Rob Hersov argues South Africa faces a collapse mirroring 1933 Germany, citing seven genocide elements like persecution and denial under ANC President Cyril Ramaphosa. He accuses the government of executing a "Soviet playbook" via state capture and expropriation without compensation, leading to infrastructure decay, load shedding, and targeted farm attacks. Hersov alleges financial ties between the ANC and Iran or Hamas to fund cases against Israel, criticizes Western appeasement, and praises Donald Trump's confrontation with Ramaphosa. Ultimately, he portrays the nation as undergoing economic genocide driven by race-based laws and incompetent loyalist appointments. [Automatically generated summary]
There are ten elements that make up genocide, starting with classification, organization, persecution, and all the way down to extermination and denial.
And South Africa has probably seven of those ongoing simultaneously.
I did not know what was going to happen to round one, but round one, which we did in February at Jordan Peterson's R Conference in London, I did not know much about you before you sat down with me.
We did a little research.
We sat down.
We had a great conversation.
We put the thing up.
It was an interesting conversation to me.
I don't know a ton about South Africa.
I've learned a lot since.
That video and that interview went bananas.
Elon retweeted it twice.
It caused South Africa to be the number one trend on X. Subsequently, South Africa has now become a hot topic here in America.
As we're taping this right now, your president is here.
He was at the White House a couple days ago.
There's a lot of talk about what's going on in your country.
You're an investor.
You're a businessman, entrepreneur.
I sort of view you as what Crocodile Dundee is to Australia.
You seem like the Crocodile Dundee of your country.
For those that didn't see the beginning part, let's just do a little bit of your history, and then we'll get caught up into all of the politics around what's happening in your neck of the world at the moment.
So I'm 64-year-old South African, born in Johannesburg, South Africa, fifth generation South African, born to sort of British-Scottish on my maternal side, and then And I was born into real wealth in South Africa.
So my grandfather and his business partner founded a mining industrial business, which in the 60s, 70s, 80s was one of the big five mining industrial businesses in South Africa.
And I grew up in, you know, I was given every opportunity in life.
And I took pretty much every opportunity and made the best of it, or I believe I did.
You know, did schooling in university and military service in South Africa and then came to America.
Worked at Goldman Sachs, New York, Harvard Business School.
Worked as Rupert Murdoch's right-hand man in New York City and then moved in the early 90s to Europe where I had big corporate jobs and then went out on my own.
As an entrepreneur.
Had failure, had success, and I've been in sports, media, finance, technology, and aviation.
And you look like more Miami guy than me at the moment.
I'm dressed in the wrong city.
You're very much in the Miami mode right now.
I guess the first part that we should start at as it relates to your history is people hear, okay, five generations in South Africa, a certain amount of people they only hear, they only associate that with one thing, which obviously is apartheid.
So can you talk a little bit about that and a little bit what it was like to grow up as a white person from a wealthy family in the midst of all of that?
Can you explain some of the complexities around that?
Because I think people just look back at history and they're like, oh, these people were automatically the evil ones, these people were automatically the good ones.
I suspect that you probably came from a pretty decent family and all of those things, but that these inequities existed, and yet they're living in a system that is not a good system, but that doesn't mean they're not good people.
So South Africa was only formed as a country in 1910.
Prior to that, we had different provinces, different republics, and only became a union of South Africa in 1910.
And before that, we had, you know, the Great Trek, where the mainly Afrikaner farmers didn't want to be under British rule in the Cape and moved inland in their ox wagons to conquer the interior.
And in many cases, they met up with the black tribes for the first time.
600 kilometers from Cape Town.
And the black tribes had migrated down from East Africa over the last thousand years.
The white arrivals, colonialists, I hate using that word because we are African, white African, arrived in 1652.
And I think the Mayflower was 1620, so similar times.
And then we Anglos are the other white tribe of Africa.
And so South Africa's had wars.
We've had chaos, we've had cooperation, But in 1948, after the Second World War, we had an election where the Afrikaner National Party won the election.
And that was the beginning of a constitutionally-based system called apartheid.
What apartheid means in Afrikaans is separateness, apartheid, separateness.
And the intention was that you're a different ethnicity and a different culture.
Have your own areas, have your own schools, and stick to your own cultures, and we mingle when we have to through employment and through other elements.
And that was the beginning of apartheid.
And it obviously evolved from there to a point where, in 1985, the Afrikaner national government got together, and because of international sanctions, because of demographics, and because they saw where the world was going, they decided apartheid was unsustainable.
They made a conscious decision.
It's not sustainable.
And in 1994, having released Nelson Mandela after 27 years in jail, South Africa had its first democratic elections, and the ANC, African National Congress, swept to power.
They got 80-something percent of the country, which meant a lot of the white people voted for them too.
