Swart Gevaar: How the PayPal Mafia Reanimated Apartheid
While it formally ended in 1994, it has now been firmly replanted in America.
“Bullying was considered a virtue.”
Kimbal Musk, on apartheid education
South African apartheid was designed to enable the white minority to extract labor from the majority Black population. This racialized social structure was enforced through physical violence, geographic separation of races, and a program of educational and psychological control starting at birth. While apartheid officially ended in 1994, I argue it has now been firmly replanted in American soil.
Three members of the PayPal Mafia—a group of Silicon Valley billionaires who met while building PayPal in the late 1990s—are part of the apartheid diaspora: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and to a lesser extent former White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks.
Understanding how apartheid’s education and pervasive propaganda systems indoctrinated its youth is extraordinarily instructive about the psychology of the men it produced—and about what they really want.
During the 1970s and 80s, the South African apartheid government was increasingly under pressure for its racist policies. Three propaganda campaigns summarize the South African apartheid government’s strategy for controlling both the white and Black populations in the 1970s and 80s.
swart gevaar: Black danger! (Black crime and violence)
rooi gevaar: Red danger! (communist infiltration)
total onslaught: A perceived campaign by foreign (especially communist) countries and South African left-wing movements against the Nationalist government and its policies, believed to be aimed at weakening South Africa through offensives in the military, economic, psychological, social, political, and cultural spheres.
Here is a short testimonial about what it was like to be brought up in a paranoid, militarized environment where the Black population planned to “destroy white life as we know it” and “there’s now these communist and socialist ideals that come with it.”
Full conversation here.
The anti-communist propaganda of the apartheid South African government was only partly ideological. While there were some communist groups that participated in anti-apartheid activities, there was no concerted plot to overthrow the government. Instead, the apartheid regime used communism as a catch-all phrase for anyone who was seen to pose a threat.
The Suppression of Communism Act, which came into effect on 17 July 1950, defined communism as any scheme aimed at achieving change—whether economic, social, political, or industrial—”by the promotion of disturbance or disorder” or any act encouraging “feelings of hostility between the European and the non-European races [...] calculated to further [disorder]”.
This is highly reminiscent of the current anti-communist hysteria being generated by the Trump regime and its supporters after Mamdani was elected in New York City—and helped several Democratic Socialist candidates become nominees in the midterms.
This is more than just propaganda. It has quasi-legal backup. Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7)—which threatens prosecution of people based on “leftist” or “antifascist” dissent or ideology—has strong echoes of South Africa’s 1950 Suppression of Communism Act.
In 1953, South Africa passed the Bantu Education Act creating a permanent separation of education for Blacks and whites which deliberately disadvantaged the Black majority while providing white children a far higher standard.
Perhaps the most revealing illustration of the ideological connection between the American failed state today and the apartheid-bred oligarchs who helped engineer it, is the 1967 National Education Policy Act which gave legal force to Christian National Education doctrine, excerpts below.
Article 1: We believe that the … education of the children of white parents … must be educated on the basis of the Christian-National world-view of our nation.
Article 2: … we believe that religious instruction ... should be the key subject. It must determine the spirit and direction of all the other subjects ...
Article 6: … The instruction in [religion] ... must not be hermetically sealed off from the other school activities, but ... must form an organic whole with them
… the teaching of the subject CIVICS must be such that it will breed Christian and National citizens ...
… history must be taught [in such a way as to be] seen as the fulfillment of God’s decree for ... humanity ... We believe that God has willed separate nations and peoples, and has given each separate nation ... its particular vocation and task and gifts … and that the patriotic ... history of the nation is the great means of cultivating love of one’s own.
Article 9: … the teacher must act as a substitute for the parent ... Our highest demand on the teacher therefore is that he should be a man of Christian life and world-view, without which he is nothing less to us than the most deadly danger ...
Article 10: … [this] world-view is equally valid for nursery schools ...
Article 11: ... the professors and lecturers must be convinced Christian and National scientists.
Article 12: [this] world-view is applicable to Technical Colleges .... and schools for the special training of ... the physically and menially defective.
Article 13: With regard to white adults, … such teaching must be given with due respect for the principle of cultural separation...
Article 14: ... Coloured teaching must be seen as a part of the vocation and task of the Afrikaner, … the sacred obligation to see to it that the coloured man is educated according to the Christian and National principles… We believe that only when the coloured man has been ... will he be truly happy ... and .... secure against all kinds of foreign ideologies which, promise him a sham happiness...
We believe that he can be made race-conscious if the principle of … apartheid is strictly applied in education ... The financing of coloured education must be placed on such a basis that it does not occur at the cost of white education.
Source: Die Beleid - the Christian National Education Policy of South Africa during Apartheid
This could easily be seen as a blueprint of the desired end-state of the broligarchy, evangelical Christianity, the GOP, and the Supreme Court. The National Education Policy Act was explicitly racist against Blacks, mandated a “Christian National” ideology, and defined the parameters of a cultic indoctrination system to perpetuate its ideology.
While the American right is not yet asking for a mandated Christian nationalist education with a privileged white elite in control; it’s not far from it. The denial of the separation of church and state, the mandating of Bible reading in Texas, and the rapid erosion of civil rights all head in the same direction.
Here are four excellent sources showing how the apartheid education system controlled its youth and built an army of white nationalist militants:
Another important aspect of the white apartheid system was an emphasis on hyper-masculinity, aggression, and physical prowess. As a nation under both perceived and real threats, South Africa mandated military service at 18 for white men, and required military training during school for white boys, including “wilderness camps” called veldskools. Elon Musk described them as “paramilitary Lord of the Flies” where boys would fight for survival.
