Trump Winning BIG On Immigration, CATO Institute CRASHES OUT
Tate Brown and Ernst Van Ziel analyze Trump's immigration success, citing a 99.9% asylum drop and 90% refugee cut to preserve Anglo-Protestant sovereignty against Cato Institute criticism. They contrast this with South Africa's collapse under the ANC, where over 145 discriminatory policies have forced citizens into private security enclaves costing mere Starbucks prices. The discussion highlights "state proofing" as a necessary strategy for Western nations facing similar deterioration, arguing that proactive community defense and property rights protection offer a viable future beyond waiting for political saviors or accepting state failure. [Automatically generated summary]
This is Tate Brown here holding it down, and we are back on this beautiful, beautiful Tuesday.
It's genuinely a beautiful Tuesday.
It is like a balmy, like high 60s, a little nice breeze coming in just outside of our nation's capital, our finally liberated nation's capital.
The National Guard has been holding it down there for about a year now, and it's really pleasant.
You can walk around D.C. with pretty much no fear.
I actually wear a watch now around D.C., which it's not like this, it's like a tag viewer.
It's not like an exceptionally Expensive watch, but you just never know.
I would hear so many stories about people getting robbed for their watches.
You would hear these stories about carjackings and these sorts of things.
You don't really hear much of that anymore.
You really don't hear much about any sort of street level violence, certainly around the relevant areas like downtown and the mall and that sort of thing.
So it's very beautiful.
Everything is beautiful.
It's a very splendid time to be a DC area resident.
I don't know if that's ever been said by any DC area resident before.
That being said, Big show today.
Obviously, you saw from the title, I'm dropping a bit of a white pill today.
Obviously, it's not really in vogue to be defending Trump emphatically right now.
I will be the first one to say that morale is a bit low right now.
There's really no question about that.
We saw with the Iran war, the market is reacting, the oil market.
I think Brent and crude are dropping down below 90 or around 90 right now.
Again, like we were at $65 a barrel prior to the war.
So still a long way to go, but it's down from the 110.
115 range it was at a few days ago because it looks like, even though Vance, obviously, which we covered yesterday, was unsuccessful to say the least, and negotiations with the Iranian regime, there are still some indications that you know there's still a pathway forward diplomatically.
And so, the market is sort of still holding their breath, anticipating that that could be the case, even with this blockade in place.
There's still plenty of reporting going around that look, the negotiations are still a viable pathway forward, which is encouraging.
I mean, I think everyone is sick and tired.
Of this entire debacle.
That being said, there's not really too many developments on that front.
I went with this story, which you probably saw a lot of people were talking about on Twitter.
Very promising.
And I think the reaction actually is even more promising than the data presented.
The Cato Institute, David Beer.
He's obviously the director of the Cato Institute, the director of immigration studies.
The Cato Institute's obviously a sort of libertarian think tank.
And it's not really the libertarians that we're kind of used to on the right that's sort of within the sort of broader right wing umbrella.
These are the classical libertarians that have pestered us for decades, that really their primary goal is just to impede America from having any national sovereignty whatsoever in the name of freedom.
Their main issues, obviously, is just keeping the border as wide open as possible, ensuring that the global markets, you know, or rather, I should say that Americans have to compete in global markets rather than an American market.
You know, they're furious about the tariff regime from Trump.
And they were, to be fair to them, just as angry during the Biden years because Biden really just kept a lot of the Trump tariffs in place.
These guys are not really friends of sort of this broader America first, you know, base, you know, that kind of makes up.
The new right wing, in a lot of ways, they're the direct opponent.
And I think the Cato Institute really, by and large, is an enemy of American sovereignty.
Anyone that prioritizes or at least has some sort of affinity or desire to see American sovereignty, a strong America, impose itself, you're going to find the Cato Institute being aligned directly opposed to you.
Even the left, every once in a while, will overlap a bit.
When it comes to the tariffs, you saw a lot of Democrats, liberals, et cetera, maybe not liberals, but people on the left.
That were like, you know, maybe it's not the worst thing in the world, you know, tariffs.
I mean, tariffs were the calling card of the Democrat Party, you know, well into the 2000s.
It was actually the Republican Party that was, you know, very opposed to tariffs.
And this, you know, was a sort of dramatic departure when Trump was, you know, dominating the primaries in 2016.
Is pretty much every other candidate on stage, you know, said tariffs were, you know, part of the liberals' way of impeding with small businesses.
You know, tariffs are just a tax on the consumer.
That was the popular.
Talking point.
And Trump was saying no, because if you look at every free market deal that's been inked in the last 20 years, it's directly led to, well, in the last 30, 40 years, it's directly led to an erosion of America's manufacturing sector primarily, but just broadly, America's, again, ability to assert itself on the global stage, ability to sort of throw its sovereignty around, its sovereign weight around.
So again, Trump really just drastically changed the view.
Kind of my whole thing.
People constantly ask me because, again, it's very in vogue right now over the last few months to be hypercritical of Trump.
And I think I've made it clear.
Anyone that's watched the show daily would know that I've been opposed to the war in Iran from day one.
Again, I've heard out all of the geopolitical game strategy, and I understand them very well, and I'm sympathetic to them in some ways.
That being said, I'm still just not sold on why this is a priority at the moment.
Again, everyone, you know, there's some people in the audience, obviously, that are in favor of this operation.
And there's a lot of camps that are in favor of it.
I'm not going to pretend like it's just, you know, Israel first.
People, or like sort of, you know, maybe Jewish people broadly, you know, that's kind of the critique is that they're the only ones that want this war.
I don't think that's true, mainly because I have open DMs.
My DMs are open, and I receive DMs quite routinely from people that really don't seem to prioritize Israel that much, or they're not terribly concerned about Israel that are in favor of this war, that are saying this war is a good idea.
