Transcript
A (0:00)
Hey, everybody, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark. Welcome him back. Senior distinguished fellow at the center for American Progress. He was the ambassador to South Africa during the Obama administration. He's had a bunch of other prominent roles in the Democratic Party. It's Patrick Gaspard. How you doing, man?
B (0:13)
Hey, man. Good to be on.
A (0:14)
Tim, we're going to keep this tight because I'm pulling you away from that next playoffs game. All right, man. Only for you and Bulwark, Tim, thank you, man. Well, I really appreciate it, and the folks will appreciate it, because if our listeners and viewers are anything like me watching the scene in the Oval Office and you're like, I know this is bullshit. I know that there's some iota of truth here, right? That there's, like, some, you know, obviously there's racial conflict in South Africa. It's obviously gotten a million times better since the battle days. But, like, but we know this. The President's lying. We know he's bullying this guy. But, like, what help us, like, separate the kind of BS from the reality of what we saw today.
B (0:56)
So thank you for, like, unpacking it that way. Not only do we know that these are, like, these allegations are not factually true, all of us know that Donald Trump knows that these allegations aren't factually true. Right. That's just the way this guy rolls this. This is performing a trifecta for him, Tim. One, he gets to kind of, like, speak to his domestic political audience in the US that loves this kind of racial polarization stuff, and this Donald Trump is saving the white race politics that he loves to play. Two, you and I right now are not having a conversation about prices going up at Walmart. We're not talking about the Republican budgets going to slash all these people off of Medicaid. And three, he's also doing a little bit of a grift game here, right? Because Elon Musk, his. His. His BFF was in the Oval Office today, and Musk is trying to get a deal in South Africa to get starlink in. So. So all three of these things are at play now, separating fact from fiction. Yeah. South Africa has challenges with, With. With race, as. As does most of the planet. There's been a. A pretty fraught history there. But the reality is that black and white South Africans are working closely with one another towards a new future in that country. And tragically, now that we're several decades removed from apartheid, there's still this extraordinary economic discrepancy there in the country and disparities between blacks and whites, whites that represent about 7% of the population in South Africa now still control and own almost 70% of the private land in South Africa. Those Africana farmers that he's going, that Trump is going on and on about, they have amassed farmland that represents about half the geography of the actual country right now. Still to this day, white South Africans, who again are about 7% of the population, represent only 2% of all the homicides in all of South Africa, despite the propaganda video and all the stuff that Trump was throwing out there today. Last thing I'll say, Tim, is no, there are extraordinary leaders in the Africana community who understand that the historic advantages that they've had in education outcomes and economic outcomes, in security outcomes, and they're doing all they can to turn around the fraught history of South Africa. And they're doing it, you know, despite a right wing fringe that's in the country called Afro Forum that are in, are making common cause with, you know, that, that guy Tucker Carlson with musk and so many other kind of fringe actors here in the US So I today I'm thinking about the dignity of Ramaphosa in that horrible room and I'm thinking about some of my Africana friends who are trying to do the right thing every single day in South Africa.