“Over the weekend, the Economic Freedom Fighters, a far-left South African political party, staged a massive rally in Johannesburg to celebrate its 10th anniversary. The faction’s leader, the incendiary Julius Malema, appeared onstage in his trademark red beret and belted out an apartheid-era song, in a raucous call and response with the thousands in attendance. To someone unfamiliar with Malema’s demagoguery, the words were startling: “Shoot to kill,” he intoned. “Kill the Boer” — a term for White Afrikaners — “kill the farmer.”
In the United States, news of the event set right-wing social media aflame. Benny Johnson, a far-right provocateur with a large following, tweeted a video of Malema singing and suggested that the proceedings were “all downstream from the rotten secular religion of wokeness … plaguing America today” — seemingly oblivious to the possibility that the chant could be the product of a country with a vastly different political history than that of the United States. Like clockwork, Twitter’s most conspicuous South African appeared in Johnson’s replies.
“They are openly pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa,” tweeted Elon Musk, the Pretoria-born CEO of Tesla, Twitter — rebranded as X — and a handful of other tech companies, before asking why South African President Cyril Ramaphosa had said “nothing” about the incident. – Washington Post
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