The White House Weighs in on White Genocide

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Speaker 12 On February 27th, 2012, three people were arrested after a rally outside the California State Capitol Building in Sacramento.

Speaker 12 If not for those arrests, The little protest may not have even made the news at all.

Speaker 12 A dozen similar rallies organized by the same group that were held that day in other cities certainly didn't.

Speaker 12 But a California Highway Patrol officer fell and scraped his knee trying to tackle a counter-protester, which made the event national news.

Speaker 12 With headlines like, Occupy protesters clash with police, officers injured, the arrests were reported by the Associated Press in stories carried in newspapers around the country.

Speaker 12 The initial wire story opens with a cursory explanation of the underlying event, offering up the phrase, a rally by a group protesting violence by blacks against whites in South Africa.

Speaker 12 But news reports about the events focus on the men who were arrested, three members of Occupy Sacramento, part of the larger nationwide series of Occupy protests that had sprung up around the country a few months earlier.

Speaker 12 In follow-up stories about the arrests, officers say the event led them to reevaluate their strategy for confronting Occupy protesters, who they describe as aggressive towards police.

Speaker 12 Initial reporting quotes one Occupy protester who spoke to the group's motivation for showing up to counter-protest.

Speaker 12 But none of the news stories follow that lead.

Speaker 12 Who exactly were the people who had organized the event at the Capitol? And why would those counter-protesters believe that the group had connections to the Klan?

Speaker 12 The Associated Press Write-Up notes, in passing,

Speaker 12 that the three dozen rally attendees at the Capitol were all white and almost all men,

Speaker 12 many with shaved heads and prominent tattoos.

Speaker 12 But it doesn't offer any indication that those very visible tattoos had any particular message.

Speaker 12 The reporter doesn't quote the man who organized the rally in Sacramento.

Speaker 12 But they do include a comment from the national spokesman for the organization behind the events.

Speaker 12 Maurice Goulet told a reporter that he wasn't surprised that counter-protesters had disrupted this peaceful march.

Speaker 12 What's missing from the articles, though, is that the event in Sacramento was hosted by the Golden State skinheads.

Speaker 12 And while he may have been speaking on behalf of something called the South Africa Project, Maurice Goulet was a lifelong member of the Aryan nations who'd recently been released from prison for bank robbery.

Speaker 12 Just beneath the surface of those rallies, had anyone bothered to look, was an old woman in Louisiana.

Speaker 12 Years before she started organizing American skinheads at poorly attended rallies, she was a key player in an international terrorist plot to disrupt South Africa's first post-apartheid elections.

Speaker 12 I'm Molly Conger,

Speaker 12 and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 12 We have to talk about white genocide.

Speaker 12 I'd really rather not, but that's just the way things are.

Speaker 12 The most important thing you need to know about white genocide is that it is absolutely not a real thing.

Speaker 12 It's not just not happening.

Speaker 12 It isn't really a thing that can happen.

Speaker 12 The white race is not dying out. White people are not subject to a targeted campaign of extermination by any government.

Speaker 12 But on the extreme right, there is an intense fear of a loss of white dominance.

Speaker 12 For years now, on the homepage of the Daily Stormer, there's been a little widget in the sidebar called Demographic Countdown.

Speaker 12 It's an actual countdown clock to the moment the United States will hit a demographic dipping point when the white population drops below 50% for the first time.

Speaker 12 As I'm writing this, they have calculated that moment to be 18 years and 221 days from now. So mark your calendars, I guess.

Speaker 12 They fear what they call the Great Replacement.

Speaker 12 The idea that through immigration and interracial marriage, white people will become a minority in historically white-majority countries.

Speaker 12 Abortion, contraception, pornography, homosexuality, all of these things are, in their minds, causing white birth rates to fall, all while non-white immigrants pour over the borders, replacing them.

Speaker 12 It was David Lane, a member of the neo-Nazi terrorist group The Order, who coined the pithy slogan that encapsulates this fear, his 14 words.

Speaker 12 We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

Speaker 12 David Lane wrote those words from his cell in federal prison. His idea of securing the existence of his people involved murdering a Jewish talk radio host.

Speaker 12 David Lane died in prison. But those 14 words have taken on a life of their own, becoming one of the most well-recognized white supremacist slogans worldwide.

