Nothing highlights the poverty of the media-Democratic mind than its weary use of echo-chamber buzzwords. Once Pravda-like instructions are sent out from DNC operatives, mindless media anchors mouth them in lockstep as gospel.
So, it was with the supposed “ambush” when South African President Cyril Ramaphosa met Donald Trump. Trump indeed pressed his guest on a number of issues, from the decades-long targeted killing of white agriculturalists on their farms by black hit teams that have totaled somewhere between 1,500 and 3,500, depending on how one defines such targeted killings.
Trump further wanted an explanation from Ramaphosa on his government’s new legislation aimed at land confiscation without compensation, and the de facto vanishing number of Boer farmers.
Trump was further bewildered by Ramaphosa’s assertion that the new law would not be used to take private property without paying for it (“No, no, no, no. Nobody can take land”), when in fact that was the very purpose of the new legislation in the first place. Trump also showed Ramaphosa videos highlighting a resurgence of South African extremism of the tired “Kill the Boer” sort.
The dictionaries define “ambush” roughly as “a surprise attack by people lying in wait in a hidden or concealed position.”
Ramaphosa’s visit was no surprise. He, not Trump, requested it. Ramaphosa spoke openly to the media before the meeting that he was planning to convince Trump that there were neither widespread killings of white farmers nor arbitrary confiscation of land.
In sum, Trump was the host; Ramaphosa was the guest, who requested the meeting to present his case for a return of a number of concessions from the U.S. He knew Trump would raise issues that had estranged South Africa from both the president and Congress, and he was calmly prepped, as expected, to offer counterarguments.
But why was Ramaphosa so eager for a meeting?
He knew that South Africa had enjoyed a rare, sweetheart, one-of-a-kind, no-tariff deal from the U.S. that had empowered his nation in the last few years to vastly expand its exports. In 2024, South Africa achieved a staggering near $9 billion surplus with the U.S.
Yet Ramaphosa and South Africa have a funny way of expressing gratitude for the free trade magnanimity accorded by the U.S.—especially both as a recipient of nearly $500 million in annual foreign aid and after raising asymmetrical high tariffs on lots of U.S. imports.
Recently, the South African ambassador to the U.S., Ebrahim Rasool, was expelled after he gratuitously slandered his host, the president, as a white “supremacist”—supposedly playing on “white victimhood as a dog whistle” out of fears of non-white demographics.
Like most globalist diplomats and intellectuals, Rasool had forged long ties with the American left and was accustomed to cheap, virtue-signaling trashing of the U.S. to his sympathetic progressive audiences. Most in South Africa supported the expelled diplomat’s allegations and smearing of his host president, as he returned home a hero rather than an embarrassment.
South Africa still trades on Nelson Mandela’s conciliation policies abroad, even as it has largely rejected his principles and insidiously transmogrified into an illiberal, violent, and racialist state.
In a characteristic fit of schizophrenic hypocrisy, the supposedly “ambushed” President Ramaphosa recently called the few South African white farmer families “cowards” who dared to consider fleeing his government-institutionalized harassment to resettle in the U.S.
I suppose he meant that they were to play the odds and hope they were not among the 60 to 70 farmers murdered each year for their race, and the hundreds assaulted. Or perhaps they were to take solace from the American left that such stuff happens because South Africa is one of the most violent places on earth, where thousands of blacks are murdered each year—though by other blacks and not for their race.
Why, then, the anger at seeing a handful of farmers leaving? And why would Ramaphosa want any largesse from an administration his own ambassador condemned as racist?
On the one hand, most South African politicians would like nothing better than to see the final riddance of the vestigial seven percent of the population.
But on the other hand, the lesson of Zimbabwe’s expulsions reminds them that such mass flight might well collapse the entire South African agricultural sector, if not the economy in general.
That same incoherence characterized Ramaphosa’s relationship with Elon Musk and his Starlink global internet system. He desperately wants Musk to do for South Africa what he has done for lots of countries, including Ukraine—ensuring high-speed internet at a cut-rate cost to remote areas.
But in contrast, his government uniquely insists that Musk essentially turn over about a third of any South African franchise to black South African partners. Ramaphosa will back down because he wants good Internet more than reminding the world that investors in South Africa must follow its racialist laws of partnership. Nonetheless, Ramaphosa has developed a bad habit of cultivating foreign magnanimity, but in a fashion that is ultimately insulting, often racist, and full of ingratitude.
In other areas, South Africa has sided with Russia in the Ukraine War—an embarrassing fact rarely mentioned by the adoring left. Indeed, it has facilitated arms transfers between Russia and North Korea, as well as opposed U.N. sanctions on Russia.
South Africa is one of the most anti-Israeli, if not anti-Semitic, nations in the world, and supported the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It usually votes at the UN in lockstep opposition to the U.S.
Of course, all that business is South Africa’s own.
But it should not expect most-favored-nation trade status and generous aid from a government its chief diplomat has smeared.
Nor should Ramaphosa have counted on an ebullient White House welcome when he and his predecessors have opposed U.S. policy on almost every international issue. (The media was excited before the meeting that far from being an ambush, Ramaphosa was going to confront Trump and set him straight.)
Indeed, South Africa has aligned itself on most key fault lines with dictatorial China and Russia—without a word of worry about the plight of the Uighurs.
The American Left and the media have blasted Trump, claiming there is no effort to kill white farmers in South Africa. They claim the “Kill the Boer” mantras belong to a long-ago age of legitimate resistance to apartheid.
Not true. In fact, Julius Malema, the leader of the “Economic Freedom Fighters,” the third largest party in South Africa, led a huge stadium crowd recently in 2023 in the “Kill the Boer, Kill the farmer” chants. And he added, “The revolution in South Africa is guaranteed.”
