May 23, AD2025 - Leader of Afrikaner Farmers: There is no genocide, and we don't really know these refugees.

Dear Reader,

Colonization

According to Deutsche Welle (DW), a German public broadcaster owned by the German government, there is no genocide of Afrikaners in South Africa, rejecting the claim of the German-American US President Donald Trump as false. Germany takes accusations of genocide seriously and, for historic reasons of having perpetrated the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jewish persons during the Second World War, which gave rise to the word and definition of genocide, the Germans are especially familiar with the qualities and parameters.

The Republican-led US Administration has used 2023 footage of South African parliamentarian, the communist Julius Malema, proclaiming the slogan “Kill the boer, kill the farmer” as evidence of genocide. The DW fact-check article addresses former President Donald Trump's false claims, made during this week’s Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, that white farmers in South Africa are being systematically murdered. During the meeting, a video was played showing a roadside display of thousands of white crosses, claiming each represented a murdered white farmer. In reality, the footage came from a 2020 protest after the murder of two married farmers, and the crosses were symbolic, not grave markers. This misinformation had already circulated widely on social media prior to the meeting.

Julius Malema is a despicable Hamas supporter. However, he was expelled from the ruling African National Congress Party over a decade ago because of his violent rhetoric, which is why he founded to communist Economic Freedom Fighters party. (Can communists ever name something correctly, or is everything a euphemism for them? Don’t answer.) Quoting Malema as if he represents the South African government is like a Russian in 2012 quoting Ron Paul and claiming his End the Fed position was the impending policy of the Republicans regarding the Federal Reserve. The current coalition government in South Africa was put together in 2024 in part to stop Malema getting anywhere near power.

DW confirmed that the claim of genocide is also flatly rejected by the prominent Afrikaner leader Theo de Jaeger. Theo de Jaeger has been a farmer for thrity years and is the former president of the World Farmers’ Organisation, former president of the Southern African Confederation of Agricultural Unions (SACAU), former president of the Pan African Farmers Union (PAFO) and current head of the Southern African Agri Initiative (SAAI) an agricultural organization based in South Africa that primarily advocates for the interests of family farmers, particularly those from minority and smallholder backgrounds, especially white farmers. Needless to say, he knows the situation of Afrikaner farmers. He says there is no genocide, and his SAAI was founded in response to growing concerns about rural safety, land reform, and policy uncertainty in South Africa’s agricultural sector. This is his issue, and he rejects the US Administration’s claim. Further, he says that his organization knows of about 1,000 families that want to come to the US because of Trump’s offer, but can identify only two of them as actually being farmers. Theo de Jaeger is not a radical afraid to use the term genocide. In the interview, he condemned the violence against white and Ndebele farmers in Zimbabwe and called the massacre of the Ndebele - known as the Gukurahundi genocide - a genocide, and still, he said that what was currently happening in South Africa is not a genocide.

Republicans Costing US Advantage in Tech

The Republican-led US Administration continues its attack on what it haphazardly identifies as “woke” and “DEI” research, creating chaos in the sectors of American research, which has led to American dominance of the world. The Economist warns that while the United States has stood at the top of global science and tech with its elite universities attracting and producing Nobel Prize winners, it was Federal grantmaking agencies like the NIH and NSF that underwrote the system, distributing billions annually through competitive, peer-reviewed processes. But under the new Republican administration, this system is destabilizing. Cancellations of already-approved grants, targeted defunding of elite universities, and proposed cuts approaching $40 billion threaten to dismantle the current scientific infrastructure. The administration’s stated aim is efficiency and alignment with national priorities, but its methods—particularly its opposition to DEI initiatives and climate-related research—have introduced fear and suspicion into a system that requires stability to function. Now, American resources are being wasted and redistributed.

US Universities Under Fire, Harvard Fights, US Court Rules Against Administration

US District Judge Allison Burroughs blocked the US Administration's ban on foreign students at Harvard. The university argued that the government's action was unconstitutional retaliation for political noncompliance and would have an "immediate and devastating effect" on more than 7,000 visa-holding students. Harvard claims the move would effectively erase a quarter of its student body and has already thrown campus operations into chaos just days before graduation.

