When the left is losing the argument, it goes ad hominem.

Which brings us to the New York Times, which decided to bring up this tripe against its anti-deep-state bugbear, Elon Musk:

Oh, please. And the op-ed's argument presented, by a crackpot Africa-based writer, tells us nothing.

It begins just about the way you'd expect:

He is firing federal employees, gaining access to important government data, popping into the Oval Office, appearing on Fox News alongside President Trump and even attending a White House cabinet meeting. For some, his rampage through the institutions of the American state augurs a replacement by private interests; for others, it amounts to a Big Tech takeover. For many looking on, it’s above all a baffling bromance at the heart of power. However one understands Mr. Musk’s role in the Trump administration, it has cemented his reputation as one of the most powerful people on the planet.

But discussion of Mr. Musk, especially in the United States, often misses something: He is a white South African, part of a demographic that for centuries sat atop a racial hierarchy maintained by violent colonial rule. That history matters. For all the attempts to describe Mr. Musk as a self-made genius or a dispassionate technocrat, he is in fact a distinctly ideological figure, one whose worldview is inseparable from his rearing in apartheid South Africa. More than just an eccentric billionaire, Mr. Musk represents an unresolved question: What happens when settler rule fails but settlers remain? That’s what is playing out in America today.

Born in Pretoria in 1971, Mr. Musk had an upbringing typical of the white South African elite. The family was wealthy, despite his parents divorcing when he was young, its economic standing shaped by a system designed to assist whites. Mr. Musk doesn’t appear to have enjoyed his private education — there are stories of bullying and loneliness — but he still benefited from the advantages it conferred. Though his father, an engineer, was for a time a member of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party, there is little evidence Mr. Musk inherited his political convictions. Like many white South Africans, Mr. Musk left the country before the collapse of racial rule, settling in 1989 in Canada, where his mother was born.

 

He never returned, but South Africa clearly stayed with him.

What this has to do with eliminating waste and fraud in the size of government, or sending rockets to Mars, goes unexplained.

What's more, there's not a scintilla of evidence, and certainly none presented here, that Musk is racist.

But here is what the jealous fourth-world resentido has to offer:

Mr. Musk’s role in the controversy suggests he has not so much moved beyond the logic of apartheid as absorbed it. His ideological commitments — deregulated markets, hostility to labor organizing and Trumpist nationalism — bear its trace. In effect, his politics reprise apartheid’s economic principles on a global scale: maintaining zones of privilege under the guise of “free enterprise” while resisting any moves toward redistribution as threats. You can hear it in his exhortations for others to work harder and his pleas for him and his businesses to receive special treatment.

If you want deregulated markets, oppose Big Labor thugcraft, and love your country, you're, deep down, a South African racist?

Big miss.

It gets more fourth-world bottom-of-the barrel as it goes on:

For them, Southern Africa is never very far away. They are part of a global right that has long been fascinated with Rhodesia and its successor, Zimbabwe. For them, the loss of white-minority rule in Zimbabwe represents the model of civilizational decay — a formerly “successful” colonial state plunged into chaos through decolonization. The specter of “Zimbabwefication” is wielded as a warning against any redistribution of power. Now South Africa — “openly pushing for genocide of white people,” according to Mr. Musk — is being made to take on the mantle of scare story. The implicit argument is that settler power, once displaced, leads only to ruin.

Memo to the goober writing this: Everyone looks on in horror at Zimbabwefication with its massive inflation, its crime, its hunger, its toilet-paper money, its fallow ruined farms, and its crazed Marxist dictators. That includes black Zimbabweans, at least a quarter of whom have fled that country, some 3.2 million as of 2013, many to South Africa itself, at least as a pit-stop until they can make it to the West.

The nonsense just keeps going on and on in this piece, a total V.S. Naipaul world of fourth-world confusion and resentment. He's upset about Musk speaking out against the racist South African government's stealing of white farms without compensation, claiming the West does it all the time under eminent domain. Uh, no, it doesn't. He goes bonkers about the cutoff of USAID for AIDS relief in South Africa, as if that country had no resources with which to replace it, that would be South Africa the big BRICS state which is supposedly so rich and powerful it will create a currency to replace the dollar.

Well, which is it, toots?

Nutty things are spewed in such enclaves of ignorant intellectuals, so let's take a look at author William Shoki's background as editor of a publication called "Africa is a Country" -- which as it turns out, is a Soros-financed operation, which "partners" with some really lunatic-fringe Marxist publications such as Jacobin. (Memo to self: Jacobin must have a lot of money coming from somewhere to be bankrolling a publication like this).

Based on its profile, it looks like the kind of outfit that might take USAID cash itself through a network of shell companies, or, it might do just fine with Soros (who uses USAID cash). If so, it would not be surprising.

So of course he hates Musk, or more particularly, Musk's mission, which is to slash the waste, fraud and abuse in the U.S. government which finances so many of these rags and their chatterboxes, the Times included.

If that involves using a guy with scurrilous, ignorant ad hominem arguments like these, the waste would be proven right there.

Obviously, a rice bowl is threatened, so now it's time to whip out a completely unsubstantiated argument that Musk is an Afrikaaner racist (Musk's family was on the English side, by the way, which fought the Boers as if that mattered). Not that a guy like Shoki could make such distinctions. It's just, when in doubt, yell 'white racism' even as South Africa melts down into a morass of black racism against whites.

If the Times is going to take another swing at him again (they tried this in 2022, too) for such a dreary, tired, argument, then all we can conclude is that it's going down to the third-world Marxist rag level now and it's out of arguments.

Image: Wikipedia (cropped) // public domain