⬆️ Think this aspect of MAGA billionaire tech leaders does not get covered as much in US media, in part because most Americans — including the reporters — fail to understand how South Africa's apartheid era is secretly viewed with nostalgia from quite a few white South Africans.
— Melissa Chan (@melissakchan) September 19, 2024
Forget South Africans, apartheid is ‘viewed with nostalgia’ by far too many Americans. Most of us, I assume, knew that Apartheid Clyde, his mini-me fanboi David Sacks, and even JD Vance / Blake Masters sugar daddy Peter Thiel spent their formative years in a society where White supremacy was literally enforced by law, but I didn’t know the probable founder of QAnon was also a member of that select club. Per the Financial Times:
Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped shape Trump’s Maga movement. (Furber denies being “Q”.)
In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This probably isn’t a coincidence…
So what connects these men’s southern African backgrounds with Maga today? Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today. First, there was tremendous inequality. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was “known for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude”, writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. “White managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental centre in Swakopmund and membership in the company country club.” The mine’s black migrant workers lived in work camps.
To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t. That was simply the way it was, and it was pointless to try to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid “works” and was “economically sound”. His spokesman has denied that he ever supported apartheid.
The white South African nightmare in the 1980s, hanging over everything, was that one day Black people would rise up and massacre whites. Like the US, South Africa was a violent society and becoming more violent in the 80s. Musk’s teenage recollections of seeing murders on trains may not be entirely factual, but do evoke the atmosphere of the era. He warned in 2023 about potential “genocide of white people in South Africa”. Trump’s recent claim about “American girls being raped and sodomised and murdered by savage criminal aliens” preyed on similar white fears…
If you’re a libertarian who believes that inequality is natural and lives in fear of race war, you will be drawn towards a certain type of American politics. You certainly won’t want government or institutions to try to intervene against racism. In 1995, a year after the ANC began attempting that in South Africa, Thiel and Sacks, who met at Stanford, published The Diversity Myth in the US. It’s a well-written defence of “western civilisation” against “multiculturalism” (or what the right now calls “woke”), written by two white twentysomethings who are sure racism isn’t the problem. Indeed, they explain: “There are almost no real racists . . . in America’s younger generation.”
Three decades later, this duo and Musk, with whom they united in Silicon Valley’s “PayPal mafia”, are backing a white Republican ticket that peddles made-up stories about Black immigrants from Haiti eating pets. The opposing Democrats are fielding a Black presidential candidate for the third time in five elections. The racial aspect of politics is almost as plain as it was in South Africa…
Palate Cleanser
Josie
Are any/all of these people citizens of the U.S.?
Urza
I find it interesting even if no one else sees it.
Urza
@Josie: They are all citizens now.
Marleedog
Bigfoot Bait–AL you are prescient.
BellyCat
White Supremacy ™ writ large. Jesus wept…
SFBayAreaGal
I loathe them
rikyrah
This mother posted her TikTok videos of her teaching her son football moves to make his game better
People were in the comments, tagging the NFL and ESPN. They went to their local NFL team’s game this past week, and this is their interview on ESPN 🤗🤗🤗🥹🥹
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8dx3mSW/
SpaceUnit
Eleven minutes. Not bad.
Josie
@Josie: Never mind. Paul Furber is the only one not a citizen.
Nelle
Peter Thiel has also bought himself New Zealand citizenship.
LeftCoastYankee
Haiti rents space in racists nightmares of accountability. I don’t think it’s an accident they chose Haitian immigrants to vilify.
Ken
Fortunately, Project 2025 has done the research and it’s perfectly legal for the Harris administration to “de-naturalize” and deport all of them.
Jackie
@rikyrah: When I click on the video, it redirects me to sign up/sign in to TikTok. I tried multiple times☹️
bbleh
Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t.
And it’s not just a belief in “nature”; it’s empirically demonstrated! They ARE wealthy, QED! See also “Prosperity Gospel.”
… one day Black people would rise up and massacre whites.
That it might happen was very low-probability but not entirely imaginary. That it would be in some ways deserved simply did not occur to them, at least not consciously.
The parallels with American white supremacists, today and since even before the nation of South Africa existed, are so straightforward as not to be worth cataloging.
WaterGirl
@Jackie: TikTok behaves better for me in Chrome than in Safari. Maybe try another browser?
bbleh
@Jackie: @WaterGirl: concur. Or Firefox. I’ve had an increasing number of problems with recent versions of Safari, NOT related to privacy settings, that have forced me to use other browsers, and I’m almost to the point of switching to another one as default. (Safari’s privacy protections aren’t the best BTW.)
Jertian
Cards Against Humanity sues SpaceX for $15 Million
Short summary – CAH bought land on the border to make building Trump’s wall harder, SpaceX has been violating the No Trespassing signs to steal the land. If they win, they plan to give the money to the backers from 2017.
Scout211
@Jertian: They also said they will accept Twitter.com as compensation. I thought that was ::chef’s kiss::
Kayla Rudbek
It’s like a modern version of Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South, although he had to use time-traveling Afrikaans to connect with the US Confederates
geg6
@LeftCoastYankee:
Exactly. History, it’s good to know because it allows me to see exactly what’s happening under the surface.
Geminid
Singer Dave Matthews provides an interesting counter-point to these creeps. Matthews was born in Johannisburg in 1967, and he lived overseas for part of his childhood before returning to Johannesburg for high school.
Matthews’ parents were Anglo-South Africans and perhaps more importantly, Quakers. So when Matthews finished high school and faced conscription into South Africa’s army, he left the country and ended up in Charlottesville, Virginia. His parents had lived there before he was born.
catpal
More nepo horrible. I happened on NPR talking about new book about Loser. Great that they kept calling him a Money Loser. Lucky Loser
WaterGirl
@Scout211: I thought so, too. Absolute perfection!
HumboldtBlue
@Kayla Rudbek:
Spot on.
Hoppie
@Ken: Well done, sir!
MagdaInBlack
Thank you for this, A.L. It helps connect the dots.
Jess
There are a lot of interesting theories about why humans love conspiracy theories (I put certain religions into this category), but the one that I lean towards is that the real, not-so-secret conspiracies are just too awful and banal-evil to deal with. Battling twats like Elon doesn’t feeling like fighting dragons; more like endlessly cleaning out cat boxes. These guys are deadly tedious as well as monstrous.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jertian: I hope they win, cards against humanity. How fabulous they bought land to prevent part of the wall. Not sure if they got it in the area where the ecosystem was in danger, endangered animals that needed to range across the border, etc
if id known about this group buying land, for $15 donation, what a great idea, I’d have so donated to that. Really uplifting to hear about this.
Trivia Man
@LeftCoastYankee: Haiti has been trying to get out from under malicious rat fuckery from the entire western world since day one.
redoubt
Late, and usually lurk, but will tell on myself here.
Late 80s. The senior class president of our (small, evangelical Christian) PWI was a White South African male (no, I didn’t vote for him). In mid-February, his sophomore brother wrote a letter in the school newspaper asking in all (pretend) seriousness why there wasn’t a “White History Month”. I was asked to respond. I was not nice.
So no, I am not in the least surprised.