Blood River

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband said, your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

I was just completely in shock.

Liz's father murdered.

And her mother found locked in a closet, her hands and feet bound.

I didn't feel real at all.

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We're still fighting.

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It was an unimaginable crime.

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Nearly 30 months of silence until

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This isn't the justice you wanted, but this is justice.

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Coolzone Media

on December 16th, 1956,

all over South Africa, people gathered in city squares and event halls.

Children's choirs performed.

Congregations gathered to sing hymns.

And whole towns turned out to hear speeches from civic leaders and church elders.

They barbecued and picnicked.

They made a whole weekend of it.

with parades led by mounted police and festivals headlined by government officials.

All over the country, people attending events in their own towns tuned in to hear the Prime Minister's speech in Krugersdorp.

A judge addressing the crowd in Germisten urged Afrikaners not to forsake God by tolerating communism, saying, quote,

everywhere is the cry for equality of whites and non-whites, and everywhere it is fanned by communism.

In Frederorp, a speaker waxed poetic on the noble character of their Dutch pioneer forefathers, saying, quote, they were neither conquerors nor oppressors.

They always followed a determined policy towards the barbarians.

In Waderfall, a member of parliament gave a speech about the importance of apartheid, that it was in fact a kindness,

allowing the races to live and let live, retaining their racial identities by avoiding race mixing.

That speaker, M.

C.

Botha, would later help design and implement the administration of of the Bantu stands.

And that day, he told the crowd that apartheid had a far more positive outlook than something like segregation.

In Kempton Park, theologian Petrus Dreyer warned that there could be no middle ground.

Economic integration inevitably leads to social integration, which always ends in blood mixing.

Apartheid was still young in 1956.

The system was still being constructed.

Dreyer predicted a complete disappearance of the white race if the country failed to quickly adopt total and complete apartheid.

That celebration, the one in Kempton Park, was presided over by festival chair William Henry Huggett.

He'd been the mayor of the city for several years in the early 50s.

and he was on the board of his local branch of the National Party.

The newspaper write-up about the event mentions him only briefly.

I couldn't even tell you if Mr.

Huggett gave a speech.

But I'm willing to bet that there in the audience, listening to those warnings of impending racial annihilation, was his daughter,

a 12-year-old Monica Huggett.

I'm Molly Conger,

and this is Weird Little Guys.

This is a story about religious fervor.

It's about myth and legend and racial holy war.

It's a story of very modern bombings and treason convictions and planned assassinations.

But it's a story rooted in history.

So first, if you'll indulge me, a bit of history.

December 16th is a significant day for South Africans.

Today, it's celebrated as Reconciliation Day.

But it wasn't always a day of peace.

In 1961, the newly formed paramilitary arm of the African National Congress, McAnto Wisizwe, announced their existence with a series of bomb blasts and leaflets declaring, quote, the time comes in the life of any nation where there remains only two choices, submit or fight.

That time has now come to South Africa.

We shall not submit, and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defense of our people.

In 1930, the South African Communist Party held a nationwide protest, encouraging black South Africans to publicly burn their passbooks, the internal passports black people were required to carry at all times.

At a passbook burning rally in Durban, police attacked demonstrators, killing ANC organizer Johannes Nkosi.

In 2012, a series of police raids were carried out, rounding up four men accused of treason and a plot to assassinate President Jacob Zuma.

And the reason that all of these things happened on December 16th is the same.

It's the same reason those crowds gathered in city squares all over the country in 1956.

Until the holiday was repurposed as Reconciliation Day, 1995,

it was celebrated as the Day of the Vow.

The holiday occupies a place of great importance in the political ideology of the Afrikaner nationalist.

In the 1830s, Dutch-speaking settlers in the British-controlled colony at the Cape of Good Hope began migrating north, away from British rule.

Of course, the land north of the British colony wasn't empty, and these exploratory missions often came into conflict with the African people whose land they wanted to settle on.

In 1837, one of those bands of Dutch pioneers, known as the Four Trekkers,

set their sights on a bit of land in what is now KwaZulu-Natal.

They approached the Zulu king Dingane.

and attempt to negotiate, stating a desire to live in peace with the Zulu,

but noting that they had been victorious in prior conflicts with Zulu warriors.

The negotiations did not go well.

Dingane was understandably cautious in dealing with the Fortrekers.

Earlier treks north had brought the settlers into violent conflict with the indigenous people they encountered.

