Ep. 115 - South Africa Destroys Itself ft. Lauren Southern
The South African parliament voted last week to steal white farmers’ land and redistribute it to black South Africans. The motion was brought by the radical leftist EFF party, whose leader promises to “cut the throat of whiteness.” The land theft was supported by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress party, leaving just one question: has South Africa just destroyed itself? We will discuss with Lauren Southern, the filmmaker behind a new documentary "Farmlands." Then the Boston Massacre on This Day In History!
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The South African Parliament voted last week to steal white farmers' land on the basis of race and redistribute it to black South Africans.
The motion was brought by the radical left Economic Freedom Fighters Party, whose leader, Julius Malema, has called for South Africans to, quote,"...cut the throat of whiteness." The land theft was supported by the late Nelson Mandela's own African National Congress Party, though presumably it wouldn't have been by Nelson Mandela himself, leaving international onlookers to wonder if South Africa has just destroyed itself.
We will discuss with Lauren Southern, who has spoken to these very South African farmers in her new documentary, Farmlands.
Then, speaking of colonial revolts, the Boston Massacre on this day in history.
I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'm not going to talk about the Oscars today.
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All right, let's get right into this.
A lot of craziness is going on in South Africa.
Oh, you haven't heard of it?
You haven't heard of what's going on?
I'm not that surprised.
It's probably because the media don't cover this stuff at all because they'd much rather cover Donald Trump's tabloid thing from the 90s.
The South African Parliament voted last week to steal all of the white farmers' land.
And guess how the economy reacted to that?
Did not react very well.
Banks are shocked by the move.
It's going to cause serious panic.
The agricultural industry obviously is faltering.
International investors are now terrified of what will happen.
It's deja vu all over again on that continent.
We have seen this happen before.
We saw it happen in Zimbabwe not that long ago.
In 2000, for some historical perspective, the Zimbabwean government proposed giving itself the constitutional power to steal land from white farmers without compensation.
When that move failed, the Pro-Mugabe Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans Association marched on white-owned farmland.
By 2002, this roving gang had killed the white farm owners on at least seven occasions, according to Human Rights Watch.
And, surprise, surprise, millions of black farmers were excluded from the redistribution.
It's almost like when you start subverting the law and having strongmen go in and steal people's property, the poor people won't benefit from that.
People that it's ostensibly intended to help will not benefit.
It hurt the people that this was intended to help dramatically.
More on that later.
The dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, had given himself 15 farms by the end of all of this.
Mugabe's deputy, number two, Simon Musenda, gave himself 13 farms.
Cabinet ministers held 160 farms.
Parliamentarians held 150 farms.
And the 2,500 war veterans who had marched on all these farms, do you know how many farms they received?
They received two farms.
150, 160, 15, 2. 4,500 landless peasant Africans, black Africans, received just three farms.
The whole process displaced 200,000 black farm workers, left them homeless and without any means of supporting themselves.
Farm production, you'll be shocked to hear, fell massively.
It fell by over two-thirds in just five years.
These once bustling farms.
Zimbabwe was called the breadbasket of southern Africa.
Bustling farms ended up with a starving population.
Tobacco, Zimbabwe's main agricultural export collapsed as As a result, Zimbabwe's government was put on a credit freeze, which led to a major trade deficit.
The economy collapsed.
Hyperinflation took hold.
You might remember this from a few years ago.
It rendered Zimbabwean banknotes worthless.
You could get bills for like a trillion dollars or something.
I think you can still find them on eBay.
Zimbabweans would put the bills in their hair or on their hats or something.
It just didn't mean anything.
They'd burn them.
Hyperinflation hit 79.6 billion percent, billion with a B, by November of 2008.
And by 2015, Zimbabwe totally switched to the U.S. dollar as its currency because its own currency wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.
Last November, Zimbabwe finally learned its lesson and sacked Robert Mugabe.