Speaker 12 This white extinction anxiety is a motivating force for acts of horrific violence on an individual level.

Speaker 12 Anders Brevik, a man who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, wrote in his manifesto, quote, what is happening to the indigenous peoples of Western Europe and our cultures amounts to a merciless and bloody genocide.

Speaker 12 When Bretton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslim worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, he titled his manifesto, The Great Replacement.

Speaker 12 And in it, he cites Brevik as an inspiration.

Speaker 12 But it's that same feeling, this paranoid reactionary whiteness that South African media studies professor Nikki Falkoff calls an anxious racial fantasy. that motivates the violence of policy too.

Speaker 12 When Republican politicians froth at the mouth spreading spreading fear of immigrant hordes at the border and give campaign speeches about how they're all rapists with the unspoken implication that they'll impregnate your white daughters.

Speaker 12 They're murderers, they carry deadly diseases and they traffic poisonous drugs that will kill your white sons.

Speaker 12 That's the same fear. It originates in the same place.
and it leads us to the same violent ends.

Speaker 12 But the great replacement myth is just that. A myth, of course,

Speaker 12 but one about replacement.

Speaker 12 They believe white people are being displaced, they are being replaced. Their cultural hegemony is at risk when immigrants bring their languages, customs, and religions with them into white countries.

Speaker 12 Interracial marriage is making new generations less and less racially pure.

Speaker 12 The belief in the conspiracy theories of white genocide and great replacement go hand hand in hand and they're often used interchangeably.

Speaker 12 But for that white genocide to be more than metaphorical, more than a slow death of this imaginary hegemonic white culture,

Speaker 12 there has to be actual violence against white people.

Speaker 12 If white people are victims of an ongoing genocide, surely you can point to blood on someone's hands. You have to have a body.

Speaker 12 And the example that bubbles to the surface more often than not is the myth of the South African farm murders.

Speaker 12 And that's what got me started on the subject of this week's episode. Those rallies in 2012 were organized by a group calling themselves the South Africa Project.

Speaker 12 And their stated goal was to raise awareness of the genocide of the white South African.

Speaker 12 The narrative is built around the idea that white South African farmers are under attack, that they are being brutally murdered in in alarming numbers by black men, motivated specifically by a desire to kill white people.

Speaker 12 The very idea of the farm murders as some discrete category of crime is a contentious one.

Speaker 12 Have white farmers been murdered?

Speaker 12 Yes,

Speaker 12 but that's where the truth leaves the room.

Speaker 12 As a nation, South Africa has a higher rate of violent crime than many other similarly situated countries.

Speaker 12 But the idea that rural white landowners are at a uniquely high risk of being murdered in racially motivated violent attacks is simply not true.

Speaker 12 But it's a myth that serves a rather particular political purpose.

Speaker 12 As Nikki Falcom writes in her book, Worrier State, Risk, Anxiety, and Moral Panic in South Africa.

Speaker 12 White people are not the only victims, or indeed only the victims, of rural murders.

Speaker 12 Black laborers, though seldom spoken about in these terms, are frequently among the victims of murders perpetrated by outsiders, and they are also killed by white managers and employers.

Speaker 12 Rates of femicide and domestic violence on farms are thought to be high, affecting both black and white women.

Speaker 12 Nonetheless, the trope of the farm murder as a specific type of violent crime featuring white victims and black killers is frequently invoked to provide evidence for the alleged genocide.

Speaker 12 In 2003, the South African police issued their final report on an inquiry conducted into the alleged phenomenon.

Speaker 12 In analysis of all reported incidents on farms and small holdings spanning 1998 to 2001,

Speaker 12 Nearly 90%

Speaker 12 were motivated by robbery,

Speaker 12 7% were the result of labor disputes. And only 2%

Speaker 12 were found to have any racial or political motivation in any direction.

Speaker 12 In a country with nearly 20,000 murders annually,

Speaker 12 there are an average of 50 per year that could be classified as farm murders.

Speaker 12 And again, almost all of those are robbery homicides, not organized political violence targeting people of a particular race.

Speaker 12 As Falkoff puts it,

Speaker 12 there is evidence for murder, atrocity, even torture.

