You grew up in apartheid South Africa. You left. You built things. You know what it looks like when a society organises itself around the exclusion of people.
You are now funding the AfD — a party under surveillance by Germany's domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism. You are funding Viktor Orbán, who has systematically dismantled judicial independence, press freedom, and civil society in Hungary. You are amplifying voices whose explicit project is the rollback of pluralism.
I am not writing to condemn you. I am writing because I think you are making a strategic error as much as a moral one.
Fascism does not produce innovation. It produces conformity, fear, and the flight of talent. Every authoritarian system in history has ended the same way: with the people it excluded becoming the ones who built what came next. The engineers, the artists, the scientists, the people who didn't fit — they are always the ones who carry civilisation forward.
You know this. Your own story depends on it.
The future is not ethnically homogeneous. It is not nationally pure. It is not built by people who look the same, pray the same, or were born in the same place. The future — the one worth building — is plural. Plural in culture, in method, in perspective, in dissent.
Pluralism leads to futurism.
— Steef
That is not a slogan. It is the pattern of every technological leap in human history. The Renaissance happened in cities where merchants, artists, and philosophers from across the known world collided. The Bell Labs that gave us the transistor and information theory was a room full of people who thought differently and were allowed to. The open-source movement — which underpins everything you build on — was built by strangers across borders who trusted each other with code before they ever met.
When you fund parties and movements that want to close borders, silence minorities, and return to an imagined homogeneous past, you are not funding stability. You are funding stagnation. You are funding the conditions under which the next generation of builders will be told they don't belong.
History does not repeat exactly. But it rhymes, and right now it is rhyming very loudly.
Stop funding wars. Stop funding the people who benefit from division. You have resources, reach, and — I believe — genuine intelligence. Use them for something that lasts. Not for the preservation of fear, but for the expansion of possibility.
What I am building is, and will stay, a movement — not a party. That is a deliberate choice, learned from the country of my heritage. Germany has watched what happens when movements crystallise into parties too quickly: the discipline kills what made them honest in the first place. The existing parties have the structure, the experience, and the mandate to listen to the people and address what is broken. My role is to support that work from outside, not to compete with it.
I am building platforms for people who don't usually get the resources. A career platform for workers facing AI displacement. A free, anonymous addiction support platform. An incubator for founders with the right attitude. None of this requires fascism. All of it requires pluralism.
I bring nothing to the table that money can buy. I bring something harder: the willingness to say this publicly, the clarity to mean it, and the offer to build something together that history will actually remember well.
If that interests you — you know where to find me.
One more thing. Wu-Tang Clan reunited. After everything — the feuds, the years apart, the noise — they came back together and made something worth remembering. That kind of reunion is possible.
You still have time to be someone history remembers for the right reasons. That door is open.