One of the stupider things that Donald Trump and his willing administration have wrought in the few hectic months since January is the provision of a special flight from South Africa for White Afrikaner "refugees".
59 (49 according to some sources) pasty White people arrived in Washington yesterday on a specially-chartered plane with a capacity of 200 (I guess take-up was not quite what Trump anticipated). These people are supposedly the victims of "racial discrimination" and even "genocide" by the Black majority South African government, about which Trump has a particular bee in his bonnet. Presumably, his buddy, White South African Elon Musk has had a word with him.
These comfortable middle-class folk were given special dispensation to emigrate to the USA as refugees, even though all other refugee admissions into the US have been summarily halted by the Trump administration, including those from war zones. Indeed, Trump is now talking about giving the South Africans automatic citizenship. Hell, we may see some of them joining his cabinet!
Of course, there is no genocide of White farmers happening; this is just a White Supremacist myth being propagated for political reasons. 60 White farmers a day are not being killed, as is claimed; the reality is more like 50 farmers a year, Black and White, in a country that sees over 20,000 murders every year, and where Black people make up 81% of the population but own about 4% of its land. On the other hand, Whites make up just 7% of the population, but own about half of South Africa's farmland. Yes, there has been government redistribution of land to the majority Black population after decades of apartheid inequality, but no arbitrary seizures or expropriation of private property.
Many Afrikaners see Trump's offer as merely a PR exercise, and look on those accepting the offer as "opportunists" and "sell-outs". South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called the emigrants "cowards" and warned "they'll be back soon". White Afrikaner farmers themselves reject the notion that there is some genocide going on, or that White Afrikaners want to leave the country. And that photo of thousands of white crosses that Trump ambushed Ramaphosa with in their prime-time Oval Office "interview"? it was actually a temporary symbolic tableau to commemorate the murder of two individuals, not the burial site of thousands, according to the man who built it. Not that Trump would care about the truth behind it - his point has already been made.
Trump, then, has drunk the White Supremacist Koolaid, and is acting on it in his usual unthinking, precipitate way. This may not be the worst thing Trump 2.0 is engaged in right now, but it ranks up there. (The list of dangerous, damaging and downright illegal actions he has embarked on - from firing huge swaths of the federal workforce to gutting environmental protections to interfering in the oversight of universities to hamstringing the ability of unions to represent workers to establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve to attacks on immigration and sanctuary cities to making independent regulators accountable to the White House to weakening anti-corruption laws to removals of all mentions and implementations of DEI and climate change policies to dismantling the Department of Education to withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, UNWRA, WHO and other international organizations - is becoming hard to keep track of. Here is just a partial list.)
While most of the media's attention is focussed on the tariffs nonsense, all of this egregious stuff is happening in the background. In fact, that is my personal theory, that the tariffs, which are gradually being walked back anyway, are a smokescreen for all the other stuff that the US would rather not have scrutinized too closely.
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