Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

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How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa​

Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler

“… Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.

They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated.

Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.

David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young.

A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.

…
The acclaimed South African writer Jonny Steinberg recently calledattempts to explain Musk through his childhood under apartheid “a bad idea” that resulted in “facile” conclusions.

But for those looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk’s early life with a neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a system infused with the ideology of white supremacy.

Musk’s formative years in the 1980s came amid a cauldron of rebellion in the Black townships which drew a state of emergency and a bloody crackdown by the state. Some whites fled the country. Others marched with the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement against any weakening of apartheid.

… In schools, Christian nationalist education sought to forge a South African identity around a singular version of the country’s history. Musk and Thiel were taught that the Afrikaner, mostly the descendants of Dutch colonisers, was the real victim of South Africa’s strife whether at the hands of grasping British imperialists or treacherous Zulu chiefs.

…
But white society was itself divided and the historical narrative embraced in Afrikaans-speaking schools could often became the basis for an implicit rejection of apartheid philosophy in English-speaking ones.

Musk attended a Johannesburg high school and then the Pretoria boys high school, an institution whose other alumni include students who went on to become leading anti-apartheid activists such as Edwin Cameron, a South African supreme court justice after the collapse of white rule, and Peter Hain, who moved to Britain, where he became a leading campaigner against apartheid and then a Labour government minister. …”
 
I don't care to speculate on what the average street level cop in Boston thinks about "illegals '. But if they see the ICE agents as "outsiders"-it could get Ugly
 
nycfan said:

How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’ extend to apartheid South Africa​

Elon Musk grew up with the privileges of a stratified racial order and Peter Thiel lived in a city that venerated Hitler

“… Musk is part of the “PayPal mafia” of libertarian billionaires with roots in South Africa under white rule now hugely influential in the US tech industry and politics.

They include Peter Thiel, the German-born billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, who was educated in a southern African city in the 1970s where Hitler was still openly venerated.

Thiel, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, has been critical of welfare programs and women being permitted to vote as undermining capitalism. A 2021 biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian, alleged that as a student at Stanford he defended apartheid as “economically sound”.

David Sacks, formerly PayPal’s chief operating officer and now a leading fundraiser for Trump, was born in Cape Town and grew up within the South African diaspora after his family moved to the US when he was young.

A fourth member of the mafia, Roelof Botha, the grandson of the apartheid regime’s last foreign minister, Pik Botha, and former PayPal CFO, has kept a lower political profile but remains close to Musk.

…
The acclaimed South African writer Jonny Steinberg recently calledattempts to explain Musk through his childhood under apartheid “a bad idea” that resulted in “facile” conclusions.

But for those looking to join dots, there is fodder from Musk’s early life with a neo-Nazi grandfather who moved from Canada to South Africa because he liked the idea of apartheid through his high school education in a system infused with the ideology of white supremacy.

Musk’s formative years in the 1980s came amid a cauldron of rebellion in the Black townships which drew a state of emergency and a bloody crackdown by the state. Some whites fled the country. Others marched with the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement against any weakening of apartheid.

… In schools, Christian nationalist education sought to forge a South African identity around a singular version of the country’s history. Musk and Thiel were taught that the Afrikaner, mostly the descendants of Dutch colonisers, was the real victim of South Africa’s strife whether at the hands of grasping British imperialists or treacherous Zulu chiefs.

…
But white society was itself divided and the historical narrative embraced in Afrikaans-speaking schools could often became the basis for an implicit rejection of apartheid philosophy in English-speaking ones.

Musk attended a Johannesburg high school and then the Pretoria boys high school, an institution whose other alumni include students who went on to become leading anti-apartheid activists such as Edwin Cameron, a South African supreme court justice after the collapse of white rule, and Peter Hain, who moved to Britain, where he became a leading campaigner against apartheid and then a Labour government minister. …”
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“… Thiel got all that and more at schools in South Africa and its de facto colony, South West Africa, which became independent as Namibia in 1990.

South West Africa had been a German colony until the end of the first world war and Thiel lived for a time in the city of Swakopmund, where he attended a German-language school while his father worked at a nearby uranium mine.

… At that time, Swakopmund was notorious for its continued glorification of Nazism, including celebrating Hitler’s birthday. In 1976, the New York Times reported that some people in the town continued to greet each other with “Heil Hitler” and to give the Nazi salute.

