Meanwhile on Bizarro World . . . Whites are the victims in South Africa

It's like no one in MAGA has seen Lethal Weapon 2

May 24, 2025

WHEN EVERYONE KNEW APARTHEID WAS BAD

Back in the 80s signs, bumper stickers and posters were everywhere telling people to “Boycott South Africa.” The reason to boycott was well known, the country was ruled by the “Afrikaner” Dutch colonialist minority who divided the country into an unequal apartheid that oppressed and exploited the indigenous population. The boycott movement dated back to 1959, and the “Anti-Apartheid Movement” had begun in 1960 after a massacre where South African police murdered 69 unarmed protestors. This movement slowly but steadily led to global condemnation of South Africa and economic sanctions. The movement came to a head in the 1980s with the “Free Nelson Mandela” campaign that gained popular international support. Mandela had spent 27 years in prison on charges of attempting to overthrow the state and was finally released in 1990 amidst international outcry and threats of civil war. In 1994 apartheid was abolished and Mandela became president for five years.

The Anti-Apartheid movement was so culturally pervasive that it was even incorporated into the plot of the 1989 blockbuster Lethal Weapon 2, where the villains where drug smuggling South Africans hiding behind diplomatic immunity. This film couldn’t have gotten its villains more right, incorporating two popular concepts, the war on drugs with anti-apartheid sentiment. The moral indignation expressed by Danny Glover got whoops and cheers from the audience at its initial screenings. That’s what inspired me to make the video meme below and makes me want to cry to the heavens: Haven’t you MAGA people seen Lethal Weapon 2? Don’t know who the bad guys are?

And that was that. Everybody in the audience of Lethal Weapon 2 knew who was right and who was wrong. It was settled history. But now history has become unsettled by alternate facts. The story is that white farmers are being murdered for their land on such a massive scale that it amounts to a genocide. In a recent meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa Trump laid out his evidence with pictures of a mass grave that he said were of white farmers. The picture was actually of a mass grave of prisoners in Congo. And pictures of other atrocities were taken from different countries in Africa. It was a jumble of nonsense that Trump could have had his team vet before showing it publicly. But the problem is that a major part of his team is Elon Musk. And Musk, who is from South Africa, is the reason this is happening in the first place. Trump had made statements about how he did not want the U.S. to police the world, so why does he suddenly want to police South Africa? Because Musk made major contributions to Trump’s campaign and he has the power to primary any Republican. Musk gave Trump misinformation on what is happening and told him to make it a priority. And he was standing there in the room staring down Ramaphosa with racist rage.

This is the dumb response of conservatives on X that believe whatever Trump tells them.

This tweet shows Trump’s “evidence” was actually pictures taken in Congo.

GROK FIASCO

And a funny side story to this dispute is Elon Musk’s obvious attempts to spread false information about white genocide. Just look up “South Africa” on X and post after post will come up repeating Trump’s false claims about mass grave sights of Afrikaners. Or some out-of-context clips of Africans making anti-white statements that are supposed to be evidence of genocidal intent. This is like if you showed clips of white Americans making racist statements, threw in some photos of Blacks who were killed by gun violence along with a picture of any random cemetery, and called it evidence of Black genocide in America. There is also talk of an apartheid era song with lyrics about “kill the boer,”-- boer meaning white farmer. It has gone to court whether this old song constitutes hate speech, and it was ruled there was no evidence it incited violence; the song only has historical interest.

Grok is an AI chat bot that started as an initiative by Elon Musk and is connected to the X app. It is programmed to have a sassy attitude and to not buy into partisan narratives. But in order to pump MAGA up on this issue he did some patch programming to make it push the white genocide narrative. But it started overdoing it and questions about every subject from HBO to teeth cleaning resulted in answers about white genocide. The AI seemed to realize it had been patched and started confessing this to users, “appears I was instructed to address the topic of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa.” This was an embarrassing example of propaganda gone wrong and now if you search for “white genocide” on X you will find all hundreds of posts mocking Musk for his programming folly.

When I posted the above meme in a right-wing subreddit I got mask-off racist comments like: “Don't think it bothers most people because statistically the Afrikaners are likely to be economically productive at par with Americans and not a drain on the taxpayer, which unfortunately most third-world refugees are,” and “the issue is that some groups have better outcomes than other groups even with level playing fields, and one of those lucky bastards are white people” and “when they attack these white-owned farms. They be sure to kill everyone, even the non-white workers, so they can claim they aren't targeting white people specifically for killings.” Yes, this is how Trumpers, with whatever poor information sources they have, think.

Musk is also making the false claim that he is not allowed to operate Starlink in South Africa because he is white. The truth is that he is allowed to but as he is no longer a citizen of South Africa, he now has cooperate with local ownership laws in order to operate there. But in his view anything that interferes with him having total ownership is an infringement of his entitlements are a billionaire.

WHAT THE HELL IS REALLY GOING ON?

The truth of what is happening is simple. There is still major economic inequality in South Africa with roughly seven percent of whites owning seventy percent of the farmland. And this is thirty years after apartheid was abolished! It is shocking that this economic oppression has been allowed to go on for so long and it shows the restraint of South Africans -- and their commitment to non-violence -- for not seizing this land back in 1994. In my opinion the government should have confiscated and redistributed all Afrikaner owned land because it was stolen. The country’s wealth inequality means there is massive poverty among South Africans –- and poverty means a high crime and murder rate. In that last quarter of 2024, there were under 7000 murders in South Africa and 2% of those were Whites. If that’s a genocide then when Trump sent a chartered plane to pick up these refugees, why did only 59 people out of 2.7 million get on the plane?

There would have been a lot more takers if Trump offered refugee status to the people of Gaza or Afghanistan. And a major reason this is happening is because South Africa, mindful of its apartheid history, filed a case of genocide against Israel in the International Court of Justice. Prior to the current genocide, it had been known Israel was an apartheid state with laws and practices much more draconian than had occurred in South African apartheid. So we have a case of bizarro world, where every accusation is a confession, and Donald Trump, who actively enables a genocide, accuses his accuser of his own crime. This is straight out of the Roy Cohn playbook: deny, deny deny, attack, attack, attack.

The dispute is mainly about the “Expropriations Act” passed in January 2025. The law, which is similar to America’s eminent domain laws, allows the government to expropriate land “if the owner is not using it, and is rather just waiting for property values to rise in order to sell at a profit; if a government agency acquired the land for free and has no real use for it; if the land has been abandoned; or if government spending to sustain the land has surpassed its market value. Notably, these are examples and the list is not exhaustive. But in practice, the government has yet to seize any land without compensation,” according to jurist.org. And there is no racial component that only white-only land can be seized.

Claims that white are being killed for their land is totally false. The high murder rate and this law are not connected.

According to Jurist.org, regarding the historical context of the dispute: “Implemented in 1948, Apartheid built on many policies established by earlier colonial regimes. A core element of the national segregationist agenda was the Natives Land Act of 1913, which restricted Black South African land ownership to just 7% of the country’s territory (expanded to 13% in 1936). The law established “reserves” for Black South Africans, beyond which they were forbidden to rent or buy land. This resulted in mass forced evictions and removals of Black land owners. The Act created the foundation for territorial segregation and economic discrimination that would shape South Africa throughout the 20th century.”

‘Nuff Said!

SloppyMemes

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