SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
white nationalism
Maintaining Empathic Sanity in Trump America
There’s more to this than simply “opposing Trump”—fighting, you know, our enemy. It’s also a matter of honoring and acting in sync with large, complex values.
Apr 20, 2025
From Gulf of America to mass expulsion of “illegals” (people of color) to continuing genocidal complicity in Gaza to whatever the daily news brings us... welcome to Trump America! Welcome to the small-minded white nation so many long for, free once again from those large, inconvenient values—e.g., the Declaration of Independence—that keep disrupting the way things are supposed to be.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...”
Cone on! In Trump America, those words were never meant to be taken literally. They create a sense of what I call empathic sanity, which has led to, for instance, the civil rights movement. But as President Donald Trump understands, empathic sanity can’t compete politically with hatred and fear—the creation of some good solid enemies—especially when mainstream Democrats, in their desperation for financial backing, are more than willing to shrug and minimize their values in the name of compromise.
If all people are created equal, my God, that pushes the limits of today’s world beyond the awareness of most legal bureaucracies, not to mention beyond the actions of most governments.
Trump, on the other hand, snorts at compromise, at least publicly, and pushes the agenda that works politically. He’ll do so even in defiance, for instance, of the Supreme Court, which recently demanded the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the hellhole prison in El Salvador to which he was sent without trial, without charges, without any chance to plead innocence. Garcia is a legal U.S. resident (father of three children who are U.S. citizens, husband of a U.S. citizen) and didn’t commit a crime, but he was snatched by ICE agents out of the blue and sent to a foreign prison. Team Trump has ignored the court’s demand for Garcia’s return, declaring that his deportation was an act of “foreign policy”—which they can conduct free of oversight.
This is all about clearing the country of enemies: of non-whites. Call them terrorists, call them criminals—dehumanize them—and then deport them. In Trump America, this is foreign policy. Millions of Americans are now in fear of deportation—for expressing the wrong political opinion (stop bombing Gaza), for simply being the wrong color.
And as Thom Hartmann pointed out, Trump is planning to up the ante. His team could start going after “you and me”—U.S. citizens who simply annoy him politically. Hartmann quotes Trump, in conversation with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele: “Home grown criminals. Home growns are next.”
And he adds, referring to the prison where Garcia was sent (the U.S. pays El Salvador for its use as a human dumping ground): “You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”
Trump as a looming Hitler? Yes, I’m sure that’s part of the current state of America, but in the present moment the primary issue is the full-on return of racism. As Clarence Lusane writes in The Nation:
There is a straight line from the 2017 “unite the right” rallies in Charlottesville to the far-right-led “Stop the Steal” movement to lies about Haitians eating cats and dogs to Donald Trump’s first day in office upon his return to power. No president in the post-civil-rights era has been as racially aggressive as the now-47th president.
Trump, Lusane notes, is the nation’s “white nationalist in chief.” His actions three months into his second term range from renaming the Gulf of Mexico (what was it again... Gulf of Some Country a Little Further North) to “re-renaming” military bases after Confederate generals to shutting down all DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs to stopping “the expanding population of Black, Latino, and Asian people in the United States.”
Indeed, Lusane writes: “The second coming of Trump will be one long slog through the bowels of racial animus and juvenile reprisals. Permanent resistance is the way forward.”
Permanent resistance is certainly necessary, but as I think about what this means, I return to the concept of empathic sanity—that is to say, valuing all of humanity and working to create a world that works for everybody. There’s more to this than simply “opposing Trump”—fighting, you know, our enemy. It’s also a matter of honoring and acting in sync with large, complex values.
What might this mean? Here’s one example, from Jewish Voice for Peace, regarding a rally a number of organizations held recently—on Passover—in New York City. Common Dreams quotes the organization’s social media post about it:
We are outside Federal Plaza to say: Stop arming Israel. End Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Free political prisoners held by ICE. Stop the attacks on immigrants, trans people, and students.
They chanted for peace in all directions: “None of Us Are Free Until All of Us Are Free.”
Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Jay Saper, whose great uncle had been at Auschwitz, put it this way:
This Passover, the Jewish festival of liberation, we cannot celebrate as usual while Palestinians in Gaza face famine and the U.S.-backed Israeli government uses starvation as a weapon of war.
The Seder ritual cannot be theoretical: It calls us to strengthen our commitment to the liberation of the Palestinian people. We commend the courageous students and all people of conscience raising their voices in dissent to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and call for the immediate release of Mahmoud Khalil and all political prisoners.
“The Seder ritual cannot be theoretical”: That hits the heart of it. No real values are theoretical. If all people are created equal, my God, that pushes the limits of today’s world beyond the awareness of most legal bureaucracies, not to mention beyond the actions of most governments. This is not a simplistic cry. It forces us to grope for understanding that lies well beyond the borders we have set for ourselves.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Will Black Trump Supporters Speak Out Against His Racist and Authoritarian Government?
The silence of Black MAGA supporters in the face of Trump and Vance’s bigotry during the campaign has carried over to the second Trump era.
Mar 30, 2025
During the 2024 election campaign, candidate Donald Trump’s most controversial rally occurred at New York’s Madison Square Garden. A comedian on the program referred to the island of Puerto Rico—and by implication Puerto Ricans—as garbage. He and the Trump campaign were rightfully pilloried and called out for his disgusting bigotry.
Little notice was given, however, to another noxious racist moment at the same event. On Trump’s playlist for the rally was the Confederate and white nationalist anthem “Dixie.” Notably, that song was played as Trump loyalist and harsh defender Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) was coming on stage. Donalds is African American and perhaps Trump’s most visible Black sycophant. While Black social media and journalists crucified Trump and Donalds over the incident, for Black MAGA supporters, the episode was simply put in the memory hole.
They were muted as well when Trump and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance spread racist falsehoods about Haitians supposedly eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. They seemed to be the only people in the country who didn’t hear what everyone else had heard—a fabrication of stunning proportions.
Trump and MAGA’s White Nationalist Rampage
The silence of Black MAGA supporters in the face of Trump and Vance’s bigotry during the campaign has carried over to the second Trump era. Now that he’s president again, their voices are being quelled as his white-power, autocratic government takes shape.
The president has spent almost every day of his second term in office so far raging against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); issuing executive orders of a white nationalist flavor; attacking a federal workforce that’s disproportionately people of color; and making it clear that rolling back civil rights and Black social and education advances is one of his top priorities. Nearly every move of his has involved nods to racist themes and aims. That includes his effort to defy the Constitution and try to eliminate birthright citizenship, his mass firings and funding freezes while he vanishes DEI programs across the federal government, his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants (of color), and even his take on the wildfires in Los Angeles and the Washington area airplane-helicopter disaster.
Trump thinks of his racialized and racist perspective on such events as “common sense.” Consider that a shield for his bias against and antipathy to science and evidence, as well as his visceral inability to see Black people and other people of color in any position of authority and expertise outside of sports and entertainment.
Racism should really be considered the central characteristic of Trump 2.0.
His vitriol against the world’s most marginalized and poor has led him to try to completely shut the door on illegal (and even legal) immigration—with a single exception. Recently, he spread his arms and opened America’s visa gates to Afrikaners, the whites whom he (along with Elon Musk) has determined are an oppressed minority in South Africa. Falsely claiming that their lands have been seized by the South African government and that they face genocide, in an executive order he called them “victims of unjust racial discrimination.” He also wrote on social media, “Any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship.” Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Elon Musk, Trump’s co-president, who traffics in racist themes about race and intelligence online, is South African apartheid-era born.
It must be strongly emphasized that Trump’s executive order and his multiple social posts on the subject are not only blatant lies but align with the work of South African and American white supremacists who have falsely charged that a “genocide” is indeed occurring there. And speaking of white supremacists, add to that list his decision to release the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who were among the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (with, of course, Trump’s blessing and encouragement). With the stroke of a pen, he absolved violent and white nationalist criminals who had carried signs supporting the Holocaust and yelled racist epithets at Black Capitol police officers.