Malema is no aberration. The South African “Equality Court” in 2022 ruled that “Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer” was not “hate speech.” If calling for the mass death of an entire minority group is not hate speech in South Africa, then one wonders what possibly could be hate speech in that nation?
Trump hardly needed more evidence that by any traditional measure, South Africa is an ungracious, illiberal “democracy” that relies on U.S. largesse while opposing every element of its foreign policy.
That is why Trump stripped away America’s singular no-tariff policy and slapped a 30 percent tariff on South Africa’s exports to reduce the U.S. trade deficit with Pretoria. The state department will likely not be so ready to issue carte blanche travel, green card, or student visas to South Africans unless applicants can demonstrate credible fear of systemic, institutionalized violence.
Again, there was little animus in Trump’s meeting, and no “ambush” at all. Like the denouement of the so-called Zelensky “ambush,” Ramaphosa will likely be back, realizing that he, not Trump, is the president in need.
The end of the session was more or less a visually aided wake-up call to South Africa. In the future, President Ramaphosa might be wiser to look for Belt and Road help among his apparent true friends and allies. Russia and South Africa are similarly aligned on the Ukraine War, friendship with China, North Korea, and Iran, and share a like-minded common hatred of Israel.
Trump is simply reminding the world that the long-ago optimism of a new Mandela South Africa has long vanished. And U.S. foreign policy needs to readjust to the alterations that South Africa, not the U.S., had previously made to our relationship.
Ramaphosa apparently thinks, like the thousands of South African residents in the U.S., that the adoring, institutionalized, left-wing administrative state, media, universities, and foundations still run the U.S. But at least for the foreseeable future, they do not.
As a result, Trump is wishing South Africa well, not as an enemy, but simply as no longer truly a friend, given its undeniable serial and passive-aggressive hostility.
What the blinkered and somewhat semi-deranged left never fails to understand is that US foreign policy is not about helping other nations, it’s about helping the US. If foreign aid of one kind or another does this by helping other countries, then so be it. But too often in recent decades, it has failed miserably, unless the theory is true that placating foreign nations prevents them from going to war with each other or even attacking the US. By the time of the Biden regime, US foreign policy resembled a badly running machine left on because its operators were too timid or didn’t know how to turn it off. Trump couldn’t during his first term because he was beset from every side by enemies, fools, and Democrats, but I repeat myself. The President will set the US relationship with other countries the way it should be because it has to be done this way, and it is long past due.
What this article mostly avoids, but still takes a peek, is the unspoken taboo that must never, ever be spoken: the permanent veneration of the black man by leftists, and the concurrent deprecation of whites (although white leftists do get somewhat of a pass).
The result of this insane guilt trip is societal dysfunction, the ignoring (or pretending) of stark reality, and a permanent cycle of societal chaos. Though a few brave and intrepid souls have attempted to discuss the undiscussable, the powerful taboo of criticism of blacks in any manner or form invites a hellish tsunami of condemnation–a cancel culture death sentence that is as harsh as it is generally effective.
Donald Trump has waded into this verboten taboo with facts and evidence. Whether others will now take his lead and begin the conversation (channeling John Derbyshire) remains to be seen. But it is time for that conversation…way past time.
South Africa is an interesting case study. Pretty much all of the evils conservatives in the 80’s predicted would follow the fall of the white National Party government and take over by the ANC have happened. On the other hand, the National Party did not make it particularly easy for anyone to support them. There are lessons there, but I doubt anyone will bother to learn them.
One thing we sometimes forget about President Trump is that he headlined for many years a TV show.
So, the question for you experts is whether the Trump Oval Office Show is a reboot of The Apprentice or the Johnny Carson Show. I rather think the latter, since VP Vance is clearly playing the Ed McMahon role.
South Africa could compete with Germany under the Nazi government in terms of intent and viciousness against non Darkies except for the fact that black natives are often also the victims of crimes almost as bad as what they deliberately inflict on the white minority as part of what can now only be described as a national policy. They can’t hide it any longer. Is it any different than the anti-semitism cultivated and propagated in American Universities and Colleges? If America were governed by a Democrat black majority the likelihood, in my opinion, is that reverse racism would make anti-apartheid policies seem fair by comparison. Why? Because socialist governments always rely on discrimination policies to disguise their intentions, failures, jealousy and envy and if anything makes that obvious it is the ostentatious reverse apartheid policy which black S. Africans support. Any political attempt to justify entitlements based on historical or contemporary disparities, real or imagined will fail. And that is what socialism is about.
Socialism using government directives, even based on ethnic and religious nationalism, always encumbers it’s intensions with an incredible array of restrictive laws, statutes and regulations that hamper individual liberty when it comes to economic endeavors. The only exception can sometimes be seen where individuals are lucky to reside in a country endowed with resources, such as oil, that affords the entire population wealth. Race and religion easily emerge as issues where differences co-exist however whenever they don’t exist other factors emerge as in the former Yugoslavia as well as in Burundi and Rwanda. There is a cure which has proven to work.
If anything illustrates E pluribus unum it is economics and competitiveness within a free society. American capitalism (Constitutional empowered) can be thought of as a glue that binds. Immigrants always arrive in America and live in cultural and social ghettos that resembled the counties of their origin yet eventually they disperse, intermingle, intermarry and prosper far from where their grandparents and parents started out. Differences don’t completely disappear but similarities that are far more binding arise.
Genocides are always based on differences but nowhere were differences obliterated and social interaction fortified than in America. The foundation was based upon individual liberty as the essential and defining ingredient. If anything supplants geographic natural advantages it will be the restoration of liberty. It is more powerful than free energy… forever.