[Editor’s note: Below is a piece that got lost in the shuffle and never found a real home, but dedicated followers of this site may be interested. John has still kissed blogging goodbye, though.]

I watch more on Real America’s Voice than I care to admit.  RAV is an over-the-air offering where I live, the lead on a channel that also includes a simulcast of a local Christian radio station as a sub-channel.  I don’t have cable or subscribe to any streaming services.  The hope was that, with such paltry television options, I would devote more time to reading.  The reality is closer to me watching about the same amount of television, it’s just worse television than if I gave in to the latest trends.  So, in addition to following the ups and downs of various gold miners in Australia and Alaska (old shows from the Discovery Channel get recycled on something called Quest), I use my antenna to check in on the crazy of the day on RAV.  The most-hyped events—like Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium”—can turn out to be embarrassing flops by any objective measure, but the My Pillow commercials and the outlandishness continue seemingly without so much as a speed bump’s worth of deceleration.

To be fair, not everything on RAV is crazy.  I probably agree with a sizable portion of the actual policy positions advocated.  (Steve Bannon is not wrong to be worried about China, and those who scoffed at “transitory” inflation turned out to be quite correct.)  But much of what the network spends its time on is merely policy-free Trump worship and immigrant demonization.  I have watched enough to become largely desensitized and demoralized at the state of those driving conservatism.  Not much registers more than a glassy-eyed shrug anymore.

But Dr. Gina recently broke through the blasé barrier by skipping across a line I would have thought beyond secure.  She brought on her husband, a former Missouri state senator, to warn that the Left wants to do to the United States what it did to . . . South Africa?  As in, when the world was rallied by the likes of Archbishop Desmond Tutu to pressure the white South African government into dismantling its apartheid system.  Dr. Gina called it the “apartheiding” of America.

For those of you not in the know, the Dr. Gina I speak of is Gina Loudon.  She has a Ph.D. in “human and organization systems” from Fielding Graduate University, an online entity.  She hosts Dr. Gina Primetime and her website describes her as a “Conservative Bacon Lover Warrior” and notes that she was named “One of the 10 Hottest Women in New Media.”  Though not a medical doctor nor a licensed psychologist, she peppers her show and promotional materials with phrases like “Truth is just what the doctor ordered.”  In 2020 as a guest on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show she declared President Trump the “most sound-minded person to ever occupy the White House.”

On the September 20 broadcast of her own show—and following an interview with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green—Dr. Gina brought her husband on to tell the television audience the “really really amazing thoughts” he had shared at home.  The segment now sits on the RAV website under the headline, “What Happend (sic) In South Africa May Happen To The U.S.!” 

Is this a reference to some of the twenty-first century problems under President Jacob Zuma?  Certainly, there are some things that have happened in South Africa that we would not want to see happen in America.  Nope, the historical analogy here for the Loudons is exactly what you think of when you think of South Africa.

Dr. Gina asked John to “lay out . . . how South Africa was destroyed and how the Left plans to do this to the United States.”  John responds with a grin saying that “South Africans woke up one day and learned that they were racists.”  What he calls a “robust guest worker program” that was unfortunately changed in response to world pressure is what most everyone else would call apartheid, a repulsive system of racial favoritism for some and exclusion and repression for others.  For John, the result of expanding voting rights and holding an election was that “overnight, they were dead.”  Dr. Gina adds, “We all know how that story ends and it is certainly not the direction we want to see America go.”

Do we all know what you are talking about, Dr. Gina?  The story of apartheid ended with Nelson Mandela being freed from decades of confinement on Robben Island and eventually becoming president of the country.  The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s then documented thousands of crimes that occurred under the apartheid regime.  So, just what is Dr. Gina talking about?  It’s hard to tell as she then moves into a rambling conspiracy theory ending with leftist “totalitarianism.”  It is not too hard for most people, though, to know that linking your argument with the racist white government of South Africa is not a formula for debate club success.

For the Loudons, there were no caveats, just defenses of the apartheid era South African system and distortions of history.   John describes South Africa as a country where all races could be voting citizens if they just followed the rules.  This they weren’t really that racist revisionism is belied by about ten minutes of research.  Here’s a 1962 quote from Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, a key architect of the apartheid policies: 

The minority groups will all have to contend with an unrestricted domination by the Bantu [black peoples] if a multi-racial state comes into being.  . . .  I say it unequivocally that the people of South Africa cannot accept the consequence of a multi-racial state unless the Whites, the Coloureds [mixed race peoples] and the Indians are prepared to commit race suicide.

The Loudons refuse to see racism even in the most famously racist regime of the post-World War II era.  In the fall of South African apartheid they just see a cautionary tale from the perspective of the white government.  We now live in a country where such arguments can bounce around the Trumpist right and then out over the airwaves without any reservations.  That fact should give the rest of us pause.  

John Murdock is an attorney who writes from Boise.  He hosts the Brass Spittoon podcast for Front Porch Republic.