Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

He really is that stupid.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

The words do not have to be perfect.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

You are here: Home / Economics / Grifters Gonna Grift / Friday Evening Bigfoot Bait Open Thread: American Apartheid’s Strongest Nepo-Babies

Friday Evening Bigfoot Bait Open Thread: American Apartheid’s Strongest Nepo-Babies

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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…

Reader Interactions

30Comments

  11. 11.

    LeftCoastYankee

    Haiti rents space in racists nightmares of accountability. I don’t think it’s an accident they chose Haitian immigrants to vilify.

  12. 12.

    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.

  14. 14.

    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.

  16. 16.

    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.)

  21. 21.

    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.

  27. 27.

    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.

  28. 28.

    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.

  30. 30.

    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.

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