Yusuf Bangura (Nyon, Switzerland): Sierra Leone Telegraph: 7 April, 2025:
I recently listened to an insightful 25-minute interview of The Guardian journalist Chris McGreal on Democracy Now’s YouTube channel (Democracy Now!, 2025), which looked at the apartheid roots of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who has carved out for himself a big job in Trump’s government to reorganise the US’s federal bureaucracy.
In that interview, I was struck that a group of white South Africans who were raised in the apartheid system have penetrated not only the high-tech industry in the US, but have also joined forces with Trump’s MAGA movement, inserted themselves in the Trump administration, and are part of Trump’s grand strategy to overturn the liberal order in the US and globally.
The insights I gained from the interview forced me to do further reading on the background and activities of the group. I also refreshed my understanding of hard-right or white supremacist groups in the US, Europe and South Africa to gain insights into what looks like a convergence of interests and transnationalisation of the groups’ activities.
After listening to the interview, I hypothesised that the breakdown of the global liberal order is not only empowering authoritarian regimes across the world and ushering in old-fashioned big power politics, as realist scholars in international relations predict; it is also connecting three types of racial politics globally.
These are the politics of the anti-immigrant and pro-white MAGA movement in the US; the politics of the nativist or anti-immigrant far-right parties in Europe; and the politics of “white victimhood” in South Africa, which seeks to hold back or overturn progressive social change in South Africa and elsewhere.
Many of these movements reject the label of racism or genetic white superiority and insist that their goal is to defend white culture and interests, which they believe are threatened by demographic changes and public policies that favour non-white people. Some, such as AfriForum in South Africa, even identify as civil rights and minority advocacy groups.
However, the growing strength of these groups, especially in the US and Europe where many are now
represented in government, poses a threat to civic values and forms of politics that respect diversity, inclusion and equity.
The legitimisation of these groups by the US – the most powerful state in the world–may undermine popular struggles for social rights and the wellbeing of historically disadvantaged groups. It threatens to reverse the laudable work of the UN in combatting racism, xenophobia and related intolerances (Bangura and Stavenhagen, 2005; UN Human Rights Council, 2001).
This essay interrogates the drivers of this ‘new’ brand of racial politics and the threats it poses to the world order. It starts with an overview of the apartheid roots of four US high-tech billionaires, three of whom are active in right-wing American politics, handsomely financed the Republican party in the 2024 elections, and currently play important roles in the Trump administration.
I’ve used the activities of these tech billionaires as entry point because I was motivated to reflect on the convergence of the racial politics of these movements after listening to McGreal’s interview. I initially wanted to write only a short piece on the tech billionaires as I found their growth in the US tech world and insertion into American far-right politics intriguing.
However, as I delved into their backgrounds, I realised that there is a bigger story to tell on the rise of transcontinental racial politics. The overview I present on the tech billionaires relies on McGreal and several other readings that I consulted after listening to McGreal and reading some of his articles in The Guardian.
What comes out of the overview is a fusion of the libertarian and anti-equity world views of the tech billionaires and the hard-right MAGA movement in the US. The overview provides a context for analysing in the subsequent section what I’ve described as transcontinental racial politics.
I divide that section into three parts: Trump’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI); Trump’s
disengagement from European liberalism and embrace of hard-right nativist parties in Europe; and Trump’s support for white supremacist groups in South Africa and their false narrative of “white victimhood”.
The PayPal Mafia
Let me start with an overview of McGreal’s insights on Elon Musk’s apartheid background. Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, a Canadian, was a staunch anti-Semite, who sympathised with Hitler and opposed the Allied war against Germany. He moved to South Africa in 1950 – two years after the Afrikaner National Party (NP) came to power and institutionalised the apartheid system.
Haldeman was attracted to the National Party’s ideology of Christian nationalism, which the NP’s leader at the time, John Vorster, proudly associated with Nazism.
Before moving to South Africa, Haldeman led a fringe movement in Canada that sought to replace democracy with a fascistic government run by technocrats (McGreal, 2025 (a) ).
