Mission South Africa

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Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 20 In February of 2025, the President of the United States announced, first by social media and then by executive order, that a white nationalist conspiracy theory is now official foreign policy.

Speaker 20 No longer relegated to racist message boards and poorly attended rallies, the idea that white South Africans are being violently persecuted is now center stage.

Speaker 20 In the months since, the administration has doubled down on this stance.

Speaker 20 Foreign aid to South Africa has been suspended. Their ambassador has been expelled.

Speaker 20 And now State Department officials have begun interviewing white South Africans who have applied for refugee resettlement in the United States.

Speaker 20 Apartheid ended in South Africa 31 years ago.

Speaker 20 But it turns out some of the same same people who fought tooth and nail to keep it back then

Speaker 20 are still around.

Speaker 20 And they haven't stopped fighting.

Speaker 20 I'm Molly Conger,

Speaker 20 and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 20 You know, I don't like current events.

Speaker 20 I really prefer to root around in the past and piece together the odds and ends of the life and crimes of someone who's done hurting other people.

Speaker 20 I had a great time writing five episodes about Dennis Mahon, a man whose career as a white supremacist activist spanned decades.

Speaker 20 But when it came time to write a follow-up episode, I hated to have to tell you that even though Dennis will almost certainly die before he finishes prison sentence, the one he got for sending a bomb to the diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona,

Speaker 20 the current political climate finished what he started.

Speaker 20 Republican politicians did what he couldn't do with that bomb, and they closed that office.

Speaker 20 And we find ourselves in something of a similar position now.

Speaker 20 These last few episodes have been a wild, sprawling narrative about white supremacist terrorism in South Africa in the final years of apartheid.

Speaker 20 And I've learned a lot of history that I'd never been exposed to before, and I've really enjoyed digging my way out of some of these unexpected rabbit holes.

Speaker 20 But it would be irresponsible of me to tell you such a long story and then leave you thinking that it was over,

Speaker 20 that it ended in 1994.

Speaker 20 That when apartheid ended, the international networks of right-wing extremists who'd done unspeakable things in its defense just faded away.

Speaker 20 Because they didn't.

Speaker 20 And they don't always need guns and bombs to get what they want.

Speaker 20 So we'll end this mini-series where we started it,

Speaker 20 the White House.

Speaker 20 Back in February, when I started down this path, I had just read the executive order, the one titled, Addressing the Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa.

Speaker 20 The week that order was signed, Trump had offered some insight into what was going on in his head in this post on Truth Social.

Speaker 25 South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of people very badly. It's a bad situation that the radical left media doesn't want to so much as mention.

Speaker 25 A massive human rights violation, at a minimum, is happening for all to see. The United States won't stand for it.
We will act.

Speaker 25 Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed.

Speaker 20 And that episode back in February goes into more detail about what he's getting at here.

Speaker 20 South African President Cyril Ramaposa had recently signed the Expropriation Act into law.

Speaker 20 There's a lot of misinformation and fear-mongering built around a very tiny kernel of truth in there.

Speaker 20 As a quick refresher, the Expropriation Act does allow the government of South Africa to expropriate land. That part's true.

Speaker 20 But only under certain specific conditions, and it is fundamentally not really that different from what we call eminent domain here in the United States.

Speaker 20 And that's a power that was given to our government by the Fifth Amendment. There's no racial component to it.
Nobody's terrorizing white farmers.

Speaker 20 There's no language at all in the Expropriation Act about race.

Speaker 20 I spent probably too long trying to look for clues that would help me guess why he made that post on Truth Social on February 2nd.

Speaker 20 Sometimes you can see a really clear, direct line between something the president says or does or posts online and the Fox News segment that he had just been watching.

Speaker 20 And that episode from back in February makes what I think is a pretty good case for how Trump's ideas about what's going on in South Africa were formed back when he posted about it for the first time in 2018.

Speaker 20 And back in 2018, He tweeted about South African land reform for the first time

Speaker 20 about 45 minutes after he heard about it on an episode of Tucker Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 20 But on February 2nd, 2025, he made that truth social post while he was sitting on Air Force One, en route to DC after a weekend golfing in Florida.

Speaker 20 His public schedule for that day doesn't give us much,

Speaker 20 but he did post several times that evening about Fox News host Mark Levin.

Speaker 20 And he posted an old clip from Levin's show, and he reposted one of Mark's old posts, and he posted, in all caps, watch Mark Levin tonight on Fox News 8 p.m. Eastern Great Show.

Speaker 20 And Levin's show that evening doesn't seem to have touched on the issue of South Africa. So honestly, I couldn't tell you how the idea got into his head that night after a long day on the golf course.

Speaker 20 He posted it around 6:19 p.m.

Speaker 20 And then 40 minutes later, as he's sitting on the tarmac after the plane landed, he reposted it.

Speaker 20 And as he's leaving for the White House, a reporter asked him about the post.

Speaker 27 So, on True So, you said that you were going to cut aid from South Africa. Well, you plan to cut aid across other African nations and why South Africa?

Speaker 28 Horrible things. So, that's under investigation right now.
We'll make a determination.

Speaker 28 And until such time as we find out what South Africa is doing, they're taking away land, they're confiscating land, and actually they're doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.

Speaker 20 The far worse than that at the end of his remarks is almost certainly a reference to his belief in the white genocide conspiracy theory.

Speaker 20 That false narrative that white farmers in South Africa are being murdered in enormous numbers.

