In Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders upon assuming office, there was one that halted the arrival of all refugees coming into the U.S--all but one category, that is. He welcomed white South Africans. On Truth Social, in March, he wrote that “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.” This follows an executive order he signed in February encouraging their resettlement in the U.S., citing a South African law on land expropriation and affirmative action as justification, claiming that it discriminated against Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch and French settlers, who ruled South Africa with an iron hand and strict separation of the races until the end of Apartheid in 1994. White South Africans still dominate the economy. About seven percent of the population hold more than 60 percent of top corporate management jobs and own seventy-five percent of privately held land.
There are several potential reasons for this. Trump has long been antagonistic toward South Africa for what he sees as cozying up to Russia and China, for referring Israel to the International Court of Justice, and its role in BRICS, which has been pushing for an alternative to the U.S. dollar as an international currency. This action on Afrikaner refugees, therefore, appears to be more about attacking South Africa for its independent, often anti-US stance, than about any concern for the ‘refugees.’
Another factor, however, gets scant media coverage: the number of people with deep South African ties who are in Trump’s inner circle.
Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, leads this South African cabal, which also includes David Sacks, Peter Thiel, and Joel Pollak. South African web designer, Paul Furber, who currently resides in South Africa, could be considered an adjunct cabal member.
While Musk, who personally funded a lot of Trump’s campaign, has publicly distanced himself from the country of his birth, which he left when he was 17, he remains interested in what goes on there. His family, who owned a diamond mine, were staunch supporters of apartheid. While his father was an engineer who became an independent politician in 1972 and joined South Africa’s progressive-liberal party, his Canadian mother, Maya Haldeman, came from a family who were members of the Social Credit Party of Saskatchewan, a conservative-Christian party that was known for populism and antisemitism. His maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, once claimed that white South Africa led the fight against the international conspiracy of Jewish bankers and other ‘people of color.’
Born in Germany, Peter Thiel moved to South Africa with his family due to his father’s job in a diamond mine. The Theil family later immigrated to the U.S., settling in California. Like Musk, it’s believed that Thiel has been influenced by the Afrikaners’ primal fear that African residents of South Africa would one day revolt against them. While we can’t know what’s inside Thiel’s mind regarding South Africa or its politics, his view of America’s constitutional machinery as a barrier to ‘a direct path forward’ is well known. In a 2007 essay, “The Straussian Moment,’ he argued that rational liberal modernity is ‘stultifying and doomed.’ The impact that a man with such views can have on someone as impulsive as Trump is frightening to contemplate.
Joel Pollak, senior editor-at-large for the alt-right platform, Breitbart, was born in South Africa but raised in the Chicago suburbs. He lived for a time in Israel, where he studied at the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies. A self-proclaimed liberal in his youth, Pollak’s swing to the right when he was an exchange student in his country of birth. The first shock to his left-wing view of the world was the South African government’s denial of the AIDS epidemic and the lack of apparent government concern for the lives of the blacks living in the townships. The second was the reaction in South Africa to Israel’s response to the Second Intifada. He witnessed anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric, and the refusal of the editors for whom he wrote to acknowledge it. His conversion was completed when he went to work for the late Andrew Breitbart as an editor of his blog-turned-conservative news platform.
Something of an outlier in this quartet, Paul Furber, a South African web programmer who posted on the far-right 4chan board under the username BaruchtheScribe, along with other ‘anon’ far-right conspiracy theorists, decided they needed to ‘go wider.’ From this, the infamous QAnon movement was born, which spread like wildfire when they moved from 4chan to user-friendly Reddit, where they created a new Reddit community called CBTS_Stream, short for Calm Before The Storm. When they kicked off Reddit, they moved to a constantly streaming YouTube channel, the Patriots’ Soapbox.
There is no hard evidence that any of these men are directly responsible for Trump’s sudden and inexplicable interest in the fate of South Africa’s Afrikaner population, but given his known lack of intellectual depth, it’s improbable that he came to this position of his own volition. The circumstantial evidence is compelling, and in the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” It is certainly something worth pondering.