Musk lived a privileged life in South Africa and went to some of the best whites-only schools. His
father, Errol Musk, rejected the principle of “one person one vote” and advocated a separate parliament for each ‘race’.
In a letter he wrote to Elon Musk in 2022, cited by Rebecca Davis (2024) in The Maverick, he asserted that “With no whites here, the blacks will go back to the trees.”
Elon Musk moved to Canada at the age of 18, in 1988, with much racist baggage from his family before apartheid was dismantled in the 1990s.
Amazingly, Davis (2024) reports in the same article that there is hardly any mention of the word ‘apartheid’ in Musk’s biography, published by Walter Isaacson in 2023, despite the tumultuous anti-apartheid events during Musk’s formative years in South Africa.
Musk is not the only white South African that came out of apartheid and made it big in the US tech industry. Three other high-tech geeks, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Roelof Botha also have deep apartheid roots.
Botha was born in Pretoria and is the grandson of Pik Botha, apartheid South Africa’s last foreign minister. Sacks was born in Cape Town and Thiel in Germany but went to school in Johannesburg and Swakopmund—a Namibian town with a distinct German architecture and feel that became a South African colony after Germany’s defeat in World War One.
Background readings I consulted before holidaying in Namibia last year (confirmed by McGreal) indicate that souvenirs celebrating Hitler and Nazism were available in gift shops at Swakopmund decades after Hitler was defeated in 1945. That city was a bastion of Nazism and white supremacy in Africa.
In 1998, working with about twenty young high-tech nerds in the US, Musk and Thiel co-founded PayPal, one of the pioneer companies for electronic payments around the world. Sacks and Botha served as PayPal’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer respectively before moving to other ventures.
Since leaving PayPal, Botha has been a board member of more than a dozen investment firms and heads Sequoia Capital, a venture capital company with assets valued at USD 85 billion.
This group of highly-driven venture capitalists became known as the PayPal Mafia (Flexmize, nd; Khan, 2024). It is believed that members developed strong social bonds at PayPal and continue to support each other even after leaving the company. Most of the members are graduates of Stanford University or the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
A distinct feature of the South African PayPal quartet is their lack of empathy and strong libertarian views. Musk recently stated that ‘‘the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit’’, which will push the West to “civilizational suicide” (Wolf, 2025).
He and his colleagues are viscerally opposed to government initiatives that seek to redistribute income, wealth and opportunities in favour of the poor or disadvantaged. They believe that their own success in
education and business is entirely due to their individual efforts.
Growing up in apartheid South Africa, which saw itself as an outpost of Western civilisation, it’s not surprising that these tech billionaires espoused a racist ‘Western civilisational’ form of politics when they migrated to the US to pursue their university education and careers. They found a home in the US’s large network of groups that espouse racist or white supremacist ideas.
Thiel and Sacks published a book, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, in 1998, in which they criticised multiculturalism in colleges and universities. They denounced
affirmative action or social justice policies, claiming that they hurt rather than helped the disadvantaged and entrenched segregation.
Relying on Max Chafkin’s biography of Thiel, Davis notes in her Daily Maverick article that, as founder of The Stanford Review at Stanford University, Thiel opposed the university’s plan to include black writers in the student literature syllabus. Thiel used a racist trope “Western culture in the balance” as headline to scare white students and elicit their support for his racist views.
We’re all familiar with the infamous Nazi-like “Heil Hitler” salutes that Musk made when celebrating Trump’s second inauguration at a rally in January 2025. Many in Germany and elsewhere with deep memories of the Holocaust condemned the salutes, even though the US’s Anti-Defamation League only described it as an awkward gesture (Connolly, 2025).
Musk’s estranged daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, also affirmed that his father’s gesture was “definitely a
Nazi salute’’ and described the Trump administration as “cartoonishly evil’’ (Teen Vogue, 2025). Musk, however, dismissed his critics as politically motivated. Regardless, it was widely reported that Neo-Nazi, white supremacist groups celebrated the salutes on social media (France 24, 2025). Symbols matter; they project identity and signal intentions.