Speaker 12 There is no evidence for genocide. The genocide myth is an iteration of long-standing white justifications for racist domination.

Speaker 12 To put it another way, The intense and formative anxiety of whiteness that it is always under threat would appear among South Africans regardless of whether the farm murders happened or not.

Speaker 12 This anxiety of a whiteness that is under violent threat is incredibly useful.

Speaker 12 Carolyn Holmes, a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has written extensively about this phenomenon, addressing specifically the ways this myth-making is marketed to a racially anxious white audience outside of South Africa, writing that white audiences are, quote, mobilizing around stories of violence against perceived members of their group as a way to protect their racial status.

Speaker 12 Afrikaner nationalist groups like Afriforum and the Swedenders tour the United States, meet with American right-wing groups, produce material in English, and make appearances in American media because they know this message sells here.

Speaker 12 And lately, it's really taken off.

Speaker 12 Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted something on Truth Social that sent up a big red flag for me. I mean, almost all of his posts are pretty alarming.

Speaker 12 But this one sent me scurrying into my archives.

Speaker 12 On February 2nd, he posted.

Speaker 20 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 20 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 20 Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed.

Speaker 12 He made an almost identical post a week later on February 9th.

Speaker 12 And in between those two posts, he issued an executive order with the title, Addressing the Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa.

Speaker 12 On its surface, the egregious action he's referring to is the Expropriation Act of 2024, an act of the South African Parliament signed into law by the South African President in January of this year.

Speaker 12 But both his reaction to it and his own history of engagement on the subject of South African land reform are instructive here.

Speaker 12 He's not actually reacting to the text of that bill. He's reacting to the imaginary world constructed by people who wish apartheid had never ended.

Speaker 12 I'll get into a little bit of what the Expropriation Act actually says.

Speaker 12 But first, let's go back in time a few years.

Speaker 12 Because like I said, When I saw Trump's post a few days before that executive order, I had a feeling he was retreading old territory.

Speaker 12 This wasn't the first time he'd fired off a half-baked take on South African land reform.

Speaker 12 Back in August of 2018, nearly two years and almost 5,000 tweets into his first term, he tweeted the word Africa for the first time as president.

Speaker 20 I have asked Secretary of State Sec Pompeo to closely study the South African land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers.

Speaker 20 South African government is now seizing land from white farmers. At Tucker Carlson, at Fox News.

Speaker 12 The tweet was posted at 10.38 p.m.,

Speaker 12 less than an hour after a segment on Tucker Carlson's nightly broadcast, fear-mongering about land reform under President Ramaposa.

Speaker 21 We've got an exclusive investigation for you tonight.

Speaker 21 The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramapoza, has begun, and you may have seen this in the press, seizing land from his own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin color.

Speaker 21 That is literally the definition of racism.

Speaker 12 Oddly, that segment doesn't mention anything about farmers being killed.

Speaker 12 Trump's decision to include that in his tweet indicates that he'd been consuming right-wing media about South Africa elsewhere prior to this nightly date with Tucker Carlson's show.

Speaker 12 If I had to guess, though, I'd say his belief in the farm murders did probably still come from Tucker Carlson.

Speaker 12 Just three months earlier, he'd invited the leader of a white nationalist group onto the show to spread disinformation on the topic.

Speaker 21 An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans-speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders.

Speaker 21 But instead of protecting them, the government just passed a law allowing it to seize their farms without any compensation based purely on their ethnicity and distribute those farms to more favored groups.

Speaker 21 Thousands have already migrated out of the country, but they've struggled to

Speaker 21 attract any sympathy abroad for some reason. Ernst Roots is deputy CEO of Afra Forum.
It's a South Africa civil rights group.

Speaker 21 He was just in the United States to meet with a number of government officials.

Speaker 12 Afra Forum is not really best described as a civil rights organization.

Speaker 12 That's what they call themselves, but I would proffer that apartheid apologists is a more fitting description.

Speaker 12 In 2016, after the group released Tainted Heroes, their documentary critical of the struggle against apartheid, a spokesman for the African National Congress called the film pure propaganda.

Speaker 12 and suggested that a better film might feature the stories of the Afroforum members and the ways in which they had collaborated with the apartheid regime.