It took them a while, but they did it.
Now, just as Zimbabwe learns its lesson, South Africa wants to copy that devastated country.
In 2017, just last year, Julius Malema, the head of this party in South Africa, the leader behind this land grab, he said, we love Uncle Bob Mugabe.
To help us make sense of all of this madness, of what has happened to Nelson Mandela's country of reconciliation and prosperity and the light of hope in Africa, to make sense of what happened from that country to this present madness, we bring on Lauren Southern, who has a new documentary she's just made about what's going on with the farmlands of South Africa.
Here's just a clip from her footage.
I'm seeing special photos.
You don't get used to it.
The torture that we find has been done on these farm murders are unbelievable.
We found pieces of nails being pulled out.
We found hands being removed from bodies.
We found people raped, brutally murdered, babies, children, the farmers trying to protect their families and there's just no stopping.
The farm murders are brutal.
Lynn and I went to this fall murder scene in the Northwest and we came upon this beautiful white house and everywhere you looked was blood splatter.
Since from where you walked in there was blood against the curtains, the walls, the paintings, the floor and you could see where two babies were murdered in the bathroom.
So they were They were definitely attacked while giving the babies a bath.
One of them actually survived and crawled all the way from the bathroom.
He was about two years old.
Crawled all the way from the bathroom to the main bedroom where the mum was murdered.
That is some pretty haunting footage.
And I think maybe for people in my generation, people who don't remember Nelson Mandela, they don't realize how shocking this is.
Nelson Mandela famously, the head of the African National Congress, which now has apparently supported this land grab, He was jailed for decades for opposing apartheid.
He was this martyr figure of apartheid.
He was criticized by people on the right for being a communist terrorist, as people on the right called him.
And he was criticized from the left for being too conciliatory, for wanting too much reconciliation in his quest to unite South Africa.
But he did during his lifetime unite South Africa, was really considered to be the hope of that continent and a real path forward out of colonization.
And that's over now.
That is clearly over now.
His own party has turned on that spirit of reconciliation.
And you don't see these reported in the news very much.
You don't hear about the murders on these South African farms.
You don't hear about this land grab yet.
I wonder why that is.
That is a little strange.
We will get Lauren on to talk about this, but before we do that, what I want to do is go from really just horrible, disturbing things in the show today to nice things.
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Do I have Lauren on now?
Alright, Lauren, thank you for being here.
Hi there.
Thanks for having me.
I'm really wanting that wine now.
I'm going to have to go punch in that code.
It's real good.
Promo code COVFEFE. C-O-V-E-F-E. Now, Lauren, I have to say, you know, sometimes the audience gives me flack because they accuse me of flirting with my female guests or hitting on my female guests.
But you, this shouldn't be as big of an issue because you are officially a man.
You have officially changed your gender to a man.
Yes, I legally changed my gender in Canada.
So if you want to win over some of the progressive audience, you can throw a few lines my way.
Be still my beating heart.
Well, that is very progressive and a really excellent story.
If you haven't looked into Lauren changing her gender, you should look it up on the Internet.
It's very funny.
Lauren, we just watched a clip from some of your footage in South Africa.
What is going on in that country?
Where do you even begin?
I went to South Africa in January just to investigate kind of whispers I heard about farm murders going on.
There were supposedly discriminatory farm murders against the Afrikaner minority that were just brutal stuff.
The Afrikaners are the white people.
I ended up, yes, yes.
They're the 8% white population in South Africa.
But I ended up going down this rabbit hole and discovering a myriad of government just absolutely biased laws against the Afrikaner people.
I discovered white squatter camps, which are basically de facto refugee camps for white people in the country.
I discovered about laws called black economic empowerment, which are basically reverse affirmative action.
So imagine if you could only hire 13% blacks in a certain career in America because it has to be representative of the population.
I think the Sports would get very boring in America.
But in South Africa, this has caused a lot of problems.
