The White House Weighs in on White Genocide

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Coll Zone Media. On February twenty seventh, twenty twelve, three
people were arrested after a rally outside the California State
Capitol Building in Sacramento. If not for those arrests, the
little protest may not have even made the news at all.

(00:23):
A dozen similar rallies organized by the same group that
were held that day and other cities certainly didn't. But
a California Highway Patrol officer fell and scraped his knee
trying to tackle a counter protester, which made the event
national news with headlines like Occupy protesters clash with police
officers injured. The arrests were reported by the Associated Press

(00:48):
in stories carried in newspapers around the country. The initial
wire story opens with a cursory explanation of the underlying event,
offering up the phrase a rally by a group so
protesting violence by blacks against whites in South Africa, but
news reports about the events focus on the men who

(01:08):
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. In follow up
stories about the arrests, officers say the event led them
to reevaluate their strategy for confronting Occupy protesters, who they

(01:28):
describe as aggressive towards police. Initial reporting quotes one occupied
protester who spoke to the group's motivation for showing up
to counter protest, but none of the news stories follow
that lead who exactly were the people who had organized
the event of the Capitol and why would those counter
protesters believe that the group had connections to the clan.

(01:52):
The Associated Press write up notes in passing that the
three dozen rally attendees of the Capital were all white
and almost all men, many with shaved heads and prominent tattoos,
but it doesn't offer any indication that those very visible
tattoos had any particular message. The reporter doesn't quote the

(02:17):
man who organized the rally in Sacramento, but they do
include a comment from the national spokesman for the organization
behind the events, Marris Gulett, told a reporter that he
wasn't surprised that counter protesters had disrupted this peaceful march.
What's missing from the articles, though, is that the event

(02:38):
in Sacramento was hosted by the Golden State Skinheads, and
while he may have been speaking on behalf of something
called the South Africa Project. Marris Gulett was a lifelong
member of the Aryan Nations who had recently been released
from prison for bank robbery. Just beneath the surface of
those rallies, had anyone bothered to look, was an old

(03:00):
woman in Louisiana. 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. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Little guys, we have to talk about white genocide.

Speaker 1 (03:42):
I'd really rather not, but that's just the way things are.
The most important thing you need to know about white
genocide is that it is absolutely not a real thing.
It's not just not happening. It isn't really a thing
that can happen. The white race is not dying out.

(04:05):
White people are not subject to a targeted campaign of
extermination by any government. But on the extreme right, there
is an intense fear of a loss of white dominance.
For years now, on the homepage of The Daily Stormer,
there's been a little widget in the sidebar called demographic countdown.

(04:27):
It's an actual countdown clock to the moment the United
States will hit a demographic tipping point when the white
population drops below fifty percent for the first time. As
I'm writing this, they have calculated that moment to be
eighteen years and two hundred and twenty one days from now,
So mark your calendars. I guess they fear what they

(04:49):
call the Great Replacement, the idea that through immigration and
interracial marriage, white people will become a minority in historically
white majority countries. Abortion, contraception, pornography, homosexuality, all of these
things are in their minds, causing white birth rates to fall,

(05:10):
all while non white immigrants pore over the borders replacing them.
It was David Lane, a member of the neo Nazi
terrorist group The Order, who coined the pithy slogan that
encapsulates the fear, his fourteen words, we must secure the
existence of our people and a future for white children.

(05:34):
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. David Lane died in prison,
but those fourteen words have taken on a life of
their own, becoming one of the most well recognized white
supremacist slogans worldwide. This white extinction anxiety is a motivating

(05:59):
for acts of horrific violence on an individual level. Anders Bravic,
a man who murdered seventy seven people in Norway in
twenty eleven, 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. When Breton Tarrant

(06:23):
murdered fifty one Muslim worshippers at mosques in christ Church,
New Zealand in twenty nineteen, he titled his manifesto The
Great Replacement, and in it he cites Bravic as an inspiration.
But it's that same feeling, this paranoid, reactionary whiteness, that
South African media studies professor Niki Falkov calls an anxious

(06:47):
racial fantasy that motivates the violence of policy too. When
Republican politicians froth at the mouth, 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. They're murderers, They carry deadly diseases, and

(07:09):
they traffic poisonous drugs that will kill your white sons.
That's the same fear. It originates in the same place,
and it leads us to the same violent ends. But
the great replacement myth is just that, a myth, of course,
but one about replacement. They believe white people are being displaced.