Three members of the quartet, Musk, Thiel and Sacks, have strong ties to Trump and the Republican Party. Musk is Trump’s point-man to dismantle the federal bureaucracy, through the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, and reconfigure it after Trump’s anti equity and authoritarian image.
He spent USD 277 million on Trump’s and the Republican Party’s 2024 election campaigns (Ingram and Reilly, 2024); and has used his X platform (previously Twitter) to disseminate conspiracy theories (Klee, 2024) and support hard-right views, such as “the great replacement theory’’ propounded by the French writer Renaud Camus and embraced by the MAGA.
Followers of this theory assert that white people are being demographically and culturally replaced by people of colour—a process, they affirm, that should be combatted.
Thiel is estimated to have a net asset of more than $18 billion (Salvucci, 2025) and ranked 129th in global wealth. He runs several investment or venture capital firms and is the financial godfather of US Vice President J.D. Vance.
He bankrolled his election for an Ohio Senate seat in 2022, spending USD10 million on his campaign, and once employed him (in 2015) in his global investment firm, Mithril Capital (Klaidman, 2024). And Sacks is a big donor and fundraiser for Trump, having raised more than $12 million for him in one event at his Francisco home. Trump has rewarded him with the job of ‘’White House AI and Crypto Czar’’.
After leaving PayPal, Miles Klee (2024) reports in the Rolling Stone that Sacks made a fortune by founding other tech companies, earning him the title “angel investor’’ (or investing in good ideas in their formative stages and reaping huge returns when they become successful) for his early investments in
companies such as Uber, Facebook, and Airbnb.
In discussing the influence of rich apartheid era white South Africans in Trump’s political circle, one should also mention the conservative radio host, Joell Pollak, who currently works as a senior editor at Breitbart News (Fabricius, 2025), an American far-right news website, which was founded by the hard-right ideologue Steve Bannon – Trump’s chief strategist when he first became president in 2017. Pollak was born in the South African mining town, Johannesburg.
Another white South African that is strongly linked with Trump is the famous golfer, Gary Player. Player told Biz News (2024), a South African online business daily, in 2024 that South Africa’s high level of unemployment is caused by its ‘open border’ policy and called for policies to regulate immigration.
Player’s views reflect the strong immigration posture that has fanned xenophobia and violence in South Africa since the end of apartheid. In his words, “You cannot share a loaf of bread with 50 people”. Pollak was a recipient of the US Medal of Freedom during Trump’s first term in office and celebrated Trump’s return to the White House in 2024.
In the Biz News interview, he applauded Trump’s tough stand on law and order and asserted that Trump “is going to stop the Woke agenda and bring back a sense of discipline and pride”.
Transcontinental racial politics
Racism has always been a global phenomenon. It provided the ideology for Europe’s conquest of foreign peoples and lands, transforming the world’s disparate regions and continents into a Eurocentric system. It is associated with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the enslavement of Africans in the US, and the extermination of indigenous people in the Americas and Australia.
Racism fuelled the brutal colonisation of Africa and Asia, the German genocide in Namibia, the Holocaust in Europe, and the apartheid system that dehumanized black people in South Africa.
In one of his most famous quotes, often cited by Barrack Obama, Martin Luther King, the US civil rights leader, asserted that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Surely, the history of global society does support this optimistic view of the human experience. The trans-Atlantic slave trade ended, slavery was abolished in the US, laws that respect the rights of indigenous peoples and African-Americans were promulgated, genocide was categorised as a crime against humanity, and colonialism and apartheid were defeated.
A large body of laws and declarations that made racism a taboo and a crime were passed or adopted across the world and in global institutions. However, it is also incontestable that even though the arc of “the moral universe bends toward justice”, it always carries within it elements of discredited values, bigotry and hate.
This suggests that justice is always a contested issue. Hate-filled movements and ideas that have been defeated or contained may receive a new lease on life and threaten an established order or consensus when the balance of forces changes.