His war against Black agency has been happily joined by his MAGA allies in Congress. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), for example, threatened to cut off millions of dollars in aid to the District of Columbia unless Mayor Muriel Bowser removed street art that read “Black Lives Matter” and renamed the area adjacent to it (previously known as Black Lives Matter Plaza) Liberty Plaza. Clyde claimed that the art was a “divisive slogan.” It went unmentioned that, if he genuinely wanted to get rid of divisive racial symbols, he could start at home. According to the Equal Justice Institute, Clyde’s state of Georgia is host to “more than 160 monuments honoring the Confederacy.”
Silence Is Not Golden
All of this is part of Trump’s lawless and corrupt war on democracy and the strategic divisiveness that is both his brand and his currency. The convicted-felon-in-chief’s usurpation of power has been as shameless as it is brazen, as he attempts to impose a government that could be characterized as racially authoritarian. In fact, racism should really be considered the central characteristic of Trump 2.0.
And what has been the response of Black Republican members of Congress to such behavior? Where is the pushback from his (once upon a time) only Black cabinet member, former Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson? Has there been any reaction from Snoop Dogg, Nelly, or other pro-Trump rappers who claim affinity with the Black grassroots? The answer, of course, is not a peep. Most have run for cover, pretending that Trump is not who he has always been: a serial racist attempting to reshape the nation into a far-right, anti-democratic, white, Christian nationalist stronghold.
Some of his prominent Black acolytes have, in fact, gone on the record opposing “equity” and DEI in general. Byron Donalds, for example, says he has issues with “equity” because it puts a person’s demographic ahead of his “actual qualifications.” It should be noted that, during the 2024 campaign, Donalds, whom Trump was then supposedly considering as a vice-presidential candidate, stated that the Jim Crow segregation era hadn’t actually been so bad because “the Black family was together” and “Black people voted conservatively.”
But qualifications or even competency are not really the issue. As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote, “Donald Trump does not care about merit.” It couldn’t be plainer or simpler than that. In late February, with the encouragement and full support of Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump fired Gen. CQ Brown Jr. from his position as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There is little doubt that Trump got rid of him because he was Black and had been outspoken on issues of race and inclusion. Hegseth accused him of having a “woke agenda.” Brown, a four-star general, is to be replaced by Dan Caine, who, you undoubtedly won’t be shocked to learn, is white and a three-star general.
On the rare occasions when Black MAGA denizens have actually addressed the president’s pathological drive to resegregate the country, it has been to protect him and his policies from criticism. The Black Conservative Federation (BCF), for example, issued a statement, riven with White House talking points, defending Trump’s (probably illegal) federal funding freeze, even as it was being condemned broadly by so many, including some of his Republican allies. Echoing Trump, it stated without evidence that the freeze would do no harm to programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicare, and Social Security while ignoring the massive negative impact it was going to have on Head Start, Medicaid, and other programs. To the BCF’s embarrassment, the president was forced to rescind the order 48 hours after it was issued.
Their one-sided loyalty to Trump knows no bounds. Last year, BCF created and presented him with the “Champion of Black America” award at their gala. And that was no joke. He gleefully accepted the award while making awkward racial remarks to the mostly white crowd. The BCF also held an inauguration event for him with tickets ranging in price from $5,000 to $100,000 dollars, which, according to the group, was soon sold out.
The BCF declared on its Facebook page that it is proud to celebrate Black History Month (BHM) and encourages everyone to “celebrate the rich tapestry of contributions made by African Americans throughout history.” Yet there was not one word addressing the cancellation of BHM events at numerous departments across the federal government following the orders of the nation’s white-supremacist-in-chief to quash DEI and any programs that seemed related to it. The Defense Department issued a memo declaring “identity months dead,” while the Transportation Department gleefully announced that it “will no longer participate in celebrations based on immutable traits or any other identity-based observances.”
