As Goes South Africa, So Goes America?

Identity Politics Are A Global Curse. You Can't Fight Racism With Racism

Afro-Communist leader Julius Malema, leader of ‘Kill the Boer!’ chants

Last night I finished a piece I have coming out soon in The Free Press, about the rise of racism and anti-Semitism on the Right. Obviously I condemn it, and in the piece urge my fellow conservatives to take seriously the online radicalization of young men. There’s a parallel between the radicalization into transgenderism of Very Online teenage girls in the last decade, and the radicalization into racism of Very Online teenage boys today. Back then, normies — including, most importantly, parents — simply did not understand what was happening to their daughters, and what their daughters were exposed to online. The same is happening now with young men.

(An interesting twist today is that not all those succumbing to anti-Semitism are whites. Kanye West and Candace Owens are famous black public figures who have been infected.)

The main point I make in the piece, which I’ll post in this newsletter when it’s out, is that despite the fact that wokeness is now receding, the danger from softer forms of totalitarianism has not passed. It is unlikely that right-wing identity politics will take over institutions, as the left-wing version did, but I wouldn’t bet on that being the case forever, and anyway, even if these people never take power as the left-totalitarians did, we are talking about actual people losing their minds and their souls to hatred.

Back in 2022, I played a small role in exposing the anonymous online racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny of the headmaster of the small classical Christian school in Baton Rouge that my kids attended. The heavy lifting had already been done by Alastair Roberts and his wife Susannah, two conservative Christian friends who rightly despise this kind of thing, and worry about how it is infecting the American Right, including Christian communities. The role I was able to play was to confirm a key clue that allowed them to identify that this man, Thomas Achord, was the real name of “Tulius Aadland,” a prolific far-right poster. Achord at the time was co-hosting a religion and politics podcast with Christian Nationalist author Stephen Wolfe. What scared the hell out of me when I learned from Alastair and Susannah what “Tulius” was up to is that Achord, in his online disguise, boasted that he was a rising star in the world of classical Christian education, and that he intended to use that position to introduce white nationalism into that world.

I didn’t really know him, but what I did know of him was that he was a modest, quiet younger man, a military veteran who had done something brave and charitable: taken his boat out into the great 2016 flood around Baton Rouge, to rescue people. I would not have suspected him of believing these things (n.b., he later confessed, and was fired). None of his colleagues at the school had any idea. Years earlier, my older son, who had taken one of Achord’s history classes, and who knew something about right-wing radicalism, told his mother (a teacher at the school) and me that Mr. Achord was trying to red-pill the boys in his class into white nationalism. We didn’t take it seriously. Thomas Achord? Really? Come on.

We should have taken him seriously. Our son saw things that we normie older people did not. Back then, in the wake of Achord’s exposure and firing, I wrote this piece at my TAC blog about why it is important to pay attention to this rising phenomenon on the Right, and to understand why young men can be drawn to it. Excerpt:

Now, having said that, I want to emphasize as strongly as I possibly can that the Left bears immense responsibility for the rise of these dark demons on the Right. It's not a matter of "the woke devil made me do it." It's about behaving in a way that drives others to radicalism.

If you are a white man in Baton Rouge like Thomas Achord, you live in a city that is majority black, and that is one of the most violent cities in the United States. The violence is almost entirely confined to the black community. You see a community that is broadly dysfunctional, with incredible rates of violence, with drug abuse, and most importantly of all, with family systems that have disintegrated. You also live in a society and culture where one cannot talk about these things openly, because to do so is to invite condemnation of yourself as a racist. This is broadly true in America. Our social taboos prevent us from dealing with the ugly realities in front of us, not only having to do with race, but also with sexuality, and now with gender.

You live in a world in which all the major institutions of your society have decided that if you are white, and especially if you are a white male, and most especially if you are a white male traditionalist Christian, then you are a Bad Person -- not by virtue of what you have done or haven't done, but by virtue of the condition into which you were born. You live in a world in which you will not only be demonized, but you stand to be denied educational and professional advancement, not because of what you have or have not done, but because of who you are -- and those who treat you like this reward themselves by claiming to be virtuous.