And their proposal just wasn't consistent with the way the Zulu lived.

The Fortrekers wanted a written contract for ownership of the land in perpetuity.

And neither of these things were possible in Zulu society.

Theirs was an oral culture.

There were no written treaties or contracts.

And their customs and laws didn't allow for the permanent transfer of ownership of land held by the king.

In February of 1838, a Fortreker delegation led by Pietre Tief met with Dengane to sign the treaty.

There are conflicting accounts as to whether this treaty was actually signed.

But Dengana clearly had no intention of giving the Dutch settlers any land.

The entire delegation was led to a nearby hillside and killed.

There were retaliatory attacks and skirmishes throughout the year, but the settlers spent most of 1838 regrouping.

Farmers from the Cape Colony were called up as reinforcements.

And the bit of history that matters here came at the end of the year:

the Battle of Blood River.

In December of 1838, Andres Pretorius led a caravan of 57 ox carts and 460 Fortreker men into Zulu territory.

The four trekkers were armed with guns and the caravan had several cannons.

The battle began at dawn on December 16th.

A surviving member of the Zulu forces said their first charge was mown down like grass by the musket fire.

The Zulu had an overwhelming numerical advantage.

Accounts vary widely, putting the number at at least 9,000, with some estimates ranging as high as 30,000.

But the Fortrekers had a strong defensive position and they had artillery.

By noon, 3,000 Zulu warriors were dead.

The Fortrekers had not lost a single man in the Battle of Blood River.

There is, of course, no river with such a hideous name.

The battle was fought on the banks of the Ncome River.

But on the day 3,000 Zulu men were slain in a matter of hours, the river is said to have run red with their blood.

That much is true.

The Battle of Blood River was fought on December 16, 1838.

The Day of the Vow, however, celebrates a possibly apocryphal vow sworn by Andres Pretorius, that that if God would deliver them a victory against the Zulu, their descendants would forever keep that day as a holy Sabbath.

They didn't.

Not until many decades later, anyway.

Leonard Thompson, an English historian who led Yale's Southern African Research Program, posits that the day of the vow is political mythology.

A piece of history that was resurrected and embellished when it was politically expedient.

There is some kernel of truth.

There is a contemporary account in the journals of Pretorius' Secretary General, Jan Bantias,

that one week before the battle, Pretorius called his senior officers to his tent and asked them to pray to God for victory.

And he promised that if they were victorious, he would build a church to commemorate it.

And they did win, and he did build that church.

Thus fulfilling the only portion of that promise that we have any record of.

For decades, white South Africans did not keep December 16th as a holy Sabbath.

An 1877 text by a South African nationalist theologian contains a history of the battle, but it makes no mention at all of any vow or of divine intervention.

The story re-emerged in the late 1800s, amidst the Boer Wars.

And in 1880, a ceremony was held to renew the covenant.

And in this ceremony, they tied the story of the four-treker victory over Black Africans to the present struggle for national identity against the British Empire.

There were sporadic celebrations of the holiday in the last few decades of the 19th century.

And the story was evolving as a sort of founding myth.

God wanted the Afrikaner to have that land.

God wanted whites to conquer black Africans.

God gave the Afrikaner this land because they were God's chosen people.

When South Africa gained independence in 1910, one of the first acts of parliament was to make the Day of the Covenant a national holiday.

In 1938, at the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the Battle of Blood River, nationalist politician D.F.

Milan addressed the crowd.

He said Blood River had decided the future of South Africa, that it was to be a civilized Christian nation under the authority of the white race.

And now, in that moment, in 1938, they were standing on the banks of their own blood river, quote, seeing the dark masses gathering around your isolated white race.

A decade later, when Milan was elected prime minister, he oversaw the implementation of apartheid.

You might be wondering at this point, why am I telling you about this?

What does this racist fake holiday have to do with the subject of our story, Monica Huggett Stone?

It has

everything

to do with her.

Her belief in the vengeful racist god of Blood River is central to the way she's lived her entire life.

She brings it up in almost every interview I could find.

In one podcast from 2021, she describes visiting the site with her family as a child.

To this day, she believes believes that if the Afrikaner renews that vow, their God will guide their hand in slaughtering the enemies of the white race, whoever they may be.

And this is what I'm clinging to, is that the God of Blood Trevor is not dead, even if the enemies all over the world, and

they not only black,

the white governments of the West

caused the fall of South Africa and Rhodesia Rhodesia and the rest of the white colonies in Africa.