(07:34):
They are being replaced. Their cultural hegemony is at risk.
When immigrants bring their languages, customs, and religions with them
into white countries in a racial marriage, is making new
generations less and less racially pure. The belief in the
conspiracy theories of white genocide and great replacement go hand

(07:55):
in hand, and they're often used interchangeably. But for that
white genosie to be more than metaphorical, more than a
slow death of this imaginary hegemonic white culture, there has
to be actual violence against white people. If white people
are victims of an ongoing genocide, surely you can point

(08:16):
to blood on someone's hands. You have to have a body.
And the example that bubbles to the surface more often
than not is the myth of the South African farm murders.
And that's what got me started on the subject of
this week's episode. Those rallies in twenty twelve were organized

(08:37):
by a group calling themselves the South Africa Project, and
their stated goal was to raise awareness of the genocide
of the white South African. The narrative is built around
the idea that white South African farmers are under attack,
that they are being brutally murdered in alarming numbers by
black men motivated specifically by desire to kill white people.

(09:03):
The very idea of the farm murders as some discrete
category of crime is a contentious one. Have white farmers
been murdered, yes, But that's where the truth leaves the room.
As a nation, South Africa has a higher rate of
violent crime than many other similarly situated countries, But the

(09:28):
idea that rural white landowners are at a uniquely high
risk of being murdered in racially motivated violent attacks is
simply not true. But it's a myth that serves a
rather particular political purpose. As Nikki Falcon writes in her
book Warrior, State, Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa,

(09:54):
white people are not the only victims, or indeed only
the victims of war murders. 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. Rates of femicide and domestic violence

(10:14):
on farms are thought to be high, affecting both black
and white women. 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. In two thousand and three, the South

(10:36):
African Police issued their final report on an inquiry conducted
into the alleged phenomenon. In analysis of all reported incidents
on farms and smallholdings spanning nineteen ninety eight two thousand one,
nearly ninety percent were motivated by robbery, seven percent were
the result of labor disputes, and only two percent found

(11:00):
to have any racial or political motivation in any direction.
In a country with nearly twenty thousand murders annually, there
are an average of fifty per year that could be
classified as farm murders, and again, almost all of those

(11:20):
are robbery homicides, not organized political violence targeting people of
a particular race. As Falkov puts it, there is evidence
for murder, atrocity, even torture, there is no evidence for genocide.
The genocide myth is an iteration of long standing white

(11:42):
justifications for racist domination. 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. This anxiety of a

(12:03):
whiteness that is under violent threat is incredibly useful. 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

(12:25):
a quote mobilizing around stories of violence against perceived members
of their group as a way to protect their racial status.
African nationalist groups like Afroforum and the Swedelanders tour the
United States, meet with American right wing groups, produce material
in English, and make appearances in American media because they

(12:48):
know this message sells here, and lately it's really taken off.
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, but this
one sent me scurrying into my archives. On February second,

(13:12):
he posted.

Speaker 3 (13:15):
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 so much as mention. A massive
human rights violation at a minimum is happening for all
to see. The United States won't stand for it. We

(13:36):
will act. Also. I will be cutting off all future
funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this
situation has been completed.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
He made an almost identical post a week later, on
February ninth, and in between those two posts, he issued
an executive order with the title addressing the Egregious Actions
of the Report Look of South Africa on its surface.
The egregious action he's referring to is the Expropriation Act
of twenty twenty four, an act of the South African

(14:11):
Parliament signed into law by the South African President in
January of this year, but both his reaction to it
and his own history of engagement on the subject of
South African land reform are instructive here. 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

(14:35):
never ended. I'll get into a little bit of what
the Expropriation Act actually says, but first let's go back
in time a few years, 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. This

(14:55):
wasn't the first time he'd fired off a half baked
take on South Africa land reform. Back in August of
twenty eighteen, nearly two years and almost five thousand tweets
into his first term, he tweeted the word Africa for
the first time.

