My late mother-in-law, Rhoda Kadalie, who died on Saturday at the age of 68, was known (and feared) as a critic of South Africa’s post-apartheid government (which she had fought for the right to elect).
She was also, however, a close observer of American politics, and predicted Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 almost as soon as he announced his candidacy.
She loved the United States, but had become quite disillusioned with the decrepit state of American democracy over the past two years.
What bothered her most was the complete lack of standards of any kind. When controversies erupted over the results of the 2020 presidential election, she was incredulous that the U.S. lacked the equivalent of South Africa’s Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), a independent state institution that runs elections and counts votes.
The idea of voting without a photo ID was also ridiculous to her: it is routine in South Africa, which has fewer resources and a more recent history of segregation.
Like Trump, for whom the phrase “never bullshit a bullshitter” could have been invented, Rhoda could sense corruption. That led her to conclude that the 2020 election was stolen.
We argued over this: I believe (and wrote) that while it was “neither free nor fair” by international standards, given the censorship, violence, media bias, and one-sided rule changes, there was little direct evidence of fraud.
Rhoda’s instinct told her that when something was that tough to verify, there was something to hide.
Before that, Rhoda had been baffled by the effort by Democrats to impeach President Donald Trump in 2019 over flimsy claims that he had somehow compromised national security, or solicited some kind of bribe, by allegedly delaying military funding to Ukraine pending an investigation of his likely political opponent, Joe Biden.
Rhoda saw the Democrats’ use of impeachment as an abuse of legislative power and a convenient smoke screen for the Biden family’s self-evident corruption.
But nothing disappointed her more than the events of the summer of 2020, when the country was locked down due to the coronavirus, except for the “woke” mobs that were allowed to run through the streets, rioting, looting, and tearing down statues on the pretext that they were protesting against racism.
Rhoda thought she had left all that behind in South Africa, where students had started the anti-statue trend by throwing human feces at a bronze version of Cecil John Rhodes in 2015.
The University of Cape Town, where the statue had stood for decades without much objection, and which is built on land Rhodes himself donated, capitulated to the students’ demands and removed the offending idol. More riots followed, and so-called “colonial” art (including by black anti-apartheid artists) was burned on campus.
South Africa’s anti-racist radicals torched the institutional foundations of the country rather than turning that legacy, however tainted, to a productive purpose.
Rhoda hoped she would find a more robust civic debate in the United States, less vulnerable to identity politics and “woke” impulses. Instead, she was witness to — and an occasional victim of — the tyranny that gripped the nation.
She saw downtown Santa Monica — including the courthouse and the public library — vandalized. And she was suspended on social media when she posted her views, as she always had. “NOT EVEN UNDER APARTHEID WAS I CENSORED!” she posted in disbelief.
In the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot, Rhoda spoke out against Democrats’ effort to exploit the event to neutralize their opponents. “If January 6th was an insurrection, then it was the lamest insurrection in the history of the globe,” she quipped. What Democrats called “defending democracy,” Rhoda saw as consolidating power and trampling civil liberties.
She took grim consolation in watching Biden’s “woke” administration collapse into failure — as she knew, from experience, it would.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the forthcoming biography, Rhoda: Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order!. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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