And of course the Jew has their hand in there.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

The constructed mythology around the importance of that day became so central to Afrikaner nationalist ideology and identity.

that for decades there was no scholarship at all examining its historical roots.

In 1979, historian Flores van Jarsfeld was presenting a conference paper at the University of Pretoria.

He had begun to question the historicity of the popular cultural narratives about Blood River.

And just as he approached the lectern to present his paper, 40 men burst into the lecture hall and surrounded the professor.

They emptied a tin of hot tar over him.

and coated him in white feathers.

Those men were members of a group that had, up until that very moment, operated entirely in secret.

This was their big public debut.

The leader seized the microphone and announced himself.

He was Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the Afrikaner resistance movement.

He called Venjarsfeld's paper blasphemous, an attack on the sanctity and very essence of Afrikaner identity.

Early on in the process of figuring out who Monica Huggett Stone was,

I saw a very strange comment.

I was reading a blog post about an internal schism within a modern-day Afrikaner nationalist group called the Swedelanders.

The blog was written by Adrian Snyman.

We'll get to him in a minute.

But in the comments under the post, there was one from Monica, posted in 2023.

And she was so sorry to see whites turning on each other instead of focusing on the real enemy.

And she ends this rather long comment by saying, quote,

the time is now for the Boer people to stand together, to go on their knees and beg forgiveness from our Creator, the great Almighty God who created the heavens and the earth.

We have turned our backs on God and have the mistaken idea that we ourselves are the saviors of the Boer people.

God has not abandoned us.

He is waiting patiently for the people to call upon him.

Just as at Blood River, he he will answer again and give his children victory.

And I didn't know what that meant.

So I made a note of it and I moved on.

And then I saw it again in a YouTube comment just a few months ago.

She wrote, May the God of Blood River be with his children and give us victory against his enemy.

And then I found a series of articles she wrote for a rapidly anti-Semitic Christian identity magazine between 2011 and 2017.

And they're all very strange.

The Bible verses she quotes are from a translation I'd never heard of.

It's not the King James or the New International, it's something else entirely, something called the Farrar Fenton Bible.

He was, apparently, a British businessman who died in 1920.

And his translation is not well regarded by biblical scholars.

He was also briefly the head of the South African diamond mining corporation, the De Beers Group,

and he believed that British people were the true Israelites.

I didn't know the Farrar-Fenton Bible was even an option, but I guess if you're a racist South African who believes white people are the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, it's the perfect choice.

In those articles, She predicts a coming race war, and she agonizes over what she calls satanic attacks on the Aryan race.

And there at the end of pages of apocalyptic rambling, she calls for a renewal of the vow of Blood River.

And that blog, Monica's comment in 2023 on that post about internal divisions within a right-wing Afrikaner group preparing for a race war.

Well, that comment wasn't her only appearance on that site.

In 2011, the blog's author, Adrian Snyman, wrote a post with the title, Thank You, Aryan Nations.

And the post is a response to Monica Stone.

She had written privately to Snyman to let him know that she would be attending the Aryan Nations World Congress in September of 2011, and she'd be giving a speech about the white genocide in South Africa.

Snyman's post describes Monica as the only female member of the Afrikaner resistance movement to have ever served time in prison for her involvement in the group.

And he urges his readers to email her their letters of thanks so she can present them to the Aryan nations after her speech.

And here's where things start to go off the rails.

Adrian Snyman, the author of that blog, is a prolific writer.

In his younger years, he worked for a newspaper covering horse racing.

And for decades, he cranked out dozens of novels under a variety of pseudonyms.

But by 1990, he'd found his calling,

interpreting the prophecies of Niklas van Rensberg.

Niklas van Rensberg was born in 1864 on a farm in what is now South Africa.

He never learned to write, and he only learned to read by sounding out the words of the Bible.

He died in 1926.

During the Second Boer War, he was a close companion of General Cous de la Rey.

He was also, allegedly, a prophet of God.

I spent too much time trying to parse the prophecies.

I had trouble locating any actual original written versions of the prophecies.

I don't want to see interpretations of them.

I want to see them.

And I looked for some original source for entirely too long before I realized they don't exist.

According to Snyman, Van Rensberg's daughter Anna wrote down over 700 of her father's visions, but the original handwritten books were lost.

At the time of her death in 1981, the family was not in possession of any of those writings.

It appears he's based his books on a document written in 1942.