With the triumph of Trumpism, attacks on liberal values in the US, and crumbling of the rules-based global order, the world seems to be entering a new phase in racial politics. Institutions and policies that helped to push back or contain racism in the US are being dismantled; and previously marginalised racist groups, ideas and practices are being legitimised in the nerve centre of government.
This development is not a return to the extremist ideology of ‘scientific racism’ or biological
white superiority that drove slavery, colonisation and genocidal politics.
The new racial politics is generally couched in non-racial, meritocratic terms. It sees racial diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as anti-white discrimination. In other words, it turns the historical discourse of racism on its head: the victims of racism are now white people, not black and brown people, who are
accused of receiving undeserved favours.
In the logic of white victimhood, DEI policies deny jobs, services and educational opportunities to qualified white people, encourage inefficiency and retard economic development.
Perhaps, US House Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right conspiracy theorist, captured the mindset of members of this movement when she told a Trump rally in 2022 that “Joe Biden’s 5 million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you, replacing your jobs, and replacing your kids in school.
And coming from all over the world, they’re also replacing your culture. And that’s not great for America” (Anderson, 2022). Far-right groups project an image of toughness, use inciteful language to stoke up fear among voters, and cast themselves as the defenders of the “people” against an indifferent elite. Their defence of traditional values and gender hierarchies endear them to voters who may not share their racist beliefs (Wolf et al, 2025).
The Trump administration’s embrace of this movement has struck a chord with Europe’s hard right nativist parties—reversing a hundred-year history of consistent and strong US support for European liberalism.
This radical change in US policy is also impacting racial politics in South Africa where white groups with strong roots in the apartheid system have solicited support from the US by projecting an identity of white victimhood or anti-white racism and white genocide, hoping that the limited social reforms that the African National Congress has implemented since 1994 will be reversed or contained.
Trump’s attack on DEI in the US
Since taking office in January 2025, the Trump government has acted swiftly through a raft of
executive orders to roll back many social reforms that helped to moderate the harmful effects of
centuries of White racism and exclusionary politics.
Central to these orders is the systematic assault on DEI, which is redefining the terrain of racial politics in the US today. This assault has four major planks. First, it has shut down programmes that seek to promote a more diverse and inclusive federal bureaucracy (White House, 2025 (a) ). This is likely to affect racial minorities, women, transgender groups and those with disabilities. The reason is clear: even when governments prioritise merit, recruitment in public bureaucracies is often influenced by social ties
or networks.
Numerous studies have shown that “race-blind’’ or “race-neutral’’ policies may make racial minorities with a history of discrimination invisible, if recruiters are under no obligation to look for qualified minority candidates.
In his 2009 book, The Politics of Exclusion, Leyland Saito shows that race-blind policies that were expected to generate widespread improvement overlooked non-white groups that were not well connected or represented in politics.
Second, the new order prohibits companies with federal contracts from using DEI policies in recruiting staff. This may make it difficult for racial minorities who lack the right social ties to gain access to the federal contract system.
Shockingly, the Trump government is even trying to impose this ban on foreign businesses. It has warned foreign companies, local suppliers to U.S. embassies, and U.S. grants recipients worldwide to comply with the ban or risk losing payments (Rosemain and Irish, 2025).
France’s ministry of trade and Spain’s labour ministry have kicked against the ban, with the latter describing the DEI ban as a “flagrant violation” of Spain’s anti discrimination and diversity laws (Reuters, 2025).
Indeed, the DEI ban drives a knife into the core values of the UN system and its impressive work on diversity, equality and inclusion.
The logic of the DEI ban goes against research that finds a strong correlation between diversity and profitability. McKinsey and Company, a US management consulting firm, conducted four surveys on the relationship between leadership diversity and company performance between 2015 and 2023, with each report showing that diversity is good for profitability.
The 2023 report Diversity matters even more: The case for holistic impact, which covers more than 1,000 companies in 23 countries, found that organisations with higher levels of ethnic and racial diversity (or companies in the top quartile of diversity) were 39 percent more profitable than those with less diversity.
