daily Mail report:

DOGE's border expert reveals terrifying number of illegals on Medicaid: 'It's just ramping up'

Illegal immigrants are claiming billions of dollars worth of Medicaid and other US benefits, according to data uncovered by the head of DOGE's border team.

Antonio Gracias said around 1.3 million non-citizens are currently claiming Medicaid, at an estimated cost of around $6.5 billion.

The stark revelation came after Gracias and his team began probing the huge uptick in non-citizens who were assigned Social Security numbers last year. 

[...]

'The defaults in the system, from Social Security to all benefit programs, have been set to maximum inclusion, maximum pay for these people, and minimum collection,' he told the All-In podcast.

"Already, we found 1.3 million of them on Medicaid as an example," he continued. "And we found people in this population registered to vote."

According to Medicaid.gov, the average annual cost per Medicaid enrollee is between $4,000 and $7,000, meaning the cost for all non-citizen beneficiaries tops out at $6.5 billion.

As you can see, Gracias was quoted referring to the "1.3 million non-citizens" who are (allegedly) "on Medicaid." He wasn't quoted about the alleged cost of all that alleged fraud—about the alleged $6.5 billion.

Also as you can see, Gracias was said to have made this presentation on "the All-In podcast." That said, what is the All-In podcast? The leading authority on the podcast tells us this:

All-In (podcast)

All-In is an American business and technology podcast hosted by four venture capitalists: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg. The podcast covers current events, market trends, political issues, and industry insights.

The All-In podcast was launched in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The hosts, who are long-time friends and colleagues, started the podcast to discuss pressing issues and share their perspectives with a broader audience, quickly receiving a large following.

[...]

Oliver Tryon praised the podcast at Cultr in 2020, and wrote, " Anyone interested in tech, business and everything in between—this is a must listen." Nitish Pahwa wrote at Slate in 2023 that the podcast is "where Silicon Valley's money says what it really thinks," while also condemning the show for "falling back on shallow talking points when it comes to common bugbears—the media, 'woke' and triggered libs, anti-capitalists, tech workers aka the 'surplus elite,' criminal justice reformers."

For the record, there you see David Sacks (and his friends) once again. At this point, we pose a question:

Can you trust the things you hear on this "venture capitalist" podcast? We quickly move to a broader question:

At this Babel-adjacent point in time, who in the world can you trust?

Back to Sunday's Fox & Friends! Campos-Duffy was blown away by what Gracias was said to have said.  Inevitably, she and Griffin said they were sure that the actual amount of (alleged) fraud would be much larger than Gracias had said.

For the record, Gracias and Musk had been bruiting one part of this claim for at least a week by that time. As you can see through the transcript and videotape offered by the invaluable Rev, here was Gracias at that Wisconsin town hall:

GRACIAS (3/30/25): So let me tell you what happened here. We started at the top of the system. We started at the top of the system mapping the whole system of Social Security to understand where all the fraud was...

Look, if I hadn't seen this myself, I'm not sure I would have believed it. I went through it myself and mapped it. And Elon is right. This is true. The defaults in the system from Social Security to all of the benefit programs have been set to max inclusion, max pay for these people, and minimum collection. That's what's happening. We found 1.3 million of them already on Medicaid as an example...

So said the second billionaire. For the record, he didn't say anything that night about the alleged $6.5 billion in fraudulent Medicaid costs.

We've offered you a bit of background concerning what Painter said. When Painter said what she said, the three friends leaped into action.

Given past ludicrous claims—for example, given Musk's ludicrous, constantly-changing insinuations and statements about all the 150-year-old Social Security recipients—none of the friends wondered if these latest plutocrat claims could be trusted. Within Red America, people were simply offered these latest claims, with Campos-Duffy and Jenkins saying they were sure that the problem is worse.

So it goes within one imitation of TV news as a vast nation teeters and flails. We live inside a giant Babel, containing a multitude of self-assured voices making all sorts of "terrifying" claims.