A man who had seen those original written versions of the prophecies related them orally to another man who wrote them down 16 years after Van Rensburg died.

And even that document was lost until Snyman received it in 1990.

There's no explanation of where it was in between or how he came to possess it.

Very unclear provenance on these prophecies.

There's no chain of custody on the prophecies.

Snyman has written so feverishly on the subject for the last 35 years that almost everything I can find about Van Rensberg is written by him

and everything else relies on his work.

There are some contemporary accounts of some of Van Rensberg's visions, but it's worth mentioning that the most spectacular examples of his predictions coming to pass aren't ones I was able to find written accounts of that date back to his lifetime.

And the interpretations of those prophecies that present possible modern occurrences as their fulfillment are almost universally written by fervent race war enthusiasts.

People who really, really want the prophecies to be true.

And the problem with prophecies that some people really,

really want to be true is that there will sometimes be people who take matters into their own hands and try to make them come true.

Most of his visions are entirely symbolic.

Things like, I saw a red bull and a gray bull fighting, is interpreted by his followers as an accurate prediction of World War I.

Or, out of the north, a speckled black ox appears.

He is looking in our direction.

The earth in our country becomes desolate, but in Europe it becomes pitch dark.

And that is apparently a prediction of the Great Depression.

According to Snyman, Van Rensburg correctly predicted such events as every war of the 20th century, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, AIDS, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the election of Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana's divorce, Princess Diana's death, and a 1995 earthquake in Japan.

As for the prophecies that haven't come true,

well, maybe they just haven't come true yet.

In 1916, he tells his friend Boy Mussman:

There will come a time when I will be once again in the news.

In those days, I see we are still fighting amongst ourselves.

Then it is over, and we will have a black government.

It is then that the Afrikaners' final and fiercest struggle will begin.

According to Snyman's books, Van Rensberg had a vision in 1925, six months before his death.

The actual text of this prophecy is word salad, something about a goose coming out of a man's mouth.

But it's interpreted to mean that Van Rensberg predicted that in the distant future, a black man will be released from prison.

And that man will attain power.

And under his rule, the country will be thrown into chaos.

And at some point, that man will die a violent death.

And on the eighth day after his death, the day he is buried, a civil war will begin.

By his own account, Snyman started interpreting the prophecies in 1990.

He published his first book on them in 1992.

But the earliest writing I could actually get my hands on is from 1995.

So I can't tell you if Snyman always believed that this particular prophecy prophecy was about Nelson Mandela and his release from prison in 1990 and his election as president in 1994, but that's his interpretation now.

And this particular prophecy has inspired at least two attempts to force it to come true.

In late 2002, a white supremacist terrorist organization calling itself the Boromag set off a series of bombs in Soweto, outside of Johannesburg.

They targeted a mosque, a Buddhist temple, an airport, a gas station, and railways.

And those bombs went off after the first round of arrests earlier that year.

After the wave of bombing, the group emailed newspapers taking responsibility for the attacks.

They demanded the release of the Boromag members who'd already been arrested.

But it warned that it wasn't just lower-ranking members of the group that people should be worried about.

Interfering with the mission of the Boromag was a challenge to the God of the Blood River.

If their demands weren't met, another wave of bombings would commence on December 16th, the day of the vow.

I couldn't even believe it was real.

Join me, Tatiana Siegel, executive editor of film and media at Variety, for a four-part tale of youthful ambition, artistic integrity, and the dark side of fame.

Just like my parents talk about they knew where they were when John F.

Kennedy was killed.

Pretty much everyone I know knows exactly where they were when River died.

Featuring new interviews with Samantha Mathis, Dr.

Drew Pinski, Corey Feldman, and more.

Listen to Variety Confidential on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband comes back outside and he's he's shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.

And he said,

your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

Her dad had been stabbed to death.

It didn't feel real at all.

For more than a decade, decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me, and I just, I want answers.

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Those bombings did not come to pass.

Police responded to the emails by raiding 94 properties and arresting 11 more Boromag members.

Intriguingly, some of the homes that were raided that day belonged to men we've encountered elsewhere in this story.

There were police raids at the home of Baron Stridem, the white wolf who went on a shooting spree in 1988,

and at the home of Willem Rata, the former Rhodesian military officer who commanded the German mercenaries at Radio Pretoria in 1994,

Afrikaner Resistance Movement member Mani Meritz,

and Pete Rudolph, the leader of the Order Borofolk.