Speaker 4 (15:13):
As president, I have asked Secretary of State Sect Bompao
to closely study the South African land and farm seizures and.

Speaker 3 (15:23):
Expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. South African
government is now seizing land from white farmers at Tucker
Carson at Fox News.

Speaker 1 (15:38):
The tweet was posted at ten thirty eight pm, less
than an hour after a segment on Tucker Carlson's nightly
broadcast fear bongering about land reform under President Ramaposa.

Speaker 5 (15:51):
We've got a holicit investigation for you tonight. The President
of South Africa, Siro Ramaposa, has begun and you may
have seen this in the press, seizing land from his
own city without compensation because they're the wrong skin color.
That is literally the definition of racism.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
Oddly, that segment doesn't mention anything about farmers being killed.
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. If
I had to guess, though, I'd say his belief in

(16:32):
the farm murders did probably still come from Tucker Carlson.
Just three months earlier, he'd invited the leader of a
white nationalist group onto the show to spread disinformation on
the topic.

Speaker 5 (16:45):
An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans speaking, is being
targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders, but
instead of protecting them, the government just passed a law
allowing it to seize their farms about any compensation. Based
purely on their ethnicity and distribute those forms to more
favored groups. Thousands have already migrated out of the country,

(17:06):
but they struggled to attack attract any sympathy abroad for
some reason. Ernst Roots is Deputy CEO of Afroform. It's
a South Africa civil rights group. It was just in
the United States to meet with a number of government officials.

Speaker 1 (17:23):
Afroforum is not really best described as a civil rights organization.
That's what they call themselves, but I would profer that
apartheid apologists is a more fitting description. In twenty sixteen,
after the group released Tainted Heroes, their documentary critical of

(17:45):
the struggle against apartheid, a spokesman for the African National
Congress called the film pure propaganda and suggested that a
better film might feature the stories of the Afro Forum
members and the ways in which they had collaborated with
the apartheid regilme harenst Ruth's appearance on Tucker Carlson's show
was during his trip to Washington, d C. To meet

(18:06):
with federal government officials and right wing think tanks. Along
with Afrofum CEO Callie Creele, he met with staffers for
Senator Ted Cruz, officials from USAID, and the pair posted
a photo of themselves with National Security Advisor John Bolton.
They posted about meetings at the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation,

(18:27):
and the International Republican Institute. They claimed to have met
with at least one member of Congress, but they declined
to say who it was. Their May twenty eighteen tour
of the United States was meant to capitalize on the
sudden international interest in the plight of the persecuted white
South African Just two months earlier, in March of twenty eighteen,

(18:51):
News Corps Australia sent reporter Paul Towey on a four
week tour of South Africa. The timing is curious. This
was right on the heel of right wing media influencers
like Lauren Southern and Katie Hopkins traveling to South Africa
to make content, and for weeks Australian news outlets owned
by Rupert Murdoch ran stories and videos about horrific violence

(19:14):
against white farmers, with headlines like horror Tales from South
African farmers in the Australian South Africa's white farmers attacked, raped,
forced from land in the Daily Telegraph, White minority targeted
in South Africa in The Courier Mail and wrights groups
silent on the whites of South Africa in the West Australian.

