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It may be hard to trust many of the storylines pushed by the media, but Cockburn must admit that looking to new Twitter — now X — isn’t likely to solve any problems either. The owner of that troubled platform, Elon Musk, illustrated Monday exactly why. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO, who has over 150 million followers, replied to a series of tweets asserting that white genocide is on the verge of erupting in South Africa.
One response came to Benny Johnson, who posted a video of Julius Malema, the firebrand head of South Africa’s far-left Economic Freedom Fighters Party, singing the apartheid-era anthem “Dubul’ ibhunu,” or “Shoot the Boer” at a political rally. Johnson wrote that “This is all downstream of the rotten secular religion of wokeness and CRT plaguing America today. You have been warned.” South African-born Musk tagged the South African president in the comments, asking “why do you say nothing?”
Musk then replied to a post from End Wokeness, who wrote of an attack on a white farmer, who died, and his wife in South Africa apparently a day after Malema’s performance. Musk’s comment consisted of two exclamation points.
The billionaire followed that one up by replying to Richard Hanania, who posted a video of Malema, this time where the he praises Putin. The caption of the tweet reads, “Leader of the party of white genocide in South Africa: ‘We are Putin and Putin is us.’” Musk commented with an exclamation point.
Malema, for those unfamiliar, is a radical pro-Putin demagogue who has capitalized on domestic unrest and resentment in South Africa to turn his party into the third largest in parliament. Among the most controversial elements of his party’s agenda is the expropriation of land without compensation. He has been prosecuted for hate speech for singing “Shoot the Boer” before; while he lost in court in 2010, the decision was reversed in 2022, when a Johannesburg judge ruled that the singing of the song “does not constitute hate speech and deserves to be protected under the rubric of freedom of speech — it articulates the failure of the current government to address issues of economic empowerment and land division.”
But while Malema is surely a dangerous troublemaker, the idea that white genocide is imminent in South Africa is absurd. It is a long-running conspiracy theory that, like most conspiracy theories, falls apart under scrutiny. South Africa is awash in crime, and is facing a tidal wave of crises from a failing electrical grid to rampant corruption. People of every race in South Africa are victimized; in fact, it is the less well-off black population that suffers the most as the economy crumbles and violence spreads.
Musk seems to have belatedly realized his error — after he amplified people trafficking in falsehoods. Better late than never, though. He responded to a tweet from @monitoringbias that pointed out that “The song in question [Shoot the Boer] existed long before the Great Awokening and can only be understood in the context of South Africa and has literally nothing to do with CRT.” Musk’s caption simply read, “True.”
The whole episode serves as a nice cautionary tale about media and the internet. The facts usually leak through at some point, but the falsehoods proliferate so fast and travel so far that most people miss the truth altogether.
Cockburn wonders how to square Musk’s tweets and call for action from the South African government with his long-stated declaration of being a “free speech absolutist…”