Far-right political scientist and Trump booster Carol Swain, best known for the Islamophobic rant that forced her to leave her tenured position at Vanderbilt University, wrote a mumble-jumble article hailing his attack on DEI. Although like some other Black conservatives she benefited from affirmative action, she now wants to pretend that DEI is an evil distortion of civil rights. She advocates for the neutral language of “nondiscrimination,” “equal opportunity,” and “integration,” suggesting that they are acceptable conservative values unlike “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” She seems pathetically unaware that Trump has no love for civil rights, voting rights, or affirmative action.
Out of Touch with the Black Majority
It must be noted that Black MAGA is overwhelmingly out of sync with the Black community in general. In large numbers, African Americans support DEI, affirmative action, and other hard-won programs that provide opportunities historically denied thanks to racial prejudice and discrimination. Black opposition to Trump is not just due to the racist slander and bile he now aims at people of color, but also to a well-documented history of bigotry. His long record of housing discrimination and advocacy for voting suppression flies in the face of the Fair Housing Act and the Voting Rights Act of the 1960s, signature victories for the civil rights and Black power movements that Trump and his Black supporters now disparage.
Trump garnered only single-digit support from Blacks in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Despite an effort to scam Black voters with Trump-created Black groups and false claims of surging Black support, he won only 6% of the Black vote in 2016 and 8% in 2020.
Unless there is organized and mobilized political resistance, President Trump will continue to throw racist tantrums and engage in dangerous, even potentially disastrous, racist policies for the next three years and 10 months while Republicans, including Black MAGA types, stand by in a distinctly cowardly fashion.
In the 2024 election, Trump won between 13% and 16% of the Black vote. This was a rise from, but not a great leap above, that 8% (documented by the Pew Research Center) in his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden.
More recent data shows Trump rapidly losing whatever Black support he had. A YouGov and the Economist poll in February found that only 24% of Black Americans approved of Trump’s job performance so far, while about 69% disapproved. In that poll, white approval was 57% and Hispanic approval 40%.
Denied a Role in Trump’s New Administration
In the new Trump administration, Black Republicans have essentially no perch from which to speak out (even if they wanted to). Trump has one African American in his cabinet, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, as was true with Ben Carson in his first term. Both were ghettoized at HUD. And Turner has recently bent the knee and essentially surrendered HUD to Elon Musk’s rampaging “Department” of Government Efficiency. Turner, in fact, even formed a DOGE Task Force that will certainly lead to staff cuts at HUD (but no guarantee whatsoever of any savings). In the meantime, HUD canceled $4 million in DEI contracts.
Trump also nominated former football star and disastrous Senate candidate Herschel Walker to be ambassador to the Bahamas. Walker, who had to be chaperoned to interviews during his 2020 Senate campaign by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and others due to his striking inability to make it through an interview without numerous gaffes, has no qualifications whatsoever to be an ambassador.
While some of Trump’s Black supporters have grumbled privately about being ostracized and marginalized, they dare not speak out publicly or demonstrate anything less than 100% fealty. And they are hardly the only Blacks suffering job losses because of Trump.
His goal to get rid of tens of thousands of federal workers will have an immediate impact on the economic and social health of the Black community. After all, African Americans constitute a disproportionate number of federal workers, a key area of employment that helped build the Black middle class. While African Americans constitute about 12.5% of the population, they are about 19% of the federal workforce. And being central to DEI, they are essentially guaranteed to be first on the chopping black.
Yet Black MAGA gathered for a Trump-led Black History Month celebration at the White House, clearly unphased by the irony of such a grim Saturday Night Live-style moment. Like his previous BHM events, it was, of course, mostly about Trump. Some of his favorite old and new Black sycophants were there, including far-right Christian activist and niece of Martin Luther King, Jr., Alveda King; golfer Tiger Woods (rumored to be dating Trump’s ex-daughter-in-law); HUD Secretary Scott Turner; Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.); and Trump youth organizer C.J. Pearson.