(19:39):
In video reports, Twoey claimed that he was quoting the
Ramaposa government when he said they were specifically targeting white
South Africans for land seizures. Australian Facebook feeds were flooded
with short videos about a pending genocide of white South
Africans two. His reporting relied heavily on the misrepresented crime

(20:01):
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. As far as I can find, Paul Twey
never explicitly disclosed any relationship with Afroforum, but the group

(20:24):
did take credit for influencing his coverage, claiming to have
provided assistance to a prominent Australian journalist. In the midst

(20:47):
of this onslaught of reporting, essentially force feeding African or
white nationalists propaganda to the entire Australian public. Australian Home
Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told a reporter from the Australian
right wing town babloid 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.

(21:12):
He'd ordered his department to explore options for fast tracking
humanitarian visas for white South Africans, saying people do need help,
and they need help from a civilized country like ours.
Dutton's comments were not well received. He dismissed the criticism

(21:34):
as lots of outrage from crazy leftists, and he said
that the outlets who covered the story negatively, like ABC,
The Guardian and Huftington Post were dead to him. But
the criticism wasn't just coming from the media. The United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees issued a statement warning of
the dire conditions for refugees living in a processing center

(21:57):
on the island of Nauru, urging Australia to prioritize actual refugees.
The UNHCR Director for Asia and the Pacific said the
decision of the government to open its migration pathways to
different categories of people is a sovereign decision, but from
the UNHCR perspective, we do encourage that resettlement opportunities that

(22:19):
are for refugees and humanitarian quotas that are for deserving
cases should not be impacted by these decisions on migration.
The South African government summoned the Australian ambassador and demanded
a formal retraction of Dutton's statements, with their Foreign Affairs
minister writing the South African government is offended by the

(22:41):
statements which have been attributed to the Australian Home Affairs
Minister and a full retraction is expected. 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, but

(23:02):
Dutton never actually retracted his statement, and as for af
Reforms attempt to capitalize on that attention on their trip
to the United States, they only actually managed to meet
with staffers in Ted Cruz's office, not the Senator himself,
and a spokesman from USAID downplayed the significance of having

(23:23):
taken a meeting with the pair offering a bland statement
that they take a lot of meetings. Their claim to
have met with John Bolton is an overstatement too. A
spokesman from the National Security Council clarified that Bolton had
no idea who Roots and Creole were and he had

(23:44):
not met with them. They'd simply run into him in
the hallway at a Fox News studio and agreed to
pose for a photo with fans. For what it's worth,
the photo of Roots with Bolton does show that Roots
is wearing the outfit he appeared in on an episode
of Talker Carlson that aired a few days later, and
the men are standing in front of what appears to

(24:05):
be the kind of large garment steamer that you might
find in a dressing room in a television studio, not
a government office building. Peter Dutton was the subject of
international ridicule, and he very nearly caused an international incident.
The leadership of Afroforum had made no headway in their

(24:27):
attempts to meet with government officials, but none of that
really matters. The only thing that mattered in the end
was that Tucker Carlson took the bait and he put
arest Rutz on a television program that the President of
the United States watched religiously. That segment aired on May fifteenth,

(24:47):
twenty eighteen. Trump didn't tweet about South Africa that night.
I can't prove he saw that episode, But three months
later in August, when Tucker Carlson had another guest on
to talk about South African land reform, the president's tweet
that night wasn't just about land reform. He specifically referenced

(25:12):
the idea of large scale killings of white farmers, something
that hadn't been discussed in that night's episode, but it
had been the subject of Carlson's interview with Rutz back
in May. That pathway from white supremacist propaganda in South
Africa to a presidential tweet is fairly clear. Trump quoted

(25:35):
and tagged Tucker Carlson in his tweet, a tweet he
posted forty five minutes after the segment aired. The guest
on the show that night was a CATO Institute fellow
named Marion tupe So not actually a representative from Afroforum,
but when Afroforum met with various right wing think tanks
back in May, Marion Tupi was the Cato Institute policy

(25:58):
analyst who replied to Huffington Post's requests for comment about
their meeting with the group. He even c seed Ernst
Roots 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

(26:19):
apartheid government. 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. But I can't actually find
any kind of official follow up to that. I found

(26:39):
a brief mention in an article from twenty twenty about
Pompeo's first trip to Southern Africa as Secretary of State,
so I guess we can at least deduce that closely
studying the issue didn't actually involve going to South Africa
for at least a year and a half. But there's
no official policy statement or reference to any study performed.

