Critical thinking has taken a leave absence. Reality is unreal. History is inverted, so the villains become the victims, and the victims the villains. Shakespeare captured it in Macbeth when the witches say, “fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Sounds like the policies that emanate from this 47th President.
I could write treatises about the illegality and illegitimacies of this President’s policies, and many of them – the arrest of Newark Mayor of Ras Baraka, the precipitous firing of Library of Congress leader Carla Hayden, just the latest, but so many breaches of decency and protocol. This president does not care about decency, nor about protocol. And clearly, with his amusing executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, he neither cares about truth or history. It is the executive order, not a law, not enforceable, simple rhetoric, that has both sparked lawsuits and caused museum executives to return historic items to their donors.
I never thought anyone would make me long for former President George W. Bush. We used to joke about how little he must have read, when we spied him reading the upside down comic book after September 11. But whatever he read, he had enough sense to help establish the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAC). He had enough sense to increase US assistance to Africa through HIV global funding, economic development assistance through the African Growth and Development Act (AGOA) and other legislation. He had enough sense to meet with 35 African heads of state, including, in 2001, South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki. I wonder, today, what the two Presidents talked about when they met. I am certain they did not talk about the way Afrikaners who colonized South Africa and exploited its Black natives, were “oppressed”.
Pir current President does not value history, though. He makes it up as he goes along, and he has an unfortunate coterie of power hungry sycophants who know better but muffle themselves for fear of being exiled from their lying leader. So white South Africans, the oppressive Afrikaners who exploited Black labor for generations (hello, Mississippi), are now feeling “discriminated against” because the new South African constitution allow people to take back some of the land that was stolen from them.
Inversive thinking. Down is up and up is down. A President who says he wants to eliminate “fraud, waste and abuse” send a plane to pick up “oppressed” South African land barons, grant them refugee status, and offer them resettlement assistant (fraud, waste and abuse) here in the United States. Our President has prioritized white South Africans, perhaps because his purchased co-President is from that country. Of the approximately resettlers, how many are his relatives or friends? And since he is so flush with cash, will he reimburse our government for his costly attempt to impose racial hierarchy in foreign policy?
Does our elected President and his purchased co-President Musk hope to resettle the entire Afrikaner population to the United States, providing them with monetary assistance to compensate them for “discrimination”. Sounds like fraud, waste and abuse, along with a warped form of affirmative action to me. But executive order 14151 – “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing – eliminated that, along with Executive Order 14173 – “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit Based Opportunity” seem to preserve preference for white people, especially exploitive Afrikaners who were only able to accumulate property in South Africa by aggressively wiping out the lives of Black South Africans. Topsy-turvy toxic policy that reinforces our President’s anti-Blackness as well as his ignorance of history. It is a slap in the face of the heralded South African President Nelson Mandela, as well as an attack of generations of anti-apartheid activists, including Randall Robinson, Mary Frances Barry, Ron Dellums, Dr. Dorothy Height, Harry Belafonte, and others. While Black Republicans were not notable activists, many played quiet roles in our nation’s (contested) opposition to apartheid. So General Colin Poell helped implement parts of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (1986) after it was passed over President Reagan’s veto, but Black Republicans, especially at the local level, were reluctant to challenge their President for fear of political consequences (sound familiar?).
We can expect more topsy turvey toxic policy from this administration, where down is up, up is down, victims are villains and villains are victims. The peculiar distortion of South African’s history is especially egregious, but not unexpected. What’s next?