Speaker 12 Hernstrut's appearance on Tucker Carlson's show was during his trip to Washington, D.C. to meet with federal government officials and right-wing think tanks.

Speaker 12 Along with Afroforum CEO Callie Creel, he met with staffers for Senator Ted Cruz, officials from USAID,

Speaker 12 and the pair posted a photo of themselves with National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Speaker 12 They posted about meetings at the the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the International Republican Institute.

Speaker 12 They claimed to have met with at least one member of Congress, but they declined to say who it was.

Speaker 12 Their May 2018 tour of the United States was meant to capitalize on the sudden international interest in the plight of the persecuted white South African.

Speaker 12 Just two months earlier, in March of 2018, News Corps Australia sent reporter Paul Touhey on a four-week tour of South Africa. The timing is curious.

Speaker 12 This was right on the heels of right-wing media influencers like Lauren Southern and Katie Hopkins traveling to South Africa to make content.

Speaker 12 And for weeks, Australian news outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch ran stories and videos about horrific violence against white farmers.

Speaker 12 With headlines like Horror tales from South African farmers in The Australian.

Speaker 12 South Africa's white farmers attacked, raped, forced from land in the Daily Telegraph. White minority targeted in South Africa in the Courier Mail.

Speaker 12 And rights groups silent on the whites of South Africa in the West Australian.

Speaker 12 In video reports, Tue claimed that he was quoting the Ramaposa government when he said they were specifically targeting white South Africans for land seizures.

Speaker 12 Australian Facebook feeds were flooded with short videos about a pending genocide of white South Africans.

Speaker 12 Tue's reporting relied heavily on the misrepresented crime statistics produced by Afroforum, and many of his stories quoted liberally from AfroForum directly or interviewed the aggrieved white farmers whose stories had been featured in Afroforum propaganda campaigns in the past.

Speaker 12 As far as I can find, Paul Tuey never explicitly disclosed any relationship with Afroforum.

Speaker 12 But the group did take credit for influencing his coverage, claiming to have provided assistance to a prominent Australian journalist.

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Speaker 12 In the midst of this onslaught of reporting, essentially force-feeding Afrikaner white nationalist propaganda to the entire Australian public, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told a reporter from the Australian right-wing tabloid, The Telegraph, that he'd seen some very concerning media coverage of the violent persecution of white farmers, and he hoped to assist them in resettling in Australia.

Speaker 12 He'd ordered his department to explore options for fast-tracking humanitarian visas for white South Africans, saying,

Speaker 12 people do need help and they need help from a civilized country like ours.

Speaker 12 Dutton's comments were

Speaker 12 not well received.

Speaker 12 He dismissed the criticism as lots of outrage from crazy leftists. And he said that the outlets who covered the story negatively, like ABC, The Guardian, and Huffington Post, were dead to him.

Speaker 12 But the criticism wasn't just coming from the media.

Speaker 12 The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees issued a statement warning of the dire conditions for refugees living in a processing center on the island of Nauru, urging Australia to prioritize actual refugees.

Speaker 12 The UNHCR Director for Asia and the Pacific said,

Speaker 12 The decision of the government to open its migration pathways to different categories of people is a sovereign decision.

Speaker 12 But from the UNHCR perspective, we do encourage that resettlement opportunities that are for refugees and humanitarian quotas that are for deserving cases should not be impacted by these decisions on migration.

Speaker 12 The South African government summoned the Australian ambassador and demanded a formal retraction of Dutton's statements.

Speaker 12 With their Foreign Affairs Minister writing, The South African government is offended by the statements which have been attributed to the Australian Home Affairs Minister, and a full retraction is expected.

Speaker 12 Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop managed to smooth things out with South Africa by clarifying that Dutton's offer did not represent the actual policies of the nation.

Speaker 12 But Dutton never actually retracted his statement.

Speaker 12 And as for AfroForum's attempt to capitalize on that attention on their trip to the United States,

Speaker 12 They only actually managed to meet with staffers in Ted Cruz's office, not the senator himself.

Speaker 12 And a spokesman from USAID downplayed the significance of having taken a meeting with the pair, offering a bland statement that they take a lot of meetings.

Speaker 12 Their claim to have met with John Bolton is an overstatement, too.