You know, it's sort of a geopolitical masterclass.
Again, I'm just skeptical.
I've been skeptical, and even if I were to.
Presuppose that this would have a favorable geopolitical outcome for us, which, again, I'm not even sure is the case.
Scott Greer wrote a really great piece that was actually, I think it was put in the American Conservative, where he basically laid out why this war is just going to leave us in a worse place for a variety of reasons geopolitically, economically, as far as the Trump administration's perception among the American people, like electoral viability for the Republicans.
Across the board, it's just not going to have a favorable outcome for us.
But even if I were to presuppose that this was a net positive, you know, geopolitically, the question is just like, yes, but it's down the pecking order of importance right now.
That's just the way I see it.
My mind can't really be changed on that.
My priority, and I've maintained this, again, people that watch the show will understand this very well because I talk about it a lot.
My priority is undoing the mass migration wave that has sort of swept through the country over the last 60, coming on 70 years now.
Again, I view, Primarily, and again, this is an unpopular opinion, or maybe not an unpopular opinion, but it's a controversial opinion, is that the Hart Seller Act, again, the Hart Seller Act of the 1960s, was really the beginning of the erosion of the American people's stake in the United States.
Again, the American identity broadly got watered down.
The American identity went from well understood as people that have stake in the country, that have been here for a while, that sort of have a shared American culture.
It got watered down to where we had Myra Flores on the show.
Former congresswoman, and she was basically just holding the line on this idea that being an American is just having these broad, warm feelings towards freedom and liberty, which is like 80% of the world.
That's like everybody for the most part.
And I just reject that wholeheartedly.
I think we need to return to, again, an America that resembles America.
And this is where it gets controversial, but this is just objectively true part of that American identity is.
European.
It's not European as in like Europe in 2026, but again, it's descended from Europe.
And again, these countries in Europe, specifically Northwest Europe, specifically the British Isles, that is where we find a direct lineage.
And again, we have a sort of a shared heritage with those people.
And so the further away you get, as Orrin McIntyre stated on Tucker Carlson's show a few months ago, the further you get from that sort of core Anglo Protestant identity, the further away you get from a Bonafide American identity through and through.
Again, this is not to say that you have to be that specifically to be an American.
It's just to say the further you distance from that, the further away you get from sort of that founding colonial stock.
I don't even think people that would be opposing me politically would even disagree with that necessarily.
Exhibit A is the Japanese.
You know, when the Japanese are putting an American in a video game, it's always, you know, like a big muscular, you know, white dude and his name's like Joey Johnson.
You know, it has like an anglo name.
Like, it's we kind of all know what's going on here.
Again, this is not to say that other people aren't Americans.
I think, you know, like, like black Americans, for example, are very distinctly American, actually.
Like, they quite literally, as a culture, as a people, could not exist without the context of the United States.
So, I'm not really making like an exclusionary argument here.
I'm just, again, stating a fact of like, we should probably consolidate because everything feels unfamiliar right now, everything feels foreign.
I live in Northern Virginia.
My neighbors are nice enough.
They're nice people, I suppose, but it doesn't feel like America.
It has this sort of veneer of America, right?
Like, you know, you still have your AutoZones and your McDonald's and whatever, but it's not, there's nothing deeper than that.
And that's what we've lost.
So this is why, for me, immigration has been the primary issue.
And as I see it, and I maintain this to this day, is President Trump, you know, put aside all the other problems that everyone, trust me, everyone is, You know, debating and talking about right now.
There's a myriad of ways you can criticize, you know, Donald Trump and the Trump administration.
For me, immigration is the primary issue, and that is where he is gaining ground on.
And I'm going to support him because of that.
That's just full stop.
That's just the reality of the situation.
As long as he continues to make gains and move the football down the field in that direction, he's going to have my support.
No, no, ands, ifs, or buts.
That's just, it is what it is.
I can't state that any clearer.
So, again, I have people that are in the sort of the plan trusting sphere that.
Critique me that come after me for again not trusting the plan on Iran.
Um, I'm not really trusting the plan on Iran, I just don't see why this is a necessary um move right now, a necessary calculation.
Um, unless he's able to again deliver on domestic policy at an even higher rate.
I mean, that was kind of the Cernovich calculation.
Um, and I sort of second that.
Um, that being said, we'll get into this story.
Um, this is from David Beer.
Obviously, he's okay.
Let's see, he says in his bio, yeah, he's the director of immigration studies for the Cato Institute.
Again, immigration is my primary.
issue I'm talking about legal immigration.
You know, illegal immigration is an issue that even Democrats can solve because, again, there's a consensus for the most part in the United States that illegal immigration is bad, right?
Even with how left wing the Democrats have gotten, they will still have to at least signal to their constituents that they're, you know, in theory, they would be opposed to, you know, like illegal immigration broadly.
Now, their policy looks drastically different, of course, but they will pay lip service to it.
That just shows you how.
Overwhelming the opposition is to illegal immigration to the United States.
But I go further.
I critique legal immigration.
I think in many ways, legal immigration actually leads to the disenfranchisement of Americans even more so than illegal immigration because the point's been made, and it's actually a correct point, is that the type of labor that illegal immigrants participate in is labor that isn't really desirable per se for Americans.
This is like very menial labor jobs.
I mean, the picking strawberries.
Is actually kind of a good example because that is actually a job that not a lot of Americans would participate in.
The wages are low.
Again, this is not an argument for legal immigration.
I'm just stating this is that legal immigration directly disenfranchises Americans because they're occupying jobs that would otherwise go to Americans, like jobs that most Americans seek out.
America, 80% of our economy is built on services.
So we have a service based economy.
Now we can debate if that's a good thing or a bad thing, et cetera, et cetera.
That's not for me.
That's not what we're discussing today.
