90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

...And I Said, Call The NFL For Help!!

Land Reform and Farm Murders in South Africa

South African farm murders have long been a niche cause on the Internet, and the country has made headlines again due to a South African government plan to seize the land of white farmers under the guise of “South African land reform.”

News of these farm murders and land seizures have gained steam with the release of Lauren Southern’s documentary Farmlands. And United States President Donald Trump has brought even more attention to the plight of Afrikaners with his tweet that he would be looking into the South African land and farm seizure.

Most people don’t know much about the history of South Africa beyond the simplistic propaganda of the 1980s – white South Africans bad, ANC good. The history and current situation of South Africa, however, is much more complex.

Defining Terms: Who Are the Key Players?

Before going any further, terms should be defined and the key players identified:

ANC: The African National Congress, the leading party in South Africa since the end of apartheid.

Afrikaners: Dutch-, German- and French Huguenot-descended white South Africans who primarily speak a language called Afrikaans.

Bantu: A group of black South Africans including the Xhosa (of which Nelson Mandela was a member) who originally lived in the northeast of the country.

Boers: A subset of Afrikaners who still lead a rural and agricultural existence.

Democratic Alliance: Currently the second-largest party in the South African parliament, the Democratic Alliance is a broad-based centrist party that is comparatively economically liberal for South Africa. It enjoys broad, multiracial support, though it is most popular among all racial minorities – white, Coloured and Indian. Its black supporters are often derided as “clever blacks” by ANC supporters.

EFF: The Economic Freedom Fighters, a far-left political party in South Africa that has pushed the South African government to seize land from white farmers. Sometimes derisively called “Everything for Free,” the EFF is the third-largest party in South Africa, but is poised to become the second.

Khoisan: A popular name for the original inhabitants of most of the territory now known as South Africa. This is not an ethnic designation, but a linguistic one. These are who the Dutch settlers first encountered.

A Brief History of South Africa: From Early Settlement to the Boer War

To understand the current situation in South Africa, it is important to first understand the country before, during and after apartheid.

South Africa’s modern history begins with the Dutch East India Company, which established trading posts for sailors along the coast. Dutchmen soon started settling the area, with little, if any, conflict with the native Khoisan population. Dutch settlers, however, quickly came into conflict with the Dutch East India Company’s authoritarian rule.

Freedom-seeking Dutch settlers moved north starting in the 17th Century. In 1852, Boers founded the South African Republic (known as the “Transvaal Republic”) and then the Orange Free State in 1854. These are called “Boer Republics” and they, in turn, came into conflict with both southward-expanding Bantu tribes (most notably the Zulu, who were in the process of conquering other nearby Bantu tribes) and the British Empire.

“White South Africans” are typically treated as a monolith, but there are two main, distinct groups: The Afrikaans-speaking Afrikaners and the English-speaking British. Indeed, there were intense hostilities between these two groups, especially after the Second Boer War when the Boer Republics were reforged as British colonies.

Telling the Afrikaners to “go home” is a nonsensical statement. They are not Dutch. They do not hold Dutch passports, nor would they at any point have been welcomed back by the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In many regions of South Africa, the Afrikaners have been around longer than the Bantus and have a stronger claim on the land, having purchased it from Khoisans. On the other hand, traditionally Bantu land was conquered from other Bantu tribes or taken by the Bantus from the Khoisans.

A Brief History of South Africa: The Boer Wars

“The Boer Wars” refers to two wars between the Boer Republics and the British Empire, but mostly the second one. The first was a rout for the Boers and left the British Empire with egg on their face. They would not be embarrassed a second time.

The first concentration camps were built for Boers. Not just any Boers, but primarily the wives and children of Boer Commandos (irregular guerilla troops) fighting the British Empire. The strategy was simple: Lock up their women and children, and they...

Also Known As: Postmodernism:

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7.1 Million Lies

Under White Privilege Theory, Progressives Won’t Be Happy Until You Hate Your Kids

You're probably perpetuating racism. How? Because you love our kids and want them to do well in life. Which is just the worst, right?
Under the “Family” heading, The Atlantic recently carried a cheerful little article titled, “How Well-Intentioned White Families Can Perpetuate Racism.” How are we doing this horrible thing? The problem, it seems, is that we love our kids and want them to do well in life. Which is just the worst, right?

From a rational perspective, of course, this is a deeply silly argument. Yet it perfectly represents some fundamental things that have gone wrong in our culture’s thinking about race, human nature, and morality. It also demonstrates why those ideas are dangerous, because it seems that so-called “progressives” won’t be happy until you hate your kids.

The article is an interview with Margaret Hagerman, a sociologist who set out to “recruit white affluent families as subjects for the research she was doing on race.” (Here’s a little tip for living in contemporary America: if anybody says she’d like to use your kids for research on race, just say “no.”) The result was a book titled “White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America.” Amazing, isn’t it, how some people will allegedly do exhaustive research just to come up with the same old clichés about “white privilege”?

What’s instructive here is what this “privilege” consists of.