In an interview, Pearson stated that “President Trump’s anti-DEI policies aren’t promoting racism but what they are doing is manifesting the dream of the great Martin Luther King Jr.: a nation where one isn’t judged by the color of their skin but instead by the content of their character.” Pearson was making this claim while, across the federal government, departments and agencies were canceling Black History Month celebrations and “identity” events.
As the crowd drank wine and ate snacks, neither Trump nor any of the attendees mentioned the elephant in the room: the president’s savage anti-DEI campaign.
Unless there is organized and mobilized political resistance, President Trump will continue to throw racist tantrums and engage in dangerous, even potentially disastrous, racist policies for the next three years and 10 months while Republicans, including Black MAGA types, stand by in a distinctly cowardly fashion. And count on one thing, as is likely to be true of so many other aspects of Donald Trump’s policies: Their capitulation will not age well.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Elon Musk's Shiny New Dystopia Is Just White Supremacy in Cyberpunk Dress
The current cyber-coup in Washington, D.C. by this country’s tech broligarchy is intended in part to remove the stigma from the politics of hatred and racialism.
Mar 08, 2025
The opening weeks of the second Trump administration have produced daily headlines that read—no, this is not hyperbole!—like science fiction. The spectacle of a South African tech billionaire and his cronies staging a 21st-century cybercoup with the acquiescence of an aging lunatic of a president beggars belief. Elon Musk has given vast powers to young, even teenaged plenipotentiaries like Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, 19, who had earlier been employed by Musk’s brain-chip project Neuralink and has now been made a special adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology and the Department of Homeland Security. The Trumpian lists of forbidden words and concepts have reminded some observers of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
High Technology and Squalor
Insights into our present crisis, however, are also offered by science fiction novels that, over the decades, imagined artificial intelligence, brain-Internet interfacing, the decline of the state in the face of tech corporations, and the development of largescale digital systems and ways they might be hacked. Such works coalesced into the cyberpunk school of sci-fi writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Heirs to that tradition like novelist William Gibson may now be seen as the reluctant prophets of—yes!—Elon Musk’s invention of a new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE for the second Trump era.
Cyberpunk has especially resonated in South Africa, its themes explored by authors like Lauren Beukes, whose 2008 novel Moxyland is set in a futuristic Cape Town that labors “under a tyrannical and vigilant government and media.” As she explained, “I’m always writing from that perspective of growing up under what was a utopia for me and a repressive violent state that destroyed lives and futures for Black people when the racist government wasn’t actively murdering them.” Cyberpunk themes have also deeply shaped video games like Canadian-South African director Neill Blomkamp’s Off the Grid, in which Mega Corporations are pitted against one another in a contest for dominance.
Rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health.
The racist tinge to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s ongoing hacking of the government should also bring to mind Blomkamp’s 2009 “first contact” movie, District 9, which highlighted the determination of white nationalists to cannibalize the resources of populations who had been marginalized precisely to make them vulnerable enough to be looted. With its simultaneous depiction of high-tech wonders and social squalor and its foregrounding of corporate rather than state power, District 9 also has significant cyberpunk themes.
On January 31s, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted, leaks from the Treasury Department revealed that high-ranking government employees were mounting resistance to ad hoc DOGE head Elon Musk’s demands that his team of young hackers be given entry to the financial-transaction systems managed by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). That’s the unit that makes virtually all government payments, control of which amounts to control of the government. It soon became clear that DOGE operatives had indeed been given authorization to access BFS platforms. As a result, Elon Musk, the CE0 of three private corporations, has gained the ability to oversee government financial transactions (with no questions asked about how he might use the information obtained to enrich himself or harm competitors).