Speaker 20 And later that same week, in February of 2025, Donald Trump signed the executive order cutting off aid to South Africa.

Speaker 20 And it also directed DHS and the State Department to, quote, promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.

Speaker 20 And so in conjunction with his other executive orders, ones that suspended all other refugee resettlement operations.

Speaker 20 This now puts white South Africans in a class all of their own.

Speaker 20 They're the only people on earth who are so persecuted, who are suffering so terribly, that they are deserving of assistance from the United States.

Speaker 20 And the executive order ignited a flurry of activity on the right, both in the United States and in South Africa.

Speaker 20 Far-right talking heads rushed to book South African guests, and one man in particular was very happy to oblige.

Speaker 20 In the last two months, Ernst Rutz has made the rounds.

Speaker 20 He's been interviewed by Ben Shapiro, Matt Gates, Tucker Carlson, Jack Bisobic, and Jordan Peterson. He's been on YouTube lives and shows that only exist on Twitter somehow.

Speaker 20 He made an appearance on a show hosted by Ronaldo Krause.

Speaker 20 a South African YouTuber whose political career was stopped dead in its tracks last summer, just days after he was elected to parliament.

Speaker 20 His own party stripped him of membership after video serviced of him calling for the murder of all black people.

Speaker 20 And he used both the American racial slur that you're probably familiar with and a South African equivalent.

Speaker 20 And Rutz also gave an interminably long interview to a benign-sounding website called the White Papers Policy Institute.

Speaker 20 But as it turns out, the woman interviewing him has a long history of affiliation with neo-Nazi groups.

Speaker 20 And Ernst Rutz may sound familiar to you. In 2018, he visited the United States in his capacity as the deputy CEO of the Afrikaner nationalist group Afriforum.

Speaker 20 He met with federal government officials and right-wing think tanks. Notably, he spent a day at the Heritage Foundation, took meetings with staffers for Ted Cruz,

Speaker 20 And during that visit, he appeared on an episode of the Tucker Carlson show,

Speaker 20 back when it was actually on TV,

Speaker 20 back when it was appointment television for the president.

Speaker 20 And you might think that Ernst Rutz would have nothing but praise for Trump's executive order, right? He's finally getting this message out.

Speaker 20 Someone in power is finally talking about this epidemic of white farmers being murdered in South Africa.

Speaker 20 And he is, he's grateful for that, sure.

Speaker 20 But he doesn't think Trump's proposed solution is the right one.

Speaker 20 Here's what he said when he sat down with Tucker Carlson at the end of February.

Speaker 29 And one part of it says that they will grant refugee status to Afrikaners if they want to go to the U.S.

Speaker 29 which I don't think, in all fairness, we're really grateful for

Speaker 29 the public stance taken by the US.

Speaker 29 and in a certain sense they haven't gone far enough but in a certain sense i don't think the the granting of refugee status is is much of a solution some people will take that up but that's why i told you the story of the battle of blood river and the vow we are culturally very very attached to to south africa

Speaker 20 And here he is telling Jordan Peterson the same thing a few weeks later.

Speaker 29 That's why I'm so grateful that we spoke about the history part at first. Is

Speaker 29 our concern is that if we just leave the country, our culture dissolves and our communal identity dissolves and we become Americans or whatever.

Speaker 26 And so, well, plus, the entire country descends into like lawlessness, chaos, and everyone dies. Yep.
Right. Because if all the white South African farmers leave, that's 100% what will happen.

Speaker 20 Ernst Rutz is a nationalist.

Speaker 20 He doesn't want to leave South Africa. He isn't being persecuted for his whiteness.
He just misses the days when white minority rule meant the persecution of everyone else.

Speaker 20 And in both of those interviews, Rutz spoke at some length about the importance of the Day of the Vow,

Speaker 20 about the covenant between God and the Afrikaner granting them that land.

Speaker 20 They can't leave.

Speaker 20 Men like Ernst Rutz are still standing on the banks of the Blood River, waiting for God to sweep all the Africans out of their way.

Speaker 20 And ahead of that whirlwind press junket in February and March, Ernst Rutz actually resigned from his position as head of the Afrikaner Foundation.

Speaker 20 And that was an initiative under the umbrella of the Afrikaner interest group, the Solidarity Movement.

Speaker 20 And Rutz says that he hadn't officially worked for Afriforum since 2023. But Afraforum and the Afrikaner Foundation are both just part of the Solidarity movement.

Speaker 20 These are just facets of the same organization.

Speaker 20 And so now in February of 2025, he no longer works for any of these organizations. He no longer works for Solidarity at all.

Speaker 20 Because it was Rutz who got the organization into some pretty hot water.

Speaker 29 Well, they're saying that we've, the organizations that I was involved with at the time have committed treason. They've been charged for treason.

Speaker 25 You've been charged with treason?

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 18 For what?

Speaker 29 For speaking... Well, among others, for me speaking with you about what's happening.
That's treason? Yeah, because it's bad-mouthing your country.

Speaker 20 I mean, we've all made mistakes at work.

Speaker 20 But I can't imagine making such a mess of things that somebody gets charged with treason.

Speaker 20 And he's watering that down a little bit, right? The accusation isn't just that he's bad-mouthing the country. I'm sure it's legal in South Africa to say negative things about the nation.

Speaker 20 But almost immediately after Trump announced that he was cutting off aid to South Africa, a lot of South Africans blamed Afroforum.

Speaker 20 Members of McConto Wasizway rallied outside of the police station in Cape Town and announced that they were filing a criminal complaint against Afroforum,

Speaker 20 accusing them of treason.