It also found that gender-diverse companies had a 39 percent higher profitability than those with less gender diversity.
Third, Trump has shut down the Department of Education (Whie House 2025 (b) ), which, over the years, has developed programmes that seek to empower racial minorities in the US’s highly unequal educational system.
This retrogressive policy operates in tandem with the defunding of colleges and universities that teach and conduct research on racial diversity, equity and inclusion.
And fourth, Trump is trying to whitewash the teaching of US history by underplaying the terrible toll of slavery on African-American lives and calling for the restoration of the Confederate statutes – symbols of slavery and racial oppression.
Trump’s recent executive order on the Smithsonian Institution (White House (c) ), which hosts the largest complex of museums in the US, to remove “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian’s museums and research centres is seen by many civil rights activists and historians as an attack on academic freedom and African-American history (Barrow, 2025).
The executive order specifically names the National Museum of African American History as part of the Smithsonian Institute’s “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history”. This flagrant attempt to define historical truth as that which is sanctioned by the state and to police it is reminiscent of George Orwell’s Big Brother in his fictional totalitarian state in which rulers wield absolute power
through a dreadful system of mass surveillance.
It is important to point out that the victims of the full gamut of Trump’s policies are not just racial minorities and immigrants. Women, LGBTQ communities, pensioners, the white working class that massively voted for him, university professors and researchers, students and academics protesting Israel’s genocidal carnage in Gaza, foreign travellers who store anti-Trump views on their phones, diverse groups of people in federal institutions that are being considerably downsized, and those who value free speech are all impacted by Trump’s unchecked use of executive power and shakeup of the federal state.
Trumpism and European racial politics
Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion is occurring at a time when far-right parties
with a dark history of racism are making tremendous gains in European politics. This poses a
challenge to the sustainability of the liberal European and global order as well as the protection
of racial minority rights in Europe. The post-war order is being turned on its head. In defending
Europe’s fragile democracies just after World War Two, the US worked with mainstream
European parties (i.e. those that embraced social democracy, liberalism, Christian democracy, and
mainstream conservative beliefs) to outlaw or contain racist and extreme left parties. The US played a lead role in denazifying German society and supported the Basic Law and Constitutional Court Act, which prohibits parties that “seek to undermine or abolish (Germany’s) free democratic basic order’ (The Federal Constitutional Court n.d.).
Under these provisions, Hitler’s National Socialism party (estimated to have had 8.5 million members) and the communist party were banned from politics. The Italian Constitution of 1947 also banned the extreme right and violent National Fascist Party and its successor, the Republican Fascist Party. And US leaders aggressively pressured mainstream Italian parties to not share power with the Italian communist
party (the largest in Europe at the time), and threatened covert operations against the Italian government if the communists gained control of it (Boghardt, 2017).
Europe’s post-war economic boom and expansion of welfare provisions helped to consolidate the US-backed fledgling democracies and kept extreme right or racist parties on the fringe. The marginalisation of hard right parties was also aided by Europe’s proportional representation electoral system.
While the PR system made it easy for fringe parties to gain representation in legislative institutions, it also acted as a check on such parties to gain control of governments.
Under the PR system, voters distribute their votes to many parties. This necessitates coalition governments, as very rarely is a single party able to secure the majority of the votes and monopolise power. The mainstream parties also pursued a policy of “cordon sanitaire’’—or firewall by refusing to form coalition governments with extreme right or extreme left parties (Worth, 2024).
However, in the last two decades, as Europe experienced a rapid increase in migration and its
economy largely stagnated, hard-right parties, which mimic the racist parties of yesteryears, have
made substantial electoral gains across the continent.
The cordon sanitaire or firewall has been broken in many countries (Worth, 2024). Today, hard-right parties govern or share power in seven countries: Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, and, to some extent Sweden, where the far-right party props up the centre-right governing party, which has pledged to sharply reduce immigration.