You live in a world in which you might have been taught, if you are of a certain age, that justice requires judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. You came to believe that, and to recognize that it was cruel and unjust to treat black people, and other racial minorities, and women, as if they were nothing more than bearers of race and sex. And now you see that the rules have been changed by the powerful, and that it is not only acceptable, but laudable to judge and treat people solely on the basis of their race or sex, if they are white and male -- and that to speak out against that, to protest against this injustice, only shows how evil you really are, and deserving of punishment by the powerful in your society.

You live in a world in which the ruling class and its institutions are now coming after your children in an attempt to alienate them from their bodies, via gender ideology -- and to speak out against it in any way is to invite scorn and even punishment.

You live in a society whose institutions are determined to denigrate and destroy your entire civilizational heritage -- not just acknowledge the evil parts and repent of them, but to brand it all as evil, and to disinherit your children from their past and their culture. And again, this colonialist exploitation is carried out in the name of Good. To resist it is, in the eyes of this upside-down world, evil.

You are told that black and black-sympathetic rioters who burned and looted were to be understood and forgiven as having their hearts in the right place, and to be disgusted by the violence and mayhem was but one more sign of how wicked you are, white man.

You are told that the border of your country must remain wide-open so that people from other countries can cross it at will, and live in your country. You are told by elites who do not have to live with the consequences of this -- their money shields them from having to send their kids to public schools that have been overwhelmed by migrant children, or to use public hospitals inundated with illegal aliens -- that to notice this, and to object to it, marks you out as a racist. The cost of virtue, in the eyes of these leftists, is to surrender your country.

I could go on, but you get the point. If you are growing up in this world, how do you react to it? How do you react to it when the churches are either silent about it, or join in with the chorus of condemnation of you? I was talking on Sunday, at breakfast after church here in Budapest, with an American expatriate who is a young white male Millennial. He grew up in suburban America. I was telling him about the Achord thing, and he agreed that it is wicked, and that we need to stand up against it. But he said that people of my generation (I am 55) don't really understand what it's like to grow up in a culture that condemns you from the start. "So many guys in my generation," he told me, "just give up and retreat into video games and porn. Some of them go into white nationalism. It's not right, but they don't see any way out."

This is what our media and all the other leading institutions of our society refuse to see. They are driving whites, especially white males, into this darkness. Hear me clearly: the fault of people who accept racism and all the rest lies primarily with them. But can you not see why this stuff would appeal to them? Can you not understand why a young black man in 1960s America would be drawn to the Black Panthers? I can. God knows it doesn't make it right, but I can see the rationale there. When you systematically silence entire groups of people, and tell them that if they speak up for themselves, or challenge the dominant narrative, that they are evil and must be silenced and destroyed, you should not be surprised if they will gravitate to radicals who tell them there is nothing wrong with you, that you are being mistreated, and here is an ideology that will give you comfort, meaning, and a program of resistance.

In reading about how Arab Muslim men become radicalized, you encounter similar stories. It often comes from an experience of deep injustice, or if we are talking about young Muslims in the United States, from a feeling of dislocation and a hunger for identity. This is why many Boomers became radicalized to the Left in the 1960s. It's where Woke comes from, I think: a desperate desire for meaning, purpose, and solidarity. It's why some white men are gravitating to the radical, racialized Right. As I write in Live Not By Lies, Hannah Arendt warned that the preconditions for totalitarianism, of either Right or Left, include mass atomization and loneliness, a loss of faith in institutions, and a love of transgression for the sake of transgression. We have created such a world in the United States today! The American system has become a machine for the radicalization of many people to the far right. And nobody on the Left seems to care that their own illiberalism is contributing to this evil state of affairs. Judging by his Tulius thread, Achord wasn't wrong about everything. The danger is that the things he was right about leads him to vicious conclusions -- and can lead others to the same. For example, it was true that the Left, especially in the media, celebrated the George Floyd riots and unfairly vilified Kyle Rittenhouse -- two common themes of the Tulius thread. But that in no way justifies racism! It is possible -- indeed it is necessary -- to call out wrongdoing when you see it, while at the same time resisting the siren song of hatred.