I'm just saying that for the majority of Americans, these are the type of jobs that they Sort of desire, and you know, like what half of uh, you know, young people, if not even more, um, you know, they go into college, and you know, the college track is supposed to you know give you that sort of job, you know, the same job that our parents had, the same jobs that our grandparents had, you know, like that's just the American dream in a lot of ways.
And legal immigration is the direct threat to that lifestyle, that sort of conventional American middle class lifestyle, and that's what I seek to protect, and that's what's under assault from legal migration.
I'm opposed to it on economic principles, you know, for economic principles, but I'm also opposed to it on cultural principles.
And as I outlined at the beginning of the show, it dilutes the actual American identity broadly.
And this is, again, this isn't like some, you know, renegade dissident point that I'm making.
This is echoed by Trump himself.
I mean, he actually went further.
He said that, you know, people that are coming to this country from these disparate cultures are poisoning the blood of America.
I think that's broadly true if you look at, like, Somalia, where, You know, a lot of these Somalis in Minneapolis came here legally.
And you're starting to see these like ethnic enclaves all over the United States.
And I think this is just going to get worse and worse.
You're seeing, you know, you have the Somalis in Minneapolis.
You know, you look at the DFW area, you see these like Indian enclaves everywhere.
You know, everyone talks about Islamic immigration.
Sure, we can be opposed to that on religious grounds.
I view Hindu Indian migration as just as big of a threat.
And my case in point is the Dallas Fort Worth area.
It's just increasingly foreign and increasingly unfamiliar.
And I don't like it.
I don't like it very much.
I think it's a net negative for the United States.
You even see bizarre ethnic enclaves, ethnic enclaves that wouldn't have been conceivable to the founding fathers.
Like Tyler Oliveira did an expose in upstate New York where you have Hasidic Jewish enclaves, where you have these entire towns where I've been talking.
I mean, I've known about this.
I've talked about this for years.
You know, everyone like pressed me.
Why aren't you talking about it?
It's like, because I've talked about it.
I can find clips I've talked about on the show before.
Obviously, you have a massive Hasidic, which is like ultra Orthodox Jewish people in Brooklyn.
That was like, that's, that's, they've been there for, you know, 50, 60 years now.
And I guess the analog kind of would be like the Amish.
It's not quite a one to one, but as far as like they are hyper committed to sort of like the Jewish, like rabbinical law and these sorts of things.
So the, They're very, very orthodox.
They're very, very religious and they're a very insular group.
Like every dollar that enters the Hasidic community never leaves.
And so you just look at communities like that that refuse to assimilate, and then you have to ask the question how could you possibly view them as American?
I mean, they don't really view themselves as American.
I'm sure they would identify as such because of the passport that they carry, but they don't participate in American society.
They purposely sort of silo themselves away to the point where this is what Tyler Oliveira covered.
Is they moved in mass, like a big group of them moved upstate to upstate New York.
They moved to this town called Monroe, which is just your traditional Hudson Valley town.
And they just started setting up these massive apartment buildings, these hideous, massive apartment buildings, because they have like eight kids a piece.
And they just packed in there.
And they eventually separated their town off from Monroe.
So they literally just moved in, changed the entire fabric of this community, and then established their own town.
Like a settler colony.
It's neither here nor there.
Just unacceptable outright.
And it's kind of crazy that a lot of people are afraid to talk about this.
I don't see why.
I think probably a lot of normal Jewish people would even agree that this is ridiculous, that this is going on, where they go in and just change the entire face of this community for the worse.
Again, these are a community that, once again, refuses to participate in American society.
They have the highest welfare participation in the entire country.
Again, if you just pick out Curious Joel's, the name of the town that they've established, if you look at the welfare numbers in this town, they're on par with Native American reservations.
And if you know anything about Native American reservations, you understand how crazy that is.
Again, these people who just have refused to assimilate whatsoever, not even the fact they haven't converted to Christianity, they haven't even moderated their religion that's, again, not native to the United States.
You know, that wasn't, you know, we would not find that among the, you know, founding stock by and large.
I mean, there was like a community in Charleston, I suppose.
They won't even like moderate.
They just come in and refuse to change their values and refuse to assimilate.
They don't even teach their kids English.
They teach them Yiddish and then they learn English later on in life.
It may sound like I'm picking on these people.
I'm just using them as like a very egregious example of these sort of ethnic enclaves that have been created because, again, of just unfettered migration policy over the years.
And then in addition to that unfettered migration policy, a refusal to like forcibly assimilate people, a refusal for, The government to again lobby on behalf of that core American population and ensure that these new arrivals are assimilating into the United States.
I don't care if it's Somalis in Minneapolis, Hindu Indians in Dallas, Fort Worth, Hasidics in New York, Haitians in Ohio.
I don't really care.
I'm tired of playing these games of like, well, they're slightly closer to America.
I don't care.
They're not participating in American society.
They refuse to.
And if anything, they impede on the everyday lives of Americans.
So I'm just really sick and tired of these semantic games.
I want America to remain American.
So I'll get to the data because I'm just crunching, blasting through the time here.
This is from David Beer.
David Beer, who, again, is not a friend of people that would be opposed to immigration, he's actually an adversary.
This is a guy who hates Donald Trump just very deeply, is basically making a pitch for why the Trump administration has been a success, which is hilarious.
I'll just read here through his little thread that he put together here.
Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration, as I predicted.
While illegal entries have fallen, they continued a prior trend, falling more before he came back, which was because people, again, illegal immigrants, started to anticipate that Donald Trump would be coming into office.
That is the primary reason why they stopped arriving into the United States, or at least stopped bothering trying to get in because they knew they'd probably be swiftly deported.
Meanwhile, Trump has cut legal entries, reversing the prior upward trend.
I mean, you can just see here.
Look, whoa, boom.
Don't worry about migration.
He continues on here, and here's a few graphs that I think just really illustrate where people are saying, you know, Trump is not doing anything about immigration.