And only Cape Town and the Western Cape, this little strip down in the bottom corner of Africa, did not vote for the ANC.
And never has.
And when you look at South Africa, somebody asked me, is it a geographic or a management problem?
The geography issue is that it is twice the size of France, South Africa.
It's huge.
And the Western Cape has nothing to do with KZN, has nothing to do with Mpomolongo.
I think there are 26 languages.
There are 12 national languages, 26 different languages.
The white tribe is made up of the Anglos and the Afrikaners.
The black tribes have got 15, Yitzhwana, Zulu, Kosa, Sutu.
Then there are the people of Indian extraction.
And then there's a group called the coloreds.
And the colored people are the mix of the blacks and the white people.
So South Africa is geographically confusing and ethnically and culturally confusing.
So as apartheid was falling apart and you're in a family that...
Was your family fighting against it?
I mean, did everyone sort of realize, I guess you sort of referenced this, but did everyone sort of realize this is going to end one way or another, and it's either going to end extremely poorly, or we're going to have to kind of let it go?
Harry Oppenheimer, the richest South African by far, who created De Beers, an Anglo-American, and was of Jewish extraction from Europe, he was vocal in standing up against the national government.
and an incredible Jewish woman, Helen Sussman, was in parliament as the main voice against the National Party and against apartheid.
So there were a lot of people who because the Jews were great supporters of bringing down apartheid.
And what happened was, Nelson Mandela stood as a giant, as a saint, astride the ANC, South Africa, and the evil ANC doctrine of implementing racist policies, socialist policies, and he kind of managed the transition.
Mbeki, who followed him, did the same.
He had his faults.
But in general, everything was working.
But Jacob Zuma, trained in Russia, came to power.
Not a very intelligent man, a populist.
But he began to implement the National Democratic Revolution, NDR.
And from then on, they implemented something called CADRE, or CADRE, C-A-D-R-E, deployment.
And Cyril Ramaphosa, our president, was a member of that committee, secret, inside the ANC, that basically said, we need to replace any white person that is a position of power, authority, or handles a budget.
And I'm not talking about just senior people.
I'm talking about a small-town manager of a sewage work, small-town manager of the people that pick up rubbish or handle the electricity.
So this is why I think Trump has hit something with the connection to America, because we've been playing these videos of the mayor of Chicago basically doing the exact same thing right now.
But not competent, not clever, people that would obey instructions.
And a maintenance budget, a maintenance budget was basically an opportunity to steal.
They'd hire consultants, pay their friends, and the de-industrialization of South Africa began then.
South Africa has gone backwards in fixed investment in infrastructure, and if you go outside of the Western Cape, which is run by the opposition party, It's called the Democratic Alliance.
It's almost another world.
There are potholes in the roads.
There's raw sewage in the street.
There's E. coli off the coast of Durban.
Surfers can't surf.
Things are falling apart.
And if you go to towns like, even Johannesburg, downtown Johannesburg is basically Mogadishu.
Okay, so obviously we'll get to the racial reckoning that seems to be happening now.
But on the economic side, or just on the day-to-day life side, so they start instituting these policies, they're hiring inept people.
I mean, this quite literally sounds exactly like our previous government, which was hiring based on skin color and gender and sexuality and the rest of it.
And we saw what the fruits of that were.
People start waking up to it, but is it just not enough people to turn it around?
I mean, what's happening to the functioning people?
Well, it's interesting because when you said to me on the show a few months ago, 140 race-based laws, you said it to me live and air, and we don't edit for content, but in my head I was thinking, could that possibly be true?
And then we aired it.
We aired it, of course, as we always do without editing.
And then immediately I saw all these people saying, that simply can't be true.
There's just no way.
And then, of course, all the fact-checkers came in and we checked on Grok and everything else, and it absolutely is true, for sure.
And the quotas that you just mentioned also are true.
Was there some way that this could have gone a different direction in some sense?
Like, was the reaction to something that was prejudiced, let's say, going to lead to this no matter what?
So there's something that's happened in South Africa, which began with Jacob Zuma, but it was really built into the Soviet playbook, the ANC playbook, one in advance, called state capture.
And state capture is you capture the...
And all of a sudden, people wake up and they can't go anywhere.
They're trapped.
So big corporates, people go, "Rob, why are you the only businessman in South Africa standing up?" And I've been very vocal about saying that the corporate South African is a coward, a colluder, or has been captured.
And I had a very good friend of mine who runs one of the biggest supermarket chains.
In South Africa, took me aside and said, Rob, you're being unfair on the corporate chieftains.
They do the best they can.
They're not cowards.
Some are colluders, but they really have been captured.
And I said, tell me what you mean.