(27:03):
That article just quotes Pompeo calling the proposed land reform
bill disastrous for the South African people, and much like
Peter Dutton's comments in March of twenty eighteen, Trump's tweet
in August twenty eighteen was not well received by the
South African government. Within hours, their official Twitter account responded,

(27:26):
tweeting South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only
seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our
colonial past hashtag land expropriation at real Donald Trump. The
following morning, a spokesperson for President Rama Posa called into
a news broadcast on e NCA, South Africa's most watched

(27:49):
television news channel, to say the government would not be
using tweets to conduct international relations.

Speaker 6 (27:59):
The president has noted that two which is attributed to
the US president President Donald Trump. In our view, the
treat is unfortunate in missing Homed. 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 1 (28:20):
Later that day, the same spokesperson, who's Ladico, told CNN
hysterical comments and statements do not assist in the process.
The majority of South Africans want to see land reform.
The majority of our farmers, white and black, want to
be part of this initiative, and President Cyril Ramaposa hit
back in remarks at a conference in Limpopo later that week.

Speaker 7 (28:45):
I don't know what Donald Trump has to do with
South African land because it's never been here and he
must keep his America. We will here for our South Africa.

Speaker 5 (28:58):
How do you have do?

Speaker 7 (29:01):
South Africa is our land. South Africa belongs to all
the people who live here in South Africa. He does
not belong to Donald Trum. He can keep his America.

Speaker 1 (29:20):
But then the story just sort of went away. I
can't find much in the way of official follow up
from either government. Trump went back to tweeting and Ramaposa
went back to working on a plan for land reform.
Back in twenty eighteen, the new story Trump was reacting
to was merely a proposal to amend the South African

(29:41):
Constitution to clarify existing powers of expropriation, and that didn't
actually happen back then. Now, in twenty twenty five, President
Ramaposa has signed into law the Expropriation Act, which does
allow the government to expropriate privately owned land. And that
might sound very scary if you don't know what it means,

(30:05):
and that's certainly the emotional reaction. The act's opponents are
counting on. But the power codified in the Act isn't
new to South Africa or unique to that country. Expropriation
of land in the public interest was a power already
granted to the government in South Africa's nineteen ninety four constitution.

(30:26):
And I'm sure you're familiar with the Fifth Amendment of
the United States Constitution. But there's more to it than
pleading the fifth Honestly, come to think of it, they
probably should have broken that one out into a couple
different amendments. But on top of giving you the right
to not incriminate yourself, the Fifth Amendment has something called

(30:49):
the taking's Clause, which limits the power of eminent domain
by requiring just compensation. 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.
The constitutions in countries like Spain, Germany, India, and Australia

(31:14):
have similar provisions. What South Africa is proposing isn't some
unimaginable tyrannical nightmare. It's eminent domain. There is a provision

(31:42):
in the Act that's getting quite a bit of attention.
In Trump's executive order, he writes.

Speaker 3 (31:50):
In shocking disregard of its citizens' rights. The Republic of
South Africa recently unacted Expropriation Act thirtain of twenty twenty
four to enable the Government of South Africa to seize
ethnic minority africaners agricultural property without compensation.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
Putting aside the commentary about race, the Act says nothing
at all about race or ethnicity. The without compensation language
has been the focus of much of the negative coverage
of this act. I'm not an expert on South African politics,
or constitutional law in any country, or really even the

(32:35):
ins and outs of eminent domain. But I did read
the Expropriation Act, and I'm not sure Trump did. It's
fifty two pages long, but each page is printed once
in English, followed by the same page in Afrikaans, so
I guess that makes it a twenty six page law.