Speaker 20 And just a quick note for those who aren't up to date on their South African current events, I wasn't.

Speaker 20 Mkonto Assizwe is now its own political party.

Speaker 20 It does share a name with the group that functioned as the paramilitary arm of the African National Congress during the last decades of apartheid, but as of a few years ago, it is a political party.

Speaker 20 So, just for clarity.

Speaker 30 The MK party vehemently condemns the treasonous actions of Afri AfriForum, which has deliberately lobbied foreign powers to act against the sovereignty and economic interests of South Africa.

Speaker 30 Their betrayal is nothing less than an act of economic sabotage, a direct assault on our nation's independence.

Speaker 20 For many South Africans, it was obvious.

Speaker 20 Trump didn't come up with this idea on his own.

Speaker 20 There is a straight line between Afroforum's trips to the United States, their appearances in American right-wing media, their collaboration with American think tanks, their English language propaganda videos targeting American audiences on American platforms,

Speaker 20 and the end result, which was this shift in U.S. foreign policy.

Speaker 20 Even President Ramaposa has gone on record blaming Afroform and Solidarity for spreading the lies about South Africa that led to Trump's executive order.

Speaker 20 He called the group unpatriotic in remarks before the National Assembly in March.

Speaker 31 In fact, whether that is treasonous or not is a matter that obviously our law enforcement agencies need to look at. The National Prosecuting Agency needs to look at that.
But I take a dim view.

Speaker 31 In fact, a very negative view of what has ensued as they run around the world, badmouthing their own country and putting their country into disrepute, not by things that are happening, but by misinformation.

Speaker 20 The matter has been confirmed to be under investigation, but there has been no decision announced by the National Prosecuting Authority as to whether the case will proceed.

Speaker 20 When Ramaposa gave those remarks on March 11th, 2025, he wasn't just talking about Ernst Rutz going on Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 20 Rutz had in fact already resigned from Solidarity by the time he returned to the U.S. this year.

Speaker 20 But in late February, a delegation from Solidarity paid a visit to the United States.

Speaker 20 They posted quite a few videos of themselves outside various government buildings in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 20 They posted some videos of them standing in lobbies of government buildings and one photo that appears to show the delegation touring the White House with visible visitors badges.

Speaker 20 There are no photos of any members of the delegation that I could find that show them with any actual U.S.

Speaker 20 policymakers, but they did take a couple of selfies in front of a sign that says Committee on Foreign Affairs. One photo was taken outside the office of Senator Christopher Koons,

Speaker 20 a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Africa and Global Health Policy Subcommittee.

Speaker 20 Their press releases about this visit don't name names, but they claim to have met with senior officials within the Trump administration during their visit.

Speaker 20 There's no direct claim made that they met with the president himself, although one of them did post a cartoon-style drawing of the group that features a cartoon Trump standing with them in front of the White House, and that is perhaps meant to insinuate that they were able to secure an audience with the president.

Speaker 20 But one member of the delegation posted something that is more interesting to me than a selfie at the Capitol building.

Speaker 20 On February 27th, Jako Kleinhans wrote,

Speaker 20 Day three in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 20 Who influences U.S. government policy? A complex network of individuals, organizations, and governmental and non-governmental structures work daily to develop U.S.
government policy.

Speaker 20 Recent policy decisions on the relationship with South Africa have been developed by a few key players at influential organizations.

Speaker 20 Together with policy specialists in the White House and Congress, the Solidarity Movement delegation currently visiting the USA met on day three with several of these influential people, with whom we have forged good relationships over the past few years to discuss a way forward.

Speaker 20 And underneath this wall of text, posted in Afrikaans, is a selfie.

Speaker 20 Visible in the photo behind Yako is the entrance to the offices of the Heritage Foundation.

Speaker 20 That conservative think tank has not, as far as I can tell, publicly commented on the recently surfaced allegations that they worked closely with South African military intelligence to craft propaganda campaigns during the latter years of apartheid.

Speaker 20 South African news outlet The Daily Maverick did take extra care to note in their article that the Heritage Foundation has made no legal challenge to the 2021 book by a former South African policeman who claims that former Heritage Foundation president Edwin Fulner was often consulted for advice by South African intelligence operatives who ran the government's apartheid disinformation campaigns.

Speaker 20 And if you can remember, all the way back to the first episode in this series, The first time Trump tweeted about South Africa, he was watching Tucker Carlson interview a policy analyst from the Heritage Foundation.

Speaker 20 Just something to mull over, I guess.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 20 And whoever it was that the delegation was able to meet with at the White House, that person received an official memorandum from Solidarity, and they also posted that document to their website.

Speaker 20 Much like Ernst Rutz, they're grateful to the Trump administration for raising awareness about the plight of the white South African.

Speaker 20 But they too want the United States to use its power to pressure South Africa to bend to the will of whites, rather than simply offering those aggrieved white South Africans the opportunity to settle in the United States.

Speaker 20 Much of the text of this memorandum reads pretty transparently as an attempt to smooth over the whole treason situation.

Speaker 20 They emphasize repeatedly that they do not support Trump's decision to cut off humanitarian aid. And they urge Washington not to suspend the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a U.S.

Speaker 20 law that allows some African nations, including South Africa, tariff-free access to U.S. markets.

Speaker 20 And as much as they appreciate Trump's offer to take Afrikaners as refugees, they want to stay.