He's completely reneged on his promise of mass deportations.
And while it's true that we're not getting tens of millions of people deported, that's what I would like to see.
I mean, I'm not like thrilled.
I'm not like exclaiming that we're just on the path to saving our country, or rather, saving the country is imminent.
I do think we're on the path.
Certainly, we're making very good progress, as I'm going to illustrate, or as David Beer is going to illustrate here.
Of the decline in Border Patrol arrests from their peak, 83% occurred under Biden.
Of the decline in Border Patrol releases, 96% occurred under Biden.
Illegal immigration was lower when Trump came into office than when he left office.
Again, because you can see people here anticipating the incoming Trump administration.
That is the primary reason why this was the case.
It's neither here nor there.
Illegal immigration, we expected that to drop under Trump.
I think we would have expected illegal immigration to drop under any Republican president, to be honest.
Like DeSantis, you probably would have had a similar sort of reaction from people that were attempting to enter the country illegally.
That's not what I'm really hung up on here.
This is the interesting one right here.
Meanwhile, legal entries by people requesting asylum at ports of entry fell 99.9% under President Trump's second term.
That decline alone is greater than the decline from the drop in illegal entries measured by Border Patrol arrests or releases, but it doesn't stop there.
So, again, asylum has completely cratered.
And if you know anything about asylum, that is where the scamming was really going on.
This is where people were able to legally domicile in the United States.
And their asylum claim, by and large, was effectively that their country sucked.
Right?
They weren't being persecuted.
I suppose they were being persecuted because their own countrymen have no idea how to run a country like Guatemala.
Not at all what the asylum program was initially set up for.
And even the initial sort of conception of the asylum program had some problems.
That's neither here nor there.
It's not just asylum.
Trump has cut the refugee program by 90%.
This program is for persecuted people, mainly Christians under Biden, which is a stretch, to say the least.
The majority of refugees that came into the United States under Joe Biden, not the majority, but the largest group, rather, the largest country of origin were Congolese people, people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly known as Zaire, if you're an old head in the crowd.
These people, I suppose, are Christian.
They maybe would profess it, but this is certainly not a Western Christianity.
If you know anything about African Christianity, I would know.
I traveled Africa.
I backpacked across Africa.
I interacted with priests, with pastors.
I attended churches.
It is Christianity, I suppose, but it is nothing even remotely close to sort of Western Christianity, certainly not American Christianity.
My case in point is that if you look at the demographic breakdown of the Congo, it's like a quarter among the Christians, it's like a quarter Protestant, a quarter Catholic, and then a quarter other Christian.
We're not talking about orthodoxy.
We're not talking about like Mormons.
We're talking about like folk religion, folk African religion with like a Christian veneer on it.
And that's supposedly the sort of Christians under Biden that beard is sort of appealing to Christian sensibilities with, just completely false on its head.
Who were vetted abroad and entered legally with a path to permanent residence, Trump immediately gutted the program.
And as we'll talk about, our guest for today, which will be joining us in about five minutes, is Conscious Caracal, Ernst Van Ziel.
He is a South African activist.
The refugees that have been entering the United States are almost entirely, with the exception of three Afghans that came in, are entirely white South Africans, specifically Afrikaners.
Like, that's just, it's hilarious because that's a policy that would have been a pipe dream for, you know, anti immigration proponents for years.
I'll just blast through.
We don't have the most up to date data for immigrant visas, mostly for family members of U.S. citizens entering for permanent residence, but the trend was down.
And then Trump and the State Department banned nearly half of all immigration visas starting in January 2026.
This is the high estimate, and it's dropping like a rock.
Temporary K visas for spouses and fiances of U.S. citizens and their children were down 65% in 2025.
Again, that's where a lot of the scamming was happening as well, was through spousal visas and fiance visas.
Huge white pill there.
Visas for international students were down 40% last summer, thanks to a slew of policies designed to throttle visa issuances and scare off students.
Students from 40 countries were now outright banned, again, because a lot of the universities were basically operating as visa mills for primarily Indians and Chinese also.
So thank you very much, President Trump.
H 1B visas for skilled workers are also down, largely because Trump imposed a $100,000 fee to hire any H 1B worker entering from abroad.
Most H 1B visas issued abroad are renewals.
So the decline for new visas was likely closer to 90%.
So, again, you know, this is just people are saying he's not doing anything on the H 1B front.
He's not doing anything on the H 1B front.
Sure, we would like to see the program scrapped entirely, but this is progress.
This is progress that is happening.
And then the opposite would be happening if Kamala was president.
I mean, we would be seeing millions more flooding into the country.
When you add it all up, the immigration collapse looks like this a decline of roughly 50K for illegals, including arrests never released.
And a decline of 132,000 for legal.
Over 70% of the cut in immigration was legal, and this excludes the bans on status for people already in the United States.
And then, of course, here's his sort of commentary at the end.
Few Americans paid attention to this aspect of the Trump agenda, but it was predictable and predicted by me that this would happen.
Trump is arguably the most anti legal immigration president ever.
Congress should stop him before the damage is permanent.
That is something that Republicans should run on is that, hey, I will fight to back the agenda of the most anti legal immigration president ever.
That's a winning message, quite frankly.
Maybe you could couch it in slightly less aggressive terms, but this is, again, this is sort of reversing the disenfranchisement of Americans.
Again, this is taking the boot off our neck.
This is buying us time, and this is reversing trends that have been completely gutting the United States.
Ernst Van Ziel, who I believe is ready, because I want to discuss with him sort of this tendency that you're seeing on the right for people to embrace the idea of accelerationism.
This idea that if we vote for Democrats, the Republicans will learn their lesson and then they will sort of pivot even more to the right.
I'm the head of public relations at AfriForum, which is one of the largest civil rights organizations in Africa.