Musk was a strange, asocial nerd who did not get along with his schoolmates, often referring to them as “stupid.” While he describes being severely bullied, at one point during high school he used “stupid” one too many times—to describe a schoolmate’s father who had just died of suicide. In response, his fellow student threw Musk down the stairs and kicked him in the head, putting him in the hospital. According to Elon and his father, this left a lifelong impression.
Elon Musk fled South Africa at 17 to Canada, just in time to avoid military service, but psychologically, being rejected by his own society clearly motivated his long arc into darkness.
Musk was taught that he is part of a privileged white elite who will inherit the Earth, that Black people are dangerous and only useful for labor, and that communism is the ultimate enemy. But those elites rejected him, leaving him full of rage and shame. Emotionally, he was stuck hating everyone else, and hating himself as well. He had no place to go with his rage, so he withdrew to believing that he alone was privileged, and would prove to the people who hurt him that he was right about them being “stupid” all along.
Now Musk spends his days as the world’s first trillionaire on his social media platform effectively reproducing his apartheid education to his 240 million followers. Communism is everywhere, Black and brown people are all dangerous, and the world is a total onslaught against persecuted white victims.
His solution to this problem happens to be the same as apartheid’s: more colonialism; only let elites vote; exile or persecute dissidents; encourage vigilante violence; label your enemies communists.
Now, if it were just the first trillionaire trying to psychologically influence his quarter-billion followers that apartheid is a great solution to America’s problems, that would be very, very bad. But in many ways, Musk has literally co-opted the presidency to enact policies that seek to turn his apartheid beliefs into real action.
First, he was given carte blanche with DOGE and immediately cut USAID, the one program that kept hundreds of thousands of Black people in South Africa alive, and millions more elsewhere. He eliminated all “DEI” programs, mentions of Black history, and any other possible recognition of Black and brown people.
Second, he engineered the inversion of the entire asylum program to only allow in white farmers from South Africa with false claims of “white genocide.”
This is not the behavior of a patriotic American immigrant. This is the behavior of an apartheid agent infiltrating liberal democracy to abuse and convert it to his alien ideology, from within.
Musk is not alone in his desire to harken back to the simpler and safer days of apartheid boarding school. Peter Thiel spent a decade—from one year-old to eleven—in South Africa and SW Africa (now Namibia)—both controlled by the apartheid state.
While Thiel is not very forthcoming about his childhood, we know it was highly unusual and psychologically formative. He attended at least seven different apartheid elementary schools, including two years at a strict German Christian school in Swakopmund, SW Africa—known to be the last place on Earth to greet each other with “Heil Hitler.”
Moreover, Thiel‘s father was effectively an asset of South African apartheid because he developed a secret uranium mine for the regime’s illegal nuclear program.
For a young gay boy in the 1970s whose favorite pastime was chess, this might be the least hospitable environment outside of prison. Similar to Musk, you can only imagine the impact of being indoctrinated to believe you are the superior race deserving of special treatment, combined with the message that you personally are excluded because of your sexual preference.
This is a psychological vicious cycle: I am special and superior because I am part of a group—which rejects me for who I am.
Thiel’s hatred of the American education system has been repeatedly expressed. He doesn’t believe higher education should be universally offered, and thinks for most people college is a waste.
Thiel has repeatedly appeared in public with infamous “scientific” racist Charles Murray who wrote the long-debunked racist book The Bell Curve to argue that “college education is a disaster” because some people just aren’t smart enough to go.
This is a signature tenet of the apartheid system—elites are naturally built to use their brains and everyone else is built to do labor for them.
It is symptomatic of the psychological trap they experience as men both obsessed with and rejected by apartheid that Thiel and Musk are both major proponents of transhumanism—the desire to extend or replace the physical human body—despite Musk’s vicious transphobia and his rejection of his own trans daughter.
Thiel has said transgender surgery “doesn’t go far enough.” Musk wants to put chips in everyone’s brain. These are men who are so uncomfortable with the world and themselves, they want to escape their own bodies.
While neither Thiel or Musk claim to be practicing Christians, Musk has repeatedly said he is “culturally Christian”—which is true because it was mandated by the South African government. Thiel says he is “religious, not spiritual” and doesn’t claim to believe in God, but “believes in Christ.”
This is made more remarkable by Thiel’s own obsession with the Antichrist, who Thiel attributes to people like the Pope and Greta Thunberg.
Musk’s religion is not Christianity, or even capitalism, it is messianic superiority. For example, Tuesday he tweeted this four-minute AI-generated video which is chock full of retro, jingoistic, over-the-top Americanism, using 100% white people.
It contains the following lyric:
“Promise me that we’re gonna make it to the light
So is it an awakening or is this a knife in the night?
so come on brothers, sisters, stand up tall
Because guess what?
Where we go one, we go all”
This refers to at least three QAnon slogans—“Dark to Light,” “Great Awakening,” and “Where We Go One, We Go All.” But in this case “we” is overtly white people. This is a deliberate attempt to pull Trump’s followers into Musk’s own domain by fusing QAnon symbology with his own open racism.
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk both share a hatred of multiracial, multicultural society, and a self-hate at being rejected by the only place they felt safe—so they are seeking to rebuild it, step by step, in America.
The United States is not just being sent backwards in time by revanchist white supremacists, in many ways we’re being sent backwards to the other side of the world a half-century ago—to an alien civilization that collapsed under its own evil.
I might suggest a simple counter-message: No Apartheid in America.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” —Desmond Tutu
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"Nobody told me there'd be days like these, strange days indeed, quite peculiar mama."
John Lennon
Excellent article, Jim. Learning things I never knew, yet watched the whole thing on TV with the Nelson Mandela marches. I've never understood racism. My inborn empathy for the injustice of POC has never waned. What's happening here is appalling and 💔.