Before the day ends, I want to write a short something about Paul Horner, who died eight years ago on Sept. 18, 2017. He was 38.
Who was Paul Horner? A prankster, best known for comic viral hoaxes and fake news stories. And I mean actual fake news, the kind that’s entirely made up — not the news dismissed as “fake” by people who don’t like what it says or because it challenges their views.
To Horner, the joke was always on the person who clicked “share.” His work often fooled media outlets, trolled conservative figures and baited culture warriors. During the 2016 presidential election he aimed much of his absurd fabrications at Donald Trump and his sycophants, convinced that their eager sharing of such clearly made-up nonsense would ultimately drive voters away. Horner believed in the corrective power of fact-checking. (H.L. Mencken could have told him a thing or two about underestimating the public’s intelligence.)
I have mixed feelings about Horner’s work. He considered himself a satirist; I suspect he was more motivated by a desire to make mischief than provoke thought. At the very least, he naively failed to understand that satire — humor in general — is often lost on many people, especially those primed to be butthurt at the slightest perceived wrong.
Few remember Paul Horner or his hoaxes now. Unfortunately, the outrage addiction he exposed is more alive than ever.
As we mark Juneteenth today — the day in 1865 when Union troops under Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to enforce emancipation in Texas1 — it’s worth asking: What could America have become if Reconstruction hadn’t been sabotaged from the start?
I’ve become deeply interested in the Reconstruction era over the past few years. When I was in school in Texas, Reconstruction was barely taught in our American history courses. And what little we were taught largely echoed the “Lost Cause” narrative, framing Reconstruction as a period of Northern misrule symbolized by corrupt carpetbaggers and inept governance. I suspect the story is still largely skimmed over.
Woodcut of Maj. Gen. Gorden Granger from The Galveston Daily News, June 21, 1865.
Reconstruction was meant to be a national rebirth after centuries of slavery and four years of bloody civil war. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, briefly opened a window when it seemed possible the country might remake itself into a multiracial democracy. But that possibility was derailed early, helped along by a disastrous political choice: Abraham Lincoln’s decision to replace Vice President Hannibal Hamlin with Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat from Tennessee who had remained loyal to the Union but was an unapologetic white supremacist. The switch was made in the name of national “unity” for the 1864 ticket.
It was one of the biggest mistakes in American history. We can never know how Hamlin might have governed after Lincoln’s assassination on April 15, 1865, but we do know what Johnson did. His “restoration” policies immediately began to unravel the fragile gains of emancipation. He gave power back to former Confederate leaders, many of whom should have been put on trial for treason, and favored the protection of wealthy plantation owners over redistributing land to freed people. He overturned Gen. William Sherman’s famous “40 acres and a mule” orders. The effort to rebuild America under “a new birth of freedom,” as Lincoln imagined at Gettysburg, never fully recovered.
Donald Trump is doing his best to seize the title of worst president ever, and figures like James Buchanan, Warren Harding, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush all have their claims. But Andrew Johnson remains secure, for now, at the bottom of most presidential rankings.
Freedmen’s Bureau office in Memphis, circa 1866. The Freedmen’s Bureau was a federal initiative aimed at aiding formerly enslaved people.
Eventually, congressional Republicans managed to wrest control from Johnson, impeaching him but failing to convict him by a single vote. They pursued a different vision, creating a promising glimpse of what a just America might have looked like. But violent white backlash and the rise of so-called Redeemer governments in the South and Northern fatigue over a long, messy struggle for racial justice crushed that vision.
The Compromise of 1877 resolved the contested 1876 election in favor of Republican Rutherford Hayes in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. The federal government and much of the North simply walked away. A century of Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement and racial terror followed. Reconstruction gave way to an American apartheid.
Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom. It’s also a reminder of a lost promise. It’s a reminder that emancipation alone didn’t secure justice or equality.
Reconstruction stands as a tragic story of failure: the failure to hold traitors accountable, the failure to enforce lasting conditions for readmission to the Union, and the failure to reckon with the racism that has always run deep in the American character.