For ourselves, we decided to google around to see what parts of the statements in question might be verifiable. We'll only tell you this:

We found an April 4 report by CBS News—an extremely detailed report which seemed to challenge the core of Gracias' statements. Like many parts of the American system, the matter at hand is impossibly complex, but this is the way CBS started:

Elon Musk, DOGE use access to Social Security data to elevate claims against migrants

Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency say they're using their access to the Social Security Administration data not only to investigate claims of waste and fraud, but also to examine claims that immigrants are abusing the system—even though undocumented immigrants contribute more to Social Security than they take. 

During his rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last Sunday, Musk and Antonio Gracias, a longtime friend and DOGE employee at the Social Security Administration, displayed a chart that purported to show over 5 million non-citizens who were issued Social Security numbers between 2021 and 2025.

Musk called it a "massive financial incentive" for people to come to the U.S. illegally and claimed it was a large-scale Democratic "program" intended "to import as many illegals as possible." Gracias claimed the number of immigrants with Social Security numbers was "totally uncontrolled" and blamed former President Joe Biden's immigration laws for this. 

The U.S. may grant parole to certain migrants for humanitarian or other reasons, allowing them to live and work in the U.S. on a temporary basis, usually for a year or two, but it's not a path to citizenship. The status allows some to obtain Social Security numbers, which makes it legal for them to find work, but they do not receive Social Security benefits. 

DOGE's chart represented immigrants with legal work authorizations who were given Social Security numbers through the Enumeration Beyond Entry program, known as EBE. Those here illegally, without any lawful immigration status, are not eligible for a Social Security number.

But then Gracias conflated the two groups and talked broadly about violent acts by undocumented immigrants as he stood in front of a chart showing data about immigrants with legal work permits. 

The EBE program, created during President Trump's first term, automatically processes Social Security cards for immigrants with temporary or permanent legal status, including those with green cards or work authorization from the Department of Homeland Security. 

We don't exactly understand that; neither does anyone else.  There is no paywall at CBS News, so you can read the rest of the lengthy, complex report.

For the record, the CBS report didn't address the claim that 1.3 million illegal immigrants are somehow receiving Medicaid. As far as we know, Gracias hadn't been making that claim as of April 4.

Please bear with us now:

We're showing you how hard it is, under current arrangements, to fact-check terrifying claims. Claims like these go flying by on a program like Fox & Friends Weekend, with the trio of friends agreeing with every word that has been said by anyone on the Trump / DOGE teams.

For the record, Gracias did make something like the claim about the alleged 1.3 million Medicaid recipient on the All-In podcast.  You can see that brief clip here, presented by the All-In podcast under this SHOCKING headline:

Antonio Gracias Breaks Down SHOCKING Immigration Data

Gracias made the SHOCKING claim. The trio of friends said the reality is almost certainly worse.

With that, we leave you with an important question, one we'll explore all week:

As our nation slides toward the sea, who in the world can you trust?

"Trust us," the gaggle of magnates have said. But what if the magnates are nuts?

Tomorrow: Given his various very strange statements, should you trust Elon Musk?

SATURDAY: One more day on something uplifting and good!

SATURDAY, APRIL 5, 2025

Last thoughts about two books: In this particular line of endeavor, it's the rare day when you get to consider something uplifting and good.

As of this very morning, we've already been dragged back into the part of the world where TV viewers hear someone say, "How great was that?" when they see a young woman taken away by masked men on the streets nears Tufts:

When TV viewers are told that rendition of people to a Central American gulag, absent anything like due process, is actually a very good thing because we got a good price on their confinement from a Central American strongman.

(As we've reported, offering likes to the videotape, the same person made those statements, on two different occasions, on the Fox News Channel.)

As for ourselves, we've already re-entered the realm in which a federal judge might be said to have been mocked by Karoline Leavitt and Stephen Miller—but also by that same Central American strongman. 

To see the strongman's mocking tweet, you can just click this. For more of what Leavitt and Miller said, you could peruse this BBC report. 

(Inevitably, Miller called the judge a "Marxist.")

We've already been dragged back into that realm! We think of the way the Harrison Ford character decides to end an internal exile from the widespread disorder of the 1980s—agrees to end his exile inside the "secret annex" of Amish country—at the end of the Oscar-nominated 1985 film, Witness.