Islam in Europe, Political Anger and Panic in France

The Editors of Le Monde state that Political Islam is a problem in France, but that politicians using it to scare voters and to outmaneuver one another is actually not raising the issue but preventing anything being done about it. A report was leaked from the French government which alleges that after an internal investigation, the Muslim Brotherhood is in fact making inroads to infiltrating French communities.

French politics has been rocked this week by the leak to Le Figaro.

Judenhass

Terrorism is the use or threat of violence by non-state actors to achieve political, ideological, or religious goals by intimidating, coercing, or instilling fear in a broader audience beyond the immediate victims.

Wednesday night, two Israeli Embassy staff were murdered in a terrorist attack in Washington, D.C.

Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26

"I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza," stated the 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago as he was taken into custody. Lischinsky and Milgrim were shot as they left an annual event for young Jewish diplomats, this year focusing on resolving humanitarian crises in the Middle East, at the Capital Jewish Museum. One mile from the White House, Rodriguez murdered two diplomats from a foreign state because of the behavior of that state in a war 6,000 miles away. He killed two diplomats in love. A Christian who retained his Jewish culture, Mr. Lischinsky, planned to propose to Ms. Milgram soon, when they returned to Jerusalem.

The terrorism of Rodriguez will feed no Palestinians, stop no bombs, save no families.

He only robbed Yaron and Sarah of their future one.

The United States government must ensure that justice is swift and firm for both domestic safety and diplomatic honor.

Tariffs Again

Wall Street suffers again as new American threats of 50% tariffs on the world’s 3rd largest economic zone, the European Union, loom. The threats also targeted Apple, the top US business, and a global icon. Such moves against Apple do nothing to help the hardworking Americans who invest and believe in the company that the late Steve Jobs led and made into a vehicle for the dreams of creators across the globe. If the US is going to win the future before China does, it is more than likely that Apple will be one of the leading lights. A question remains as to how the EU will retaliate as American popularity falls across the continent.

Malcolm X at 100 and a new NPR Controversy

El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, formerly Malcolm Little, popularly known as Malcolm X | May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965

Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad, great-grandson of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, sharply critiqued Leila Fadel and Steve Inskeep of NPR for their segment on Malcolm X on the 100th anniversary of his birth. He called attention to what he sees as a reductive and misleading portrayal of one of the most compelling figures of the mid-20th-century African American Civil Rights Movement. At its core, his argument is about omission as distortion, that by focusing narrowly on Malcolm X’s early criminal background, his Nation of Islam affiliation, and his eventual break with it and murder by some of its members, NPR stripped away the very substance of his importance in history. According to Professor Muhammad, “If you'd never heard of Malcolm X before this morning's broadcast, you'd ask yourself why is the news celebrating a criminal-turned-violent separatist killed by his own people. The only point of his life, in this NPR remembrance, is that he eventually saw the humanity of non-Black Muslims. The problem isn't that the hosts made things up. It is that the story left out anything that showed him as the courageous leader who influenced countless Black folk to stand taller and with dignity or who inspired many people to fight for human rights here and around the world.”

The Futility of the African National Congress

Just as I was firm with the Democratic Republic of Congo, I will be so with South Africa. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was humiliated in the Oval Office just like President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and with far less excuse.

Since the end of apartheid in 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) has presided over South Africa’s slow decline from promised rebirth to systemic dysfunction. It was not inevitable. With its moral capital from the liberation struggle, international goodwill, and a wealth of natural resources, South Africa should have emerged as the geopolitical anchor of the continent and a major power with real influence. Instead, today, crime is rampant, and the economy is riven with extreme inequality. That is not the necessary legacy of apartheid; it is the result of ANC choices, and no one else can be blamed.

President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa 's trip to the White House illustrates the country’s diminished stature. South Africa under Mandela was a moral voice that could get respect from the world. Now it sends its president abroad to absorb public humiliation, dragged into American racialist fantasies. That never should have happened. But it did, because South Africa no longer commands respect. The ANC failed to convert liberation into lasting power, and it squandered three decades of legitimacy.