… Thiel, who moved to the US when he was 10, has described his schooling in Swakopmund as instilling a dislike of regimentation that steered him towards libertarianism. …”
 
Continued [and this makes some sense if you follow Maye Musk’s statements the last year or so]

“… Errol Musk [Elon’s dad] has said that he opposed apartheid and joined the Progressive Federal party but then left because he didn’t like its demand for one person, one vote, and instead favored a more gradual reform with separate parliaments for different races.

That was the liberal position inside the Musk family.

Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because he liked the newly elected apartheid government.

In the 1930s, Haldeman was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians but which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes.

The Canadian government banned Technocracy Incorporated during the second world war as a threat to the country’s security in part for its opposition to fighting Hitler. Haldeman was charged with publishing documents opposing the war and sent to prison for two months.

After the war, Haldeman led a separate political party that among other things promoted the antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When that went nowhere, he moved to South Africa because he said he liked the core National party philosophy of Christian nationalism that Vorster likened to Nazism.

Errol Musk described Maye’s parents as so extreme he stopped visiting them.

… “They were very fanatical in favor of apartheid,” he told Podcast and Chill. “Her parents came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.”

…
Haldeman was killed in a plane crash when Elon was three years old but the boy remained close to his grandmother and mother. He is estranged from his father, whom Maye has described as abusive of her and their children. Errol Musk once claimed to have shot and killed three people who broke into his house.

Musk has described his father as a “terrible human being”.

“Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” he told Rolling Stone without elaborating in 2017.

What is indisputable is that Musk and Thiel grew up amid incredible privilege where the racial hierarchy was clear. Those who claimed to reject apartheid sought to explain this privilege not as the result of systemic racial oppression but the natural order of things thanks to their own abilities. That in turn led some to regard all forms government as oppressive and true liberty as an individual battle for survival. …”

[Article also notes that by taking his mother’s Canadian citizenship and moving to Canada in 1988, Musk avoided two years compulsory military service in South Africa, where he could have been thrust into border battles in the “low level civil war” in South Africa at the time.]
 
genevabuck said:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">If you’re cheering for a South African sociopath to fuck over US military veterans then you should probably stop with that America first bullshit.</p>&mdash; Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) <a href="">February 23, 2025</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
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Truth. Although I suspect it won't go over very well with our resident Trumpers and bosiders.
 
I have received this email. I have also received instructions not to respond until I receive further guidance from management. FWIW, the forced resignation for not responding is not included in the official email. It’s simply a request for information on what I did at work for the last week. I’ll just wait to see what communication I receive from union and management on Monday. What a strange time it is.
 
Well if you're not leeching off the system it should be easy to respond. Alot of govt workers show up everyday and add no value to govt work, and are wasting money.
 
Silence Dogood said:
Its out there, I'm not going to keep babying you. I also seen it with my own eyes. And I know that you know it exists, you just don't like who's leading the charge.
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Good, hard-working people are getting fired for no damn good reason by a couple of worthless billionaire plutocrats so they can give themselves massive tax breaks and you're here gloating over their firing. Seriously, if you're a troll this isn't the place to be trolling, and if you're serious you're a miserable excuse for a human being and don't have a shred of compassion in your body.
 
wmheel1287 said:
What 5 bullet points would you say describe what you accomplished last week?
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Yep. If our Trumper posters love what Elon is doing so much maybe they need to be required to send us a detailed summary of what they do at work each week to justify their continued employment. But of course if a liberal asked them to do it they would scream bloody murder and have a fit.
 

Air traffic controllers among federal employees who received request to justify their work​



“The Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic controllers received Office of Personnel Management’s Saturday email asking employees to explain what work they did last week — though it is not clear how and when the understaffed workforce will be able to respond, their union told CNN.

“This weekend’s mass email is an unnecessary distraction to a fragile system,” the National Air Traffic Controllers Association told CNN in a statement.

… Some context: Shortages of air traffic controllersand FAA infrastructure issues have come to light in recent weeks following multiple midair collisions and plane crashes.

And as Trump and Musk ramp up their efforts to shrink the federal government, hundreds of probationary FAA workers were fired.

The country’s more than 10,000 air traffic controllers are already working mandatory six-day weeks of ten-hour shifts. …”
 
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