Speaker 12 A spokesman from the National Security Council clarified that Bolton had no idea who Rutz and Creel were and he had not met with them.

Speaker 12 They'd simply run into him in the hallway at a Fox News studio and agreed to pose for a photo with fans.

Speaker 12 For what it's worth, the photo of Rutz with Bolton does show that Rutz is wearing the outfit he appeared in on an episode of Tucker Carlson that aired a few days later.

Speaker 12 And the men are standing in front of what appears to be the kind of large garment steamer that you might find in a dressing room at a television studio, not a government office building.

Speaker 12 Peter Dutton was the subject of international ridicule, and he very nearly caused an international incident.

Speaker 12 The leadership of Afroforum had made no headway in their attempts to meet with government officials.

Speaker 12 But none of that really matters.

Speaker 12 The only thing that mattered, in the end, was that Tucker Carlson took the bait, and he put Ernst Rutz on a television program that the President of the United States watched religiously.

Speaker 12 That segment aired on May 15th, 2018.

Speaker 12 Trump didn't tweet about South Africa that night. I can't prove he saw that episode.

Speaker 12 But three months later, in August, when Tucker Carlson had another guest on to talk about South African land reform,

Speaker 12 the president's tweet that night wasn't just about land reform.

Speaker 12 He specifically referenced the idea of large-scale killings of white farmers, something that hadn't been discussed in that that night's episode.

Speaker 12 But it had been the subject of Carlson's interview with Rutz back in May.

Speaker 12 That pathway from white supremacist propaganda in South Africa to a presidential tweet is fairly clear.

Speaker 12 Trump quoted and tagged Tucker Carlson in his tweet, a tweet he posted 45 minutes after the segment aired.

Speaker 12 The guest on the show that night was a Cato Institute fellow named Marion Tupe,

Speaker 12 so not actually a representative from Afroforum.

Speaker 12 But when Afroforum met with various right-wing think tanks back in May, Marion Tupey was the Cato Institute policy analyst who replied to Huffington Post's request for comment about their meeting with the group.

Speaker 12 He even CC'd Ernst Rutz in his reply to the Huffington Post, a message that included a bizarre comment that the current South African government was explicitly racist and in fact comparable to the apartheid government.

Speaker 12 When Donald Trump tweeted about South Africa for the first time as president, he said he was going to have Secretary of State Mike Pompeo closely study the issue of South African farmers.

Speaker 12 But I can't actually find any kind of official follow-up to that.

Speaker 12 I found a brief mention in an article from 2020 about Pompeo's first trip to Southern Africa as Secretary of State.

Speaker 12 So I guess we can at at least deduce that closely studying the issue didn't actually involve going to South Africa for at least a year and a half.

Speaker 12 But there's no official policy statement or reference to any study performed. That article just quotes Pompeo calling the proposed land reform bill disastrous for the South African people.

Speaker 12 And much like Peter Dutton's comments in March of 2018, Trump's tweet in August 2018 was not well received by the South African government.

Speaker 12 Within hours, their official Twitter account responded, tweeting,

Speaker 12 South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past. Hashtag landexpropriation at real Donald Trump

Speaker 12 The following morning, a spokesperson for President Ramaposa called into a news broadcast on ENCA, South Africa's most watched television news channel, to say the government would not be using tweets to conduct international relations.

Speaker 16 The presidency has noted the tweet, which is attributed to the U.S. President, President Donald Trump.

Speaker 16 In our view, the tweet is unfortunate and misinformed. However, we've chosen not to respond to it via social media.
Instead, we'll use the diplomatic channels that exist for such purposes.

Speaker 12 Later that day, the same spokesperson, Kusel Adiko, told CNN, hysterical comments and statements do not assist in the process. The majority of South Africans want to see land reform.

Speaker 12 The majority of our farmers, white and black, want to be part of this initiative.

Speaker 12 And President Cyril Ramaposa hit back in remarks at a conference in Limpopo later that week.

Speaker 26 I don't know what Donald Trump has to do with South African land because he's never been here and he must keep his America. We will keep our South Africa.

Speaker 26 I do what he must do.

Speaker 26 South Africa is our land.