He said, big corporates have the PIC, the Public Investment Corporation, government entity, like a sovereign wealth fund, invested in their businesses for 10, 20, 30%.
And they have directors.
They have You know, DEI appointees.
They have unions.
They have employees that don't know if they're going to make it to the next paycheck.
And there's some white-colored Indian or black chief executive earning a salary, earning equity, that is supposed to stand up, Rob.
You're telling them to stand up and call out the government.
How are they going to do that?
They're captured.
They've got people on their board that won't let them speak.
I'm guessing you've seen at least portions of that Yuri Bezmenov video, the KGB agent, who talks about how you subvert a society, and you don't do it overnight.
It actually does take decades, and you've laid out some of that.
So before we get to the White House, because it's an incredible moment what happened there.
I mean, it really was extraordinary watching Trump pull out the video and the photos and all that stuff.
So give me just sort of what's happened even in the last two years as it pertains to the white, So,
But genocide, if you go to the United Nations definition, but I've also given your team a great slide they can put up, there are 10 elements that make up genocide, starting with classification, organization, persecution, and all the way down to, you know, extermination and denial.
So there are 10 elements.
Very interesting.
And South Africa has probably seven of those ongoing simultaneously.
Now, extermination, has not taken place.
Okay?
And I'll talk about farm attacks in a second, but there is not a mass extermination of minority South Africans yet.
But if you listen to Julius Malema, and that video was played in the White House yesterday, he said 90,000 people jumping up and down the stadium, kill the boer, kill the farmer, one settler, one bullet.
But he said a terrible thing on an interview.
He said, we have not yet Cut the throat of whiteness.
We have the dangerous populace, not in brown shirts, in red berets, jumping up and down and openly and publicly threatening to kill minorities, especially white people.
We have that already.
We have a Soviet playbook being pulled out, which is economic genocide, which is already in place, you know, taking as much as you can away from minorities to chase them away or take away what they have, and then signed into law in December, expropriation without compensation in law by So this is the farmer portion of this, correct?
Well, this is the beginning.
And then Cyril Ramaphosa denies that farm attacks are anything different.
He says South Africa is a violent society.
There are farm attacks.
Everybody's under threat.
If you live in the townships as a poor person, you're just as likely to be killed.
Not true.
There are 30,000 commercial farmers in South Africa.
There are 3 million commercial farmers in America.
If you take 2000 to 2020, the number of South African farmers murdered, not attacks, murders, and there are about 45% of the attacks are murders.
Torture and rape are 20% of them.
Torture and rape.
And it's not just white farmers, but it's mostly white farmers.
If you take the numbers of South African farmers that have been murdered, extrapolate that pro rata to the 3 million American, you would have had 234,000 farmers murdered in America from 2000 to 2020.
And when the electricity goes down, the alarm systems go down.
If they've got a generator or solar, you've got to be wealthy to do that.
That could be protected.
But, you know, it's one family, maybe one or two males in the house, not necessarily able to trust your staff because they might be scared and run away.
And horrific things happen.
20% of the murders involve torture and rape of women and children.
There's an only other South African that's been speaking internationally is Ernst Rutz, extraordinary guy, but there are unsung heroes, Gary Player, Ernie Els, the golfers who have access to Donald Trump.
Gary Player, 30-year friendship with Donald Trump, national hero.
And there are other South Africans who are David Sachs, Elon Musk.
To a less extent, Rulof Porta, Peter Thiel.
These are all people who are educated in South Africa, grew up there, or from South Africa.
So basically, you think there were suddenly enough people, obviously the Elon thing, probably specifically, but Sachs, who's in the administration as well.
You think there were enough people suddenly around him?
And then, because of the other things that you discussed around how this is DI on steroids, sort of, and all the weird racial crap that we have here now.
And having been forced to leave the country they loved, the only way they can justify it And South Africans, all the wealthy South Africans over here and in Europe, have some family, a property, all great emotional feelings for the country.
And there's a buildup of angst.
And they've been speaking to Republicans, Democrats, and the buildup has happened.
And I think you getting me on the show has listed touch paper.
A South African billionaire and two famous South African golfers.
None of those three live in South Africa.
None of those two golfers, nor Johan Rupert, live in South Africa.
They've all left.
And all, you know, Donald Trump does have a liking for golfers and billionaires, and Johan Rupert is So having him there, I think, blunted a little bit the, I don't know what word to use, but the giving a Zelensky times 10 to Sororo Imposo, which he deserves.
Look, the MK party with Zuma and the EFF, economic freedom fighters, nothing to the economic or freedom, are the Red Berets.
Are way, way, way more dangerous than Sir Ramaphosa and what's left of his ANC.
And so we have a, for the first time ever, in May 2024, we had a national election.
For the first time in 30 years, the ANC didn't get a majority.