Yesterday, we were thrilled to be able to link to a recollection like this. For today, we thought we'd offer a bit more background about Francine Prose's 2009 book—a book which spills which awareness of the higher possibilities of the human experiment:

HarperCollins Publishers
Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife
By Francine Prose

“Prose’s book is a stunning achievement. . . . Now Anne Frank stands before us. . . a figure who will live not only in history but also in the literature she aspired to create.”  Minneapolis Star Tribune

That's the book to which we refer. If only on this one last day, we thought we'd try to flesh out the various themes its author explores.

What themes does Prose explore in her book? Amazingly, HarperCollins allowed NPR to publish her entire opening chapter, fashioning it an "excerpt." 

As you can see, that chapter begins with a statement about Anne Frank's book—a statement authored by John Berryman in a 1967 essay. Prose begins her book with this:

The Book, The Life, The Afterlife

"I would call the subject of Anne Frank's Diary even more mysterious and fundamental than St. Augustine's, and describe it as: the conversion of a child into a person. . . . Why—I asked myself with astonishment when I first encountered the Diary, or the extracts Commentary published—has this process not been described before? universal as it is, and universally interesting? And the answer came. It is not universal, for most people do not grow up, in any degree that will correspond to Anne Frank's growing up; and it is not universally interesting, for nobody cares to recall his own, or can. It took, I believe, a special pressure forcing the child-adult conversion, and exceptional self-awareness and exceptional candor and exceptional powers of expression, to bring that strange or normal change into view."

— JOHN BERRYMAN, "The Development of Anne Frank"

So begin the Francine Prose text. Prose then quotes a second statement, this time from Philip Roth: 

"She was a marvelous young writer," the voice of Roth says at the start of a longer statement. "She's like some impassioned little sister of Kafka's, his lost little daughter."

So begins Prose's book, in which one principal theme is this:

Anne Frank wasn't just an adorable child, placing adorable jottings in the diary of a child.  In Prose's view, Anne Frank was also something else. Early on, Prose posits this:

In his 1967 essay, "The Development of Anne Frank," John Berryman asked "whether Anne Frank has had any serious readers, for I find no indication in anything written about her that anyone has taken her with real seriousness." That is no longer completely true. In an incisive 1989 New Yorker essay, "Not Even a Nice Girl," Judith Thurman remarked on the skill with which Anne Frank constructed her narrative. A small number of critics and historians have called attention to Anne's precocious literary talent. In her introduction to the British edition of The Tales from the House Behind, a collection of Anne's fiction and her autobiographical compositions, the British author G. B. Stern wrote, "One thing is certain, that Anne was a writer in embryo." But is a "writer in embryo" the same as one who has emerged, at once newborn and mature?

The fact remains that Anne Frank has only rarely been given her due as a writer. With few exceptions, her diary has still never been taken seriously as literature, perhaps because it is a diary, or, more likely, because its author was a girl. Her book has been discussed as eyewitness testimony, as a war document, as a Holocaust narrative or not, as a book written during the time of war that is only tangentially about the war, and as a springboard for conversations about racism and intolerance. But it has hardly ever been viewed as a work of art.

"Anne Frank has only rarely been given her due as a writer"—as a person who happened to be gifted with "precocious literary talent," in a way most people aren't. That's one of the themes which Prose explores through her account of the way Anne Frank composed her journal, then rewrote more than a year's worth of passages.

Frank did so in the hope that her journal might be published as a book, in keeping with the stated desire of the Dutch government in exile that a full record of the Nazi occupation might be offered after liberation, which was already believed to be soon to come.

The sheer effort which went into Anne Frank's book is one subject of Prose's book. In this passage, Prose describes what she learned once she started on the project which produced her own book:

I had always believed Anne Frank's diary to be a printed version (lightly edited by her father) of the book with the checked cloth cover that she received on her thirteenth birthday in June 1942, and that she began to write in shortly before she and her family went into hiding. That was what I had assumed, especially after I, like the rest of Anne's early readers, had been reassured by the brief epilogue to early editions of her book, in which we were informed that "apart from a very few passages, which are of little interest to the reader, the original text has been printed."

[...]