A ton of white South Africans have been fired from their jobs to meet these quotas.
It's caused for an absolute gutting of the energy sector.
In fact, people have probably heard Cape Town is about to run out of water because of this.
The white South Africans are not just being murdered, but there's just been an announcement that the government plans to take their land without compensation.
So things are just collapsing in on themselves.
There's so many issues to talk about.
You're going to have to pick one.
What has happened to the spirit of Nelson Mandela?
You know, the right frequently pilloried Mandela for being a communist terrorist.
And I think it's a little bit like the Mike Bloomberg effect.
When Bloomberg was my mayor in New York, I would criticize him relentlessly because he wouldn't let me smoke cigars in the parks.
But now looking back, now that we have de Blasio, I think like, man, those were the good old days.
I didn't know.
We don't know what we got till it's gone.
You know, Mandela did exude this apparent spirit of reconciliation.
He was pilloried by both sides, the left and the right in South Africa, jailed for decades for opposing apartheid.
What happened to that now that that guy is gone?
What happened to his own party and what happened to his country?
So the ANC is still in power in South Africa, but of course the reason we don't hear much about South Africa in the news anymore is because what South Africa was supposed to exemplify was the progressive communist rainbow nation.
And the left loved it, and they still tout this day the Rainbow Nation is the most beautiful thing to ever have existed.
But the reason we don't hear about it anymore is because the Rainbow Nation has failed.
That is just a fact.
The ANC has turned into a party that is not for equality, but has become quite openly anti-white.
If their policies don't speak for themselves, you can go and watch some of the videos of even the other parties in Parliament, the EFF, who have about 10% of control of the government, saying We should kill and shoot the boar, literally dancing on their stage and saying, kill, shoot the white South Africans.
This is the government of South Africa right now.
It is not this progressive rainbow nation.
And the Marxism hasn't done them much good either.
You can see the Rand, since the ANC has brought in a lot of their Marxist policies, it has collapsed in value since the 90s.
You're not going to hear much from the left about this, so it's really good to see, although I think a little late, as we've just started talking about South Africa, when the land crisis is now being enacted by Parliament, It's good to start seeing it in the conservative media because this is going to ramp up into something far more serious in the coming years.
Well, I wonder because the head of the EFF has said that he wants to cut the throat of whiteness in South Africa.
He says he loves Uncle Bob Mugabe.
But there were 80 some odd, I think 83 South African parliamentarians who voted against the land expropriation.
Isn't that right?
Now, many more parliamentarians voted for it.
Is there any hope That this doesn't happen, that the minority of parliamentarians are able to bring some stability and sanity back to the country?
Right, of course.
It's good to make a nod to those sane people who I'm sure are just hitting their face on their desk right now, looking at things like Zimbabwe, which if people don't know what happened in Zimbabwe, they kicked out all the white farmers and it ended up causing a huge crisis there with food issues, people starving, their economy collapsed.
Of course that will become a problem in South Africa as well.
The farmers there are desperately trying to train their workers to take over their jobs and take over the farms, but you just can't fill that many spaces so quickly.
So I think there are at least some people within the media and within the government that realize that confiscating white land is not just going to be a problem for white people.
It's going to be a problem for all South Africans, black, white, mixed alike.
It's going to cause starvation.
It's going to hurt the futures of young people in the country.
If enough people can start talking about that, showing what happened in Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe who are now inviting back the white farmers because they need help, hopefully there can be some change.
But people have to start talking about it.
We can't wait until it actually happens.
Because the mainstream media I found waited until the land crisis was actually seen in Parliament and passed.
They waited for that last kind of moment.
If we wait again until more drastic policies and laws happen, then things might be far too late.
It's amazing.
Even now that the South African parliament has voted to take away all the white farmland, when you look in Google News or you look in a lot of mainstream outlets, it won't come up.
If you Google South Africa, you'll see sporting events and frivolous things like that.