(32:55):
Chapter five of the Act is called Compensation for expropriation,
and it discusses in detail how compensation is calculated and paid.
There's a lot of boring bits about interest and mortgages
and taxes, but I want to talk about Chapter five,
Section twelve, and then skip on down to sub section three,

(33:20):
which begins 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
and the four conditions laid out there. For scenarios where
it may be appropriate to offer a landowner no compensation

(33:41):
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. 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

(34:02):
they are unlikely to require it in the future, if
the owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise
control over it despite being reasonably capable of doing so,
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. The furor being whipped up

(34:24):
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,
But the law says nothing at all about targeting any
particular group for expropriation, and the conditions under which someone
might be offered anything less than equitable compensation would necessarily

(34:47):
exclude land that anyone actually lived or worked on. The
goal of land reform at its core is to address
the wrongs of apartheid. The Native's Land Act of nineteen
thirteen prevented black people from buying land, setting aside just
seven percent of the country's land for use by black

(35:10):
South Africans. A later amendment expanded that to thirteen percent,
but the law itself wasn't repealed until nineteen ninety one.
A land audit conducted by the South African government in
twenty seventeen reported that seventy two percent of all privately
owned agricultural land in South Africa was owned by white people,

(35:33):
despite the fact that white people make up about seven
percent of the South African population. I couldn't actually find
any specific information about how much of that land had
changed hands over the years, but in a twenty twenty
article in the African Journal on Conflict Resolution, doctor Adeoya
Achinola wrote, farm owners or farmers, are predominantly made up

(35:57):
of the white group, who in most cases inn inherited
the farms from their families. A prevailing narrative is that
in most cases these lands and farms had been forcifully
taken from black South Africans during colonialism and apartheid. It
may be said, therefore, that few white farmers had genuinely
bought the lands, particularly in opposed apartheid South Africa. This

(36:22):
isn't a wrong of the distant past. In nineteen ninety four,
when apartheid was finally ended, the South African National Congress
announced an ambitious plan to return at least thirty percent
of the stolen land by twenty fourteen. By twenty eighteen,
though only an estimated ten percent of land had been

(36:42):
returned to indigenous people. 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 certainly
the image conjured in the white supremacist imagination. It's a slow,
boring process, involving petitions and judicial review. It's not a revolution,

(37:08):
but it is an important step in the ongoing process
of undoing apartheid. The President of the United States, it seems,
does not feel that way. His executive order not only
ends all foreign aid to South Africa, but it allows
quote africaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust

(37:30):
racial discrimination to be admitted and resettled in the United
States as refugees. So not only is he saying that
white South Africans are politically persecuted to such an extent
that they are refugees deserving special treatment, they are essentially
the only refugees in the world worthy of assistance by

(37:51):
the US government. Because he ordered an end to refugee
resettlement programs on his first day in office last month,
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. In twenty
twenty three, he replied to a tweet from an account

(38:13):
called end Wokeness, writing, they are actually killing white farmers
every day. It's not just a threat. Musk was born
in South Africa under apartheid, and he emigrated to Canada
in nineteen eighty nine to avoid compulsory military service. The
South Africa, he knew, was one under apartheid, and in

(38:36):
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. His
plan to launch Starlink service in South Africa hit a roadblock.

(38:58):
The country requires life operating a national network or selling
internet services nationwide to be at least thirty percent black owned,
a requirement must claims is simply not possible. Trump has
yet to nominate a pick for South African Ambassador, but
the current front runner is rumored to be Breitbart Editor

(39:20):
in chief Joel Pollock. 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. But the idea of the Breitbart
editor becoming the South African Ambassador did remind me of

(39:40):
another video. Back in twenty eighteen, 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. The topic of the event was something else,
big tech and speech. But during the Q and A

(40:02):
session and Coulter came out strong in support of white
genocide conspiracy theory.

Speaker 8 (40:11):
But I mean, we are seeing a genocide, they are,
and if we're going to take any refugees, it seems
to me it ought to be, particularly these white farmers
who are being chosen and killed in really horrible ways.
And you can find it by doing a Google search.
But you can find these web pages. It's not They're

(40:31):
not just going in and shooting them point blank. They're
really disgusting and boiling people's death, just really sick, sick tortures.

