Appalling

 

Why white South Africans are migrants the Trump adminstration can love

Brown or Black immigrants? Invaders. White ones? Refugees. It's no surprise from Musk and Trump.

May 19, 2025

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By Shalise Manza Young

Among the many terrible, horrible, no-good things the Trump administration has done since re-taking office in January is firing as many Black federal employees who have risen up the management ladder as possible.

The firings are abrupt and without cause, and because media writ large are reporting on the firehose of scandals and stupid decisions coming daily, many of these firings have received little to no coverage.

But if those dismissals, along with the constant refrain of blaming DEI—nearly always code for Black—for pretty much everything are a wink to the racism that undergirds the MAGA base, last week the administration put its “white is right” values on display so obviously they might as well be written in neon lights worthy of the Vegas strip.

Earlier this week, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau welcomed 59 Afrikaner farmers to the United States, meeting with the group in a hangar at Dulles International Airport after they touched down in a government-chartered plane.

Afrikaners are white South Africans who some, including Elon Musk, a South African, claim are facing unfair treatment in their home country. With Musk’s encouragement, the administration termed them refugees and expedited their arrival.

Trump has shut off resettlement programs for refugees from other countries, but white South Africans got the green light. Not anyone trying to flee Sudan, where a second genocide has begun just 20 years after the last. Not Palestinians, who are being bombed and who are starving. Not those seeking to escape Nicolas Maduro’s violent regime in Venezuela.

White South Africans got red-carpet treatment as Trump’s administration ended the protected status for Afghan refugees living here—Afghans who risked their lives helping American troops—shamefully breaking the promise made to those who allied with the United States and who will be in grave danger if they are returned to Afghanistan.

White South Africans were treated like dignitaries arriving for a state visit while Hispanic and Muslim people who are here legally are kidnapped by mask-wearing thugs and sent to a gulag in El Salvador or a deplorable prison in Louisiana where they are deprived of crucial medicines.

White South Africans get special treatment while non-white immigrants and migrants are called “invaders” and “vermin.”

White South Africans were embraced months after Haitians who influenced the revitalization of a dying Ohio factory town dealt with bomb threats after the future vice president baselessly accused them of eating their neighbors’ pets.

Seeing a pattern?

Just as JD Vance’s stories about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were lies, so, too, is Musk’s assertion that Afrikaner farmers are facing “white genocide.”

Afrikaners, the descendants of the Dutch colonizers who ran the South African government for hundreds of years and installed the apartheid system—the strict stratification of races that ensured all power rested in the white minority while Black Africans were stripped of all human rights—are a minority in South Africa.

Apartheid ended 30 years ago, and Black South Africans have had full civil rights restored, but inequality persists. It’s not much different from Black people in the United States: When you deprive a group of opportunities for generations and don’t actively try to make them whole, they’ll always be behind, particularly economically.

And just as many white Americans throw temper tantrums when anyone makes an attempt to level the playing field for Blacks, so, too, do many white South Africans.

Despite making up just 7% of the population, white farmers own 70% of the commercial farmland in the country. The South African government has approved seizing land without compensation, but that hasn’t happened yet.

That hasn’t stopped Musk, who has openly supported far-right racist groups and threw Nazi salutes from the dais at Trump’s Nuremburg rally (sorry, post-inaugural party), from claiming that it’s reverse racism to attempt to give Black South Africans ownership of their native land and some political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”

There is no evidence that white farmers are being targeted. The South African government has firmly denied that intentional harm is being done to whites, and even Afrikaner-led groups say there’s no truth to either claim.

But when a rich boy raised in apartheid South Africa in a family so devoted to the cause that his maternal grandparents moved there from Canada to be part of it gets together with Trump, who has long shown racist tendencies, reality goes out the window and a solution without a problem is devised.

And thus, a deputy secretary of state went to Dulles to greet the Afrikaners with open arms. Asked by a reporter why this group of people had been granted refugee status and not others from war-torn lands facing oppression or famine, Landau said, “They [can] be assimilated easily into our country.”

As subtle as the neon lights on the Vegas strip.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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Worth Listening to

 My sister shared this link with me from her daughter.  I then saw it as well in the Indivisible email I received.

Here's the Link. to watch the quick video.

[Below is just the screenshot]

I think I'll start sending notes to my Representative and Senators.

Bleeding Hearts

 

From The Contrarian

Words & Phrases We Can Do Without

We've had more than our fill of Trump telling us about our “needs”

JENNIFER RUBIN MAY 13

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Donald Trump—who never saw anything he wouldn’t drench in gold and has acquired a fortune in questionable crypto-currency, now wants an Air Force One from Qatar that he can take with him when/if he leaves the White House. This man, who lives on multiple golf course estates and is as far removed from the realities of everyday Americans as he can be, refuses to stop telling other people what they “need.” 