At one of these homes, though none of the reporting specifies whose,

police found a list of names of the detectives who'd been investigating the Boromag.

The trials took over a decade, with testimony from over 200 people.

In the end, 23 members of the group received prison sentences of varying lengths, between 5 and 35 years.

The ringleader, Mike Dutoy, was the first South African to be convicted of treason by the post-apartheid government.

And because the cases spent 11 years in court, we know a lot about them.

At the group's first meeting, members took the vow of Blood River.

They carried copies of the vow pasted into a little book at all times.

And they gave each other code names like Rottweiler and Motherfucker.

After they swore their allegiance to God and each other, the leader of the group gave each man a single 9mm bullet.

In later testimony, a member said,

He said there was no turning back now.

Anyone turning back will be shot.

And if you knew somebody would betray you, you had to make sure he was shot.

In October of 2002, former President Nelson Mandela was scheduled to travel to Limpopo for a ceremony opening a new school.

Boromag members placed a large bomb on the side of the road they knew he would have to travel to get there and stretched a tripwire across it.

They were hiding in the bushes, waiting to watch the former president get blown to bits when they heard the helicopter.

They'd failed.

Had Mandela not taken a helicopter at the last minute instead of traveling the final leg of his journey by car, the bomb almost certainly would have killed him.

And this, they believed, would trigger Van Rensburg's prophecies of a race war.

Both their own testimony and documents recovered in the police raids show their dedication to the Van Rensberg prophecies.

A lot of their planning documents just don't make sense at all without the context of the prophecies.

One plan presupposes, without explanation, that the violence will simply begin when a mob of black people engage in violent midnight attacks in Johannesburg.

That's an extremely unlikely and unexplained scenario in the real world, but it is something that does incite an unstoppable wave of violence in some of Snyman's interpretations of the prophecies.

Their planning documents also fixate on the idea of amassing their forces in a small town called Prisca.

There's no political or tactical advantage to being in Prisca,

but the town is mentioned more than 20 times in one of Snyman's books.

Van Rensberg had a vision that a miracle would occur in Prisca,

that in their hour of need, the Boers would receive much-needed help from abroad.

In the prophecies, the white Afrikaner is armed for the final struggle in Prisca

when German guns arrive.

It's very important in the prophecies, these German guns.

The guns must come from Germany.

And that's so interesting.

I mean, the prophecies are a jumbled mess.

A lot of it doesn't mean anything.

They're mostly about bulls fighting and white horses on hillsides and chickens running east.

But the German guns are quite concrete.

And I wonder if that was on anyone's mind in 1993, when Monica Huggett started hosting German mercenaries in her home.

Maybe it's a coincidence that those Germans were the ones smuggling in the guns they hoped to use in the race war back then.

Hard to say.

Over the course of the Boromag trials, witnesses testified to almost unbelievable plots that the group never had a chance to carry out.

Members testified that they'd considered stoking racial tension by carrying out terrorist attacks intended to appear as though the perpetrators had been Jewish or Muslim.

One early plan involved shooting down an American passenger plane, but that was scrapped because it was likely to kill white people.

A police informant who'd infiltrated the group testified that one member claimed his American contacts in the Ku Klux Klan could help them create a poison to put in the water supply.

Another member said on the stand that they'd planned to poison oranges and then leave them on the streets of Soweto, where black people might pick them up and eat them.

When the guilty verdicts were read, Pete Rudolph stood up in the gallery and yelled, in Afrikaans, We shall overcome.

How odd to see Pete Rudolph misbehaving in the gallery twice so many years apart.

It was a few episodes ago now, but 33 years before this, in 1980, it was Pete Rudolph Rudolph who stood and applauded as the Vit Commando bombers were led into the courtroom.

But during the trials, 13 of those defendants took a unorthodox approach to their defense.

They challenged the court's jurisdiction to even try them at all, claiming that due to irregularities in the 1992 referendum and the 1994 election, The current government was illegitimate and the post-1994 Constitution was not binding.

The government's position was, of course, that the 1992 referendum had authorized the government to negotiate a new constitution.

That referendum, for the record, asked the question:

Do you support continuation of the reform process which the state president began on 2 February 1990 and which has aimed at a new constitution through negotiation?

And that referendum passed with 69% of voters saying yes.

Here's Monica's memory of that election, just for fun.

I mean, I remember my niece was about three, four years old.

We walked into

the voting booth, and she,

little as she was, gave the Nazi salute and she said, my daddy is voting no.

