Surprised I am that item on Faux Knews caught Donnie’s attention.
If it had been black farmers in Alabama, it would have been crickets instead of tweets.
(Or brown children stolen from parents at the border.)
But, but, but he saw it on Tucker Carlson Tonight, America’s most reliable source of information.
Dog whistle ? We’re like at the Queen Mary’s foghorn about now.
Please, the next Democratic congress and President, restore the Fairness Doctrine and make it unassailable Federal law. Please!
While the 10 paragraphs accurately describing the situation in South Africa were interesting, they’re entirely irrelevant to trump’s tweet. He certainly wasn’t paying attention to any of the details. He just saw a chance to give a shout out to his white nationalist supporters, and took it.
It won’t work. Cable content can’t be regulated the way the airwaves can.
So is this the opening salvo of some genius pushing for an eventual return of “forty acres and a mule” here? I would have thought a modern-day Marcus Garvey would be more to their liking.
This is only gonna get worse. Trump knows how to work the base. The more legal pressure on Trump, the more “WHITE GENOCIDE” him and his supporters are gonna scream.
Careful here. Trump is a malign racist idiot, but the current South African government has a significant despotic potential and is unquestionably corrupt. A destruction of the agricultural economy in the name of redistribution is not off the cards. The Zimbabwe precedent is hardly exemplary.
In related news, Trump has tweeted that the Emancipation Proclamation was just an illegal property grab - sad, and very unfair.
He wants to fight Reconstruction here, but can’t, so it is off to S. Africa.
Congress can find a way to regulate anything, if it wants to (if there’s money in it).
I once met an old guy who complained he would have been rich but his grandfather had all his property stolen from him. When I asked “What kind of property?”, he replied “Grandpa had about a hundred slaves.”
Slowly I turned and walked away.
But that is what I see in the modern Trumpublican partei.
Since Melania is going to Africa, Trump’s tweet may have been more about the state of their marriage than it was really about South Africa.
I am driving up fromDurban to Johannesburg today, and was gobsmacked this afternoon as the local radio news fills with reaction to President Trump’s opining by tweet concerning South Africa’s land issues. I am taking a break only a half hour from my destination, to cool down from the consternation, with embarrassment, I feel. I am shocked (at the stupidity and willful ignorance on display) but not really surprised — I gather someone on Fox News was blathering about it overnight, so our State Department, what is left of it, was probably anticipating some nonsense from Trump this morning. I was rather taken aback by the whole thing, though on reflection a bit relieved, from what I have heard while here, that the major long term reaction here may well mainly be to laugh, even scornfully, at us and this buffoonery of our own creation—which is saying something, given recent figures here, cough, Zuma. You are welcome, RSA. I take immediate comfort in the unlikelihood that this will start a war; but then have to wonder, when could he? Shudder; sigh.
Isn’t this interesting. Check the dates.
(h/t Qasim Rashid, Esq. @MuslimIQ)
Even so, Trump’s tweet is hardly a nuanced plea for creating a sustainable plan to address the injustices of the past while maintaining stability and minimizing corruption.
“Role Player” is a good description of Tucker Carlson btw.
From FT Aug.23,2018
Trump repeated the rhetoric of South African farmers being particularly vulnerable to violence. The issue is controversial and statistics are contested. However, according to research by one of South Africa’s biggest farmers’ organisations, such murders are at a 20-year low.
In 2017-18, 47 farmers were killed, according to statistics compiled by AgriSA, an association of hundreds of agricultural groups across South Africa. Violence against farmers peaked in 1998 when 153 died. Between 80 and 100 were murdered each year from 2003 to 2011, and about 60 until 2016.
Despite the decline in the number of fatalities there has been a rise in the number of attacks on farms, from 478 in 2016-17 to 561 a year later.
The figures have been challenged by other organisations representing farmers in South Africa such as Afriforum, a lobby group that campaigns for the interests of South Africa’s white Afrikaans-speaking minority. But AgriSA said its research was reliable.
Senior officials from Afriforum travelled to the US in May where they met Carlson, the Fox news host quoted by Trump in his tweet.