According to The Economist’s (2025) data on European parties’ votes and seats shares, hard-right parties are now Europe’s most popular even though they have mostly been kept out of power. If, as the journal projects, the hard-right’s vote share is able to match its seats share, Europe will become “less welcoming of racial and sexual minorities’’.
J. D. Vance and Musk’s brazen interference in Germany’s 2025 elections, in which they supported the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which received an unprecedented one fifth of the votes, sent shock waves across Europe’s liberal political establishment.
Musk tweeted that only the AfD could save Europe (Le Monde, 2025), and Vance shocked the world by meeting with the leader of the AFD, Alice Weidal, before the elections and chastised German mainstream politicians for excluding the AfD from government (Shuster, 2025). And Trump condemned the recent court ruling in France that found Marine Le Pen guilty of corruption and barred her from contesting elections for five years (Symons, 2025).
At a stroke, these unprecedented interventions upturned more than 80 years of US policy of keeping hard-right parties in Europe from the centre of power. They signalled that Trump’s government is uncomfortable with Europe’s liberal parties and prefers to work with the hard-right, which shares its authoritarian and anti-DEI world view. They suggest that Trump is not just disengaging from Europe in order to pivot to Asia, as realists, such as John Measheimer (The Face of War, n.d.), have affirmed.
An additional, and equally if not more important, reason for Trump’s disengagement from Europe is that he doesn’t like the liberal world view of the dominant powers in Europe.
Trumpism and white victimhood in South Africa
Trump’s assault on DEI has provided a fillip to the discourse of “white victimhood’’ advanced by white South Africans who seek to hold back or block redistributive justice. With the dismantling of apartheid and loss of white power and influence in politics, there is, perhaps, no other place in the world where the notion of “white victimhood’’ is as potent as in South Africa.
Nicky Falkof (2023), writing in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, links this sense of victimhood, which she describes as “moral panic’’, to two emotional strands or beliefs that have plagued white South Africans since the end of apartheid: satanism and white genocide.
According to Falkof, belief in satanism or stories of occult rituals, including the black abuse of white children and cannibalism, was prevalent in the dying years of apartheid in the 1980s and 1990s, forcing many white South Africans to migrate to Australia and the US.
The black liberation fighter assumed the status of the folk devil or Satan in the conspiratorial imagination of white supremacists. Falkof notes that the second myth—”white genocide’’—gained traction in 2023 as white supremacists came to believe that the ruling African National Congress encourages black militants to exterminate whites after a few instances of white farm murders.
South Africa’s white supremacists are totally blind to the enormous White privileges and grossly obscene levels of inequality in that country even after 30 years of ANC rule. Even though Whites account for only 7.3% of the population, they own more than 70% of farmland and vastly dominate the manufacturing, mining and modern services sectors.
We were shocked by South Africa’s obscene racial inequalities when we holidayed in the Western Cape Province in November 2024. Leafy white neighbourhoods had big and immaculate houses as well as
dreamland swimming pools and high electric fences.
The contrast with the more than 400 high density townships, especially Khaylitsha, home to two million people, with innumerable tin shacks and poor sanitation, was mind boggling, depressing and deplorable. We couldn’t believe that such dehumanising places still existed and seemed to be expanding even after 30 years of ANC rule.
The ideology of white supremacy is intertwined with the global history of racism. It is what drove Europe’s conquest of the world. White supremacy lost its sting with the end of slavery, colonialism and apartheid, and became confined to fringes within states. However, scholars believe that it has made a strong rebound in recent decades by assuming a transnational character.
Heidi Beirich (2022) has traced the evolution of these movements from a domestic to a transnational phenomenon. As she notes, these movements use modern technologies and have crafted a coherent worldview that focuses on fear of displacement by non-whites and the need to counter demographic trends that aid displacement, increasingly through violence.
These transnational movements largely operate in the US, Europe and South Africa. One remarkable development is the increasing interconnection of the politics of white supremacist groups in South Africa and those in the US.