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1Granger’s General Order No. 3 informed Texans that “all slaves are free,” but it also instructed that freed people should “remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages.” It warned “that they will not be supported in idleness.” While the order marked the end of slavery in Texas, it reinforced racial hierarchies and foreshadowed the limited and conditional nature of freedom that would undermine Reconstruction from the start.
Amid reports that Elon Musk may soon leave his role as a “special government employee” — although, like most things involving the Trump White House, clarity is elusive — historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore recently wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk.” In the piece, Lepore argues that Musk, despite his reputation as a futurist, is actually recycling dusty ideas from the past — specifically technocracy, a 1930s-era movement that imagined a society run by scientists and engineers instead of elected leaders.
Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, circa 1945.
Lepore traces Musk’s ideological roots to his maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a Canadian technocracy leader and conspiracy theorist who later moved to apartheid South Africa and espoused racist and anti-democratic views. Musk’s push to cut government programs, replace workers with AI and impose efficiency-driven reforms echoes the technocratic dream of a depoliticized, elite-run society.
Lepore also connects Musk’s rhetoric and goals with other early 20th century ideas, including futurist and fascist manifestos by Italy’s Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. These works glorified aggression, hierarchy and technological dominance.
“Few figures in public life are more shackled to the past,” Lepore writes of Musk.
Thus, Musk doesn’t represent a leap forward but a regression. He’s attempting to reboot a future that already failed.
“Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future,” Lepore writes. “It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.”
I have often found it ironic that many of today’s Silicon Valley billionaires and tech bros fashion themselves as libertarian “technological supermen” when their entire industry rests on a foundation of federal research and development — from semiconductors to GPS to the internet itself. Without the massive public funding of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist to disrupt anything.
What does Musk want?
A cheeky poster in London. The British have a tradition of political mockery that stands in sharp contrast to the often more sanitized style of American political satire. “There’s something campy and ridiculous about Musk’s brand of toxicity. And it opens up a real space to ridicule,” John Gorenfeld of London recently told The New York Times.
So, what does Musk, in the guise of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, want from the government he seems so eager to dismantle?
In a recent appearance on The Focus Group podcast, tech journalist Kara Swisher, who has covered Musk for years and probably knows him better than anyone not impregnated by him — indeed, who probably knows Musk better than anyone, even those impregnated by him — said he’s motivated by two things: “One he wants to go to Mars, and he needs the government to pay for it. … And then two, he wants the data so his AI will be bigger than other AIs.”
As she also put it: “Why do you rob banks? Because that’s where the money is. Why do you rob government agencies? Because that’s where the data is.”
Mars remains a distant ambition limited by the ginormous costs, need for extended human life support systems, propulsion and radiation shielding, and the physical and psychological challenges of long-term space travel.
As for the data, I fear Musk will soon succeed in stealing it, if he hasn’t succeeded already.
DOGE and the theater of efficiency
DOGE claims that it has saved the federal government $150 billion. That may sound like a hefty number, until you compare it with the $2 trillion in cuts Musk once promised, or even his more recent $1 trillion revision. As The New York Times reported Thursday, it’s not clear how much more beyond the claimed $150 billion Musk expects his DOGEteam to find.
DOGE’s claim, based on a fuzzy list of asset sales, lease cancellations, and contract and grant cuts, is also smaller than the $154 billion increase in federal spending since Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, compared with the same three-month period in 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
As The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell put it in a recent column, “How DOGE is making government almost comically inefficient,” Musk isn’t really interested in improving government performance. To paraphrase one of Rampell’s astute readers commenting on her article, DOGE is a political tool designed to undermine regulatory agencies, destabilize the civil service and make it harder for government to function, especially in ways that inconvenience Musk and his fellow plutocrats. And it doesn’t hurt that DOGE is good political theater for the cruelty-loving MAGA crowd.
The danger in Musk’s vision, which fits comfortably within the decadeslong right-wing push to undo the New Deal, lies not only in his embrace of a modern version of his grandfather’s technocratic fantasy, but also in what he’s willing to destroy to achieve it.