The Boromag defendants were unsuccessful, obviously.

But they did did try to subpoena South Africa's last apartheid president, F.W.

de Klerk.

I guess in an attempt to prove that the government didn't legally exist.

And after the verdicts were in, some right-wingers blamed de Klerk.

If he hadn't ended apartheid, none of this would have happened in the first place.

A press release from Andries Breitenbach, leader of the far-right party, HNP, and chairman of a group called the Bohr Afrikaner Volksrad,

attacked de Klerk.

The press release read in part:

each of those sentences is yours personally because you are the real traitor who subjugated our people to a hostile power with cunning and deceit.

And further down the page, he continues, that you have not created any gate through which the Bohr Afrikaner people can escape from this dispensation in a constitutional manner shows your evil intent against our people.

News reports at the time say the press release was issued via his Facebook page.

But I couldn't dig it up there.

No, unfortunately, I found it on Stormfront.

I can't believe I'd never noticed before, but the internet's oldest running Nazi message board has an entire subsection where all the posts are in Afrikaans.

In a 2009 dissertation by Inez Mary Stephanie at the University of the Wittwaterstrand,

the author makes a claim that, I believe, but I can't find anywhere else.

She writes that in the mid-90s, the Afrikaner resistance movement didn't have their own website.

I mean, it was the 90s.

How many people knew how to make a website?

But instead of the group just not having a website, American Klansman Don Black, Stormfront's webmaster, hosted their online presence for them.

What a strange and fascinating intersection.

But back to the press release.

I wouldn't have bothered to tell you Andries Breitenbach's name if that was his only appearance in the story.

There's already too many guys, I know.

But it's not.

No, because he had friends overseas too.

And he was in Washington, DC

in September of 2012.

I can't blame you if you've forgotten why that's interesting.

It's been a long story.

It was in September of 2012 that Monica Huggett Stone led that tiny gaggle of Aryan nations members on a march through DC.

It was her second attempt at getting public attention for her South Africa project, raising awareness for the white genocide of the Afrikaner.

But what if it was something else?

A month before that rally, The front page story in Die Afrikaner, the newspaper for the far-right party HNP,

said that their chairman, Andries Breitenbach, had decided that there would be a march in America the following month.

Quote, a march will be held in America next month.

This action, stop genocide, was initiated by the HNP.

So maybe there was some other march against white genocide.

somewhere in the United States in September of 2012.

That's possible, I guess.

But this was the only one in Washington, D.C.

And that's where Andries Breitenbach was the week of Monica's Aryan Nations rally at the Capitol.

I can't find him in any of the photos.

But that same party newspaper uses a photo of Monica at her rally to illustrate their story about Breitenbach delivering a letter to the ambassador in Washington that same week.

Maybe something is lost in translation here.

But the article appears to conclude with this statement.

The group of local protesters was also encouraged by the fact that their spokesman, Mr.

Andries Breitenbach, gave an interview to the media at the embassy.

And Monica obviously saw and had no issue with the wording of this article, because it was proudly posted to the Aryan Nations website, which is where I found it.

But it gets even stranger.

Breitenbach wasn't the only South African who paid a visit to the Aryan nations in September of 2012.

That same month, a man named Hein Bunsaier took a trip to the United States.

When he was arrested for treason three months later, it was revealed in court that he'd been trying to secure funding from the Aryan nations and the Ku Klux Klan.

Bunsayer and three others, Johan Prinslu, John Martin Kivy, and Mark Trollop, were arrested on December 16th, 2012, the day of the vow,

and the day they had planned to assassinate South African President Jacob Zuma.

The charges against Bunsire were dropped in August of 2013.

And after a psychiatric evaluation, John Martin Keevy was committed to a state hospital.

Mark Trollope pled guilty to conspiracy, and Johan Prinzloo was found guilty of treason after a trial.

So, legally, can I tell you that Hein Bundsayer was soliciting funding for terrorism?

No,

I can't.

He wasn't convicted of any crime in connection to the plot.

But the plot was real.

It was real enough that Johan Prinzli was convicted of treason.

And Bunsheier did make two trips to the United States to connect with right-wing groups, one just months before his arrest.

Early reporting about his arrest explicitly states that the 2012 trip had been an effort to secure financial backing from American extremist groups.

But I was puzzled about the economics of such a trip.

I mean, guns aren't cheap, sure, but what's the return on investment in terms of ammunition when you're looking at booking international travel?

