How South Africa's Apartheid Shaped the MAGA Mindset [View all]

[AndyTiedye]

𝖲𝗂𝗆𝗈𝗇 𝖪𝗎𝗉𝖾𝗋 𝖥𝗂𝗇𝖺𝗇𝖼𝗂𝖺𝗅 𝖳𝗂𝗆𝖾𝗌

Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the ven­ture cap­it­al­ist who has become a fun­draiser for Don­ald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African dia­spora fam­ily in Ten­nessee. Peter Thiel spent years of child­hood in South Africa and Nam­i­bia, where his father was involved in uranium min­ing as part of the apartheid regime’s clandes­tine drive to acquire nuc­lear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African soft­ware developer and tech journ­al­ist liv­ing near Johan­nes­burg, has been iden­ti­fied by two teams of forensic lin­guists as the ori­gin­ator of the QAnon con­spir­acy, which helped shape Trump’s Maga move­ment. (Furber denies being “Q”.)

In short, four of Maga’s most influ­en­tial voices are fiftyso­mething white men with form­at­ive exper­i­ences in apartheid South Africa. This prob­ably isn’t a coin­cid­ence.

https://ft.pressreader.com/article/282355455139348