Speaker 20 One section of the memo reads, although individuals may qualify for a resettlement program, the majority of Afrikaners will still remain in South Africa.

Speaker 20 During the past 30 years, Afrikaners have begun to establish cultural infrastructure in South Africa so that we can still live here freely and safely in order for us to make a sustainable contribution toward the country and all its people.

Speaker 20 This is being done under the banner of the Solidarity Movement, with Solidarity and Afroforum being the largest organizations.

Speaker 20 Security structures, social structures, job structures, training structures, and cultural structures have been established. All of this is being done without state support.

Speaker 20 And at the bottom of that section, they make several recommendations.

Speaker 20 They recommend the United States should, instead of offering refugee resettlement, offer direct aid to these Afrikaner communities, quote, to assist with community infrastructure protecting Afrikaners.

Speaker 20 This includes security structures, social structures, job structures, training structures, and infrastructure to settle Afrikaners in vulnerable places in a concentrated manner.

Speaker 20 So they're saying they want help

Speaker 20 moving all of the white people to a place in South Africa still. They don't want to leave South Africa, but they need help moving all of the white people into a concentrated place.

Speaker 20 So a place that's all white.

Speaker 20 And that sounds kind of like a mini-ethno state, a Volkstadt, if you will, an island of apartheid and a sea of integration.

Speaker 20 And that does, in fact, already exist.

Speaker 20 And here's where I have to confess something to you.

Speaker 20 I overlooked something, in retrospect, pretty obvious.

Speaker 20 Remember, I said a few minutes ago that Ernst Rutz had resigned from his position with Solidarity, and his trip to the United States in March of 2025 was totally separate from this delegation.

Speaker 20 Well, it might not have actually been that separate. I mean, they flew here separately.
They were here during different weeks, and they claimed to be from separate organizations.

Speaker 20 Rutz was here in the United States with Just Stridem, the current CEO of Orania,

Speaker 20 a white separatist community in South Africa's northern Cape province.

Speaker 20 Jako Kleinhans, the international liaison for solidarity, who was here with that other delegation,

Speaker 20 he used to be the CEO of Orania.

Speaker 20 He and his family live there.

Speaker 20 His wife, Magdalene, was featured in a Guardian article about the community in 2019.

Speaker 20 She runs the call center in Irania that recruits members and solicits donations.

Speaker 20 So they're the same people.

Speaker 20 The Venn diagram is a circle. They present slightly different public faces.
I mean, Solidarity was allowed into the White House.

Speaker 20 while the delegation officially from Irania was stuck doing events like Wine Wednesday at the New York Young Republicans Club.

Speaker 20 But it's sort of like how sometimes the name brand ketchup and the store brand ketchup are made at the same factory and they just package them in different bottles.

Speaker 20 The two groups traveled the United States separately, a few weeks apart. They met with slightly different crowds and marketed the message ever so slightly differently.

Speaker 20 But ultimately, what they want is for the United States to officially recognize their 3.5 square mile whites only town of 3,000 people as an autonomous state.

Speaker 20 And in February, while that first delegation, the one from Solidarity, was in Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 20 an American neo-Nazi group posted photos of their trip to South Africa.

Speaker 20 A regional chapter within the Active Club network visited Irania, quote, to gain a deeper understanding of how whites can form intentional communities.

Speaker 20 During the first week of March, the delegation from Solidarity finished out their trip in the United States States with a visit to California. Specifically, they went to Los Angeles.

Speaker 20 More specifically, they had lunch with Joel Pollock, the editor-at-large of the far-right rag Breitbart.

Speaker 20 After lunch, Pollock tweeted a photo captioned, Just had lunch at a kosher restaurant owned by Steven Spielberg's mom with four gentlemen from AfroForum slash Solidarity.

Speaker 20 The South African government is investigating them for treason, for the crime of sharing their views with Americans. The treason was delicious.

Speaker 20 Okay, Joel, not to nitpick. I mean, first of all, super cringe, but Steven Spielberg's mom is dead.

Speaker 20 Leah Adler, Spielberg's mother, did open the restaurant, the Milky Way, in Los Angeles in 1977, but the restaurant closed after her death in 2017.

Speaker 20 Her children reopened the restaurant in 2019, so it is still the same restaurant in the same place, but it isn't owned by a woman who's been dead for eight years.

Speaker 20 But it's probably much more important that you know one other fact about this lunch. At the time, in the first week of March of 2025,

Speaker 20 Joel Pollack was widely believed to be Trump's pick for ambassador to South Africa.

Speaker 20 There'd been no official public nomination, but Pollock was out there telling people that and going on the news in South Africa to that effect.

Speaker 20 And after lunch, Jako Kleinhans from Solidarity reposted that picture and offered his full-throated endorsement of Pollock's appointment as ambassador.

Speaker 20 But barely two weeks after that lunch, Joel Pollock's chances of getting that job dropped to near zero.

Speaker 20 Things were already a little dicey for him, considering he'd been publicly calling for sanctions against President Cyril Ramaposa personally, specifically because of South Africa's continued opposition to the genocide in Gaza.

Speaker 20 But the nail in the coffin really seems to have been his direct personal involvement in the expulsion of South Africa's ambassador to the United States.

Speaker 20 On March 14th, 2025, the United States of America expelled a foreign diplomat.

Speaker 20 This sort of thing happens from time to time.

Speaker 20 Article 9 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations establishes a pretty broad authority for this.