But we are based in South Africa.
And I also post on X and YouTube under the name Conscious Caracal, all about South Africa, culture, and politics from here, and also breaking news regarding South Africa.
I guess before we really dive in, I want to hit on this point first, and I hope this doesn't catch you too off guard.
Is I was going through sort of the immigration numbers thus far under the Trump administration.
Obviously, on this show, we are broadly skeptical of immigration.
We're saying that, look, this has led to a lot of disenfranchisement in the United States, but also across Europe.
I mean, you're seeing this.
And I guess what I'm contesting is this idea that if we are to just endorse Democrats, if we are to vote for Democrats and sort of accelerate this process, that this will lead to the Republican Party sort of pivoting.
Further right, and basically theorizing that if we accelerate the collapse of the United States, then our ideology will rise out of the ashes.
This is why I wanted to talk to you specifically, but really just talk to any South African, but specifically you.
I want to ask you if that strategy has worked in South Africa.
If South Africa now has a based right wing party that's ascendant, is that the case?
And the top four parties that I could choose from to vote for was the biggest party, which is left wing, second biggest party, which is center left, the third biggest party, which is far left, and the fourth biggest party, which is also far left, Marxist Leninist.
So in South Africa, yes, still after all the different horror stories that you've heard of state collapse and just state failure, corruption, all the far left nonsense and just Commie behavior that you've read about coming out of South Africa.
30 years of that has produced a political spectrum or a political menu to choose from.
That is pretty much do you want to choose what flavor of leftism would you like to vote for this election?
Viably, I mean, there are some parties that you would consider conservative, but they're not in the top parties that are actually making a major impact on government.
It's really just a rebuttal to all of these arguments is just hey, look at South Africa.
And it's almost Too obvious.
Now, what's unfortunate for you guys, for obvious reasons, and I'm certainly there's this tendency almost for people on the right here to like almost gloat, and I'm like, that's ridiculous.
But the point that they gloat over, and again, I think it's just wrong to do so, is they say, you know, there was that famous page that was going viral a few weeks ago, Josie versus Josie, where they would show a picture of Johannesburg in 2010 versus 2025 at the exact same spot, and you would just see within 15 years, it looks like you guys lost a war or something like that.
And this point that rightfully so, a lot of people made was there are still liberals in South Africa, specifically like white liberals in South Africa.
And so it really just kind of gets to the point of like, no, this sort of cognitive dissonance that we're seeing from people that are on the left, people that would obviously should know better, that doesn't go anywhere, no matter how bad things get.
Maybe you could break down sort of the psychology of a liberal in South Africa.
How can they tolerate all this collapse and not, it doesn't occur to them that maybe this project? is just fundamentally flawed.
So, maybe first, just as a quick introduction, what people need to understand about the nature of collapse is that it's much less like a bomb going off and much more like an ultra slow motion car crash.
Those videos you've seen of like crash test dummies in a car, it's much more like that on like an ultra slow mo level.
So, it's just accumulated decay.
That's what collapse looks like.
And what happens during collapse is not that it gets to a certain point when it's quote unquote bad enough.
And then everyone just wakes up and realizes we have to do something about this.
And then in mass, there's this revolutionary turning point.
No, what happens is as things gradually get worse, the majority of people just kind of normalize it and adjust to the decay.
So you just have people, for example, South Africa has been struggling with rolling blackouts for 18 years, meaning that for 18 years or more, South Africa has had rolling blackouts where for many hours a day, Power is off.
What's the reaction?
Well, did people after five years of rolling blackouts say this is preposterous?
We're voting in a new government to solve this problem.
No, they just slowly got adjusted to it.
They've got solar panels on their roof.
People got generators.
There's an app that I have on my phone.
Every South African has it on their phone that tells you when the power is going to go off.
That's adjusting to decay, adjusting to collapse.
It's not at some point things just get so bad that people say, This is okay.
We've had enough.
We're now going to.
Vote for a different party, or we're just going to go in a more based direction because this leftism thing isn't working.
No, it just, people just adjust to it.
So that doesn't mean that there's nobody doing anything positive.
It just means that the quote unquote silent majority kind of just goes with the decay and adjusts and normalizes it rather than quote unquote waking up.
But we can talk about what an energized or visionary minority is doing, but that's the big picture of what's happening is that.
As decay accelerates or happens, the majority of people just adjust to it and normalize it rather than doing something drastic to solve it.
But I do want to drill down on this a little more because another question I have for you, again, you know, it seems like it should be obvious, but a lot of people are contesting this point, is that there's sort of, again, this theory that, you know, if the right in America sort of tones it down or ratchets down the pressure, or that if the left has, you know, power for extended periods of time, they will moderate.
My question, I guess, would be the ANC has been in power for like, what, 30 years now.
Has the racial grievance politics toned down in South Africa since then?
Not a single central policy of the ANC has moderated in any sense.
So, their central philosophy is the National Democratic Revolution, a Cold War era Soviet theory of just like first you pretend to be a liberal movement to gain power, then you use liberalism to transition to socialism, and then you use socialism to transition to communism, and then the National Democratic Revolution is.
I mean, the ANC have not moderated in any sense.
They are progressing down the road of national democratic revolution.
So they are increasingly nationalizing more and more and more, not moderating in any sense.
The amount of racially discriminatory policies targeting minorities in South Africa, in particular the white minority, is increasing, not decreasing.
The amount of nationalization of healthcare, of electricity, of water, of every single service, it's not privatizing, it is increasingly being nationalized.
The only thing that's stopping the ANC is.
In a lot of these ventures, is the fact that they, as they are through their own corruption and mismanagement, state capacity is decaying at a rapid and increasing rate.
So they want more control, but at some point they can only stretch state power as far before their own baked in incompetence and corruption kind of limits their power.
