One-time child actor (and guy aspiring to be the next Scott Baio) Ricky Schroder followed up on his weekend outburst at a Costco employee who instructed him to put a mask on before entering the store, posting a video “apology” to the worker while ranting about the injustices that happened to white farmers in Rhodesia more than four decades ago and other white nationalist tropes.
Saying that he felt the United States was becoming exactly like Rhodesia in the 1980s, when native Africans overthrew a white-dominated colonial government, Schroder lamented the loss of the “once thriving bread basket of southern Africa,” saying “whites live in fear” there. Schroder repeated the debunked claim that hundreds of white farmers are killed in Zimbabwe, saying that the African nationalists who overthrew colonial rule used “racial tension to create that disaster.” (A tweet to a series of videos posted by Schroder is available after the fold.)
While it is true that during the revolution, thousands of white farmers lost their lands, which their ancestors stole from African tribes in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Zimbabwean government has worked to compensate those who lost lands, the latest being a $3.5 billion fund for reparations set up in 2020.
Schroder also seems to be referring to a debunked talking point among white nationalists here in the United States that hundreds of white farmers are killed annually in Zimbabwe, a claim that is debunked by statistics: in the latest numbers available, there were 84 murders on farms in Zimbabwe in 2017, with 59 of those having white victims (who were not necessarily the landowner).
In the video, Schroder does attempt to apologize to the California Costco worker who barred him from entering the store on Saturday because Schroder wasn’t wearing a mask. Schroder incorrectly stated that Costco lifted its mask requirement at all stores; Costco said that its stores were adhering to local guidelines, and California has not yet lifted its mask mandates in retail locations.
In his so-called apology, Schroder said the worker was just following the dictate of his “corporate overlords” and that his anti-masking stand was more righteous than “hurting people’s feelings.”
Schroder also said that Blacks in the United States should strive to go back to how it was in the 1980s, as though that decade (when Schroder had child-star celebrity status and a job) were better for Blacks in America. He then went on to describe life in America’s cities in the 1980s as a time of “crack-filled streets” before complaining that Black community leaders have failed.
You can watch the video segments on this thread:
Ricky Schroder laments the United States could fall like white supremacist Rhodesia did and “became a place where whites live in fear.”
Praise for Rhodesia is straight out of the white nationalist playbook. pic.twitter.com/CeRKlgQmco
— Resist Programming 🛰 (@RzstProgramming) May 17, 2021