Liberal Hypocrisy: The Meltdown Over Trump Granting Persecuted Afrikaners Asylum

Donald Trump finally found the one group of foreign-born refugees that the American Left doesn’t like: white South Africans.

The president welcomed a few dozen Afrikaner farmers to Washington this week, offering them refuge from deadly persecution in their home country, South Africa. The media, naturally, went crazy, implying that Trump must be a racist for bringing in white people while clamping down on the influx of non-white asylum seekers.

The Episcopal Church, the national standard-bearer for woke Christianity, ended its decades-long contract with the U.S. government to help refugees settle in America over the arrival of the Afrikaners, citing “moral opposition” to helping them resettle. The Episcopalians—a wealthy but fast-shrinking denomination whose membership in the U.S. is 90% white—are thrilled to show mercy to foreigners fleeing persecution … but not white ones. 

Let there be no doubt that Afrikaners, like South African whites of English heritage, are suffering greatly. Since the end of apartheid in the 1990s, the country has declined both economically and in terms of safety. Crime has skyrocketed, affecting South Africans of all races, but with particular hideousness against white farmers, who have been murdered in large numbers by black gangs for years. 

Criminal violence affects all South Africans. But the black-run state itself is preparing to steal farmers’ land. Earlier this year, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa signed a law allowing the government to expropriate white lands without compensation. It is true that most farmland there is held by whites. This has been done before. In 1980, when the white-ruled colonial state of Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, the black Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe imposed land reform to take land from white owners and distribute it to blacks. The Mugabe regime took land from the people who knew how to make it productive and gave it to people who did not. Result: In twenty years, the country once called Africa’s breadbasket suffered economic collapse and a massive hunger crisis. 

South Africa knows how this story will end. Today, white farmers produce almost all of the country’s grains and 66% of its beef production. It is impossible to move black South Africans who have little to no experience running large farms onto expropriated land and keep them productive. But that is not stopping the government from pushing ahead with its equity scheme.

This is how things work in post-apartheid South Africa. Under its equivalent of DEI laws, white South Africans, regardless of their abilities and accomplishments, are systematically discriminated against in employment and school placements. In many cases, the results have not been to empower ordinary black South Africans, but to grant privileges to ruling party loyalists.

No country governed like this can thrive. Consider the fate of the state-owned power company, Eskom. By apartheid’s end, Eskom was the largest power generator in all of Africa. Then, beginning in 1998, the black government began sacking its white managers and engineers, replacing them with blacks who had no expertise in running a utility company, but who did have political connections to black politicians. As I reported in The European Conservative in 2008: 

By 2008, South Africa began to suffer its first-ever “loadshedding”—rolling blackouts necessary to keep the entire power grid from collapsing. Under the spectacularly corrupt government of President Jacob Zuma (2009-2018), Eskom very nearly fell apart, as loadshedding swept the nation of 60 million, threatening the fundamentals of Africa’s largest economy.

In 2019, the Ramaphosa government, desperate to fix the problem, hired a white South African executive, Andre de Ruyter, to turn Eskom around. Julius Malema, a Marxist militant who leads one of the country’s biggest political parties, protested hiring a white man to run Eskom. But de Ruyter took the job.

He failed. In Truth To Power, his memoir about his time there, de Ruyter says that anti-white racism, incompetence, and corruption—all supported by the government—doomed the utility. He writes:

Now, I am not naive: I understand that in every society there is a certain level of corruption. Whether in the US, France, Germany or the UK, corruption seems to be a ubiquitous phenomenon. The difference is that even if a corrupt official abroad takes a 5 per cent bribe, the bridge still gets built, the power plant still gets repaired. In South Africa, corruption has become so overwhelmingly dominant that the system feeding the corrupt has begun to fail.

In early 2023, de Ruyter resigned in defeat. The next day, someone in his office tried to murder him with cyanide-laced coffee. Eskom continues to reel from crisis to crisis. That’s South Africa today. 

What of Julius Malema? He is famous for leading political rallies in full stadiums, chanting, “Kill the Boers!”(“Boer” is a Dutch and Afrikaans word for “farmer.”) Despite Western media downplaying the racialist terror of these obscene chants, actual Boers who live in South Africa can’t afford to ignore the threat. 

Is it really such a surprise that some Boers are fleeing the country, where their ancestors migrated from the Netherlands four centuries ago? Yes, they came as colonizers, just as the English and other northern Europeans did to North America around the same time. However unjust white rule was, South Africa is their country too. As Paul Maritz, an Afrikaner studying in Europe, said in a 2023 interview with The European Conservative,

In South Africa, the number of people who want apartheid back is negligible. No one wants it back. What we want is a country that works. If you say a company owned by a white father and his white son can’t work with the government because of the color of their skin—and that’s exactly what the South African government is saying—then you’re saying that ability is trumped by race concerns. 

In South Africa, one on one, people from different races get along well. But there is a serious threat from radical ideology (like the EFF, which sang “Kill the Boer”), and a serious threat of the state collapsing due to its inability to fulfill basic responsibilities.

That’s easy to explain: because the victims are white, and the victimizers are black. It works the same way in the West. The hatred liberal media, liberal churches, and other leftists now spew against President Trump for giving shelter to these few Afrikaners fleeing persecution exposes the moral rot at the heart of progressive politics. For today’s Left, refugees are sacred, as long as they are not Christians of European stock. There is no one the white Western leftist hates more than his own people.

If you watch the video of the 59 Afrikaners welcomed into the U.S. this week, you’ll notice that, unlike most non-white asylum seekers, they are families of various ages—not military-age men. They are waving American flags. And they are unlikely to be a drain on the welfare system, but rather have valuable skills that they can use to grow food and raise cattle to feed their fellow Americans. 

Most South African whites prefer to remain behind and fight to hold on to their land, even as their own government despises them, seeks to dispossess them, and make them poor (God help them if Julius Malema ever comes to power). But for those who accept the Trump administration’s offer of asylum, welcome to America. If Trump keeps fast-tracking the immigration of skilled, productive refugees of European background, who are fleeing the immiseration and persecution of hostile and incompetent woke governments—well, Keir Starmer is going to have a big problem on his hands.