When The Unreality Is Too Unreal
Characterizing white South Africans as a persecuted minority in need of saving is a miscalculation by the bad-faith unreality creators among us
Think of the right’s creation of alternate realities as a math equation.
When right-wing media and politicians and activists get that equation right, people are fearful for no reason, panicked for no reason, and turn to them for salvation. When they get that equation wrong – when the numbers just don’t add up for the content-consuming public – they get undesirable results, namely Democrats gaining a foothold in a political and legal and media environment dominated from top to bottom by far-right interests.
Republicans and their propagandists got the equation wrong in the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, the latter being a prime example of the American public’s rejection of ludicrous bad-faith arguments that seem not to land with voters when Donald Trump is not on the ballot. The equation was off in 2017 when Republicans pitched the death of the Affordable Care Act as an effort to save people’s access to health care. They got the equation all wrong in 2020 too when they acted as if normie stalwart Joe Biden – one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate’s modern history – represented a radical communist threat to the nation. The math of that made-up reality was dismissed out of hand.
For a more recent example, consider the unreality of the regime's segregation efforts in American public schools running headlong into the reality of a courtroom, where a judge forced the regime's lawyers to defend is anti-DEI initiative. The unreality in which white students in the US suffer discrimination did not hold up in this clash of realities.
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The American right got the reality-forging equation just right in 2016, creating an image of Trump as a disrupting force that would shake loose the calcified centrist power structure that had held a death grip on American politics in the postwar era. And in 2024, with the help of brainwashing algorithms used by Meta and X, the right’s equation was right again (It’s notable, I think, that 2024 marked the first time Elon Musk’s conversion of Twitter into a fascist propaganda machine played a factor in national elections). The algorithmic unreality in 2024 was total: The economy, they said, was in shambles (it wasn’t); Democrats had weakened the US overseas (they hadn’t); crime had reached historic levels (it was at historic lows); transgender athletes were destroying women’s sports (they weren’t); out-of-control immigration had turned every American town and city into post-apocalyptic deathscapes (there is no immigration crisis); Trump was a populist savior of the working class who would would remove the nation from foreign entanglements and maybe support abortion rights and IVF and affordable housing.
Denny Carter
Through the power of algorithms on Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s social media fiefdoms, Trump became the choose-your-own-adventure candidate. He was whatever you wanted him to be because social media sites controlled by bad actors told their products – the people signed up and posting on X and Instagram and Facebook – Trump was the Everything Candidate. People believed it and now we live under a system of competitive authoritarianism.
I think they really fucked up with the bad-faith, alternate reality equation that has resulted in the U.S. government identifying white South Africans are a persecuted group in need of saving. The regime this week granted refugee status to dozens of Afrikaners while denying that status to almost every other population on earth. It is the most nakedly racist policy the regime has so far implemented – quite the feat considering the competition for such a title.
The history of apartheid in South Africa includes an Afrikaner massacre of black students protesting segregationist policies in 1976.
The bad-faith unreality construction goes like this: White folks in South Africa are being targeted by a majority-Black government that is seeking revenge for the monstrous apartheid regime that was broken up three decades ago. The Musk-Trump regime recognizes these Afrikaners as “racially disfavored landowners” who have been unfairly targeted by corrupt lawmakers and require the protection of the United States. Nowhere does this belief exist outside the blackpilled reality generated on Musk’s fascist social media app, where Musk – a South African – and his followers believe South African whites are victims of genocide. All you need to know about how dreadful this is: White supremacist Stephen Miller called the effort a “textbook definition of why the refugee program was created.”
“This is race-based persecution,” said Miller, who has carried on the long tradition of fascist trolling unlike any other figure in the cursed Trump universe.
It’s another tragic case of far-right online spaces spilling into real-life policy making, the same way the poison created by crushingly ignorant Instagram health influencers have spilled into the nation’s health-related policy making. This unreality can only be forged through the careful use of bad-faith arguments – in this case, that white folks in South Africa are victims in need to saving. No one, not even Musk, believes this, just as he surely does not believe that the South African government refuses to do business with his corrupt business empire due to the color of his skin. But it must be true for their preferred policies to be implemented.
Probably you know by now that this protection of white farmers from South Africa has nothing to do with what we might call objective reality, which plays no role in right-wing policy making. The South African law known as the Expropriation Act, which allows the government to seize land without compensating landowners, has never been used to take away property from any South African citizen. Any effort to take land under the Act is subject to a thorough judicial review of why such a decision is justified. The Act is in no way discriminatory toward the Afrikaners who represent 7 percent of the country’s population and own more than half of South Africa’s farmland. That the average white South African is exponentially wealthier than the average black South African will carry no weight with members of the Trump regime.
Denny Carter
It checks out that Musk would lead the charge to craft an unreality in which the South African government is using its power against poor white families who happen to own most of the country’s land. It was Musk’s grandfather who moved his family from Minnesota to South Africa specifically to support the nation’s virulently racist white leaders who implemented apartheid in 1950. Seventy years before Musk would buy Twitter to defeat the “woke mind virus,” Musk’s grandfather railed incessantly against radio and television in the US as “unconditional propaganda warfare… against the white man.” Pretending white people are persecuted runs in the family, I suppose.
Forging an inverse reality by warping both history and current events is how the modern right wing shapes reality for its adherents. It’s when those outside the sordid far-right echo chamber start to believe this version of reality that we have problems, and fascist thought spreads, and otherwise normal people become sick with the lies of the unreality driven into their brains by insidious social media algorithms designed in a lab to short-circuit their reasoning abilities. It's when normies choose unreality over reality that we get fascism.
Thankfully this effort to characterize white South Africans – whose ancestors repressed black South Africans for generations with brutal violence – as a marginalized, persecuted minority group won’t work. The math of this unreality creation is off. Musk and Trump and Miller and the rest of the regime’s white supremacists are getting high on their own supply here. This shit might play among porn-addicted basement dwellers who poison themselves on the X platform fifteen hours a day every day, but it won’t play with normal folks who would require an hour of education just to understand the contours of this entirely made-up reality in which Afrikaners are refugees fleeing their homeland for the safety and protection of the United States.
Why am I so confident the bad-faith unreality math is off here? For one, nonprofit organizations that work with the federal government to house and feed and care for actual refugees have ended their working relationship with the government rather than serving Afrikaners who have experienced no hardship in their homeland. They have rejected the regime’s attempt to forge a new reality.
Denny Carter
“Just over two weeks ago, the federal government informed Episcopal Migration Ministries that under the terms of our federal grant, we are expected to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa whom the U.S. government has classified as refugees,” Bishop Sean W. Rowe of the Episcopal Church wrote in a letter Monday, according to The New York Times. “In light of our Church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step.”
Then there’s the Trump official who gave away the whole racist ballgame shortly after the Afrikaners landed in the US this week. Asked why the white South Africans were being hustled into the United States after the regime had denied entry to tens of thousands of refugees from Afghanistan and parts of Africa, a State Department official said, “One of the criteria is making sure they can be assimilated easily into our country.”
The unreality, it turns out, falls apart easily.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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