Speaker 20 Quote, the receiving state may at any time and without having to explain its decision notify the sending state that the head of the mission or any member of the diplomatic staff of the mission is persona non-grata.

Speaker 20 It wasn't uncommon during the Cold War, usually after allegations of espionage, whether real or imagined.

Speaker 20 And it can be a way for a country to send a political message, to say to a country, we're kind of upset with you right now even if the diplomatic staff themselves haven't done anything wrong

Speaker 20 several countries expelled syrian diplomats in 2012 in response to the murder of civilians in hala

Speaker 20 in 2021 president erdogon declared diplomats from 10 countries persona non grata in turkey after those countries governments had called for the release of an imprisoned turkish activist

Speaker 20 several israeli diplomats were expelled from britain and australia in 2010 after both countries discovered that Israel had used forged British and Australian passports to carry out assassinations in Dubai.

Speaker 20 In 2011, the U.S. ambassador to Ecuador was expelled after Wikileaks revealed that she believed President Correa had been aware of corruption within his police force.

Speaker 20 And the United States responded by expelling Ecuador's ambassador in return.

Speaker 20 And sometimes it's not even political. The decision may be the the result of personal misconduct by a member of the diplomatic staff.

Speaker 20 With some rather specific exceptions, ambassadors and their staff have diplomatic immunity. They can't be prosecuted, but they can be expelled.

Speaker 20 So, for example, in 2017, New Zealand had to expel an American diplomat after the man got into some kind of violent physical altercation and the American government refused to waive his diplomatic immunity so that he could be prosecuted.

Speaker 20 In 2012, the Philippines expelled a Panamanian diplomat accused of rape.

Speaker 20 Honestly, a lot of the examples of this that I found were related to lower-level embassy staff who got drunk, got a DUI, got into fights, or committed some kind of sex crime.

Speaker 20 There have also been more than a few cases of diplomats accused of using their position to facilitate drug trafficking.

Speaker 20 So it does happen.

Speaker 20 It It doesn't even seem particularly rare, especially if you're including these examples of lower-level embassy staff who maybe got in a bar fight.

Speaker 20 But it doesn't usually happen by tweet.

Speaker 20 Let's work backwards.

Speaker 20 At 4.42 p.m. Eastern Time on March 14th, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted,

Speaker 20 South Africa's ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country. Ibrahim Rasul is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates POTUS.

Speaker 20 We have nothing to discuss with him, and so he is considered persona non-grata.

Speaker 20 That last bit is in all caps, which is why I had to yell it.

Speaker 20 And for the record, on that read, I did pronounce Ibrahim Rasul's name, Ibrahim Rasul, which is his name.

Speaker 20 But in this, I guess, official State Department tweet, Marco Rubio did misspell his name as Emrahim Rasul.

Speaker 20 So take that as you will.

Speaker 20 But Rubio's tweet included a link to a Breitbart article, the headline of which is, South African Ambassador Ibrahim Rasul, colon, Trump is leading global white supremacist movement.

Speaker 20 The article, written by Joel Pollack,

Speaker 20 had gone up earlier that same day.

Speaker 18 Article might not be the right word for it.

Speaker 20 I don't know what you call what appears on Breitbart's website. But Pollock only actually wrote six sentences in the original piece.
But those sentences frame the actual content.

Speaker 20 It's a video clip, accompanied by a transcript of the video, of statements made by South African Ambassador Ibrahim Rasool during a webinar hosted by the Mapungubwe Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, a South African think tank just called Mistra for short.

Speaker 42 What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, those who are in power

Speaker 42 by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency at home. And I think I've illustrated abroad as well.

Speaker 20 He was speaking to a small group of academics, and Rasul is talking about the ways in which American politics have changed.

Speaker 20 He later explained to a reporter, my remarks were speaking to South African intelligentsia, intellectuals, political leaders, and others to alert them to a changed tradition in the United States that the old way of doing business with the U.S.

Speaker 20 was not going to work.

Speaker 20 Now, I watched most of that webinar. I'm not going to lie to you, it's two hours long.
I didn't watch all of it. I watched most of that webinar.

Speaker 20 But I watched all of the parts where Ibrahim Razul is speaking. And nothing he said felt shocking to me.

Speaker 20 He wasn't being hysterical or hyperbolic. He's not tearing his hair and gnashing his teeth.

Speaker 20 He had some interesting observations about the way the white South African functions as a rhetorical dog whistle for white victimhood within Trump's narrative, but he didn't say anything wild.

Speaker 20 He's not calling for violence or talking about radical shifts in policy.

Speaker 18 He's a diplomat, right?

Speaker 20 He was just making correct observations about the political climate that it is his job to navigate.

Speaker 20 But those remarks, with Joel Pollack's six sentences of commentary,

Speaker 20 made their way to Marco Rubio within hours.

Speaker 20 And by that afternoon, Rubio had declared Rasul persona non grata and ordered him to leave the United States.

Speaker 20 When Rasul arrived home in South Africa on March 23rd, he issued a statement.

Speaker 20 He's standing by what he said about the Trump administration.

Speaker 20 And his four-page statement has some real bangers. It goes pretty hard as far as diplomatic statements go.

Speaker 20 Quote, when we have been the victims of apartheid and saw how it cannot tolerate free speech, an independent judiciary, or even peaceful dissent, then we can smell the birth of chauvinism globally, sense the fear it engenders, hear its words, and see its signs.