They went from 56% to 40% and had to form this coalition government called the GNU, Governments of National Unity, with the Democratic Alliance and a bunch of other parties.
So we have this kind of rainbow coalition which people was hoping is going to be.
You can say, Cyril Ramaphosa, with his little entourage, and white John Stenhausen, and the billionaire, and the two golfers, was trying to represent the middle ground of South Africa.
But they glossed over some of the key questions.
They didn't tell it like it is honestly to Donald Trump.
Like the statistics I've given you on farm attacks are real.
And only Retief Hoersen, the golfer, said, look, my family have farms.
They've all been attacked.
It's dangerous being a farmer.
That was it.
At least he told the truth.
And I think Cyril was lucky.
He got away with it a little bit through Ramaphosa.
I think Donald Trump could have been way tougher.
But maybe behind the scenes, Marco Rubio, who I respect, I mean, wow.
I want Cyril Ramaphosa and his merry clowns to go back to South Africa and realize, They're in deep trouble.
The country's not fixable.
They know that.
And America can make a hell of a difference, carrot and stick.
The carrot, America can invest heavily, can revitalize our economy, give us economic growth, which we're not getting, but the stick.
And here's where I'm hoping.
The Donald Trump administration, Congressman Ronny Jackson's bill that's going to Congress, and will pick individuals in the South African government, And the radicals who've done hate speech, teamed up with Iran and Hamas, created racist and socialist, anti-American and anti-Semitic policies, are put on sanctions list individually.
Acid freezers, bank freezers, travel freezers.
The names are there.
It's the easiest list to create because there was the Zondo Commission.
Listen to this.
Four years of work, a billion rand of taxpayer money, 2,348 names mentioned.
Alleged and real criminal activity.
There's your list.
Pick the top guys.
Sanction them.
And that will change South Africa.
Because we're not going to change it internally.
So the stick needs to come.
And I think the team going back to South Africa are very well aware that Donald Trump was reasonably peaceful and charming in that meeting.
But they're being told behind the scenes, repeal expropriation without compensation.
Repeal racist black economic impound laws and withdraw the ICJ case against Israel as a fundamental basis before we even have proper talks with you.
As a sidebar for a moment, I mean, this ICC thing against Israel, it largely seems like it's fallen apart, but I mean, it basically originated in South Africa.
So, the link, and America knows all this, by the way, the link between the ANC and Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, etc., radical Islamists, is provable, it's not alleged, it's provable, in Reims.
And the ANC was bankrupt just before the national election.
Had a few meetings in Iran.
Overnight, they were able to pay their bills.
Cyril Ramaphosa, our mighty president, is caught with millions of dollars in his sofa, in his house.
Hasn't had to explain why.
Where did that come from?
Iran.
These guys are bribed by Iran.
But they've run out of allies.
Russia and China are not going to ride to the ANC's rescue.
So, I feel a certain sadness, but I think, why not?
Why shouldn't they go?
You know, my two older sons, one lives in the UK, one lives in America.
I don't want them to come back to South Africa.
I want them to be successful.
And if we can fix South Africa and turn it around, Then they can come back.
But why should they stay when you have less opportunity, you're being persecuted, and the ANC in this new GNU government, in this coalition, are pushing forward what they call transformation.
Another word that doesn't mean what it says.
They're pushing forward transformation even faster now because they think the gravy train might be gone.
Let me ask you a little bit on the personal side of all this, because anytime I have someone in that's speaking out against some stuff that has cost to them financially, but security-wise more than anything else.
You mentioned your two sons don't even live in your country anymore.
You don't have to be doing this, obviously.
You just mentioned you're kind of good to go.
You could just disappear and move to the Maldives or something.
I've been kicked off boards, kicked out of companies that I founded.
I get deplatformed, but I'm through it all.
I don't care anymore because I don't want to call it a calling.
But I am moving the needle.
And every day I get messages from people I know and people I don't know saying, thank you for giving us a voice.
And it makes such a difference to me, no, I'm moving the needle.
However, when it all started to happen, my wife said to me, I effing love this country.
It's worth fighting for.
And that just gave me the spine to keep going.
But last night, she called me in tears.
Some friends of hers had said, you need security.
You're in serious threat.
Surprised Rob hasn't been bumped off.
And separately, a friend of mine had heard something and called my wife and said, look, you know, I really think Rob should ease off on this public speaking.
And she called me almost in tears to say, I love you so much and I don't want you to get taken out or have anything happen to us.
And it's breaking my heart because I'm hurt.
I'm hurting her and putting her under stress.
I don't think I'm in danger.
But, you know, sometimes us males think we're immortal.
But I'm hurting.
She's scared.
And I did say to her last night that I will start easing out of this.