In fact, as I soon learned, Anne had filled the famous checked diary by the end of 1942; the entries in the red, gray, and tan cloth-covered book span the period from June 12, 1942, until December 5 of that year. Then a year—that is, a year of original, unrevised diary entries—is missing. The diary resumes in an exercise book with a black cover, which the Dutch helpers brought her. Begun on December 22, 1943, this continuation of the diary runs until April 17, 1944. A third exercise book begins on April 17, 1944; the final entry was written three days before its writer's arrest on August 4.

Starting in the spring of 1944, Anne went back and rewrote her diary from the beginning. These revisions would cover 324 loose sheets of colored paper and fill in the one-year gap between the checked diary and the first black exercise book. She continued to update the diary even as she rewrote the earlier pages. Anne had wanted her book to be noticed, to be read, and she spent her last months of relative freedom desperately attempting to make sure that her wish might some day be granted.

So the author learned. In our view, this determined process of rewriting also resembles a "fairy tale"—a tale sent to us from antiquity, from the gods, a tale designed to offer instruction.

Below, we'll show you the passage, later in Prose's book, in which she employs the term, "fairy tale." But when we first read Prose's book, we were amazed by this part of the backstory. Anne Frank may well have been an adorable child, but she was also a determined writer, one who "wanted her book to be noticed, to be read."

On the day of her "arrest," her book was saved by the actions of Miep Geis, the woman who had risked her own life to keep the Franks safely in hiding for a bit more than two years. 

(The righteous of the earth do exist! Geis and her husband were also hiding a university student in the attic of their home. He was never found, never arrested.)

In yesterday's report, we briefly described the details of the way Anne Frank's famous book was saved. It's when Prose describes that chain of events that she employs the term, "fairy tale:"

Eventually, it [had been] decided that the briefcase containing the diary would be one of the things the family took with them if a fire or some other emergency necessitated a hasty escape from the attic. But now the briefcase was being put to a different use. [The arresting officer] dumped out the papers, along with some notebooks, and handed the satchel to his colleagues to stuff with jewels and cash.

The detail of the briefcase could have come from one of those fairy tales that counsel reflection, patience, morality—lest one wind up like the thoughtless, greedy man or woman (usually the wife) who mistakes the rhinestones for diamonds or cooks the magic fish for dinner. Eventually, Silberhauer realized he'd filled the briefcase with pasteboard and scattered rubies across the attic floor.

But how could he have imagined that what he had discarded—loose sheets of paper, exercise books—was not only a work of literary genius...but a piece of evidence that would lead to the exposure of his role in the Nazis' war against the Jews, even as many like him slipped back into their old lives? 

The arresting officer had dumped priceless rubies onto the floor so he could haul off a handful of trinkets. It's like a fairy tale, Prose correctly said—like instruction sent by the gods.

The original contents of the journal had been rewritten at lightning speed. Eventually, the very young person who rewrote her text died of typhus, at age 15, mere weeks before the camp in which she was imprisoned would be liberated—exposed to the world. 

That said, every person wrongly taken away is, of course, the very same person seen in the beautiful, instructive photographs we linked you to yesterday morning. Accidents of literary precocity to the side, every person wrongly taken is, of course, that same person, the person with that human face.

We first learned about the bare outline of these events when we were ten years old. We're writing too much about them today, but it's obvious why these events have inspired a type of religious awe in countries around the world.

Prose does a superb job exploring her various themes. We ourselves will add this:

Every victim led away is the person described by Prose. Also, every human population contains its collection of unfortunate people who may be inclined to behave in roughly the way Silberhauer did.

"How great is that?" Fox News Channel viewers were asked when the young woman at Tufts was removed from the street by six men. Earlier, such viewers had also been told this as they watched Fox & Friends:

We got a wonderful price from the Central American strongman!

Thanks to our imperfect wiring, we're all inclined to fail in such ways until we may somehow learn not to. Yesterday, we were lucky enough to be able to link to some photographs which might help us understand what we're allowing to happen when we refuse to speak about the full extent of what is occurring around us.

Blue America has been insisting on the right to avoid such a task.   We aren't as smart as we constantly say we are, nor are we morally perfect.

That doesn't mean that we're bad people. It simply means that we're people people—but also, that we may have a great deal of explaining to do, a bit of forgiveness to seek.