Save the White People

[ajax18]

Trump once again showed who he is. While millions in the world starve or face violence every day, Trump reached down to the Afrikaners, white South Africans of Dutch descent, to fast-track them into the United States and full citizenship. He claims, without any real evidence, that they are being "persecuted" and facing "genocide."

The racism of Donald Trump's actions is pretty clear. The claim that Afrikaners are facing genocide is popular among far-right groups and is roundly criticized in this country and South Africa. One of the main grievances white South Africans have is that the government passed a law facilitating the expropriation of land so that property can black South Africans, who comprise 82% of the population but own 4% of the land, can have greater access to land ownership. Whites, who comprise just 7% of the population, own the lion's share of South African land.

Under the new land expropriation law, land can be seized without compensation if the property is not being used and there is no intention to either develop or make money from it, or if it poses a risk to others. See https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg9w4n6gp5o The disparity in land ownership is a result of the European colonization of South African land over the centuries. In the 20th century, the 1913 Native Lands Act limited black ownership of land to just 7% of the country. The majority of South African land was allotted to whites. See https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/20/africa/s ... eform-intl Naturally, black South Africans feel that post-apartheid progress has been too slow, with only 4% of land in black ownership.

This is the persecution in the eyes of right-wing groups and President Trump--that the government could seize land that is not being used or that poses a risk to others. Keep in mind that governments in the US regularly use what is called eminent domain to seize property, and, in fact, the courts have expanded the government's power to do so regularly. The most recent decision finding in favor of the government occurred in 2005. While it is true that the government in question must compensate the owner, the idea of what compensation is just is often contested, since governments frequently pay less than what others would consider a fair price.

Many people around the globe are fleeing immediate threats to their lives. They are starving. They are in war zones. They are victims of out-of-control criminal gangs. But Trump has stopped helping these people. Instead, he ostentatiously picks out a relatively privileged group of white South Africans, pays to bring them here, and puts them on a fast-track to citizenship in the USA. It boggles the mind. The racism is obvious.

There is a principle of economic theory called revealed preference. According to this theory, consumers reveal their true preferences in what they actually purchase, as opposed to what they claim to prefer. Trust the purchase, not the verbiage. If we apply this theory to Trump's decision to stop granting asylum to thousands of POCs in order to pay to bring relatively privileged white South Africans to the US and grant these same people citizenship expeditiously, then the revealed preference is clear: Trump is strongly biased in favor of white people and against POCs.

South African racists seem to understand they have a friend in a racist Trump. White Afrikaner separatists of the Karoo region have even come to the US seeking recognition as an autonomous entity. Three thousand white Afrikaners live in Orania, a whites only, separatist enclave. They want financial support from the Trump administration. And it is not just the people of Orania who are seeking out Trump and the MAGA GOP. Other Afrikaner nationalist groups have been visiting with GOP leaders to build alliances with them. See https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/so ... 025-04-03/

Vote Democrat and see your lands confiscated and redistributed based on race. After all, if you're white and too many white people own land than you should lose your land to a black person for no no other reason than the pigmentation level in your skin. But no that's not racist. No, that will never happen here they say.

[canpakes]

Vote Democrat and see your lands confiscated and redistributed based on race.

Or vote in as President the man who confiscated and redistributed property to himself based on his desire to build casinos.

https://www.cato.org/commentary/donald- ... -her-house

[huckelberry]

Disadvantage of racial segregation and discrimination is people live in fear of it being reversed. This fear is not so easy to leave behind.

[Kishkumen]

Vote Democrat and see your lands confiscated and redistributed based on race. After all, if you're white and too many white people own land than you should lose your land to a black person for no no other reason than the pigmentation level in your skin. But no that's not racist. No, that will never happen here they say.

Vote MAGA and God knows what will happen, but it will probably be performative, chaotic, and stupid.

In any case, the discussion of land policy here regards South Africa, genius. No one here represents the Democratic Party or sets Democratic policy agendas. So, your dim conclusion, "Vote Democrat and see your lands confiscated and redistributed based on race," is a bizarre fiction of your own creation. My statement about voting MAGA is based on our experience of the Trump 47 presidency thus far.

[Kishkumen]

https://www.cato.org/blog/donald-Trump- ... dows-house

Let me try this again, since canpakes' link did not work for me.

