Richard Poplak is an author, investigative journalist, and filmmaker based Johannesburg, South Africa. Much of his work has focused on corruption, and especially state capture, which refers to business people using their influence over government officials to appropriate government decision-making for their own profit.

With Elon Musk’s companies already benefiting from his high-profile role in the U.S. government, this might sound familiar to Americans. There’s a lot else going on in the U.S. right now that rhymes with South Africa’s recent past, and in this episode, we discuss state capture and other parallels in this episode of the podcast.

Poplak is the author of many things, including Ja No Man: Growing Up White In Apartheid Era South Africa, The Sheikh's Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World, and the journalistic graphic novel Kenk: A Portrait about notorious Toronto bike thief Igor Kent. He is also co-author of Continental Shift: A Journey into Africa's Changing Fortunes, the co-director of Influence, a documentary film about corruption in South Africa, senior contributor to the Daily Maverick, an extraordinary South African news organization.

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.

Geremie R. Barmé is a Sinologist, historian, filmmaker, translator, and author of a shelf of books on China.

In 1974, in the dying days of the Cultural Revolution, he went to China as a student and occasional farm laborer. He has studied both the ancient and modern history of the country, and observed firsthand momentous changes from the death of Mao to the rise of Xi Jinping.

In this podcast, we discuss the echoes, parallels, and rhymes he sees happening now in Musk and Trump’s America with power grabs and self-coups in recent Chinese history, when the ruler carries out a self-authored coup against the system he is running.

Links

* China Heritage: Contra Trump — American Tedium by Geremie Barmé

* New York Times: Welcome to America’s Fourth Great Constitutional Rupture by Noah Millman

The Rhyming Chaos podcast is produced by Jeremy Goldkorn and edited by Cadre Scripts. The theme music is Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, arranged and performed by Wu Fei. Our cover art is by Li Yunfei.