By mid-February it was clear that one of Musk’s acolytes, 25-year-old Marko Elez, had for some time obtained overwrite privileges at the BFS—power, that is, to override the entire federal budget, if he (and Musk) wished to. Elez briefly felt he had to resign due to past messages on social media boasting of his racism, including his advocacy for “Indian hate.” His cause was nevertheless adopted by Vice President JD Vance (whose wife Usha is, ironically enough, from India). For right-wing movements, whipping up hatred of racialized minorities is crucial to getting into and staying in power, and disciplining Elez would have undermined Vance’s project—in comparison to which his wife’s honor is apparently of little interest to him. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Elez was soon reinstated.
Overwrite Privileges
Musk maintains that he’s reducing government waste by capturing the Treasury Department infrastructure and arbitrarily firing large numbers of government workers. He essentially abolished by fiat the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main government distributor of aid globally, which he bizarrely characterized as a “criminal” organization and the employees of which he called “worms.” He abruptly cut off its field agents in dangerous areas like the Congolese capital Kinshasha from their email access and funds to escape a potentially hazardous situation.
Nor was that agency the only object of his ire. In his view, vast swathes of the government are unnecessary and wasteful. No matter that his own companies have fed from the public trough to the tune of nearly $21 billion dollars since 2008 and his DOGE team has been enormously wasteful and dangerous. For example, they fired hundreds of personnel at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration who oversee the country’s nuclear arsenal. When the Gen Z DOGE ninjas finally thought better of it, they couldn’t immediately rehire the experts since they didn’t have their personal emails and had already abruptly closed their government accounts.
As though intent on causing serial catastrophes for the United States, Trump and his crew then began firing employees of the Federal Aviation Agency without whom air traffic controllers say they cannot do their work. They appear to have done keyword searches for “probationary” employees of the agency whom they let go en masse, unaware that the term has a technical meaning in government. A newly promoted FAA employee with a high level of irreplaceable technical knowledge would still be “probationary” for one month.
And here’s the reality of our governmental moment in the second age of Donald Trump: Rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After all, every $100 million of funding for NIH-supported research (often at universities) generates some 76 patents. In turn, such breakthroughs can generate as much as $600 million in continuing research and development funds. Cuts to overhead at universities hosting NIH research threaten to bankrupt the country’s network of unparalleled research universities, setting the U.S. farther behind in a race to innovate in which China has already taken the lead. The DOGE cowboys may tell themselves that private industry will take up the slack, but (bluntly put) that’s a libertarian fairy tale.
Cyber Capital
The tech-bro oligarchy’s rise to power is intimately connected with profound changes in America’s political economy. This country has always had a capitalist system, but it has taken radically different forms over time. Each of those forms has had a strong racial dimension. Today, cyber capital seems in the process of becoming dominant, driven by the internet and large language models (misnamed “artificial intelligence”). The digital economy now represents 12% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than industry, and from 2017 to 2021 it grew seven times as fast as the rest of the economy. It is also giving a fillip to American trade. In 2022, government data indicated that “while U.S. real GDP grew by 1.9%, the U.S. digital economy real value added grew by 6.3% driven primarily by growth in software and telecommunication services.”
This development was foreseen by cyberpunk authors like Gibson whose 1984 novel Neuromancer is soon to be an Apple TV serial. His hacker hero, Henry Dorsett Case, takes on the fabulously wealthy Tessier-Ashpool SA, a clan-corporation with its own space station fighting the attempt of an artificial intelligence entity, Wintermute, to become autonomous. An amoral gun-for-hire and adrenaline junkie, Case gradually discovers that he’s actually working for that AI entity, which could be seen as a symbol for oppressed, non-autonomous workers or minorities, and is coerced into helping it. (The Cyberpunk genre often depicts a dystopian world in which the dispossessed, ranging from Haitians to immigrant Mongolians, form defiant subcultures never quite penetrated by white corporate digital power.)
The Ultimate in White Privilege
It has been argued that digital capitalism is intricately interlinked with whiteness as an ideology, serving to perpetuate a racial hierarchy that evolved over the past four centuries. Such a historical interconnection between whiteness and technology functioned as both a tool and a rationale for European colonial expansion. The technology-driven ability to ransack the rest of the world for its wealth turbocharged Europe and North America in the early modern and modern periods. In some instances, as was true with slavery in the United States, Black workers were simply kidnapped and made to work for no pay. The total value of the enslaved in this country on the eve of the Civil War has been estimated at as much as $3.7 billion, among the country’s biggest capital assets at the time.
