Trump Not Playing With Racist South Africa

And

Ebrahim Rasool, South African diplomat

Hi all, I owe you another newsletter this week. I’m on a TGV down to a monastery in the southwest of France, and had time to write this below.

The other day in Strasbourg, several European supporters of J.D. Vance told me that the US vice president should mount an aggressive media campaign of interviews with selected European journalists who can give him a fair shot. My interlocutors are all English speakers, and can discern the difference between what Vance actually says and believes, versus the way his words and reviews are reported by (left wing) European media. The problem is, in most European countries — certainly in France — people don’t speak English, so are entirely dependent on the picture of America that their national media give them.

I told them that living in Europe has shown me how different actual existing Europe is from the way liberal American media report, so yeah, I get it. Well, here is an almost grotesque example of how the US media lie about conditions abroad. John Eligon, the New York Times reporter in South Africa, has in the past downplayed hysterical racialism by powerful black radical politicians there, including leading a rally calling for the massacre of white people. Look and listen:

Here’s how Eligon reported on this event. Excerpt:

Mr. Malema leads the Economic Freedom Fighters, a party that advocates taking white-owned land to give to Black South Africans. That has made his embrace of the chant all the more disturbing to some whites.

Despite the words, the song should not be taken as a literal call to violence, according to Mr. Malema and veterans and historians of the anti-apartheid struggle. It has been around for decades, one of many battle cries of the anti-apartheid movement that remain a defining feature of the country’s political culture.

Well, Eligon is back, portraying the Trump administration’s support of the embattled white minority as — you guessed it — racism! Excerpt:

To hear President Trump and some of his closest supporters tell it, South Africa is a terrible place for white people. They face discrimination, are sidelined from jobs and live under the constant threat of violence or having their land stolen by a corrupt, Black-led government that has left the country in disarray.

The data tell a different story. Although white people make up 7 percent of the country’s population, they own at least half of South Africa’s land. Police statistics do not show that they are any more vulnerable to violent crime than other people. And white South Africans are far better off than Black people on virtually every marker of the economic scale.

Yet Mr. Trump and his allies have pushed their own narrative of South Africa to press an argument at home: If the United States doesn’t clamp down on attempts to promote diversity, America will become a hotbed of dysfunction and anti-white discrimination.

“It plays into the fears of white people in America and elsewhere: ‘We whites are threatened,’” Max du Preez, a white South African writer and historian, said of Mr. Trump’s description of his country.

But, Mr. du Preez added, white people have flourished since the end of apartheid in 1994.

More:

His party, the African National Congress, has passed laws to try to close the gap for Black people. Most recently, South Africa enacted one that allows the government to take private land in the public interest, sometimes without providing compensation.

The law has not yet been used, but some white South Africans — and Mr. Trump — say it unfairly targets the country’s landowners and commercial farmers, who remain mostly white despite decades of anti-apartheid policies.

Mr. Trump has built his political identity in part as a protector of white America. He has fought to save symbols of the Confederacy in the South, blasted racial sensitivity training as “un-American propaganda” and publicly defended white supremacists.

Cutting off aid to most of Africa while championing Afrikaners — the white ethnic minority in South Africa that led the apartheid government — appears to be the latest illustration of Mr. Trump’s commitment to white interests.

Last month, the president signed an executive order granting refugee status to Afrikaners and suspending all aid to South Africa, partly in response to its land-reform law. He said on social media last week that the United States would offer a rapid pathway to citizenship to South African farmers, many of whom are Afrikaner. Then on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called South Africa’s ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, “a race-baiting politician who hates America” and expelled him.

He did so because that ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, gave a speech denouncing the Trump administration and its policies as white “supremacist”. Not very diplomatic! In Hungary, the Biden ambassador routinely attacked the Hungarian government, but of course the Hungarians, as a small country, were not in a position to make him persona non grata. Thank goodness America doesn’t have that problem with this Rasool ghoul.

And:

Willem Petzer, an Afrikaner online influencer whose social media posts have been shared by Trump supporters, said he was considering Mr. Trump’s offer [of refugee status]. But he said he hoped more than anything that South Africa’s government would end what he called its racism toward people who look like him.

“By the time I was a conscious human being, apartheid had been long gone,” Mr. Petzer, 28, said. “All I have ever known is discrimination against white people.”

That sort of rebranding of Afrikaners as victims has great resonance among the American far-right, said Mr. du Preez, the Afrikaner writer and historian, who founded the first anti-apartheid newspaper in Afrikaans.

“They’re playing on the thing of the white Christian civilization being threatened,” he said. “And that has a lot of appeal among the evangelicals and others in the United States.”

Ah. So that’s it. Nothing to see here, NYT readers, just more white racism.

I invite you to read this interview I did in 2023 with Paul Maritz, an Afrikaner (Boer) academic who was at the time studying in Europe. Excerpts:

For example, [the Afro-communist party of Julius Malema, who led the “Kill the Boers” chant] ended up in court a few years back by publicizing communist revolutionary Che Guevara’s quote: “A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” In 2018, Malema called for the forcible removal of an elected white mayor, saying, “We are cutting the throat of whiteness.” Later, Malema claimed that he was speaking metaphorically about ending white privilege.

That’s cold comfort to South Africa’s whites, who comprise about 8% of the population of the 60 million-strong nation. Blacks, by contrast, make up 81% of the population, with the rest being of mixed race (‘coloured’) or Indian origin. Since apartheid’s end, a number of white farmers (boer is the Afrikaans word for farmer) have been murdered, and Boer leaders claim the black-majority government doesn’t care .

While overall crime has skyrocketed in South Africa, affecting citizens of every race, the farm attacks have particular salience, both because they target prosperous farmers who feed the country and because whites are a small minority who have limited capacity to defend themselves.

The misleading Times story about “Kill the Boer” symbolizes the attitude of right-thinking Western liberals, who prefer to avert their gaze from the situation in a country that thirty years ago was a model of a Hollywood happy ending. The attitude from Western media towards the racist murders of South African whites seems to be it’s not happening, and if it is, can you really blame the blacks?

Sound familiar, in a US context? More from the Maritz interview, in which he talks about the insane amount of crime and material collapse due to corrupt and racist government by black politicians. He emphasizes that the issue is not whether or not blacks can govern themselves; it’s about this particular black political establishment, and the particular anti-white racist ideology animating much of the majority’s politics in South Africa:

Why have we not heard about this in the United States and Europe?

I think there’s a narrative. The narrative is “everything is fine in South Africa.” This understanding is stuck in 1991, when the Iron Curtain fell, and liberal democracy triumphed. For the world to admit that the South African project hasn’t worked would be an immense political and ideological failure, I suppose, for the West.

Certain things were promised. The whole world celebrated this new dawn in South Africa. For the liberal establishment to recognize that that has not been working out—that murder rates are increasing, that provision of basic services is lacking, that the ANC, which was the world’s darling, has mismanaged the country as badly as it has—would be too much of an embarrassment.

Furthermore—and this might be a more controversial point—we would have to recognize the importance of merit. In South Africa, if you say that our most important goal is diversity, not merit, then you have to deny something about the reality of the human condition. That’s not something that ‘woke’ culture in the West finds itself comfortable with.

The South African experiment was ten years ahead of the world, to a certain extent, in the sense that we had these serious racial quotas a lot earlier than most other countries. When looking to fill jobs, we didn’t ask, “Can they do the job?” or “who is the most competent,” but rather if they could fill some other requirement.

Again, you see the parallels to the US? In any case, I think it is right for the US to stand up when it can for minorities abroad that face potential genocide. Don’t you? The New York Times does not, apparently, and if white South Africans have to have their property stolen and their lives taken for the cause, then so be it. Justice requires it, you know.

The Trump administration understands perfectly well what is going on in South Africa, and how the globalist liberal West prefers to sacrifice actual human beings to protect its illusions. Funny, but an American soldier stationed in Europe who has been involved in training Ukrainians to fight the Russians told me last year how sick at heart he feels knowing that he and his colleagues are doing nothing more than preparing these poor men to go home and die. The training is inadequate for several reasons, he told me, but one doesn’t dare question the US policy to one’s American military superiors. The Narrative must be upheld, no matter how many poor Ukrainian bastards have to die.

This puts me in mind also of European Commission president Ursula Von Der Leyen’s speech last year at Davos, when she said that the biggest national security issue facing Europe is “disinformation”. This means that she fears that European governing elites will lose control of the Narrative.

David Brooks: Nobody Trusts America Anymore

I know, I know, nobody around here likes David Brooks. And often I disagree with his views, despite my personal affection for him. I mostly disagree with this column, in which he blasts the Trump administration for needlessly alienating America’s European allies … but he’s not entirely wrong. Excerpts:

Many years ago, I asked a friend who had been hired as a senior foreign policy official what he’d learned in government that he didn’t know beforehand. He replied: “I used to think policy-making was 75 percent about relationships. Now I realize it’s 95 percent about relationships.”

It’s very hard to do big things alone. So competent leaders and nations rely on relationships built on shared values, shared history and shared trust. They construct coalitions to take on the big challenges of the age, including the biggest: whether the 21st century is going to be a Chinese century or another American century.

In that contest the Chinese have many advantages, but until recently America had the decisive one — we had more friends around the world. Unfortunately, over the last month and a half, America has smashed a lot of those relationships to smithereens.

President Trump does not seem to notice or care that if you betray people, or jerk them around, they will revile you. Over the last few weeks, the Europeans have gone from shock to bewilderment to revulsion. This period was for them what 9/11 was for us — the stripping away of illusions, the exposure of an existential threat. The Europeans have realized that America, the nation they thought was their friend, is actually a rogue superpower.

I say Brooks is mostly but not entirely wrong because the status quo between the US and Europe could not be sustained. I have spoken this week to French people and other Europeans who are grateful that America is no longer going to subsidize the comfortable decadence of their own ruling classes. But I would not say at all that this is a majority view over here. In any case, it seems to me that if Team Trump needs to change the relationship, it should do so with a lot more finesse than it has shown, and it should also avoid needless antagonism. The French are freaking out over Trump’s proposed 200 percent tariffs on French wine — as well they might! Why is Trump doing this? Why is he being so pointlessly aggressive with Canada? Honestly, I can’t see the purpose.

Nations need allies. It is perfectly understandable to me that the Trump administration wants to radically change the terms of the US relationship with its allies. But conservatism usually prizes prudence. On the European nationalist Right, there is rising concern that Trump’s aggression is going to make it a lot harder for them to come to power. They generally support his anti-wokism and support for sovereignty (as opposed to being craven to Brussels and the trans-national EU bureaucracy), but if European voters come to see those parties as appendages of Trump, they will suffer.

Bottom line: Pursuing an America First foreign and economic policy does not actually put America First if it’s so extreme that it enrages allies we depend on for our own prosperity.

But this from Brooks is just bonkers:

The West is (temporarily) over. What we call “the West” is a centuries-long conversation — Socrates searching for truth, Rembrandt embodying compassion, Locke developing enlightenment liberalism, Francis Bacon pioneering the scientific method. This is our heritage. For all of our history America understood itself as the culmination of the great Western project. The idea of the West was reified in all the alliances and exchanges between Europe and North America.

But the category “the West” does not seem to be in Donald Trump’s head. Trump is cutting America off from its spiritual and intellectual roots. He has completed the project that Jesse Jackson started in 1987 when he and a bunch of progressive activists at Stanford chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

Wait … what?! For one thing, “Western civilization” is not the same thing as the current ruling class across the West, both in political and cultural institutions. For another, that same ruling class has spent decades denigrating the West and its traditional values, and valorizing the Other. Philip Rieff accurately said that the West in our era advances an “anti-culture,” and that we are the first people in history who have tried to sustain a civilization on such a thing. If the West is over, it’s damn sure not because Donald Trump killed it. He might be the only thing that saves it from its own corrupt and decadent elites.

You Aren’t Worried Enough About AI

The NYT tech columnist Kevin Roose published an important column explaining why, in his view, we are not taking the rapid advances in artificial intelligence seriously enough. It starts like this:

Here are some things I believe about artificial intelligence:

I believe that over the past several years, A.I. systems have started surpassing humans in a number of domains — math, coding and medical diagnosis, just to name a few — and that they’re getting better every day.

I believe that very soon — probably in 2026 or 2027, but possibly as soon as this year — one or more A.I. companies will claim they’ve created an artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is usually defined as something like “a general-purpose A.I. system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do.”

I believe that when A.G.I. is announced, there will be debates over definitions and arguments about whether or not it counts as “real” A.G.I., but that these mostly won’t matter, because the broader point — that we are losing our monopoly on human-level intelligence, and transitioning to a world with very powerful A.I. systems in it — will be true.

I believe that over the next decade, powerful A.I. will generate trillions of dollars in economic value and tilt the balance of political and military power toward the nations that control it — and that most governments and big corporations already view this as obvious, as evidenced by the huge sums of money they’re spending to get there first.

I believe that most people and institutions are totally unprepared for the A.I. systems that exist today, let alone more powerful ones, and that there is no realistic plan at any level of government to mitigate the risks or capture the benefits of these systems.

I believe that hardened A.I. skeptics — who insist that the progress is all smoke and mirrors, and who dismiss A.G.I. as a delusional fantasy — not only are wrong on the merits, but are giving people a false sense of security.

I believe that whether you think A.G.I. will be great or terrible for humanity — and honestly, it may be too early to say — its arrival raises important economic, political and technological questions to which we currently have no answers.

I believe that the right time to start preparing for A.G.I. is now.

AGI generally means an AI entity that can do everything a human can do, and possibly better. An important point in Roose’s column:

The most disorienting thing about today’s A.I. industry is that the people closest to the technology — the employees and executives of the leading A.I. labs — tend to be the most worried about how fast it’s improving.

I hope you will read the whole thing. There are many things I could say about this, but the train is almost at the station. Let me simply point out a claim I advance in Living In Wonder: that people will come to treat AI as a god. Excerpt:

It is clear that AI will be a machine that goes beyond the idol and becomes a portal of communication with what many people will treat as divinity. Neil McArthur, director of the University of Manitoba Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics, foresees the arrival of AI religions. He says that generative AI (AI that can create new information) possesses qualities associated with divine beings:

1. “It displays a level of intelligence that goes beyond that of most humans. Indeed, its knowledge appears limitless.

2. “It is capable of great feats of creativity. It can write poetry, compose music and generate art, in almost any style, close to instantaneously.

3. “It is removed from normal human concerns and needs. It does not suffer physical pain, hunger, or sexual desire.

4. “It can offer guidance to people in their daily lives.

5. “It is immortal.”

AI will be able to answer complex moral and philosophical questions. Many people will cease to read on the assumption that wisdom is nothing more than the accumulation of information and that asking AI is the most efficient, friction-free way to solve problems. The ways of thinking that established religious and philosophical traditions have taught us will disappear. Indeed, the creation and adoption of AI technology could happen only in a culture that had been cleared of any serious obstacle to its embrace.

If AI has been personally paired to individuals as “helpers” … the bespoke AI entities will know the hearts and minds of its supposed masters with superhuman levels of intimacy. Who, then, will be the true master?

This is an important point to get right: it does not matter if AI (AGI) is a mere machine; if it behaves with godlike powers, people will treat it as a god. This is why I bang on about the “false enchantment” of this technology. And it is why Jon Askonas says that a medieval peasant, who believed that he dwelled in a world of discarnate higher intelligences — God, angels, demons — who had to be negotiated to avoid danger, would have been better prepared psychologically to grapple with the AI world than most people today.