But it's possible they needed money for more than just weapons.

Bunsayer was buying land,

a lot of it, in Prisca.

There is a post from the year before his arrest on a website for believers in the Free Afrikaner movement.

It's a collection of white South Africans who want an independent state.

And the post names Bunsire's real estate company, Hausenberg Development Cooperative, as one of two companies allowing people to purchase shares in a large tract of land to facilitate white resettlement.

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Later reporting from investigative journalism outlet Amapungane says Bunzaier's company website was, in 2012, quote, in the process of purchasing 30,000 hectares of farmland in Prisca.

But I can't find any follow-up as to whether or not he ever successfully purchased the land for his white enclave.

During his trip to the United States in 2012, he appeared on six episodes of one right-wing podcast and made a single appearance on a wildly fringe anti-Semitic conspiracy theory show.

I spent the better part of the day trying to dig up audio of any of those episodes, but they seem to be lost to time.

Amapungane reported in 2012 that in one episode, Bunsair said,

I think we can assume that within the next six to eight months, I wouldn't be surprised if we had a full-scale civil war in South Africa.

It's a low-level war that's being waged against us, and at some point any group of people or a nation would stand up and say, enough is enough.

In the reporting about Bunzeier's American connections, it's mentioned that he'd visited once before,

but no details are provided.

It seems like that first trip might remain a mystery.

Until I found an open letter Bunzeier himself wrote in 2013 after his charges were dropped.

In that letter, he reveals that he'd been publishing online for years under the pseudonym Heinrich Zeyman.

And there is a bit of writing online in Afrikaans under that name, much of it published by the Pro-Afrikaner Action Group.

But I found one essay in English.

The piece tells the almost entirely fictional story of the author's grandparents falling victim to the ongoing white genocide in South Africa.

They are victims of these infamous farm murders, hacked to death in their beds by machete-wielding black men.

And it writes in gory detail about the couple's beloved dog, dismembered by the attackers as he gave his life trying to protect his masters.

It's gruesome.

It's almost pornographic in its description of the author discovering that the dog's final act was tearing the throat out of one of the black attackers.

It was published in 2011 by American Renaissance, the white supremacist magazine run by Jared Taylor.

Taylor's website notes that the author attended the American Renaissance Conference in 2010, an event that was headlined by a speaker from the Belgian fascist group Flams Belang,

the successor organization to Flams Block, the neo-Nazi organization that coordinated the movement of stolen guns and mercenaries to South Africa in the 90s.

Bunzeier's piece was included in a collection of essays published by American Renaissance in 2020, and the book has a foreword by Jared Taylor himself.

I will do some episodes on Jared Taylor one of these days.

He's had an enormous influence on American white supremacist thought over the last 40 years.

His annual conference has, for decades now, been a real who's who of the international extreme right.

I went once, years ago.

I mean, I couldn't get inside, obviously.

I just stood outside in a park somewhere in Tennessee, and all I got for my trouble was pepper sprayed and trampled by some cops.

For the average person, I would guess the only time you've encountered Jared Taylor's name in the news was back in 2015.

He was the spokesman for the Council of Conservative Citizens.

when they had to make a series of public statements after the Charleston church shooting.

Dylan Roof's manifesto made it quite clear that he'd been radicalized by the Council of Conservative Citizens, specifically their publications on black crime.

And that's what convinced him that white people were being treated unfairly.

Their website set him down the path that ended the lives of nine people whose only crime was welcoming a stranger into their Bible study.

Like I said, Bunzier's charges were dropped.

When he was arrested in 2012, he was removed as the head of a newly formed political party, the Federal Freedom Party.

After its founder was arrested for treason, it obviously struggled a bit and it rebranded as Front Nationale in 2013 and then rebranded again as the Afrikaner Self-Determination Party in 2020.

I can't tell if Bunzeier is still active in the party he started.

Seems like it would be kind of hard to go back to canvassing for elections when you've already considered triggering a prophecy by blowing up the president, but people can change.

I don't know.

In September of 2012, Monica Huggett Stone was in touch with the leader of the far-right party, HNP, and a man accused of treason.

She led a tiny Aryan nations rally of the United States Capitol,

and then she left.

She'd been living in the United States since 2000 after marrying Jim Stone, a retired sports news broadcaster living just outside New Orleans.

Federal Election Commission filings show that Jim Stone was on the payroll for David Duke's 1996 Senate run, but the campaign didn't amount to much.