Elsewhere, instead of outright slavery, an external system of oppressive colonialism was established to extract value from the colonial world for the metropole. South Africa was a classic example of how a white settler-colonial capitalist class from the Netherlands profited from the utter exploitation of Black labor. Consider it no accident that Elon Musk came from South Africa or that such a system, even after it was ended, gave birth to the “PayPal Mafia” of “libertarian billionaires” that has now taken over the U.S government (though they sold PayPal to Ebay in 2002 and no longer own shares in that company).
Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a 21st-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination.
Elon Musk grew up with the ultimate in white privilege, for which he is clearly nostalgic. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, for instance, his Johannesburg-based father Errol “worked on building hotels, shopping centers, and factories;” held political office in South Africa while it was still an apartheid state; and opposed the very principle of one person, one vote. Black South Africans were excluded from the university Errol Musk attended, had their movements restricted by pass laws, could not shop in white establishments, and had no right to vote.
In 1971, when Elon was born in Pretoria, Black South Africans earned, on average, about a sixth of what the average white worker did. And keep in mind that his father Errol wasn’t even the most hardline supporter of the old regime in his family. He viewed his in-laws, the family of Elon’s mother Maye, as far worse. And indeed, Joshua Haldeman, Elon’s maternal grandfather, a Canadian Nazi, moved to South Africa in 1950 because he liked its apartheid racial segregation and ruling white nationalism. No wonder that, today, his grandson Elon is a supporter of Germany’s neo-Nazi party the AfD.
Peter Thiel, Musk’s comrade-in-arms among the tech-bro oligarchs, is from a German family that moved to the South African town of Swakopmund, which had a substantial German population—many of them unreformed Nazis who idolized Hitler. In the 1980s, at Stanford University, Thiel allegedly proclaimed that “apartheid works.” He now serves as the chief ventriloquist for Vice President JD Vance, hence Vance’s recent attacks on any European attempts to curb racist speech.
District 9
What a resegregated world would look like was imagined as science fiction allegory in Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9. In it, an alien spaceship, perhaps disabled, parks over Johannesburg in 1981. Its passengers descend and live in a ramshackle slum, District 9. After a while, the government decides to exile them to a settlement outside the city, hiring Multinational United, a private corporation, for the purpose. It begins evicting the aliens, smeared as “prawns,” brutalizing them and even performing experiments on them of the kind once used by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The smarmy white Afrikaner Wikus van de Merwe starts as the corporation’s point man in executing that forcible relocation but becomes infected with alien DNA and begins transforming into one of them. Hoping to reverse that phenomenon, he aids an alien who adopts the human moniker Christopher Johnson. Johnson attempts to return to the mother ship and pilot it to the home world, having discovered to his horror that his people are being experimented on. The film is prescient in highlighting how contemporary capitalist states increasingly view immigration as a problem rather than an asset, how xenophobia drives violence and displacement, and how the role of private corporations in policing citizenship is on the rise.
The South African mafia and their fellow travelers are conducting a counterrevolution. Developments like the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the United States and the 1994 end of apartheid rule in South Africa both represented an international wave of reaction against racist politics. Such reforms made it distinctly harder for politicians and businessmen to gain and keep power by stigmatizing people of color and representing them as a “terrorist” threat to whites. The current cyber-coup in Washington, D.C. by this country’s tech broligarchy is intended in part to remove the stigma from such a politics of hatred and racialism.
It should be underlined that birthplace isn’t destiny. Many South African whites, Beukes and Blomkamp among them, are committed to democracy and determined to make their multiracial country work. Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a 21st-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination. Sadly, we have yet to see any of the libertarian racists now in charge of the U.S. government grow a conscience as Blomkamp’s Wikus did.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular