WHEN it comes to people, I am an equal opportunity cynic: I believe that 99.9% of them, if you scratch just below the surface, are selfish, greedy, and willfully ignorant. Most politicians are in it for money and power, and the few who are not probably never grew up poor and powerless. Most billionaires, no matter how much they donate to charity, are greedy egomaniacs who believe their wealth is proof of their superior intellect. Take Rob Hersov, the local oligarch who has appointed himself the latest bearer of the White Man's Burden in Darkest Africa.
On his new podcast and in the many talks he is called upon to deliver around the country, Hersov regurgitates the same tired warnings about how South Africa's white population is under siege. According to him, white South Africans are being crushed in every way, even as they continue to enjoy some of the highest living standards in the world's most unequal country. These living standards, he recently claimed, were attained through nothing but hard work and an innate capacity for 'academics' and 'competition.'
You can tell that he truly believes, like his pals Errol Musk and Gary Player, that he is saying something original, profound, and important. The tragedy, of course, is that his audience takes his words as gospel truth, scurrying home to warn their friends and family of the rising black menace. Very few of them will ever conduct their own research. If they did, they would quickly recognise that Hersov’s message is little more than a modern repackaging of 19th-century pseudoscience — ideas mainstream about 250 years ago, when European powers needed to justify the violent excesses of slavery and colonialism.
Back then, the strategy was simple: dehumanise. Cast indigenous people as lazy, brutish, and unintelligent, and their enslavement and mass murder suddenly became palatable. When they refused to submit, European colonisers justified hunting them down like vermin or conveniently wiping them out with smallpox-infected blankets. The same principle applies today. If the masses can be convinced that white people are inherently more intelligent and industrious, then their disproportionate wealth and power cease to be evidence of systemic privilege and instead become proof of some natural law.
Hersov won’t tell his followers about the 1932 Carnegie Commission Investigation into the Poor White Problem in South Africa, which found that if black South Africans were given the same education and opportunities, they would easily surpass their white counterparts in nearly every economic sector. To prevent this, the report recommended a national programme of White Economic Empowerment, ensuring that key jobs remained in white hands. Admitting to this history would shatter the myth of innate superiority, so instead, Hersov perpetuates the delusion of white victimhood.
And make no mistake, the myth of white victimhood is not unique to South Africa. It is the same absurd paranoia that fuels Trump’s MAGA movement, Musk’s Twitter rants about 'wokeism,' and the fever dreams of American conservatives who claim they are being 'replaced.' It is the same desperation that leads some to believe in the laughable fantasy of a 'white genocide' in South Africa — a claim so ridiculous that even a cursory glance at actual crime statistics disproves it. But facts don’t matter to those who need their illusions to survive. Trump, Musk, and their ilk find it convenient to ignore that South Africa endured decades of a system classified as a crime against humanity. The formerly oppressed majority now holds political power, and suddenly, white people playing by the same rules as everyone else feels like oppression.
Hersov and his acolytes love to reminisce about the 'good old days', a time when racial hierarchies were firmly in place, and 'non-whites' knew their 'place.' It is the same nostalgia that fuels secessionist fantasies about the Western Cape breaking away from the rest of South Africa. The dream is simple: carve out a little white ethnostate, one last bastion of 'civilisation' in a dark and unruly world. It’s a fantasy underpinned by the same logic that upheld Apartheid: that white South Africans built the country and are its rightful rulers. Never mind that the wealth they enjoy was accumulated through centuries of forced labor, land dispossession, and a legal system designed to keep the black majority economically crippled.
This isn’t 'common sense'; it’s white supremacy dressed up as pragmatism. And let’s not pretend it’s harmless. Throughout history, these delusions have led to some of humanity’s worst atrocities. The Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, the brutal Belgian rule in the Congo, the dehumanising mechanisms of Jim Crow - all were fueled by the same belief that some people are inherently superior to others. The ghost of scientific racism lingers, mutating into new forms but always serving the same end: justifying the unjustifiable.
And so we arrive at the present, where men like Hersov stand on national stages repeating the same tired scripts, preying on the fears of those desperate to believe that their declining dominance is a historical injustice rather than a long-overdue reckoning.
They wrap their ideology in the language of “free speech,” “individual rights,” and “common sense,” but strip away the veneer, and it’s just the same old racism with a fresh coat of paint.
In the end, the real tragedy isn’t that Hersov and his cronies believe their own nonsense, it’s that so many others do, too. That they cling to these myths rather than face the truth: that their advantages were never the result of inherent greatness, but of a system meticulously designed to benefit them at the expense of everyone else. And that, despite their efforts to hold onto the past, the world is moving forward, with or without them.
Ryan Fortune is a writer, thinker and builder of AI-powered web applications. He can be contacted via his email: [email protected]