One of the things I talk about in the book is what I call this ‘conundrum of privilege,’ which is that these parents have a lot of resources economically as well as status as white people. They can then use those resources to set up their own child’s life in ways that give them the best education, the best health care, all the best things. And we have this collectively agreed-upon idea in our society that being a ‘good parent’ means exactly that—providing the best opportunities you can for your own child.

But then some of these parents are also people who believe strongly in the importance of diversity and multiculturalism and who want to resist racial inequality. And these two things are sort of at odds with one another. These affluent white parents are in a position where they can set up their kids’ lives so that they’re better than other kids’ lives. So the dark side is that, ultimately, people are thinking about their own kids, and that can come at the expense of other people’s kids.

The idea that the good of your own kids necessarily has to come at the expense of other people’s kids is a dubious assumption, to say the least, but it’s there to make you feel guilty enough that you will agree to sacrifice your kids on the altar of equality. And what would that mean?

Some of the parents in my book, they rejected the idea that their child needed to be in all the AP classes. They valued other elements of their children’s personalities, such as their concerns about ethics or fairness or social justice. There were a handful of parents in my study who resisted having a...

Peter Strzok has been fired from his job at the FBI, but the hits from his text messages to his former mistress, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page, just keep on coming.

In the latest development, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., has written a letter to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, disclosing that the latest documents provided to his committee by the Justice Department contained Strzok-Page texts that revealed “an apparent systemic culture of media leaking by high-ranking officials at the FBI and DOJ related to ongoing investigations.”

Meadows, who chairs the subcommittee on government operations of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, was referring to a text on April 10, 2017, in which Strzok tells Page that he wants to talk to her “about [a] media leak strategy with DOJ.”

The reason that this is significant is that on April 11, the very next day, The Washington Post broke the story that the FBI had obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to electronically eavesdrop on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page after convincing the FISA court that Page was “acting as an agent of a foreign power.”

The Washington Post article cited “law enforcement” officials as the source of its story. On April 12, the day after the story broke, Strzok sent Lisa Page another text message that, according to Meadows, congratulated her for a job “well done,” while referring to two derogatory articles about Carter Page.

As Meadows correctly points out, the story set “off a flurry of articles suggesting connections between President Trump and Russia.”

Of course, after a year and a half of the special counsel investigation by Robert Mueller, there still has not been any evidence publicly revealed that shows any actual collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials and agents.

Moreover, Carter Page has never been charged with being an agent of a foreign power or for any other violation of the law.

What makes this even worse is that Meadows also tells Rosenstein that other documents indicate that Andrew Weissmann “participated in unauthorized conversations with the media during this same time period,” as did other “senior officials at...

New York Times
WASHINGTON — JIM RISEN is gruff.

The tall slab of a reporter looks like someone who could have played an Irish Marine sergeant in an old World War II movie.

“Editors think I’m a curmudgeon,” the 59-year-old admits, laughing.

Eric Lichtblau, the reporter who sits next to Risen in The Times’s Washington bureau and who won a Pulitzer with him for their remarkable stories about the Bush administration’s illegal warrantless wiretapping, says Risen revels in his prickly, old-school style, acting contrary on everything from newfangled computers to the Bush crew’s fictions about Saddam and W.M.D. to cautious editors.

“He’s pushed to go places that often editors are unwilling to go,” Lichtblau said. “He’s never taken the safe route.”

Once Lichtblau took him to a pick-up basketball game and, naturally, Risen got in a fight with a lobbyist about the rules for being out of bounds.

As Carl Hulse, The Times’s chief Washington correspondent, wryly puts it: “Whether it’s editors or government officials, Jim definitely won’t take no for an answer, but he will certainly give it.”

Over lunch near the White House on Friday, Risen, dressed in his Men’s Wearhouse shirt and khakis and his brown Ecco walking shoes, talked about having the sword of Damocles over his head, as the reluctant star of a searing media-government showdown that could end with him behind bars.

“It’s surreal to be caught up in a news story instead of writing about one,” he said, in his soft voice.

He said he was inspired by the Watergate hearings to get into journalism and that he inherited his skepticism about government from his mom, who grew up in Indiana during the Depression, the daughter of an Irish railway machinist who was often out of work. Every time she saw the pyramids on TV, she would say, “I wonder how many slaves died building that?”

Risen said he’s not afraid that F.B.I. agents will show up one day at the suburban Maryland home he shares with his wife, Penny. (His three sons are grown, and one is a reporter.) But he has exhausted all his legal challenges, including at the Supreme Court, against the Obama administration.

“I was nervous for a long time, but they’ve been after me for six years so now I try to ignore it,” he said, musing that he’s already decided what he’ll take to prison: Civil War books and World War II histories.

The Justice Department is trying to scuttle the reporters’ privilege — ignoring the chilling effect that is having on truth emerging in a jittery post-9/11 world prone to egregious government excesses.

Attorney General Eric Holder wants to force Risen to testify and reveal the identity of his confidential source on...