Speaker 1 (40:41):
Her answer was in response to a question from an
unnamed audience member, just a random guy at a town hall,
but I recognize that voice.

Speaker 6 (40:55):
This question is for miss Culter.

Speaker 3 (40:58):
Why do you think the mainstream media has been is
on the genocide of white farmers in South Africa? And
why does social media center post about the issue, And
how can we draw attention to these wild.

Speaker 8 (41:14):
I am so glad you asked that question.

Speaker 1 (41:21):
That's Patrick Casey back in twenty eighteen. He was the
leader of the white supremacist group Identity Europa. The person
injecting white genocide talking points into this Breitbart event in
twenty eighteen was the head of a white supremacist organization,
and not just any white supremacist organization. Identity Europa was

(41:43):
a primary organizer of the United the Right rally in
Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. It was Identity Europa members who
started the chance of you will Not Replace Us as
they marched through the University of Virginia with their torches.
But remarkably, Ann Coulter took the ball and ran with it,

(42:06):
and she demonstrated that she was deeply immersed in this
same racist worldview. She had these talking points ready to go,
and you might be asking at this point, Mollie, what
does any of this have to do with a few
dozen skinheads getting pelted with rocks and Sacramento in twenty twelve.

(42:29):
Those rallies against white genocide back in twenty twelve were
poorly attended and barely reported on. The idea behind this
organizing strategy was pretty similar to the twenty seventeen March
against Sharia rallies I talked about a few episodes ago,
a nationwide series of public protests designed to give the

(42:50):
appearance of widespread public support for a pretty unpopular racist idea.
But when Act for America pulled that stunt in twenty seven.
They were able to attract some mainstream Republican attendees, and
more importantly, they had access to the legitimizing force of

(43:10):
the right wing media ecosystem. 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. 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

(43:35):
journalists into picking it up. The group that put on
those rallies against white genocide in twenty twelve didn't have
that kind of access. The South Africa Project was very
obviously a front for the Aryan Nations Chapter in Louisiana.
They were having trouble forcing their way into the conversation

(43:56):
and attracting any normal people to their events, 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. The
message hadn't changed, the motivation behind it remains the same.

(44:20):
The myth of the South African Farm murder exists to
stoke white anxiety. For African internationalists, 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.
It may be dressed up as foreign policy, but it's

(44:41):
no different from the message on those flyers printed out
by Aryan Nations members. It just took the right messenger
to get on Tucker Carlson for the President to hear it.
I did set out to just write a story about
those rallies and the people involved in them, but current

(45:02):
events keep getting in my way. I never really know
where a story is going to take me until I
have forty or fifty browser tabs open and a dozen
pages of notes that don't really make any sense. But
this one took a hard right turn. Early on, I
thought for sure that the star of the story of

(45:23):
these white genocide rallies would be Billy Roper. It seemed
like such an interesting coincidence that in both of these
tales of fake grassroots rallies for racist causes, there's Billy
stepping up to the plate to hold an event in Arkansas.
But when I started probing a little deeper into the

(45:44):
woman behind the South Africa Project. I made an alarming discovery.
Before Monica Stone moved to a small town in Louisiana
to marry an American clansman, she lived in South Africa,
and she had a different name. And it's a name
that I found in some very strange places, like the

(46:08):
memoir of a British Man seeking redemption for his years
in a violent fascist movement, or deep within the text
of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. But
you'll have to wait until next week to hear an
almost unbelievable tale of international gun smuggling, bombings and shootouts

(46:31):
that failed to prevent the end of apartheid. Weird Little
Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written and recorded by me Mollie Kunger. Our
executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show

(46:52):
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me
at Weird Little Guy Podcast at gmail dot com. 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. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show
with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just

(47:16):
don't post anything that's going to make you one of
my Weird Little Guys

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The White House Weighs in on White Genocide