Speaker 26 South Africa belongs to all the people who live here in South Africa. It does not belong to Donald Trump.
He can keep his America.

Speaker 12 But then the story just sort of went away. I can't find much in the way of official follow-up from either government.

Speaker 12 Trump went back to tweeting and Ramaposa went back to working on a plan for land reform.

Speaker 12 Back in 2018, the news story Trump was reacting to was merely a proposal to amend the South African Constitution to clarify existing powers of expropriation.

Speaker 12 And that didn't actually happen back then.

Speaker 12 Now, in 2025, President Ramoposa has signed into law the Expropriation Act, which does allow the government to expropriate privately owned land.

Speaker 12 And that might sound very scary if you don't know what it means.

Speaker 12 And that's certainly the emotional reaction the Act's opponents are counting on.

Speaker 12 But the power codified in the Act isn't new to South Africa or unique to that country.

Speaker 12 Expropriation of land in the public interest was a power already granted to the government in South Africa's 1994 Constitution.

Speaker 12 And I'm sure you're familiar with the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Speaker 12 But there's more to it than pleading the Fifth.

Speaker 12 Honestly, come to think of it, they probably should have broken that one out into a couple different amendments.

Speaker 12 But on top of giving you the right to not incriminate yourself, the Fifth Amendment has something called the Takings Clause,

Speaker 12 which limits the power of eminent domain by requiring just compensation.

Speaker 12 In other words, if the government believes that it is in the public interest and they pay you a fair price, they can take your land.

Speaker 12 The constitutions in countries like Spain, Germany, India, and Australia have similar provisions.

Speaker 12 What South Africa is proposing isn't some unimaginable, tyrannical nightmare.

Speaker 12 It's eminent domain.

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Speaker 12 Variety has the solution.

Speaker 23 Take 20 minutes out of your day and listen to the new Daily Variety podcast for breaking entertainment news and expert perspectives.

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Speaker 12 There is a provision in the Act that's getting quite a bit of attention.

Speaker 12 In Trump's executive order, he writes:

Speaker 20 In shocking disregard of its citizens' rights, the Republic of South Africa recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners' agricultural property without compensation.

Speaker 12 Putting aside the commentary about race, the Act says nothing at all about race or ethnicity,

Speaker 12 the without compensation language has been the focus of much of the negative coverage of this act.

Speaker 12 I'm not an expert on South African politics or constitutional law in any country, or really even the ins and outs of eminent domain.

Speaker 12 But I did read the Expropriation Act, and I'm not sure Trump did.

Speaker 12 It's 52 pages long, but each page is printed once in English, followed by the same page in Afrikaans, so I guess that makes it a 26-page law.

Speaker 12 Chapter 5 of the Act is called Compensation for Expropriation, and it discusses in detail how compensation is calculated and paid.

Speaker 12 There's a lot of boring bits about interest and mortgages and taxes, but I want to talk about chapter 5, section 12, and then skip on down to subsection 3,

Speaker 12 which begins,

Speaker 12 it may be just and equitable for nil compensation to be paid where land is expropriated in the public interest, having regard to all the relevant circumstances, including

Speaker 12 And the four conditions laid out there for scenarios where it may be appropriate to offer a landowner no compensation are things like when the land is entirely unused because the landowner's main purpose is not to develop the land or use it to generate income but instead to benefit from appreciation of its market value

Speaker 12 or if the land is currently owned by an organ of the state and they're not using that land for its core functions and they're unlikely to require it in the future

Speaker 12 If the owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise control over it despite being reasonably capable of doing so.

Speaker 12 Or if the present value of the land is less than the amount of direct state subsidy in the acquisition or improvement of the land.

Speaker 12 The furor being whipped up about the law makes it sound like the South African government has written a law that says, white families will be driven from their homes and stripped of all their possessions.

Speaker 12 But the law says nothing at all about targeting any particular group for expropriation.

Speaker 12 And the conditions under which someone might be offered anything less than equitable compensation would necessarily exclude land that anyone actually lived or worked on.

Speaker 12 The goal of land reform at its core is to address the wrongs of apartheid.

Speaker 12 The Natives Land Act of 1913 prevented black people from buying land, setting aside just 7%

Speaker 12 of the country's land for use by black South Africans.