Ramaphosa himself is emblematic of the lost potential. Ramaphosa was Mandela’s protégé, one of the negotiators who helped bring apartheid to a formal end. And then he cashed out. And then he quit politics to reap the benefits of what he negotiated: democratic political reform, economic continuity with apartheid. Rather than stay in public life and help rebuild the country he helped liberate, he went into business—business with the Afrikaner corporate class that profited under apartheid. He made money through deals that would have been impossible without elite backing. McDonald’s. Coca-Cola. Unilever. By 2011, he was the 11th richest man in South Africa and had become the face of “Black Economic Empowerment” (BEE) in the boardroom, not the parliament. Meanwhile, the ANC’s moral leadership collapsed into scandal and mismanagement. Mandela left office in 1999 at age 81 and was followed by men he would not have chosen: Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, both accused of misdeeds in the 1999 Strategic Defence Package, and general corruption and rising crime, especially during the Zuma presidency from 2009–2018. Mandela preferred Ramaphosa.

While South Africa declined, Ramaphosa got rich. He had the skills that Zuma and Mbeki lacked, but he waited two decades before getting back into politics. By that time, Zuma had secured the presidency, and South Africa was on a downward trajectory. Zuma was forced to resign in 2018, and Ramaphosa was finally made president. Rather than slink away, Zuma has since created a new political party as a vehicle for his ambitious and ran against the ANC in 2024, coming in 3rd place, while the awful Julius Malema came in fourth. However, in second place was a white candidate, John Henry Steenhuisen, an Afrikaner who leads the Democratic Alliance party and serves as Minister of Agriculture in a coalition government with Ramaphosa’s ANC. Steenhuisen was in the meeting with US President Donald Trump this week and clearly stated that there is no genocide, and Steenhuisen is the Afrikaner candidate to lead the government. Yet the US media somehow managed not to focus on what he had to say. Steenhuisen was blunt that crime is bad for everyone.

We have a real safety problem in South Africa. I do not think anyone wants to candy-coat that. It requires a lot of effort to get on top of it. It is going to require more policing resources. It is going to require a different strategy to be able to deal with it. Certainly, the majority of South Africa's commercial and smallholder farmers really do want to stay in South Africa and make it work. - John Henry Steenhuisen, South African Minister for Agriculture, DA leader, Afrikaner politician.

Ramaphosa is not preparing for genocide; he is the beneficiary of white South African capital. Now, 30 years after apartheid ended, South Africa resembles a stratified Latin American economy, with a few Black South African elites like Ramaphosa at the top alongside the Whites. Ramaphosa could have stabilized South Africa after Mandela retired, but he chose to get rich first. The problem is that while he has talents that Mbeki and Zuma lacked, twenty years went by before he took the presidency; time that South Africa cannot get back.

One of the most revealing political inversions of our time is the growing tendency among certain Western commentators, odd expatriates and reactionary glorified tourists, to center their racial anxieties on South Africa, not in terms of that country’s enduring legacy of apartheid, nor the persistent inequality and state dysfunction that plague its majority population, but rather in defense of the white minority that once ruled it. In this narrative, the long-standing oppressors are recast as victims. The moral center of gravity is shifted. The question becomes not what apartheid did to South Africa, but what should have been fixed in the 1990s but was not. No, they focus on what post-apartheid South Africa might, maybe, potentially do to the beneficiaries of that system. Myths and projected fantasies.

Perhaps it is easier, and more emotionally satisfying for some, than to reckon with the fact that the possibilities of the post-apartheid project, like land reform and economic redress, were rejected as options that fit with global capital's preference for continuity over justice. To weep over symbolic crosses in the ground while ignoring the structural aftershocks of a racialized economy that still locks out the majority is not just an oversight. It is a moral preference, and that is bad for Afrikaner farmers because it contributes to awful crime rates for the majority, both whites and blacks, while elites benefit from the huge boom in private security. Afrikaner farmers, like other South Africans, need peace, order, and good government, not foreign fantasies.

But President Ramaphosa may have waited too long to lead, and no one knows what is coming next, because whatever it is, it is not about any reality of genocide in South Africa.

South Africa is not the next Rwanda or Zimbabwe, it is Mexico on the Cape.