Jim was apparently the campaign press secretary and director of media relations,

but the only news story I can find that looks like it was placed by a press secretary is the one announcing he'd been hired for the position.

So maybe he wasn't very good at it.

Jim Stone passed away in early 2012 and in 2013 the now widowed Monica Stone sold their home in Mandeville, Louisiana and returned to her hometown of Kempton Park in South Africa.

Back in South Africa, she operates a charitable organization called the Living Waters Foundation and interviews in recent years always include a request for donations.

She helps orphans, you see.

But only white ones.

She's quite meticulous about it.

In 2015, a fellow South African neo-Nazi recommended donating to Monica's charity, writing on his blog, quote,

She's a hardcore national socialist.

She only gives money to white children.

If she gives money to someone and she later sees them helping non-whites, then she cuts off the monies.

I went with her in 2015 to visit an orphanage in Pretoria, the only one run by a white woman who was doing it only for white children.

But when Monica later found out that the woman was also helping blacks, she cut off all donations, which I agree with.

Batman, Jan Lamprecht, was arrested in 2021 for violating a court order to stop harassing a Jewish professor.

But that's neither here nor there.

I can't quite nail down the specifics, but it seems Jan and Monica had a falling out sometime after 2015.

But for the most part, In a movement constantly ripped apart by personal feuds and power struggles and accusations of betrayal.

I can't find a single bad word about Monica Huggettstone.

I scraped together every existing record of her involvement in white supremacist groups from 1979 when she first met Eugene Terreblanche through the present day, covering nearly 50 years,

intersecting with multiple bombing campaigns, international arms smuggling rings, and attempted coups.

She turned state's witness against her own boyfriend in 1980.

And I dug through dozens of ancient blogs in multiple languages.

And I can't find a single Nazi with a bad word to say about her.

And I think that's a first.

There's always beef somewhere.

I will have to circle back at some point to talk about the Swedenders, maybe another time.

They're a more recent Afrikaner nationalist group founded in the early 2000s.

And they publicly shy away from being associated with obvious neo-Nazi imagery.

But the group is explicitly and completely centered around the Van Rensburg prophecies.

They exist to prepare their members for the coming race war.

And spoiler alert, in case I don't get back to the Swedelenders anytime soon, Their spokesman, Simon Roche, spent most of the summer of 2017 traveling the United States, including attending the Unite the Right rally here in Charlottesville.

And back in that time period, they got into a little bit of hot water in the movement.

There were allegations that Simon Roche had been pocketing donations from other white nationalists.

It was a bit of a scandal.

And in 2018, he appeared on an American neo-Nazi podcast to address the issue.

And at some point during the show, he was ambushed by Jan Lamprecht, who is a rival of his.

And it got a little heated and it was a very lengthy, uncomfortable interview.

But at the end of all that, Simon Roche still spoke glowingly of Monica, calling her someone with an impeccable reputation and recommending that if after all of this, you're still not comfortable donating to the Swedenders, you should donate to Monica.

Let me ask you this.

Are there other groups that you think are reputable that are doing good work in South Africa that if anybody has questions about,

if there are people who have questions about the integrity of Sidelanders, who would they want to support instead of of you?

I would recommend that they support somebody like Monica Stone, a very distinguished, decent lady who has fought for white nationalism.

She's probably a bit too right-wing for me, but she's a marvelous human being.

So she's a bit too right-wing for the race war guy.

But she's a marvelous human being, he says.

She's 81 years old now, and she spent her entire life in the orbit of assassins, mercenaries, and war criminals, and bombers, and rapists, and torturers, and terrorists, and death squad leaders, and just run-of-the-mill neo-Nazis with fantasies of racial holy war.

Her religion is quite literally one of blood.

Her God is the vengeful God of Blood River.

This story is over.

The part of it that was in the past anyway.

But I can't move on without making the consequences clear.

This is still happening.

We'll leave Monica Huggettstone behind at long last

because she was just the backstory.

No,

now we live in a world where these once fringe ideas are front page news at outlets with White House press credentials.

Now,

in 2025, the President of the United States wants to welcome as refugees, these people with their apocalyptic visions of race war and mass extermination.

These people who worship the God of the Blood River.

Weird Little Guys is a collection of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio.

It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.

Our executive producers are Soby Lichterman and Robert Evans.

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.

I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.

It's nothing personal.

You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

But as always,

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