I wonder, you bring up Zimbabwe.
Obviously, black Zimbabweans did terribly under that expropriation regime.
Mugabe and his cronies enriched himself dramatically.
And the people who really paid the price were the millions of black peasants, basically, who couldn't work and couldn't feed themselves and couldn't support themselves.
There was a good op-ed out today about how land expropriation in South Africa is the same thing.
It is primarily an attack on Not just white farm owners, but black South Africans who are going to be devastated when the starvation hits.
Is there any voice in South Africa or in the international media who are pointing this out, that it seems like it's an attack on white people, it seems like it's an attack on the original sin of that country, as the activists describe it, but really the people who are going to be hurt, as is so often the case, are the people it purports to help.
Well, this is the upsetting thing, is the media, and certainly within the mainstream, it rarely speaks the minds of the people.
It speaks its own agenda and what it wants the people to think.
And I remember sitting down when I was in South Africa with a woman from Zimbabwe, she was a very sweet lady, and she was telling me, quite emotionally, that she didn't know what she was going to do after South Africa kicked out the white people, because she had come to South Africa because of what happened in Zimbabwe.
She came there to make money to send back to her family in Zimbabwe and she said, I don't know where there is to go next in Africa if they do the same thing here.
South Africa was her safe zone after the kicking out of whites.
So it's a, yeah, you're absolutely correct in that the victim are People of all skin colors.
The victim of this is the whole nation in general.
Because the conservative argument is always that a rising tide lifts all ships and we can see that not just in the U.S. but around the world.
Capitalism lifted 600 million people out of poverty in China in something like a decade or two decades.
But of course, the opposite is also true.
A sinkhole is going to sink everybody.
It isn't just going to sink one group of the kind.
It's going to destroy the country.
And yet there's basically no reporting on the panic of international investors, the panic of the South African banks.
Tell us a little bit more about your movie.
What's next for that?
What made you decide to do the project?
And where and when can we see it?
Right, so Farmlands hopefully will be out within the next month.
I'm hesitant to give people a specific date because there's so much preparation that has to go into it.
The films always take about six months longer than anybody says they will and an extra $200,000 or something, right?
Precisely.
But luckily on my channel, if you just look up on YouTube, Lauren Southern, you can find a ton of little mini-series you watched a bit at the beginning interviewing farmers themselves, interviewing politicians.
Interviewing individuals who have been struck by the drought, by murder, by all these different crises, just to actually bring it to you.
And to see, we hear a lot of statistics, and of course there's that famous Joseph Stalin quote that is just horrific, where he says, one person's death is a tragedy, a million is simply a statistic.
And for a lot of people, all they've seen is the statistics of farm murders.
All they've seen is the numbers, that this is happening at a horrific rate.
But they haven't actually gotten to meet the people and realize these are humans just like me and you that are suffering through this crisis right now.
And that's kind of what I hope to do with farmlands.
I hope to humanize the Afrikaner people and show that they're not just these statistics.
They're not these colonizer monsters as some people like to portray them.
They just happened to be born on this land after their family had been there hundreds of years.
But also to record what is going on in South Africa because Lord knows if things get worse there, The media is not going to tell the truth and I want there to be at least some record of what happened So we can learn from kind of the mistakes, which hopefully we can fix things, but if not, I want the truth to be out there.
You would think we would have learned from Zimbabwe, but if South Africa destroys itself as it looks like it is doing, then at least there will be a record and maybe we'll be able to stop the next country.
Absolutely.
Lauren, thank you.
That was not only very educational, but you've really helped me out.
You've bumped up my progressive credentials by being such an articulate, The official government-recognized man on the program.
I really appreciate it.
Lauren Southern, everybody.
Go check out her YouTube channel and check out the movie whenever it comes out.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks for having me.
Alright, we've got to get to this day in history.
Do we have to sign off first?
Are you going to make me sign off before we do this day in history?