So that's the only thing really saving South Africa at the moment is that the state is incompetent.
The state has horrible ideas, but luckily it's also incompetent in.
In using those bad ideas.
So that's the only limiting factor.
There's no, as to get back to your original question, there's no ideological limiting factor or zeitgeist limiting factor stopping the ANC.
It's literally just the state apparatus, the state machinery that they need to enact their national democratic revolution is collapsing around them and that is limiting their power.
I mean, on that point, I mean, maybe you could, I'm sure a lot of people in the audience are familiar, especially because obviously South Africa is.
Was in the news fairly recently in the United States, and it still bubbles up, obviously, around the white South African refugees that are being admitted into the United States.
Could you maybe outline, as a white South African, sort of the situation for you guys specifically inside of South Africa?
Sort of what is the government policies that impact you?
And then, in addition, what is like sort of the social condition?
Obviously, people have highlighted the outsized violent crime that is directed towards white South Africans.
So, on the one side, you have to deal with just general state collapse.
So, all these basic services that the government is supposed to be providing, such as water, electricity, safety, I mean, bare bones type of things, are all collapsing and deteriorating, getting worse and worse.
So, you have to increasingly find alternative ways of providing those goods and services to your community, whether that be through community organization or through the private sector.
But then also on the other side, you have a genuinely malicious government that targets certain groups with.
Policies, discriminatory policies.
For example, South Africa has over 145 racially discriminatory policies currently on the books.
No, I'm not talking about the South African government of the 20th century.
I'm talking about the South African government in 2026.
And then also, a lot of these policies really go into absolutely just absurd levels of malicious discrimination.
There were just so many examples.
I don't know which one to give you.
The first one that comes to mind was now a few years ago.
There was a major pharmacy in South Africa, pharmacy chain Diskem, and an internal memo leaked where the CEO pretty much wrote a memo internally saying, We are putting a total freeze, a total moratorium on any hiring or promotion of white people for the foreseeable future, seeing as we're not reaching the race targets that the government has mandated for the private sector, meaning that we are at risk of such big fines,
it might take this massive corporation under.
So that's the type of things you see.
Every level of sport, for example, has racial discrimination in it.
Even seven year old, 10 year old children get discriminated against in sports teams at school because you need a certain amount of every race in every team.
It's called the ideology of transformation.
Everything needs to be racially transformed, that every facet of society needs to represent the demographics of the country perfectly.
And if it doesn't, harsh discrimination needs to be.
Apply to make it so.
And that you see it in every facet of society.
One other example would be, for example, during COVID, there was something called the Tourism Relief Fund.
So that was a relief fund started by the South African government to assist small and medium, like family sized businesses, family run businesses in the tourism sector that were going under due to the lockdowns.
But this Tourism Relief Fund had a catch, a racist catch.
You only qualify for this assistance if your management is black enough.
If it's too white, You don't qualify for this funding, meaning the government's literally going to watch your small family business go under and wave at you and say, sorry, your management's too white, we can't help you.
And this is kind of the stuff that, of course, when people were citing that this could possibly happen, you know, when the sort of order was being upended, people laughed at them.
Like, that's something out of a dystopia novel or something.
And of course, it didn't take very long to arrive there.
I think the timelines they provided were a bit too generous.
It's here.
In addition to that, maybe because this is something that I don't think a lot of Americans realize how dire the safety situation is in South Africa.
I was in South Africa fairly recently.
I traveled all throughout Africa and I was in Johannesburg.
I was at a A pub there watching the Spring Box, go Spring Box.
And I was talking to some of the students at the local university, and I was explaining to them that in the United States, no matter where you are in the country, you can just walk up to someone's door and knock on the door.
And, like, you know, if you're like a postman or something, you're delivering a package, it's very common.
There's no fences, no nothing.
You just walk up.
And I was like, in a lot of parts of the country, people still don't even lock their doors.
I mean, that's still like a very common thing.
And I was explaining this to them that we don't have fences.
We don't have really, a lot of people don't even really have security systems.
And they were just completely like dumbfounded.
And I would have thought they maybe would have known this from like movies or media, but.
They were quite literally stunned at the level of crime that they have relative to the rest, you know, really to the developed world, you know, the United States specifically.
Could you maybe outline what the average South African middle class person's home looks like, the sort of extent that you guys have to go to guarantee your family's safety?
It's always funny when me and my wife watch American films.
There's always a plot point, like one character goes up to the house that they need to retrieve something from the bad guys in that house and they want to retrieve something.
They walk up to the front door and they pick the lock or the door is unlocked and they walk in.
It's not strange.
And we just immediately stop.
Like, we can't, that breaks the whole story for us because we're like in South Africa, you can't do that.
You're like, you can't just walk up to someone's door, let alone open the door and walk in.
But the American film just treats it like normal, like no, this is just completely believable, average stuff.
Yes, so in South Africa, various levels of security that you can use to fortify your house.
Some South Africans, especially the richer white liberals, all move to security complexes with like a security gate.
You get scanned in, very, very high security, very high walls around the security complexes with barbed wire, electric wire, 24 7 armed guards driving around.
For those that can't afford the security complexes, then you have to turn your house into a fort to the best of your ability.
Also, barbed wire on the high walls, electric fences, alarm systems in your house, armed response.
So, for example, armed response is a good example of a private sector solution that's helped fight crime in the past few decades.
So, armed response is basically you have an armed response service, a private security firm on your phone that you can press the panic button and they will arrive within a few minutes at your house, heavily armed, well trained, pretty much.
Take on anything, even take on criminals that are armed with like automatic weapons.
So, and that service, because the private security sector is so expansive in South Africa now due to the government's failure, there are more private security guards in South Africa than the police and the military combined.
Meaning that there's so much competition in this private sector of private security that it becomes dirt cheap.
For example, I have private security armed response that I can call to my house and I pay.
