TOM EATON | Pot calls kettle black, but America ‘is white’, so Marco Rubio sees no issue at all

When US secretary of state Marco Rubio speaks about South Africa we should listen: even in a world increasingly run by broken man-babies, it’s still rare to be lectured by such a degraded hypocrite, and we should try to appreciate Thursday’s finger-wagging for the historic event that it was.

To be fair, not everything that Rubio wrote in his denunciation of the South African government, included as part of a statement titled ‘America Welcomes A New G20’, was a lie delivered in the interests of promoting American and global white nationalism.

It is true, for example, that South Africa’s post-1994 goodwill, institutions and financial position have been squandered by subsequent ANC governments that let dysfunction, incompetence and corruption run rampant.

The rest of Rubio’s whinge, however, was the sort of Trumpian grievance porn that gets AfriForum followers all sweaty.

Consider, for example, the nonsensical claim that South Africa has a “radical” government.

Of course, this isn’t quite the indictment Rubio thinks it is: in Trump world, “radical” includes women who are not blonde, being able to speak two languages and anyone who repeats Jesus’s ideas about feeding the hungry and housing the homeless.

Bizarrely, these days it also includes conservative capitalists: if you want to see how far right the US has goose-stepped just look at how often Democrat politicians are called “radical leftists” — the same Democrats who support a corporatist state in which workers own none of the means of production and who endlessly fund or fight forever wars to enrich the owners of the military-industrial complex.

Besides, it’s not like Rubio has any actual thoughts or beliefs of his own. He is a husk of something that was once a man, hollowed out by his ambition and his moral weakness, willing to call Trump a ‘con artist’ and a ‘serious threat’ to the US in 2016 and now willing to defend Trump’s policies to the hilt.

What really reveals Rubio’s ignorance, though, is his repeated reference to the “radical ANC-led government”, proving that he has no idea who’s in the government of national unity. After all, if there is a less radical form of life than John Steenhuisen, science has yet to identify it.

I’m also tempted to add that Rubio hasn’t realised that our GNU is supported by about 20% more of our electorate than Trump is supported by Americans ― about 70% to Trump’s 50% ― but this would be futile: MAGA has shown that facts don’t matter when it comes to the politics of grievance.

Besides, it’s not like Rubio has any actual thoughts or beliefs of his own. He is a husk of something that was once a man, hollowed out by his ambition and his moral weakness, willing to call Trump a “con artist” and a “serious threat” to the US in 2016 and now willing to defend Trump’s policies to the hilt.

Still, for someone who is nothing but an expensive windsock, he certainly managed to inject more than a few bursts of lively hypocrisy into his statement.

Some of it was almost too on-the-nose, like accusing South Africa of practising “the politics of grievance” and condemning the government’s “appetite for racism” while serving a racist movement built on the politics of white grievance and imaginary victimhood.

But the bit I liked the most, that almost made me feel I’d seen something historic and memorable, was when Rubio complained that South Africa was “cosying up to America’s greatest adversaries”, a move that was excluding us “from the family of nations we once called close”.

Ah yes. The famous steely-eyed, uncompromising toughness of the American frontiersman, hand hovering over his six-shooter, ready to slap leather and deal out justice to the varmints and lowlifes of the world.

No siree. When it comes to those huge, nuclear-armed autocracies that oppose America, you cannot cosy up to them one inch. Instead, when China comes at you, you need to step up and — checks notes — do $660bn in trade with them every year.

The Russians? You warn them that if they don’t stop their war in Ukraine pronto, you’re going to be forced to draw up a peace plan that hands Ukraine to Vladimir Putin on a plate. Watch out, Comrade, or The Donald is going to give you the best foot massage you’ve ever had.

And as for the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, well, their punishment is worst of all: you sell their government $142bn worth of weaponry, publicly absolve their prince of ordering the murder of a journalist, and promise you’ll come to their aid whenever he tosses you a coin.

Yes, you can’t make stuff this up. I mean, you can, because that’s all Trump and his goons do, but you know what I mean.