Speaker 12 A later amendment expanded that to 13%,

Speaker 12 but the law itself wasn't repealed until 1991.

Speaker 12 A land audit conducted by the South African government in 2017 reported that 72%

Speaker 12 of all privately owned agricultural land in South Africa was owned by white people. despite the fact that white people make up about 7% of the South African population.

Speaker 12 I couldn't actually find any specific information about how much of that land had changed hands over the years.

Speaker 12 But in a 2020 article in the African Journal on Conflict Resolution, Dr.

Speaker 12 Edeoy Akinola wrote, Farm owners or farmers are predominantly made up of the white group who in most cases inherited the farms from their families.

Speaker 12 A prevailing narrative is that in most cases, these lands and farms had been forcefully taken from black South Africans during colonialism and apartheid.

Speaker 12 It may be said, therefore, that few white farmers had genuinely bought the lands, particularly in a post-apartheid South Africa.

Speaker 12 This isn't a wrong of the distant past.

Speaker 12 In 1994, when apartheid was finally ended, the South African National Congress announced an ambitious plan to return at least 30% of the stolen land by 2014.

Speaker 12 By 2018, though, only an estimated 10% of land had been returned to Indigenous people.

Speaker 12 The policies of the current government won't lead to terrifying scenes of black soldiers forcing pretty white mothers off their land at gunpoint, although that's certainly the image conjured in the white supremacist imagination.

Speaker 12 It's a slow, boring process involving petitions and judicial review.

Speaker 12 It's not a revolution, but it is an important step in the ongoing ongoing process of undoing apartheid.

Speaker 12 The President of the United States, it seems, does not feel that way.

Speaker 12 His executive order not only ends all foreign aid to South Africa, but it allows, quote, Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination to be admitted and resettled in the United States as refugees.

Speaker 12 So not only is he saying that white South Africans are politically persecuted to such an extent that they are refugees deserving special treatment,

Speaker 12 they are essentially the only refugees in the world worthy of assistance by the U.S. government because he ordered an end to refugee resettlement programs on his first day in office last month.

Speaker 12 It probably doesn't help that the president is heavily influenced by Elon Musk. a man with a long history of spreading propaganda about white genocide in South Africa.

Speaker 12 In 2023, 2023, he replied to a tweet from an account called End Wokeness, writing, they are actually killing white farmers every day. It's not just a threat.

Speaker 12 Musk was born in South Africa under apartheid, and he emigrated to Canada in 1989 to avoid compulsory military service.

Speaker 12 The South Africa he knew was one under apartheid.

Speaker 12 And in addition to his frenetic posting about white genocide conspiracy theories, he's also accused the South African government of having, quote, openly racist laws after he refused to participate in regulatory hearings with the Independent Communications Authority in South Africa.

Speaker 12 His plan to launch Starlink service in South Africa hit a roadblock. The country requires licensees operating a national network or selling internet services nationwide to be at least 30% black-owned.

Speaker 12 A requirement Musk claims is simply not possible.

Speaker 12 Trump has yet to nominate a pick for South African ambassador. But the current frontrunner is rumored to be Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Joel Pollock.

Speaker 12 I considered cutting a clip from an interview Pollock gave a South African TV news program the other day, but the man has all the charisma of a wet rag.

Speaker 12 But the idea of the Breitbart editor becoming the South African ambassador did remind me of another video.

Speaker 12 Back in 2018, amidst all that ongoing public interest in Australian tabloid coverage of anti-white violence in South Africa, Breitbart News held a town hall event in New Orleans.

Speaker 12 The topic of the event was something else, big tech and free speech. But during the QA session, Ann Coulter came out strong in support of white genocide conspiracy theory.

Speaker 27 But I mean, we are seeing a genocide there. And if we're going to take any refugees, it seems to me it ought to be particularly these white farmers who are being

Speaker 27 chosen and killed in really horrible ways. And you can find it by doing a Google search, but you can find these web pages.
They're not just going in and shooting them point blank.

Speaker 27 They're really disgusting. They're boiling people to death.

Speaker 27 Just really sick, sick tortures.

Speaker 12 Her answer was in response to a question from an unnamed audience member. Just a random guy at a town hall.

Speaker 12 But I recognize that voice.