The amount that I pay per month for that service of armed response, people that are well armed, well trained, showing up at my house that can fight anything that the crime world can throw at them, I pay the same amount that you pay for a coffee at Starbucks.
I pay per month to have that armed response service at my disposal.
So that's not something just for the super rich in South Africa.
Even a basic middle class income can afford armed response.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of poor South Africans can't afford any of the things that I've described now.
The poorest of the poor are completely just left at their own devices to try and survive in a country where crime is just completely rampant.
So, on the one side, you have the private sector, and then also there's the community based solutions alongside the private sector solutions.
Community based solutions are neighborhood watches.
So, for example, AfriForum, the organization that I work for, has a network of over 177 neighborhood watches all across the country that organize people in over 177 different communities all across the country.
Organizing volunteers that are well trained and well armed to keep their community safe.
This isn't your grandma's neighborhood watch like you'd have in America, just with pepper spray and maybe a cell phone camera or a flashlight.
These guys are ready to fight well organized criminals that are well armed as well, but also within the confines of the law.
This isn't like some vigilante militia group, but that's also on the other side.
So, to fight the crime scourge in South Africa, you have the private sector solutions and then you also have the community based, volunteer based solutions, which AfriForum specializes in.
Well, I think this specific sort of realm is really relevant to Americans because I do think Americans and honestly Westerners by and large, but specifically Americans are really starting, even under the Trump administration, are still sort of accurately perceiving an increase in the deterioration of public safety, right?
Like people are not crazy.
They're walking around.
I mean, you can see the videos out of like Philadelphia where it literally looks like a zombie movie, but people are just noticing hey, there's more break ins in my neighborhood, you know?
Like my car is getting broken too more often.
You're hearing.
More and more stories of just random acts of violence on the street against just like, again, just like middle class people by and large.
This is where I think you might have coined this or at least popularized two phrases that I love using.
And I heard them from you first.
I've been watching for years, so I know it was you.
One was you said South Africa is sort of a crystal ball into the future of the West if we don't react accordingly.
And then the other phrase that you use quite often or that I would credit you for popularizing is, you know, we need to plant trees that will not rest under the shade of, or something along those lines.
And I think those two points are really salient.
So maybe you could outline specifically how everyday South Africans, specifically like the white minority, have reacted to all these points that you've outlined, sort of some of the methods that they use to sort of insulate.
I guess, in short, provide some white pills because this is also.
So, yeah, the bad news, unfortunately, is that many Western countries seem doomed to continue to South Africanize.
South Africanization is a real phenomenon that is.
Unfortunately, it seems that it is going to increase in many Western nations.
That's the bad news.
The good news is the solutions to South Africanization are already being pioneered at ground zero in South Africa by the private sector, by community based organizations like AfriForum and the Solidarity Movement.
And what we are doing specifically is called state proofing, where if you have a malicious state or a failing state, you proof yourself or build up solutions to defend and shield yourself against not just the decay, but the malicious policies as well.
And that's where this type of The type of model of AfriForum comes in, specifically state proofing against a malicious and a failing state.
But that's the white pill.
The white pill is that these solutions are being tested and crash tested and stress tested in South Africa at the moment.
So we're going to make mistakes, but we're also going to have some major successes.
And you can learn from both the mistakes and the successes.
And that's some reassurance for those who know that your country is probably going to continue to South Africanize.
Many of your politicians in America, specifically, even just like say the quiet part out loud.
Mandani the other day said that South Africa is the model that he wants to use for New York City.
So, my only comment there is when your politicians tell you South Africa is the model, please believe them.
Don't just like laugh it off.
Don't just say, oh, well, that's just the left has lost their minds.
They're just saying crazy, kooky things again.
No, they are deadly serious.
And that's what we've learned in South Africa.
When the left tells you, We are coming for your property, you believe them.
When the left tells you we are going to discriminate against you and we're going to justify it as positive discrimination, believe them.
When the left tells you if your particular community is affected by a particular form of crime, like farm murders, especially, we are going to deny that that crime phenomenon even exists and we're going to praise the politicians that encourage it.
Believe them when the left tells you kill the boer, kill the farmer, and encourages farm murders, and then you tell them, Why are you doing this? and they're telling you it's just a metaphor.
That's the type of things that you're going to hear, and that's the type of justification that you're going to hear from them.
So, no, it brings us back to the original point don't bet on collapse, don't bet on let's give the left more power, so that's going to energize our boys.
Like, no, it's not going to do that, it's just going to create a worse situation.
You'd rather just speaking metaphorically, but also a little bit literally in the South African sense, you'd rather be building for the future while the lights are on than when they start going off.
So, you'd rather be building when the collapse has not gotten to a worse, even worse point, than wait for that collapse and then start building in the chaos.
That doesn't work.
So, those people betting on the collapse are making a gamble that they're going to lose, unfortunately.
And when it comes to particularly South African solutions that have worked in South Africa, It's the solutions that are proactive.
For example, AfriForum, with our solutions to the problems in South Africa, we didn't start yesterday.
AfriForum as an organization is 20 years old.
We started building capacity 20 years ago, and this year we're 20 years old now.
And now we're starting to see the real fruits of what we've built over these many decades.
So that's my lesson, or the lesson that I would like to instill in your audience is that start building today.
Yeah, because I mean, there's kind of two poisonous lines of theory that are sort of diverging and sort of on the right with the Trump era.
Is okay.
We've already outlined into the people that are like, let's just accelerate this and then we'll get out of it, which we've already debunked, I would say, pretty concisely.
But there's also this kind of line of thinking, which I think is also a false sense of security, which is like, see, someone's going to come save us.
We just have to wait for the cavalry to arrive and Trump's here and now it's going to, you know, where our future, my children and my grandchildren's prosperity is guaranteed.
That also seems like a mistake.
