TOM EATON | Let’s get to the Roet of it: is it money? Making black people poorer? A persecution kink?

It now seems likely that the likes of Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roets will keep their Great White Wail roadshow running for a while yet, hawking their snowflake fantasies of white victimhood and begging Donald Trump to impose sanctions on South Africa. Which is why it’s important to keep asking why they’re doing it.

One feasible answer is that they want poor, mostly black South Africans, to get poorer.

Those aren’t my words, by the way: that’s what it says right there in the “Washington Memorandum”, a document put together by Kriel’s Solidarity Movement, in the section where they ask the Trump administration to hit South Africa with sanctions and suggest that “the pressure on South Africa be sustained, but that the focus be on pressuring the ANC leaders who are responsible for these policies”.

If they hadn’t made that distinction, they might have got away with their current line that they only want ANC leaders targeted with sanctions. But for those of us who read at grade 3 level or higher, the distinction is very clear: Kallie wants most of the sanctions to be aimed at the ANC, but there must also be sanctions that affect the rest of country too. In short, he wants the poorest South Africans to sink even deeper into poverty.

Another reason they took their circus to Washington is that they knew they’d find extremely sympathetic ears. After all, what they’re selling is manna from Caucasian heaven for the white nationalists currently running the US.

A month ago, I suggested on social media that Trump’s real interest in South Africa is that people like Kriel and Roets offer him a powerful hit of the paranoid fantasy that is the animating energy of the whole MAGA movement, namely, the myth of white persecution.

We’ve been taught that the Crusades were about religion, but religion was just the pretext. Almost without exception, they were a business venture; a way for popes, kings and nobles to levy taxes, buy armies and then go and plunder.

To white people convinced that they are being oppressed, facts don’t matter. It doesn’t matter to Trump, Kriel or Roets that far more black South Africans despair of the ANC than white ones. It doesn’t matter that a far higher proportion of black South Africans are victims of violent crimes than whites ones.

All that matters to them is that some white South Africans are scared and angry, which allows MAGA to shine its toxic light on them and proclaim: “See! Just look at what bla — sorry I mean DEI people are doing to those poor, oppressed white people down there! Yet more proof of what might happen here if you don't obey Daddy and his little helpers currently reconfiguring the state to serve oligarchy more efficiently.”

When I wrote that last imagined quote a month ago, a few supporters of Trump and AfriForum said that I was making myself guilty of hyperbole and crude satire.

Since Wednesday, however, I’m afraid they’ll have to take it up with Tucker Carlson, who gave Roets almost two hours to meander through the kind of catalogue of misery you expect to hear in an Auckland bar for South African expats.

I’ll spare you the contents of the interview, but what is pertinent here is the little write-up Carlson gave the segment across his social media platforms. I quote: “South Africa is what happens when you take DEI seriously, which is why the western media pretend it’s not happening.”

Not hyperbole. Not satire. Just one of the founding fathers of MAGA using “DEI” as a racist dog-whistle to conjure up “die swart gevaar”.

When Roets resigned from AfriForum last month he explained that he wanted to go and “live out his calling”. Kriel’s document is bursting with references to “freedom” and “culture”. MAGA keeps talking about “the West”, “civilisation” and “family values”. It’s all framed in these sweeping, grandiose terms, as if it’s all about principle and political truths; as if these are the leaders of a modern crusade.

And of course in a sense they are. We’ve been taught that the Crusades were about religion, but religion was just the pretext. Almost without exception, they were a business venture; a way for popes, kings and nobles to levy taxes, buy armies and then go and plunder. Crusades always were, and always are, about rich men getting richer.

Which brings us to a possible third reason for why the Great White Wail tour might be continuing: money.

The Washington Memorandum isn’t shy in this regard: it asks for vast US resources to protect Afrikaners in South Africa. It is also patently obvious that most of these excursions double as fundraising exercising: nobody is flying to the US and staying in DC hotels on his own dime.

But handouts only go so far, and for Kallie En Kie the endgame has surely always been a volkstaat. And as we’ve been shown over and over again through the decades, whether by corrupt apartheid leaders, or their puppets in the homelands, or 30 years of ANC graft, or, on a much larger scale, by Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi and Vladimir Putin, owning your own country is where the real money is.

I’m not suggesting our local hustlers will ever get close to the immense fortunes of the most corrupt leaders of all time. After all, the combined estimated wealth of those last three tyrants was north of $600bn.

But still, you can’t blame a guy for trying to live out his calling ...