Speaker 20 And Razul says that, quote, in meetings with senators and congress members and in the weekly forums we addressed of think tanks and business associations and in the few meetings with the administration, we were forced to discuss seriously how Afrikaners could be refugees in the USA, while ANC leaders are threatened with personal sanctions.

Speaker 20 We had to avoid arguing how there was a genocide in Israel.

Speaker 20 But diplomacy is not the art of lying. It is the art of telling the truth gently and constructively.

Speaker 20 Pollock seized on one line of that statement in particular, a parenthetical mention of an anonymous participant in the webinar who Razul calls one ex-South African anti-intellectual hatchet man hiding under a pseudonym.

Speaker 20 And that's obviously a reference to Joel Pollock.

Speaker 20 Rasul is implying that Pollock himself not only joined that webinar live, but participated in it without disclosing his name or affiliation.

Speaker 20 And in this case, his affiliation would be editor of American conservative website Breitbart.com and also current contender for American ambassador to South Africa.

Speaker 20 Because during the QA portion, the moderator read submitted questions out loud. And when he did so, he read the question asker's name.

Speaker 20 And when the question was from a reporter, the name of the outlet.

Speaker 20 The very first question, though, was from Anonymous.

Speaker 41 First, because I'd like to start with something funny.

Speaker 41 An anonymous comment for Ambassador Rasool. Ambassador Rasool's analysis of the U.S.
may be correct. However, he's doing South Africa no service by speaking this way.

Speaker 41 His job is to represent South African interests in Washington, not to be a left-wing militant, Ambassador Rasool.

Speaker 20 Now,

Speaker 20 can I tell you for sure? that that question was submitted by Joel Pollock?

Speaker 18 Of course not.

Speaker 20 But that appears to be what Ibrahim Rasul is implying in his statement, that he believes that.

Speaker 20 Pollock tweeted a screenshot of that portion of the statement and said, Ex-Ambassador Ibrahim Rasul believes he was done in by a spy. Good luck hunting.

Speaker 20 I watched his remarks on YouTube after they had been publicly available at Mistra's channel for hours. Is incompetence a defense to defamation in South African law?

Speaker 20 So Pollock is in this tweet insinuating that he could could sue Ibrahim Rasul for defamation for implying that Pollock was in the webinar.

Speaker 20 I don't know anything about South African law, but I don't think in an American court, a claim of defamation would hold up because he didn't actually say Joel Pollock's name.

Speaker 20 I guess if Joel Pollock identifies publicly as an anti-intellectual hatchet man,

Speaker 20 he's welcome to make that argument in court, but I digress.

Speaker 20 Because back to his actual claim. He's saying he wasn't in the webinar live.
He watched the replay on YouTube hours after the event ended.

Speaker 20 And the problem with that is that it isn't true.

Speaker 20 The webinar was live.

Speaker 20 You could pre-register and participate in the Zoom meeting, or you could just watch it live on YouTube. And the event was from 10 a.m.
to noon, Johannesburg time.

Speaker 20 And that means that it started at 4 a.m. here on the East Coast and 1 a.m.
in California, which is where Joel Pollock lives.

Speaker 20 And I'm reasonably certain he was indeed in California that day because the night before he posted a photo of the sunset and that morning he posted a photo of the sunrise.

Speaker 20 And both photos were posted at the time that the sun rose and set in the part of California where he lives. And there are visible palm palm trees.

Speaker 20 So when Joel Pollock tweeted the link to his article at 8.45 a.m. Eastern Time, that's 5.45 a.m.
where he lives.

Speaker 20 And the source code for the webpage shows that the article went live at 8.35 a.m. Eastern.
Again, that's 5.35 a.m. Pacific.

Speaker 20 And that's two and a half hours after the event ended.

Speaker 20 Those six sentences didn't take two hours to write, but he would have had to download the entire video, cut the sections he wanted to post, transcribe those sections, and get everything onto the website.

Speaker 20 The other problem, though, is not how long it would have taken to cut the clips.

Speaker 20 It's that he could not have watched a two-hour video and then written the article if he didn't start watching the video until, quote, hours after the event ended and the final video was available for playback online.

Speaker 20 An op-ed written by the director of the think tank that hosted the event takes aim at Pollock, arguing that it was no accident that his article made its way to the White House so quickly.

Speaker 20 Quote, Rasul has been articulating these views in other interactions with U.S. audiences.
The difference in this case is that Joel Pollack at Breitbart News, himself campaigning to be U.S.

Speaker 20 ambassador in South Africa, selectively quoted from Rasul's presentation, deliberately to incite the U.S. administration.

Speaker 20 But Joel Pollock got what he wanted. Kind of.
He got Ibrahim Rasul expelled from the United States. Got him fired.
Ibrahim Rasul isn't the ambassador to the United States anymore.

Speaker 20 It's a bit of a monkey's paw situation for Joel Pollock, though.

Speaker 20 The whole affair ended up ruining his own ambitions of becoming an ambassador.

Speaker 20 Within days of all this going down, Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters Party vowed that they would block Pollock from entering South Africa at all if he was appointed ambassador.

Speaker 20 And they said that they could ensure President Ramaposo wouldn't accept the appointment.

Speaker 20 A presidential spokesman was a little more diplomatic about this, but they did go on the record that the president was concerned about the possibility of Pollock being appointed ambassador because, quote, he is engaged in a very divisive and very damaging manner towards South Africa and South Africa-related issues.

Speaker 20 By March 26, just 12 days after Pollock's post cost Ambassador Rasul his job, it was clear that he'd cost himself the ambassador job, too.