And this is kind of what you're hitting at is like, to your point, which is excellent, excellent point, is it's easier to build while the lights are on than, you know, when it's sort of the 13th hour, so to speak.
I think it's Very, very salient.
In addition to that, I wanted to ask you this because obviously it's an American news show.
It's very American centric news.
The topic that people are sort of popping up, it's not going anywhere because it's a really drastic change in our refugee policy.
Obviously, everyone is talking about the white South Africans, right?
Like the white South Africans make up pretty much the entirety of all refugee admissions in the United States.
Now, obviously, I think from the American centric point of view, this is a good thing.
This shows a radical reshift in how we're approaching refugees.
We're starting to evaluate how easily they can assimilate into the United States.
Are they actually under threat, which you've outlined clearly is the case in South Africa?
But I want to sort of steel man the South African patriot perspective, which is maybe it's not a good thing to bleed South Africa of their people, you know, and in this case, you know, people that would be really useful, I would say, in sort of combating the rot that's occurring in the country.
I don't know if you share that position, but I hear this from a lot of South African patriots.
But you've illustrated, or sorry, you've talked about at length in the past that it's Really important to dig trenches because if you're just constantly retreating, you're just going to keep looking for sinking ships to jump on and have oxygen for you know a few more days.
So, I think this is absolutely a fascinating question, and it is the answer is nuanced.
It's not very simple.
So, when it comes to the refugee program, I mean, I'm glad that it exists.
It should exist.
I'm not going to sit here and say it's a terrible or a bad thing because it's specifically for those people that really see no future in South Africa anymore.
People that I look at some of the case studies of people that have been accepted for this program.
Some of them have been rejected for jobs like dozens of times and been explicitly told like it's because you have the wrong skin color.
Some of them have Have survived multiple farm attacks.
Many of them have lost people, family members, and friends in farm attacks.
Many of them are survivors.
So, for those people that are just completely destroyed by the realities that I've described here tonight, absolutely give them the option if they'd see no other future in South Africa, give them an out, give them an option that they can actually escape what they've been subjected to, the legitimate injustices that they've been subjected to.
But at the same time, the reality remains the majority of And the majority of white South Africans are going to choose to remain in South Africa for various reasons.
There are many different personal reasons why people choose to stay.
You correctly pointed out, I've written an entire piece talking about the reasons why me and my colleagues and many of my friends choose to stay.
And it's things that are hard to put a material value on, things like the fact that my family have been in South Africa since 1688, before the United States was a country.
My wife's family have been here for 219 years.
319 years.
So the same, like a very, very long time.
And we've gone through many difficult times as a people.
And also the fact is that if Afrikaners don't have a future in Africa, we don't have a future as a culture, seeing as Afrikaners don't have the cultural, what would you call it, the cultural toolbox to survive as a 100% diaspora people.
The fact remains that everywhere where Afrikaners immigrate or move to Western countries, We assimilate very quickly within one or two generations.
We are very, from the host nation's perspective, Afrikaners are fantastic immigrants.
We don't create enclaves.
We don't resist assimilation.
We don't attack the host nation.
We don't criticize in the sense of just talk about how terrible the host nation is.
The majority of Afrikaners that emigrate completely dedicate themselves to the new host nation.
But at the same time, that means if all Afrikaners were to leave South Africa, there will not be any more Afrikaners within one or two generations.
So that's why they always, for the preservation of a culture that I think deserves to live on, it's a fantastic, great culture.
For the preservation of that culture, there needs to be a nucleus or a core community in Africa, and specifically in South Africa.
And that's what AfriForum's mission is.
We don't attack those who leave.
That's everyone's decision whether to leave or stay is deeply personal.
But our mission, our founding mission, has always been to ensure a future for Afrikaners in South Africa, a future where Afrikaners are safe and prosperous and free from persecution.
And that's what we're fighting for.
But anyone who chooses to leave, that is their personal choice.
And we're not going to shame them and attack them or tell them that they're making a bad or a good choice.
That's their personal decision.
Those who stay are also making a deeply personal decision.
And I think there needs to be understanding towards both sides.
But to get back to the original question that you asked, for the foreseeable future, there's going to be millions of Afrikaners in South Africa.
And AfriForum is fighting specifically to fight and build for a better future, not just for those Afrikaners, but for South Africa as a whole.
When you're fighting for, for example, private property rights, that's not just for white South Africans, that's for everyone.
When we're fighting for freedom of expression, that's for everyone.
When we go to court to fight for your right or freedom of religion, that's for everyone.
So, Afri Forum has that.
That's our core mission.
And, yeah, as I said, we can fill an entire episode just talking about that whole refugee topic.
I think it's absolutely fascinating and necessary.
But that's the long and short of it.
That's the summary, as nuanced as I can make it, because it deserves nuance.
And, yeah, I just think we shouldn't cede ground anywhere because it's much harder to win ground back.
So, it's just, I think it's fantastic.
I think Afri Forum.
Doing excellent work.
You specifically are doing excellent work.
As far as where people can find, because obviously it's going to be in a very American audience, it's going to be very curious as to what you guys are up to.
Where can people find AfriForum's work and where can people follow you?
So, if you're an international supporter of AfriForum, you can support us by going to Friends of AfriForum and making a donation there or becoming an international friend of AfriForum.
You can find me on X and YouTube under the name Conscious Caracal.
On my YouTube channel, I do interviews with people that I find interesting, but Not on current events, particularly on solutions for our time, but solutions that are relevant to South Africa and to the wider Western world.
So that's what I try to focus on on my YouTube channel and on my ex.
I focus on breaking news, but also cultural and philosophical and political matters regarding not just South Africa, but things that are relevant to Western listeners as well.
So that's where you can find me.
And yeah, I'm live every Tuesday at 7 o'clock Central Africa time on my YouTube channel.