Friday Night Bigfoot Bait Open Thread: The Strongest Nepo Babies of American Apartheid

I think this aspect of the MAGA billionaire tech executives doesn’t get as much attention in the American media, partly because most Americans — including reporters — don’t understand how the apartheid era in South Africa is secretly viewed with nostalgia by quite a few white South Africans.

— Melissa Chan (@melissakchan) September 19, 2024

Forget South Africans, apartheid is ‘viewed with nostalgia’ by far too many Americans. Most of us, I assume, knew that Apartheid Clyde, his mini-me fanboi David Sacks, and even JD Vance/Blake Masters sugar daddy Peter Thiel spent their formative years in a society where white supremacy was literally enforced by law, but I didn’t know that the likely founder of QAnon was also a member of that select club. According to the Financial Times:

Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist turned Donald Trump fundraiser and Ukraine troll, left at age 5 and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent his childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s secret effort to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the creator of the QAnon conspiracy, which shaped Trump’s Maga movement. (Furber denies that he is “Q.”)

In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are over 50, white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This is probably no coincidence…

So what connects these men’s Southern African backgrounds to Maga today? Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the most important themes in American life today. For one thing, there was massive inequality. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was “notorious for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude,” writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. “White managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental center in Swakopmund and membership in the company’s country club.” The mine’s black migrant workers lived in labor camps.

For whites of a certain mentality, this inequality was not due to apartheid. They thought it was hardwired into nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others were not. That was just the way it was, and there was no point in trying to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid “worked” and was “economically sound.” His spokesman has denied that he ever supported apartheid.

The white South African nightmare of the 1980s, hanging over everything, was that one day black people would rise up and slaughter white people. Like the US, South Africa was a violent society, and became even more violent in the 1980s. Musk’s teenage memories of witnessing murders on trains may not be entirely true, but they do evoke the mood of the time. He warned in 2023 of the potential “genocide of white people in South Africa.” Trump’s recent claim about “American girls being raped, sodomized and murdered by barbaric criminal aliens” played on similar white fears…

If you are a libertarian who believes that inequality is natural and fears racial conflict, then you will be attracted to a certain type of American politics. You certainly will not want the government or institutions to try to intervene against racism. In 1995, a year after the ANC began trying to do so in South Africa, Thiel and Sacks, who met at Stanford, published The myth of diversity in the US. It is a well-written defense of “Western civilization” against “multiculturalism” (or what the right now calls “woke”), written by two white twenty-somethings who are certain that racism is not the problem. They even explain: “There are almost no real racists . . . in the younger generation of America.”

Three decades later, the duo and Musk, with whom they formed Silicon Valley’s “PayPal mafia,” support a white Republican party that spreads fabricated stories about black immigrants from Haiti eating pets. The opposing Democrats are fielding a black presidential candidate for the third time in five elections. The racial dimension of politics is almost as clear today as it was in South Africa…

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