Oh, that's so awful.
This is a good this day in history.
Speaking of colonial revolts, this is an excellent, a timely this day in history from what took place on this very Monday in 1770.
But if you're not on dailywire.com, you can't watch it.
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Yeah, you'll get all that, but who cares?
Nobody cares about all that.
We want to thank all of our current subscribers, and I know our current subscribers are going to make everybody very envious because they...
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We'll be right back.
It is time for This Day in History.
In 1770, the American Revolution began five years before the shot heard round the world.
Now, a lot of people don't know that.
The event was the Boston Massacre.
This was five years before Lexington and Concord Bridge.
One cold night in Boston, angry colonists met at the Customs House in Boston, and they started tossing snowballs at the one lonely British soldier guarding that building.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
We know this is the Boston Massacre, where the British shoot the American colonists, and it's just so awful, it's totally unprovoked, and the British shot everybody down.
Colonists were not just throwing snowballs.
This was not just a snowball fight in some elementary school that you have with your sister or something.
Tension had been building for two years.
At this event, they were throwing rocks.
They were really trying to hurt this guy and hurt the British.
Even that isn't as simple as it sounds.
We hear no taxation without representation.
That isn't the whole story.
The British Crown expected the colonies to help pay for the French and Indian War.
That was their war.
It was fought in America.
And...
So the British expect, the imperial overlords expected the colonies to help pay for that.
Americans at this time were not some horribly oppressed people.
They had the highest average disposable income in the world.
Per capita annual incomes were $2,100 to $3,500.
Nearly the same as the British across the pond.
The British had a slightly higher per capita annual income.
But when you take into account the lower tax rates...
American colonists paid a much lower tax rate.
The colonists were living very large.
On top of that, the American colonists had more land.
They had greater availability of food and wood, both of which were much cheaper in America than in Britain.
Also in America, population density was low.
America had higher birth rates and it had lower death rates.
And so in America, unlike in Britain, you had a 3% population growth per year.
This is an exploding country.
Americans also were taller, thanks to better nutrition and health care, than their British counterparts.
The average height of an American colonial soldier was 5'8".
Which is two inches taller than their British counterparts.
You can picture that in the battles.
You know, the Americans are just bigger, brawnier guys than the British in the redcoats that they were fighting.
Nevertheless, colonists were rightly angered by what they saw as the wrongful British occupation of their city.
So already, we're seeing a breaking away of the American identity from that of Britain.
They viewed the British troops who were there as occupiers of their city.
Paul Revere never said the British are coming, the British are coming.
Because that would have been nonsense.
Everybody was British.
Everybody considered himself British, except that the identities were diverging just a little bit.
The Americans had been here for 400 years.
The Pilgrims landed in 1620.
They have been here for 400 years.
They'd already been there for over a century.
exploring this country, forming a new culture, forming a new country.
They were separatists, the pilgrims who left.
They did choose to leave Britain.
And these new cultures were forming.
So the Friday before the massacre, British soldiers were looking for part-time work And they brawled with Boston laborers at John Hancock's wharf.
This was three days before the Boston Massacre.
Tension was already brewing.
They were fighting each other.
This brawl grew to include 40 soldiers, which actually forced their colonel, William Dalrymple, to confine them to their barracks.
This was pretty violent and so much so that an order had to come down from the Brits.
Everybody knew that tensions were going to flare up again on Monday.
This didn't come out of nowhere.
It had been building for two years, but especially it had been building over the weekend.
They basically respected the Sabbath.
Then the weekend was over.
They said, bring it on.
The Customs House Sentinel called for backup, and they brought a British corporal and seven soldiers to his aid.
Now, two of those people that came to his aid had previously brawled on that Friday.
Captain Thomas Preston told the Redcoats to fix their bayonets.
Rocks getting thrown, snowballs being thrown.
The British there fixed their bayonets.
The colonists are jeering them.