Once again: the evil of the Left does not justify or excuse the evil of the Right. But it does help explain where it comes from. If you want to teach these young whites not to hate others on the basis of race, then stop hating white people on the basis of race, and maligning them, and disadvantaging them, solely because they are white, or white and male. If you won't stop it, then you can expect a hell of a lot more Thomas Achords to arise, and Christian conservatives like Alastair Roberts and me won't be able to do much at all to stop it. They'll see us as they do today: like useful idiots for those who want to destroy them.

Racism, tribalism, and injustice begets more of the same. You don’t exorcise that demon by using it against those who oppressed you when they had power. This is the story of South Africa today. Last year, Will Tanner wrote this powerful essay in the Jewish online magazine Tablet about the hellhole that is post-apartheid South Africa. If you are tempted to accept the mainstream media line that Donald Trump is exaggerating the attacks in that country against white farmers, you need to read Tanner’s piece. Excerpts:

The worst of the crimes under which South Africans suffer are the farm murders, in which African criminals use equipment, including signal jammers and automatic weapons, to break into isolated farmsteads and torture, kill, rape, and rob the predominantly Boer inhabitants. These attacks are known for their brutality, with atrocities like drowning children in boiling water and gang-raping female victims being close to the norm rather than radically atypical. Similar atrocities are inflicted on other South Africans, including children.

More:

The scale of these farm attacks is extreme, with attackers, according to data from 2023, committing about one farm murder a week and nearly one attack a day. At the very least, the problem is “large scale,” as former President Donald Trump posted on X, then-Twitter, that his administration would study “the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.” Describing the attacks in even more extreme language, the South African artist Steve Hofmeyr, said that the attacks are a genocide. As he put it, “If you think that the slaughter of South African farmers is not genocide enough, ask them about their land, language, religion, education, universities, heritage, monuments, safety, dignity, and the race-based regulations imposed upon them and their children.”

Though farm attacks are less frequent than other crimes that plague South Africa, such as cash-in-transit heists, they are renowned for their extreme brutality. Jack Loggenberg of the Transvaal Agricultural Union, describing that aspect of the crime and what makes them worse than other crimes, said, “We say it is not only crime but something else; the way the people are handled, not only killed, but also tortured brutally, and sometimes nothing is stolen. And not doing anything about it gives the impression that this is acceptable. It could be organized, but we don’t have the facts. We find that in farm murders a lot of research is done, in 100 percent of cases there is prior reconnaissance and then there is extreme violence used.”

Observers, such as Ernst Roets in his book Kill the Boer: Government Complicity in South Africa’s Brutal Farm Murders, make the case that agents of the South African government, such as law enforcement officers, are either not willing to stop the farm attackers or actively assisting the brutal murderers. Some farmers and Boers, for example, hold the “belief that the government is training former members of MK or APLA to assassinate white farm owners.” Others argue that even if the government is not actively assisting the farm murderers, it is doing little to investigate them and bring the perpetrators to justice. At the very least, 95% of the farm murders go unsolved, and the government allows, despite prohibiting other “hate speech,” chants like “Kill the Boer” that encourage the horrific farm murders. Additionally, the government refuses to set up specialized task forces to investigate and stop farm murders, despite doing so to investigate crimes like the illegal mining of the zama zamas and cash-in-transit robberies.

Jacques Broodryk, AfriForum’s chief spokesperson for community safety, said that the South African government and police force see farm murders as less important than other murders and that it is shocking it will not develop unique police resources to handle the problem. “However, there are questions as to why the South African government refuses to follow the same approach with farm attacks and murders. In certain cases, the occurrence of farm attacks and murders is much higher, more violent, and requires a much more specialized approach than some of the crimes that were prioritized,” Broodryk said.

