As we approach the Fifth of November, the day Britain resolves that there is no reason why the 1605 “Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot,” we should also remember that the two fascist billionaires, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, are products of the white Christian nationalist and racist apartheid state of South Africa. Musk’s ownership of Twitter, the world’s third-largest social media platform, and Thiel’s unveiled attempt to insert two of his hedge fund lackeys, J. D. Vance and Blake Masters into the U.S. Senate representing Ohio and Arizona, respectively, point to the export of apartheid fascism from the Boer veldt of South Africa to the shores of the United States.
Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. For two more decades, racial segregation was the law of the land and a fascist white nationalist surveillance state ensured compliance with that law. Under the apartheid system, South Africa’s population was classified as being part of four groups: African, White, Indian, and Coloured. In many respects, the apartheid system was an outgrowth of the Nazi German racial purity laws aimed at Jews, blacks, and those of mixed race. In South Africa, those of mixed white and black lineage were considered “Coloured.” From 1984 to 1994, the apartheid system created a tricameral parliament of a white House of Assembly, a Coloured House of Representatives, and an Indian House of Delegates. In addition, several black “homelands” or “Bantustans” were created with four receiving nominal “independence.”
It should be noted that several members of South Africa’s black, mixed race, and subcontinental Indian descent communities gladly participated in apartheid’s sham of a democracy. Therefore, it should not come as a shock that there are people of color in the United States, Britain, Canada, and elsewhere who wholeheartedly embrace the fascist policies of the U.S. Republican Party, the British Tories, and the Canadian Conservatives. Just as was the case with avid apartheid supporters in the South African Coloured and Indian legislative houses and the governments and legislatures of such Bantustans as Transkei and Bophuthatswana, there are willing dupes like Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, U.S. House Republican candidates Billy Prempeh in New Jersey and Allan Fung in Rhode Island, Georgia U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker, British Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, British Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman, former British Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, former British Tory Home Secretary Priti Patel, and former Canadian Tory Minister of State for Multiculturalism Tim Uppal who help apply a veneer of ethnic minority legitimacy for unbridled fascism with strong underpinnings of Christian nationalism. And just as apartheid South Africa had their propagandists among the press of the Bantustans and non-white communities, the United States suffers from the likes of Ye (formerly Kanye West), GOP coup provocateurs Kash Patel and Ali Alexander (formerly Ali Akbar), and shameless hate merchants Dinesh D’Souza, failed California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder, and Candace Owens. If future historians do their job, these carnival barkers for fascism will be judged as harshly as the black, Indian, and mixed race supporters of the apartheid regime.
The Musks were among the white families who prospered under apartheid. They lived in Waterkloof, a well-heeled suburb of Pretoria. Musk’s father, Errol, made his fortune in the African precious gem mining industry, which was a major backer of apartheid, mainly because of the cheap African labor who toiled under awful conditions in diamond, emerald, and other mines.
Musk’s business partner, Thiel, was also a beneficiary of apartheid. During the 1970s, he and his German parents lived in South Africa and the former South West Africa, now Namibia. South West Africa, a South African territory, had been subject to apartheid when the Thiels lived there. Thiel spent part of his youth in the former German colonial town of Swakopmund on the Atlantic coast of South West Africa. The area is known for a large uranium mine, which Thiel’s father, Klaus Thiel, helped build. Judging from their fondness for fascism and Nazis, Musk and Thiel appear to be quite nostalgic for the days of apartheid rule in South Africa. Thiel, a student at the elite Pridwin Preparatory School in Johannesburg and a German Grundschule—elementary school—in Swakopmund, trained him to be a defender of apartheid at Stanford University. At the university, Thiel defended the economics of the apartheid system, claiming that “South Africa was much more developed than its neighbors.” Thiel and Musk would gladly favor such a system for the United States, one where certain groups, including those known in the land of apartheid as “kaffirs,” “hottentots,” “roetmops,” “nikkers,” “charra,” and “smous,” “know their place.”
There is little wonder why Musk and Thiel have found common cause with Donald Trump. According to the book, “Disloyal: A Memoir,” by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, Trump, upon learning about the death of South Africa’s first post-apartheid President, Nelson Mandela, said, apartheid South Africa had been “beautiful” and that Mandela had “fucked the whole country up.”
Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who is now awaiting prison, has made common cause with South Africa’s leading white nationalists, including members of the Freedom Front Plus party, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), and the Cape Independence Party, whose leader, Jack Miller, considers Covid vaccine mandates to be “apartheid.” In Musk, Thiel, Trump, and Bannon, these white nationalists see an opportunity for the return of an apartheid state in South Africa.
It was not coincidence that Trump’s last national security adviser was Robert O’Brien. In the 1980s, O’Brien attended the University of the Orange Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa and learned to speak Afrikaans fluently. It was at the university where O’Brien met his white South African wife, an avid reader of two Afrikaans magazines, Huisgenoot and Dekat, both of which have had a history of supporting Afrikaner nationalism.
Two other South African mavens of apartheid who are in Trump’s circle are former CBS News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Lara Logan, a native of Durban, and Trump’s former ambassador to South Africa, Lana Marks, the Mar-a-Lago member and designer handbag businesswoman who was born in East London, Cape Province. Both were born during the apartheid. Logan has become a proponent of anti-Semitic conspiracies theories, including Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution being a Rothschild plot, and Jews engineering the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, the sort of pabulum trafficked by Musk, Thiel, Trump, Bannon and their supporters on Twitter.
Musk and Thiel may pine for the days of apartheid South Africa, South West Africa, Walvis Bay, and white minority-ruled Rhodesia, but they have no inherent right to push fascism in their adopted nation—the United States. They do have an obligation, however, to pay their fair share of taxes to the United States Treasury. Taxing to the max these white nationalist billionaire brats may even, ironically, help put America back on an even political keel.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist, author and nationally-distributed columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