They're saying, fire on us.
We dare you.
There's no way you're going to fire on your colonists.
Ain't going to happen in Boston.
Until Private Hugh Montgomery slipped.
Private Hugh Montgomery slipped.
He fell.
He accidentally discharged his rifle.
He didn't fire it at the Americans.
He just fired.
Just went off.
This led all of the other British to fire.
They fired on the colonists.
When smoke cleared, five colonists were dead or dying.
Those men were Crispus Attucks, Patrick Carr, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, and James Caldwell.
A lot of people now believe that the first person to fall in the Boston Massacre was Crispus Attucks, who was a sailor of African and Indian ancestry.
Say, a black American was the first guy to fall in what was the early stage of the Revolutionary War.
That's how the story evolved.
There's actually no evidence that he was the first to go down.
He was certainly one of the first five, though.
That goes without saying.
These were the first deaths, and they're considered the first deaths, of the American Revolution.
So what happened after that?
British soldiers were put on trial in the colonial system.
Who defended them?
John Adams and Josiah Quincy Jr.
defended them.
John Adams, you might remember, was the second president of the United States.
Nevertheless, he defended them.
Josiah Quincy Jr.
was actually the spokesman for the Sons of Liberty in Boston, the radical group, the radical independence group.
They both defended them because they defended the colonial system of government and they defended the rule of law.
Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France juxtaposes the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
The French Revolution went crazy and it was a leftist revolution.
But the American Revolution was a conservative revolution and we see the seeds of that even here.
So two of the six soldiers who were tried were found guilty of manslaughter.
Their punishment was being branded on the thumb and then released.
It's not a tough punishment, getting branded on the thumb, I guess, but that was the only punishment.
This was the first shot of the American Revolution.
We hear about the shot heard around the world at Lexington and Concord.
Really, this was the first one, and it happened six years before the Declaration of Independence and five years before those early battles.
Nothing about this event is clear, as I hope I've explained, except for the need for American independence.
The guilt isn't really clear.
Who started it isn't totally clear.
Who was in the right to occupy or levy the tax or to pay the tax?
Not totally clear, but the need for American independence was.
Colonists were rightly angry.
That their self-governing city was being occupied.
They were basically self-governing and had been for a long time.
They were angry at being taxed without representation.
They were angry that British soldiers were competing in the labor market.
And the Crown expected colonists to foot some of the bill for their own war.
And the Crown saw that Americans were living large on British protection.
And the British soldiers were being pelted with rocks just for standing guard and doing their job.
American independence was coming.
These seeds were sown into the founding of the country.
There was this separate entity, this American character that was being built.
We see it very early on, and here we're seeing it flourish.
It's much easier to say those were bad people and these were good people and these were oppressing them and these were not oppressing them.
The reality of it is different.
The historical context is different.
It actually gives one some reason to maybe have some empathy for King George III.
The American Revolution began before he read the Declaration of Independence or something like that.
And when George Washington ceded his military commission, George III called him the greatest man in the history of the world.
Now we have a special relationship with Britain, and that has built for a very long time.
Even though they kept trying to invade the War of 1812, they kept trying to give us trouble.
We fought them back, though.
We're brawny Americans.
We have two inches on those guys.
So...
That was built into the character.
But looking at the historical context of the United States, you see just in that character, independence was our future.
It was our destiny.
We were going to people this continent.
We were going to story this continent.
It was built into the American experiment.
And I think when people view it, view that moment and view our country's character with less of an ideological view, Take on it with less of a rigid, narrow ideology.
And they look more into the character of what makes America, America.
You see all of that flourishing and blossoming for what it is.
And hopefully we get to keep doing that.
We don't just go all the way down into our decadent slump.
But if watching Jimmy Kimmel on the Oscars last night, I don't know, maybe that tempers our hope a little bit.
In any case, that is our show today.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Come back tomorrow.
We'll do it all again.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
