As has been well established since January 20 of this year, when it comes to the insanity of the Trump administration, it is hard to know where to look first. The demolition of democracy has clearly required an “everything, everywhere, all at once” kind of strategy: heedless, destructive, and, of course, deeply troubling. Troubling, yes, but not surprising, since Trump has been tearing pages from the Tyrant’s Handbook for at least 10 years. In fact, if one considers that the book on his bedside table throughout his marriage to first wife Ivana was a compendium of Adolph Hitler’s speeches, Trump has been studying the Tyrant’s Handbook for most of his adult life. Chaos is the smokescreen that allows the dictator to keep gradually turning up the heat until an entire nation is cooked.
And cooked we are.
We have certainly given lots of our attention to brown people and refugees and foreign nationals being kidnapped off the streets of America by masked, flak-jacketed thugs, shoved into unmarked vans, and whisked off to concentration camps in El Salvador and Djibouti and God knows where else. However, we have given almost no attention to the fact that Donald Trump, having virtually stopped all immigration into the United States from almost everywhere on Earth, has somehow managed to make an exception for a handful of South African Afrikaners on the basis that their community is fleeing from a genocide allegedly underwritten by the South African government.
The level of sheer, unadulterated hypocrisy undergirding this particular assertion is, frankly, stunning. What about the genocide being perpetrated on the women and children and elderly and weak and starving of Gaza? What about the gang-sponsored butchery taking place throughout Latin America? What about Darfur and Sudan? What about the Christians of Nigeria? What about terrified Afghans and Turks? What about the genocides taking place in North Korea, Myanmar, India, China, Ethiopia, and Congo?
Oh, wait… none of those people are white. Oh. OK—now I get it.
Our illustrious president has referred to South Africa, in the past, as one of those “s-hole” countries from which he wants to bar immigration—unless, of course, they are the white racist homeboys of a former Afrikaner who has stuffed billions of dollars into the president’s pockets. There is always room for more white racists in Trump’s America, particularly if they are looked upon favorably by the drug-addled, Sieg-Heiling mastermind of the DOGE show, the mental case who has happily destroyed all of the government programs and services upon which we formerly depended, Elon Musk.
This may be a good juncture to consider the following elements of Musk’s biography, courtesy of Wikipedia:
Elon Musk was born in South Africa. His mother was a dietitian, and his father was an engineer and adventurer. His maternal grandfather was an American-born chiropractor, aviator, and political activist who moved to South Africa in 1950. His anti-government, anti-democratic, and far-right antisemitic conspiracy theories made him an enthusiastic supporter of both Apartheid and Nazism. In his youth, Elon was told of his grandfather’s exploits and political views by his grandmother, and Musk has suggested that he shares his grandfather’s “desire for adventure, exploration—doing crazy things.”
Thus, mental illness and racism appear to be encoded in Mr. Musk’s DNA.
It occurs to me that not everyone in the United States is familiar with the former South African system of “Apartheid,” a national policy of rigidly enforced segregation in which white colonists ran the show in their majority-Black country. Many of those colonists were Dutch Boers (subsequently known as Afrikaners), and “apartheid” is an Afrikaans word meaning “apartness.”
The minority white Afrikaner government passed laws prohibiting mixed marriages, or any other affectional or physical mingling. The 1950 Population Registration Act classified all South Africans into four racial groups based on physical appearance: “Black,” “White,” “Coloured,” and “Indian.” Thus segregated, all members of a particular group of designees were also consigned to residential and occupational ghettos that were seen as consistent with their racial designation.
According to Wikipedia,
Between 1960 and 1983, 3.5 million Black Africans were removed from their homes and forced into segregated regions as a result of apartheid legislation, in some of the largest mass evictions in modern history. Most of these targeted removals were intended to restrict the Black population to ten designated ‘tribal homelands’, also known as Bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states. The government announced that relocated persons would lose their South African citizenship as they were absorbed into the Bantustans.
The entire Black population of South Africa was oppressed and scorned, lost their citizenship, were evicted from their tribal lands, were forced to live in squalor, and were abused by the Dutch colonists until, finally, Black South Africans had had enough. Led by imprisoned dissident Nelson Mandella, they overthrew the Afrikaner government.
There followed extensive public “Truth and Reconciliation” hearings, which required an honest discussion of the horrible oppression that had been visited for generations upon Black South Africans, along with a mechanism for repentance and forgiveness.
The Afrikaners did not appreciate losing their grip on the levers of power. They did not want to forfeit the ability to control the lives and destinies of others based on skin color. Given that Elon Musk and his family were Afrikaners, the loss of dominance must have stung.
As for the “racial discrimination” and “white genocide” described by the bloviating moron who likes to savage world leaders as part of his “Welcome to the White House” routine, I would like to suggest to those who prefer to fact-check and verify the statements of politicians, journalists, and anyone else influencing public discourse that you make good use of Snopes.com. The Snopes website is a one-stop shop for vetting the veracity of the information you consume.
I went to Snopes to investigate whether the pathological liar who enjoys spending your hard-earned money on gold-leafing the Oval Office and buying a big “flying palace” from Middle Eastern potentates as an adjunct to his imperial presidency had happened, for a change, to tell the truth. Was there really a genocide against white Afrikaners in South Africa?
According to Snopes, no.
President Dim Bulb is supremely uninterested in fact-checking any of the information he consumes as part of his daily diet of Quarter Pounders and conspiracy theories, so he is happy to show misleading videos of hundreds of white crosses planted along a South African roadside, claiming that there were “thousands” of crosses (lie #1—there were hundreds, not thousands) marking the “gravesites” of white Afrikaner farmers (lie #2—there were no gravesites) and that there were thousands of body bags filled with the murdered farmers (lie #3—the body bags were from the genocides occurring in the Democratic Republic of Congo).
Snopes goes on to say that about 80 percent of the farmland in South Africa is owned by white people, but whites account for less than one percent of all murders in South Africa, and farm murders also account for less than one percent of total murders. Further, farmers are targeted not because they are white but because of their isolation. The isolation encourages thieves, and farmers killed on their farms have typically died as part of robberies-gone-wrong, not because they happen to be white. Snopes goes on to confirm that the vast majority of murder victims in South Africa are Black.
Let’s define “genocide” here: the intentional annihilation of groups of people based on religion, ethnicity, nationality, or, perhaps, political stance.
So there is no “white genocide” occurring in South Africa. The 59 Afrikaners welcomed with open arms into the same nation that has virtually halted immigration from everywhere else on the planet are here because our racist president really likes white people, particularly if they are likely to be racists, too. It really is that simple. He has lifted an immigration embargo to glorify 59 white Afrikaners who are not only in no immediate danger of being killed, but in no danger of being killed ever.
There is no, repeat, no genocide of white farmers in South Africa.
And what of our plans to rescue the brutalized citizens of Gaza, more than 40,000 of whom have already been murdered by Benjamin Netanyahu in a genocide so horrific that he has been referred to the Hague, along with Vladimir Putin, for crimes against humanity?
No airlift in sight.