Speaker 28 This question is for Miss Coulter.

Speaker 28 Why do you think the mainstream media has been silent on the genocide of white farmers in South Africa?

Speaker 28 And why does social media center post about the issue, and how can we draw attention to these results?

Speaker 27 I am so glad you asked that question, everyone.

Speaker 12 That's Patrick Casey.

Speaker 12 Back in 2018, he was the leader of the white supremacist group Identity Europa.

Speaker 12 The person injecting white genocide talking points into this Breitbart event in 2018 was the head of a white supremacist organization.

Speaker 12 And not just any white supremacist organization. Identity Europa was a primary organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017.

Speaker 12 It was Identity Europa members who started the chants of you will not replace us

Speaker 12 as they marched through the University of Virginia with their torches.

Speaker 12 But remarkably, Anne Coulter took the ball and ran with it. And she demonstrated that she was deeply immersed in this same racist worldview.
She had these talking points ready to go.

Speaker 12 And now you might be asking at this point, Molly,

Speaker 12 what does any of this have to do with a few dozen skinheads getting pelted with rocks in Sacramento in 2012?

Speaker 12 Those rallies against white genocide back in 2012 were poorly attended and barely reported on.

Speaker 12 The idea behind this organizing strategy was pretty similar to the 2017 March Against Sharia rallies I talked about a few episodes ago, a nationwide series of public protests designed to give the appearance of widespread public support for a pretty unpopular racist idea.

Speaker 12 But when Act for America pulled that stunt in 2017, they were able to attract some mainstream Republican attendees.

Speaker 12 And more importantly, they had access to the legitimizing force of the right-wing media ecosystem.

Speaker 12 Act for America issued their press releases directly to Breitbart, and their CEO was able to publish her own write-ups on the events on their site.

Speaker 12 They didn't have to wait for the idea to make its way through the human centipede of right-wing media, slowly laundering fascist ideas through intermediaries and conning journalists into picking it up.

Speaker 12 The group that put on those rallies against white genocide in 2012 didn't have that kind of access.

Speaker 12 The South Africa project was very obviously a front for the Aryan Nations chapter in Louisiana.

Speaker 12 They were having trouble forcing their way into the conversation and attracting any normal people to their events.

Speaker 12 But the very same idea, presented in almost exactly the same way by a man in a suit, made its way directly into the White House just a few years later.

Speaker 12 The message hadn't changed. The motivation behind it remains the same.

Speaker 12 The myth of the South African farm murder exists to stoke white anxiety.

Speaker 12 For Afrikaner nationalists, it's a desire to return to apartheid. For the American audience they sell it to, It's a longing to roll back civil rights and integration.

Speaker 12 It may be dressed up as foreign policy, but it's no different from the message on those flyers printed out by Aryan nations members.

Speaker 12 It just took the right messenger to get on Tucker Carlson for the president to hear it.

Speaker 12 I did set out to just write a story about those rallies and the people involved in them,

Speaker 12 but current events keep getting in my way.

Speaker 12 I never really know where a story is going to take me until I have 40 or 50 browser tabs open and a dozen pages of notes that don't really make any sense.

Speaker 12 But this one took a hard right turn early on.

Speaker 12 I thought for sure that the star of the story of these white genocide rallies would be Billy Roper.

Speaker 12 It seemed like such an interesting coincidence that in both of these tales of fate grassroots rallies for racist causes, There's Billy stepping up to the plate to hold an event in Arkansas.

Speaker 12 But when I started probing a little deeper into the woman behind the South Africa project,

Speaker 12 I made an alarming discovery.

Speaker 12 Before Monica Stone moved to a small town in Louisiana to marry an American Klansman, she lived in South Africa. And she had a different name.

Speaker 12 And it's a name that I found in some

Speaker 12 very strange places.

Speaker 12 Like the memoir of a British man seeking redemption for his years in a violent fascist movement,

Speaker 12 or deep within the text of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission report.

Speaker 12 But you'll have to wait until next week to hear an almost unbelievable tale of international gun smuggling, bombings, and shootouts that failed to prevent the end of apartheid.

Speaker 12 Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 12 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 12 I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal.
I don't answer any of my emails.

Speaker 12 You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

Speaker 12 Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.

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