Speaker 20 Trump boasted on Truth Social that he would be nominating Brent Bozell as the United States ambassador to South Africa.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 20 Brent Bozell

Speaker 20 is not a better choice.

Speaker 20 There's a lot of history behind that name, especially considering he shares it with his father, Leo Brent Bozel II.

Speaker 20 He was William F. Buckley's best friend and Joseph McCarthy's speechwriter.

Speaker 20 And then there is, of course, his son, Leo Brent Bozel IV,

Speaker 20 who was convicted of five felonies before getting pardoned along with all of the other January 6 rioters.

Speaker 20 And we can't get into all that. Not today.

Speaker 20 The thing you might be interested to know about Leo Brent Bozel III

Speaker 20 is that he he pretty actively opposed the idea of ending apartheid.

Speaker 20 And not just as a casual private opinion, this wasn't an ugly thought he was having at home by himself. No, in 1987, he was the head of the National Conservative Political Action Committee.

Speaker 20 And in that capacity, he signed on as a coalition partner for a group called the Coalition Against ANC Terrorism.

Speaker 20 And that year, the group hosted a summit to oppose a meeting between the U.S. Secretary of State and Oliver Tambo, who was at the time the leader of the African National Congress.

Speaker 20 And speakers at the summit that they held included policy analysts from groups like the Heritage Foundation.

Speaker 20 They also brought in a South African political activist named John Gogatia.

Speaker 20 Gogatya was the founder and leader of a political organization in South Africa. It was, allegedly, a group of black moderates who opposed multiracial democracy.

Speaker 20 Kogatya actually made several trips to the United States to lobby against U.S. sanctions on the apartheid regime.

Speaker 20 He did turn out to be employed by South African military intelligence, but you probably already guessed that.

Speaker 20 That same year, 1987, Bozell produced a series of television commercials urging Americans to write to the White House to express their support for the Nicaraguan Contras.

Speaker 20 Before the commercials were released, Bozel attended a screening of the videos with his special guest, Death Squad leader Adolfo Calero.

Speaker 20 So there's definitely some baggage there for Bozell.

Speaker 20 The South African party that he was calling terrorists in 1987 holds the presidency right now.

Speaker 20 Cyril Ramaposa, the current president of South Africa, was one of the African National Congress's negotiators during the talks that ended apartheid.

Speaker 20 While there was some public uncertainty as to whether Ramaposa would admit Pollock as an ambassador, I haven't seen any speculation that the president would refuse to accept Bozell.

Speaker 20 But honestly, once Trump posted that online that he was going to nominate Bozel,

Speaker 20 there was not a lot of follow-up to that. So I guess we'll have to wait and see if he's even confirmed.

Speaker 20 Because among the countless problems created every day by the current administration is this lack of follow-up.

Speaker 20 It seems like every day the president just fires off some half-baked demand that doesn't really have any clear force of law or plan for implementation.

Speaker 20 And maybe some government office is working on implementing the new policy, and maybe they aren't. It's hard to say.

Speaker 20 That executive order back in February called for the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security to prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program for Afrikaners.

Speaker 20 And then a month later, on March 7th, he posted on Truth Social,

Speaker 20 Any farmer with family from South Africa seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety will be invited to the United States of America with a rapid pathway to citizenship.

Speaker 20 This process will begin immediately.

Speaker 20 A few weeks later, the website for the U.S. Embassy in South Africa posted a very generic set of FAQs about the refugee admissions program.

Speaker 20 But it doesn't have any information specific to this program or any particular timeline.

Speaker 20 It just directs those who are interested in inquiring about the program to send a message to a State Department email address, Pretoria PRMINFO.

Speaker 20 And the PRM there is the abbreviation for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. So, at the very least, we know the State Department set up an email address for this.

Speaker 20 And a few days after that page went up, the New York Times reported that they had obtained documents outlining a plan that the administration was calling Mission South Africa.

Speaker 20 And phase one of the plan was already underway.

Speaker 20 The State Department had dispatched teams to convert vacant office space space in Pretoria for use by U.S.

Speaker 20 officials who are going to go over there and review the over 8,000 applications that had already been received.

Speaker 20 And then last week, on April 24th, Reuters reported that U.S. refugee officers had in fact flown to Pretoria to begin interviewing the applicants whose applications were successfully reviewed.

Speaker 20 And they report that at least 30 Afrikaners who had applied for refugee resettlement have had their applications approved.

Speaker 20 The sources are all unnamed, and the White House and the Embassy declined to comment.

Speaker 20 Anonymous Department of Homeland Security employees told Reuters that applicants who claimed to have been persecuted by Black South Africans had gained preliminary approval.

Speaker 20 Another employee told the outlet, I imagine some will be denied, as we do in all cases, but I think there is administrative pressure to approve these.

Speaker 20 The article is careful to note that they attempted to, and were unable to, verify the stories of persecution that were shared with them by several of the applicants.

Speaker 20 And the article ends with a quote from the only person who gave their name, a woman named Katya Beden.

Speaker 20 Beden works with a very newly formed organization called AmeriConners.

Speaker 20 According to their website, their mission is to assist South Africans in navigating this process and successfully move to the United States as refugees.

Speaker 20 The homepage has a very helpful set of FAQs.

Speaker 20 Your basics like, do I need a visa? Do I need a lawyer? And they say no on both of those. You don't need that.
It's going to be easy.

Speaker 20 They assure the reader that, of course, you can take your pets with you. The job market is great there and you don't need any vaccinations.