According to Trump, “baby” girls (which includes eleven-year-olds) do not need 30 dolls. They don’t need 250 pencils. Toy manufacturers, not to mention many children, beg to differ with his arbitrary caps on goods. He’s threatened to effectively ban Barbie dolls. The toy czar has spoken.

We have plunged far, far away from President Jimmy Carter, who was mocked for calling for the sacrifice of a couple of degrees on the thermostat. Kevin McCarthy, of all people, whined, “He told me that the best days were behind us, that as an American I had to accept less. That wasn’t how I was raised.” Instead of the party of capitalism, free markets, fiscal awareness, and abundance, the MAGA GOP has become stingy, Grinch-like commissars allocating rations to everybody who’s not a billionaire.

So much for Americans’ consumer-driven economy—and the entire retail industry. What Trump meant was: “Forget my ridiculous campaign promises. You all are going to suffer because my fixation with tariffs is going to make you poorer while I rake in billions.” Trump delights in turning victims of his unhinged policies into ingrates. That way, he can reclaim the mantle of being the victim of selfish, greedy Americans! Instead of the reality—that he is failing all of us—by his narrative, it is we who are failing the great leader.

Trump has a peculiar view of what the United States “needs.” The U.S. does not need anything from Canada (the largest purchaser of U.S. goods). Incoherently, even for him, he huffed: “We don’t have to sign deals, they have to sign deals with us. They want a piece of our market. We don’t want a piece of their market.” (Narrator: The United States is the world’s second-largest exporter.) Latin America? “They need us much more than we need them. We don’t need them. They need us—everybody needs us.”

Trump thinks of “need” as a sign of weakness, vulnerability, or dependence; conditions he loathes. Like all bullies and egomaniacs, he claims that “I alone can fix it,” and simply cannot grasp the concept of an interdependent world, mutually beneficial bilateral partnerships, and/or enduring alliances.

On the other hand, he invents things the U.S. “needs,” such as…Greenland (!). In March, he declared, “We need Greenland for national security and international security.” What’s more, “the world needs us to have Greenland, including Denmark. Denmark has to have us have Greenland.” (Narrator: Denmark says the U.S. is never getting Greenland.) To NBC’s Kristen Welker, he repeated, “We need Greenland very badly. True, Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that,” Trump said. “But we need that for international security.” Strangely, this “need” never manifested in Trump’s first term, nor has it been identified in our National Security Strategy.

And in yet another vein, Trump insists he does not need experts. He knows more about everything than anyone. He actively does not want to hear from people who know what they are talking about, nor does he want to put competent people in his Cabinet lest they contradict his bizarre impulses, hunches, conspiracy theories, and wackadoodle ideas. Forget the “best people.” He needs the worst people, i.e., the sycophantic anti-experts who would never dream of correcting or countering his blather.

Unfortunately for Trump, reporters keep asking him about things he does not know. He’s not a government-conscious human, so how could he possibly know if he is obligated to uphold the Constitution? He is not a lawyer, so how could we expect him to know if noncitizens have due process rights? He’s apparently never had to shop for groceries, so how would he know that you don’t need ID to do so? Weirdly, the guy who knows more about anything than everyone doesn’t know such basics.

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Dictionary.com tells us that “need” means “a requirement, necessary duty, or obligation.” In other words, people dying of starvation or AIDS in undeveloped countries need USAID. Cancer patients need life-saving medical advances. And anyone in public office needs to follow the Constitution. 

When Trump uses the word, he does not mean any of that. Instead, he deploys “need” or “don’t need” to camouflage his failures (tariffs), to shift blame (greedy kids!), to assert dominance (forget foreign purchasers), to defy expertise (no scientists required) and to translate his ridiculous whims into national imperatives (Greenland!).

In each case, his word choice conveys his inadequacies and errors. He cannot deliver on painless tariffs. He cannot force trading partners to bend to his will. He cannot match wits with experts who are competent in their fields. (It’s no wonder why dim Fox News TV hosts populate the Cabinet.) And he has yet to convince sane Americans that personal, nonsensical impulses should translate into national policy.

Since “need” in Trump’s usage has lost all meaning, we should dispense with it for the time being. Like all autocrats, he wants to tell us what we can and cannot have. We are not about to put up with that. 

Instead, we need to vote his enablers out of office and begin to hold him accountable.

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