As US lawmakers once again demand a renegotiation of their country’s relationship with South Africa, we can at least claim to have done the impossible: uniting MAGA secessionists, Reagan Republicans and far-right Democrats under the banner of rank hypocrisy.
On Tuesday, as the US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act of 2025 was approved to be presented to the House of Representative for a vote, Republican Ronny Jackson, the bill’s head cheerleader, reiterated why we needed to be kicked to the curb.
“South Africa made its choice when they abandoned America and our allies and sided with communists and terrorists,” Jackson wrote on X, raising some important questions.
The first of those is why anyone should listen to Ronny on any topic at all given that he was a prominent member of the ‘Stop The Steal’ coup attempt on January 6 2021, with some members of the fascist Oathkeepers militia emphasising in text messages that he should be kept safe as he tried to collapse US democracy from the inside.
I mean, if anyone is going to lecture the ANC about its corruption and anti-democratic excesses, surely it should be someone who hasn’t personally tried to overthrow a free and fair election while having fascist storm troopers volunteer to be his personal VIP protection squad?
The second question, however, is even more perplexing and takes us back to February last year.
Back then, a Republican congressman named John James reached across the aisle to a conservative Florida Democrat named Jared Moskowitz to cook up a bill with the same name as Ronny’s recent bill, also aimed at discussing whether South Africa should lose its favourable relationship with the US.
They seemed like an odd couple, but in retrospect it’s clear that the political divide between them was bridged by shared hypocrisy.
If it believes that Russia is a dictatorship ruled by a 'despot', why does Trump keep telling that despot how clever and strong and charismatic and generous he is?
James is a cookie-cutter Reagan Republican, who has told small audiences that he disagrees with Trump on many issues but who, in public, has said he supports Trump “2,000%”. Without the excuse of being a true MAGA fanatic, he, like Marco Rubio, is something worse: a man who knows exactly what Trump is but who has sold his integrity for a handful of silver.
Moskowitz, likewise, doesn’t seem to let petty things like morality get in the way of his decisions: in November of 2013, as Israel dropped 1,000kg “bunker buster” bombs on a Gaza refugee camp as part of an aerial assault that saw more bombs dropped on Gaza than on Germany in World War 2, and Israeli attacks on ambulances and hospitals and schools became commonplace, and an American cruise missile submarine sailed into the region to provide support, and the UK’s Royal Air Force flew secret reconnaissance missions from Cyprus, allegedly helping Israel select targets for long-range destruction, Moskowitz reckoned it was Israel that really needed help, proposing a bill that would see $14bn taken from the US tax collection agency and given to Israel as “aid”.
One can only imagine Moskowitz’s outrage when South Africa dragged Israel to the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide; an outrage which, though toned down, was still evident in the bill James put forward: South Africa, this pair of righteous dudes insisted, was threatening the American way of life by offering military and political support to “dictators and despots in Beijing and Moscow” as well as supporting “US-designated terrorist organisation Hamas”.
James and Moskowitz had named names, and when Ronny launched his newer version of the bill in April this year, the identity of the “communists and terrorists” was clear: China, Russia and Hamas.
Which brings us back to that second question, namely: why can the US have lucrative relationships with China, Russia and organisations murdering thousands of civilians, but South Africa can’t?
I mean, if the US believes that communism is the enemy, why does it do $700bn in trade with China and Vietnam every year?
If it believes that Russia is a dictatorship ruled by a “despot”, why does Trump keep telling that despot how clever and strong and charismatic and generous he is?
And as for Hamas, well, if the US genuinely frowns on terrorism — the illegal killing of civilians in the pursuit of political aims — then why did it send $18bn worth of weaponry to Israel between 2023 and 2024 to drop on refugee camps, hospitals and schools in Gaza?
These questions, however, are unlikely to be answered soon, and not just because big countries never have to justify their reasons for leaning on small ones: for now those noble Republican defenders of American values like truth and justice are “2,000%” focused on trying to stop Trump’s name from being publicly associated with Jeffrey Epstein’s paedophile ring.
What a time to be alive.
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