Speaker 20 My favorite question though is, will I have to prove persecution?

Speaker 20 And the answer is no, you don't have to prove it.

Speaker 20 Quote, no, you don't. This requirement only occurs when an individual slash group initiates the refugee status request where the circumstances in the problem country are unknown.

Speaker 20 In the South Africa case, the U.S. is not only aware of the racial prejudice towards minorities, but President Trump himself has laid out the case to that effect.

Speaker 20 So there you have it. This is the most obvious and clear-cut case of persecution that has ever existed in human history.
People who are fleeing active genocides, active war zones, have to do this.

Speaker 20 But if you're a white person in South Africa, it's very obvious that you are suffering, so don't even bother.

Speaker 20 And the site assures prospective refugees that this program isn't just for farmers.

Speaker 20 Even though Trump seems to have been motivated by the twin boogeymen of farm murders and farm seizures, issues that, even if they were real, would only affect farmers.

Speaker 20 But the site assures the reader that all Afrikaners are eligible.

Speaker 20 Guidance from the administration has been muddled and rare and contradictory.

Speaker 20 In several of his comments, Trump is definitely using the word farmers.

Speaker 20 But in the executive order, he does use the word Afrikaners.

Speaker 20 A statement from a State Department official used the language descendants of settlers being abused by the government.

Speaker 20 And a State Department document just says disfavored minorities. And it sounds like everyone is just trying to avoid saying white people.

Speaker 20 And I guess that's good news for Katya Beden, that woman who works for the Americaners website.

Speaker 20 She was wearing a Make America Great Again hat when she showed up at the embassy for her interview, but she isn't a farmer. According to her personal website, she is a self-love coach.

Speaker 20 For just $200 an hour, you can call Katya on Zoom for a one-on-one faith-based trauma recovery session to heal from your toxic relationships. It's audio only, though.

Speaker 20 She is not going to turn on the camera. Not even if you buy the $2,000 12-week self-love journey mentoring package.

Speaker 20 Aside from Beaton, everyone Reuters spoke to declined to be named in the article. So it's hard to sort out how many people went in for interviews, what their stories are, if they're all sincere.

Speaker 20 But I did find one woman on Facebook who has been posting in multiple groups for Afrikaners interested in moving to the United States.

Speaker 20 And she actually started posting about this a few days before the New York Times broke the story that U.S. officials had begun conducting the interviews in Pretoria.

Speaker 20 So I'm inclined to believe she is talking about a real thing that happened because she couldn't have pulled this from the news.

Speaker 20 So a few days before that story broke, a woman named Annalee posted,

Speaker 20 Hi everybody. My husband and I just finished our preliminary interview with the U.S.
Embassy in Pretoria.

Speaker 20 From what I understand, the interviewers were delegates slash representatives of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, U.S.

Speaker 20 Department of State, just sent to South Africa for this week's interviews, traveling back to the U.S. tonight.

Speaker 20 She stated in our invitational email that this interview was to collect information on individuals' experience, not for official application.

Speaker 20 She was very polite, asked us a few basic questions, then spent most of the 90 plus minutes asking, listening, and typing our life experiences and instances where where/slash/when we were affected, deprived, persecuted, or wronged due to our race.

Speaker 20 A lot of detail was asked. Most of the focus was on these specific experiences.

Speaker 20 And she goes on to say that she doesn't have much more information, but she was told that she'll hear from Homeland Security in the coming weeks, and that officers from the U.S.

Speaker 20 Refugee Admissions Program will be arriving in South Africa sometime soon.

Speaker 20 Annalie and her husband do not appear to be farmers. Her husband is a real estate agent.

Speaker 20 They have several adult children and they appear to be financially secure enough to enjoy the occasional international vacation.

Speaker 20 But I think it's really interesting that she noted how fixated that State Department employee was on collecting anecdotes about white persecution.

Speaker 20 They spent most of that hour and a half long interview trying to get them to talk about times where they'd experienced anti-white racism.

Speaker 20 And then just last week, on April 25th, Katya Beden, that employee of the AmeriConnect Network, tweeted that the first South African families approved for resettlement in the United States will arrive here, quote, next week,

Speaker 20 which, if she's telling the truth, would mean that they could already be here as you're listening to this.

Speaker 20 The administration is still not offered any clear explanation of how the process works or if it's already underway, so it's possible she's making that up to keep people hopeful, to keep them going to her website.

Speaker 20 But it's equally possible that the Trump administration plucked a couple of the most racist families in South Africa and just put them on a plane to Georgia or something.

Speaker 18 We don't know.

Speaker 20 Will Trump follow through on any part of this?

Speaker 20 Hard to say.

Speaker 20 There is so much more to say about this story, especially because it turns out it isn't over.

Speaker 20 But I know this story has been going on for too long because I'm starting to recognize the words when I open a webpage that's in Afrikaans.

Speaker 20 I had imagined a much tidier ending to this story, one that I poured two months and more than 50,000 words into, but to be quite honest with you, I watched way too much Trucker Carlson this week, and I'm trying to have a wedding in a couple of days.

Speaker 20 I won't be back with brand new full-length episodes for the next two weeks, but I am going to try to get something together so that there's something for you on your feed while I'm gone, so you won't miss me too much.

Speaker 20 So be good to each other.

Speaker 20 And please, don't do anything that's gonna make you one of my weird little guys.

Speaker 20 Weird Little Guys is a production of Wholezone Media at NiHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 20 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com.

Speaker 20 I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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