On the same note, Mike de Lange, formerly head of the KwaZulu-Natal Agricultural Union, argued that the government is intentionally ignoring the sickening attacks for ideological reasons. He said, “I don’t believe that there is an organized plan to drive farmers off the land; but I do believe that the government knows what is happening and is doing nothing about it.” Adding credence to the claims of Broodryk and de Lange about South African indifference toward the fate of farmers is that when former President Trump posted about the frequent attacks, the South African government responded not by pledging to solve the murders but by accusing him of spreading “false information” and holding a “narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past.”

The core of the problem is that the black-majority successor to the white-minority government is ruled by the same racial mentality that its predecessor had. Though it has not instituted a formal system of racial discrimination, like apartheid, it has nevertheless adopted policies and practices that seek to advantage some and disadvantage others, according to their racial identity. Not only is this unjust, but it also impoverishes everybody in the country, regardless of their race:

Though it has avoided the worst outcomes, South Africa is hardly a multiracial paradise. Instead, it has trended toward chaos and internal disaster; its economy is in shambles, its once-budding space and nuclear programs are long gone. Crime rules in place of law and order. South Africa’s internal issues are manifold but can be distilled down to two categories: economic tyranny stemming from an unyielding top-down emphasis on racial spoils programs in the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mode, and anarcho-tyranny in which the government is both unable and unwilling to protect the Afrikaner, Anglo, and Indian populations from vicious criminals.

The economic aspect of South Africa’s decline is primarily a result of its postapartheid obsession with extending the country’s cursed racial logic, this time in the name of justice and equity. Though it didn’t see the outright expropriations inflicted upon white farmers in Zimbabwe by Mugabe’s government, it has seen softer forms of expropriation and reparations. For example, as of 2024, more than 24 million South Africans, the vast majority of them Black, received welfare grants from just 7.1 million taxpayers. That 3.38-to-1 grant-to-taxpayer ratio is plainly unsustainable. However, with the leftist ANC in charge, it is part of the system now and seen as an important social justice achievement. South Africa also has an outright reparations program for victims of apartheid, another expensive tax money transfer program.

The affirmative action situation in hiring is even worse.

The main point of Tanner’s essay is to compare South Africa’s fate to the potential for disaster in woke America, in which cultural, business, academic, media, and institutional elites embrace and impose a racial spoils system that privileges non-whites over whites. What the American Left, and their Right-wing collaborators in business and elsewhere, have to assume is that whites will accept this as justice, or at least will be so reluctant to embrace racism that they don’t protest their dispossession and immiseration.

That is not working. There is no way to short-circuit white nationalism and related ideology is to stop racial discrimination, period. Normie right-wingers like me had better start paying attention to what our sons and grandsons are exposed to online. But we had also better start agitating for a total end to DEI and other forms of officially sanctioned racism. White nationalism and the rest are bad — indeed evil — responses to anti-white discrimination. But at least they are a response! Like the American guy I quoted in the 2022 piece told me, if the only alternative these young dudes perceive is the passivity of dope, video games, and porn, it should not surprise any of us that they succumb to the temptation of racial solidarity and hatred.

I had heard not long ago that the UK had given the evil Julius Malema, the black Communist firebrand politician from South Africa, the one who leads stadiums in chants of “Kill the Boer!”, and also attacks Indian South Africans, a visa to attend a conference at Cambridge University this month. Happily, the British government did not do so, though in a cowardly move, it put this down to bureaucratic inefficiency. Whatever the truth of the matter, what on earth is Cambridge University doing inviting to speak a man who openly calls for racial murder against whites?

That Cambridge did this tells you a lot about the mentality of British elites. What are young white Britons supposed to conclude about how their country’s liberal ruling class sees them, and their future? An American student who just finished a year in Oxford stayed with me in Budapest last weekend, on the eve of returning to America. He’s a conservative who hangs out with conservatives. He did not indicate that his British Oxbridge peers had embraced racism, but he did say that they are radicalizing around the migration issue, and the two-tier society the UK ruling class has imposed on white Britons, to a shocking degree. Hard to blame them when you see what that same ruling class, both Labour and Tory, have done and are doing to that country. This is the same young man whom I first met in Oxford this spring, and who told me then that as a foreign observer, if the British ruling class openly despised the British people, it would be hard to imagine what they would be doing differently than what they do now.