For more than 30 years Vera Coking lived in a three-story house just off the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. Donald Trump built his 22-story Trump Plaza next door. In the mid-1990s Trump wanted to build a limousine parking lot for the hotel, so he bought several nearby properties. But three owners, including the by then elderly and widowed Ms Coking, refused to sell.


As his daughter Ivanka said in introducing him at his campaign announcement, Donald Trump doesn’t take no for an answer.


Trump turned to a government agency – the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) – to take Coking’s property. CRDA offered her $250,000 for the property – one-fourth of what another hotel builder had offered her a decade earlier. When she turned that down, the agency went into court to claim her property under eminent domain so that Trump could pave it and put up a parking lot.

[ajax18]

Disadvantage of racial segregation and discrimination is people live in fear of it being reversed. This fear is not so easy to leave behind.

You'll never see a quota for a minimum number of white players in the NBA even though blacks are overrepresented. Nor will you ever see such a quota on a public high school team. But if you're talking about engineers, pilots, enlisted men, surgeons, well then who gives a rip about merit, we need racial diversity.

[Doctor Steuss]

Disadvantage of racial segregation and discrimination is people live in fear of it being reversed. This fear is not so easy to leave behind.

You'll never see a quota for a minimum number of white players in the NBA even though blacks are overrepresented. Nor will you ever see such a quota on a public high school team. But if you're talking about engineers, pilots, enlisted men, surgeons, well then who gives a rip about merit, we need racial diversity.

Name the state medical licensing boards that have a racial quota, and change the licensing requirements to accommodate that quota.

Name the state engineering licensure boards that have a racial quota, and change the licensing requirements to accommodate that quota.

Point to the FAA requirements for obtaining a PPC that are different, based on an individual's race.


[This space reserved for the meltdown of discovering that it was a team of black Airmen who won the first "Top Gun" competition against every single team of white "merit" pilots and enlisted men]

[Kishkumen]

Here is a video from an African news program covering Trump's asylum to Afrikaners who don't need it but will take advantage of it anyway:

https://youtu.be/5zRoPlb1Tyo

It is clear that people in South Africa are aware that this is mostly about Trump putting on a show for US domestic political advantage, and that it has nothing to do with addressing any real issues in South Africa.

[Kishkumen]

There has been a trickle of interesting reporting on the relationship between the GOP and apartheid South Africa going back decades. Here is a quote from a piece in the Financial Times that I accessed through Joy Reid's citation in her own piece:

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. I say that as a fiftysomething white man whose formative experiences include childhood visits to my extended family in apartheid South Africa. (My parents left Johannesburg before I was born.) We’d swim in my grandparents’ pool while the maid and her grandchildren lived in the garage. These experiences were so shocking, so different from anything I experienced growing up in Europe, that they are my sharpest childhood memories.

Then she quotes from her own book:

In the days after Barack Obama’s reelection in 2012, Dan Roodt, founder of the Pro-Afrikaans Action Group, wrote in the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance, “What lessons can white Americans draw from our tragic demise, as they ponder the outcome of a Presidential election in which the evidence of a demographic turn for the worse is clear for all to see?”[1] Roodt saw a Republican Party locked in a “demographic death spiral as youth, single women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians overwhelmingly vote Democrat.” He warned that the Democratic Party “could become an American version of [the] African National Congress, as immigration and high non-white birth rates ensure a steady stream of Democratic voters eager for “change” and channeled American white supremacist Jared Taylor in calling for the Republican Party to become the explicit champion of white interests.

In an August 2018 tweet, Donald Trump invoked South Africa, seemingly out of the blue, saying he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers,” adding: “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” The tweet echoed a sentiment voiced not long before by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and caused white supremacists, including David Duke and Richard Spencer, to cheer.[2]

See https://www.joyannreid.com/p/the-afrika ... n#_ftnref2

I should say that I was not a huge fan of Joy Reid's old show on MSNBC, which tended toward the sensational, and I thought was beneath her actual ability as a journalist and thinker. Here, in print, she does a better job of letting the facts do the talking.

Here is white supremacist Dan Roodt's essay. Ajax might enjoy it.

https://www.amren.com/commentary/2012/1 ... e-decline/

[Moksha]

I remember Trump lamenting that those migrating to the US come from "crap hole countries rather than Norway". Trump has nothing against Norway.

Would these Afrikaners take a pledge that they would be MAGA Fascists if fast-tracked? Would they be granted a homeland on the Veldts of Florida and Alabama?