Previous sections have shown how Musk and his South African PayPal colleagues moved seamlessly into the libertarian and anti-DEI discourses and movements in the US and became ardent supporters of the Republican Party and Trump.
The penetration by South Africa’s white supremacist groups of US politics and its feedback effects in South Africa goes deeper than the activities of the high-tech quartet.
To give a few examples: Jacob Ware (2020) reports on the Council on Foreign Relations’ website
that a Neo-Nazi organisation, the Base, which was formed in 2018 and active in Maryland, USA,
recruited some of its members from South Africa; and a senior official of an Afrikaner far-right
group, Suidlanders, participated in the infamous white supremacists’ Charlottesville Unite Right
rally in August 2017, in which a young woman was killed by a far-right car attack.
And the murderer of nine African-Americans at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, Dylann Roof, was inspired by the politics of white supremacy in Southern Africa. His Facebook page had a picture of him with a jacket bearing racist white Rhodesian flags as well as his manifesto, which he titled “The Last Rhodesian’’.
Significantly, leaders of AfriForum, the ultra-right Afrikaner organisation, Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roest, travelled to the US in 2018 and lobbied the Trump administration to resist land redistribution in South Africa (McGreal, 2025 (b) ).
The organisation opened an Afrikaner Foundation in New York in 2024 to coordinate its international activities. During their campaign in the US, Kriel and Roest falsely claimed that “White farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land.’’
AfriForum has been strong advocates for Musk in his standoff with the ANC government, which insists that Musk’s proposed Starlink project in South Africa should include the participation of black people as part of that government’s Black Economic Empowerment programme. Musk described the ANC’s demand as “openly racist ownership laws’’.
The lobbying activities of the South African hard-right groups were massively boosted in February 2025 when Trump issued an executive order (White House, 2025 (d) ) condemning South Africa’s new land law, which seeks to confiscate some white farmland, and freezing aid to the country.
The order also condemned South Africa for taking Israel to the International Criminal Court and accusing Israeli leaders of genocide in Gaza. It’s clear that hard-right groups in South Africa now have strong allies in Trump’s White House and the MAGA movement.
Trump has even offered white Southern Africans, whom he claims are being victimized, refugee status in the US. The goal of the Trump-Musk-AfriForum alliance is to preserve South Africa’s highly iniquitous racial system of land ownership, which is a product of massive land grabs by white settlers and displacement of black people from their lands.
Conclusion
Trump’s assault on the global liberal order has empowered far-right movements with a dark history of racism and violence. These movements no longer espouse the racist theory of biological white superiority or “scientific racism”. They believe instead hat the ‘white race’ is being replaced demographically and culturally by non-white people through lax immigration laws, and that programmes that seek to correct historical racial injustices and foster inclusion and equity discriminate against Whites and should be resisted.
One interesting dimension of the transnationalisation of hard-right movements is the role that tech billionaires with apartheid roots have played in their development.
These billionaires and their far-right views found a home in America’s racially-charged environment when they moved to the US to pursue their careers. They financed Trump and the Republican Party and are part of the strategy to upend the global liberal order.
Previously operating within the confines of nation-states, hard-right movements have become transnational in membership, information sharing, networking, and mass activism.
The cordon sanitaire or fire wall that restricted them to the fringes of politics has been broken in many
countries; and Trump has relentlessly pursued their grievances on immigration and DEI.
Speeches by senior government officials and Trump’s executive orders clearly demonstrate a realignment of American power away from liberalism and towards hard-right groups in Europe and South Africa.
The racial factor, which complicates recent shifts in the geopolitical landscape, is likely to influence the calculations of states as interests are realligned.
Trump and his new friends are unlikely to prevail in this new form of politics, given how far the world has come in combatting racism and the declining authority of the US in the global structure of power.
But it’s a challenge that the rest of the world will have to recognise and confront. The arch of the moral universe undoubtedly bends towards justice, as Dr Martin King observed, but it needs sustained pressure and vigilance to keep it in the right trajectory.
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