William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” has popped into my head more than once during this past upside-down week. Well, mainly the haunting and well-known line, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
I’m determined not to be drawn in by the outrage of the moment. The “ever-present subject” of this blog isn’t politics and it certainly isn’t Donald Trump, despite my first few posts. My aim is to write about all topics that interest me – not only politics, but also history, culture, science, etc. I remind myself that not everything deserves a reaction.
William Butler Yeats
And yet … Trump and his pseudo-conservative cheerleaders (see my previous post) are living up to their expected awfulness – exceeding it, if that’s possible. It’s easy to feel like everything’s spinning off its axis.
Hence, thoughts of a century-old poem. Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” with the horrors of the First World War still raw and amid the Irish War of Independence and the 1918-19 flu pandemic that almost killed his pregnant wife, Georgie. In the poem, Yeats surveys a world unravelling and anticipates with dread the arrival of something even more unsettling.
“Literature is news that stays news,” Yeats’ contemporary, Ezra Pound, wrote in “ABC of Reading.” Since its publication, “The Second Coming” has remained profoundly resonant. Joan Didion notably quoted the poem in her essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” when she chronicled the disorder of 1967 Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco. The piece helped Didion regain her footing as a writer.
Perhaps that’s the lesson, then. Conviction may falter in the swirling chaos, but it doesn’t vanish. It remains to be rediscovered, reinvigorated, reinforced – an anchor to steady us.
The Second Coming William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The second Trump administration is officially a reality. It is deeply disheartening that a plurality of voters would overlook the chaos and corruption of Donald Trump’s first term, his 34 felony convictions, his liability for sexual assault and, most troubling for our democracy, his violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election to return him to the office for which he is manifestly unfit.
Throughout American history, a percentage of our fellow citizens have been dissatisfied with, or even hostile toward, our ideals and institutions. Sometimes, this discontent simmers on the margins. At other times, like now, it swells into a more significant force.
Even so, this faction rarely represents more than about a third of the population, and the number of true believers is smaller. Yet it’s cold comfort to say that Trump failed to win a majority of the 2024 vote (49.8%) or that only 31.6% of eligible voters actively supported him. Because here we are.
Here we are because some portion of that 31.6% voted for Trump because of what they know about him, not despite it. And because another 34% of eligible voters couldn’t bother to vote at all.
And so, after everything we already know about Donald Trump, here we are.
Since the New Deal ushered in a decadeslong series of economic, social and cultural reforms, reactionary discontent in our politics has often been expressed by a particular brand of conservatism that historian Richard Hofstadter, in a 1954 essay, called “pseudo-conservative.” Unlike classical conservativism, which values stability and the measured stewardship of institutions, pseudo-conservatism is rooted in anxiety about declining social status. It thrives on grievance and nostalgia for an idealized past.
Pseudo-conservatives see themselves as morally true conservatives. They echo conservative language, drape themselves in the flag, invoke the Constitution and call themselves patriots. Yet these self-proclaimed “real Americans” paradoxically embrace authoritarian tendencies and a willingness to dismantle democratic norms. They reject diversity and pluralism, offer few coherent policy solutions (in fact, political incoherence is a defining trait) and channel their energy into retribution. A more accurate term for them might be “revanchists,” a fancy political term derived from the French word “revanche,” meaning “revenge.”
The lineage from pseudo-conservatives to movement conservatives to the tea party and MAGA is unmistakable. To dismiss them as cranks or extremists, however much they might actually be, is to underestimate their enduring influence and diminish the need to effectively counter them. When their interests happen to align with the general disinterest of apolitical swing voters — whose own vague, perpetual disgruntlement with whoever is in power at any given moment has repeatedly shifted congressional control between Republicans and Democrats since 1980 — the nation’s trajectory can change dramatically.
With most newly inaugurated presidents, we have no way of knowing whether they will rise to greatness, falter into failure or settle into mediocrity, trapped by the gravitational pull of William Taft and so many others. With Trump, there is no such uncertainty. We know exactly what we’re getting.
