130: South African Farm Murders and 'White Genocide', with Bianca van Wyk
Daniel and Jack are joined by special guest, South African anti-disinformation advocate, Bianca van Wyk, to discuss the issue of 'South African farm murders', the reality vs the right-wing narrative, some of the bad actors pushing the fake version of the story, and the links to the 'white genocide' conspiracy theory. Bianca helps us get the whole thing into proper context, especially re South Africa's history and current politics. Also discussed: the recent fast-tracking of refugee status for white South Africans by the Trump administration, the US Right's embrace of the South African far-right's propaganda, the 'Kill the Boer!' chant and what it really means, Elon Musk, and the recent reprogramming of X's AI chatbot Grok. Content Warnings apply. Episode Notes: X @biancavanwyk16 TikTok @BiancaSays3 YouTube @WhiteWhineTalks Sour Grapes — The Toxic Vintage of White Whine by Bianca https://iol.co.za/news/politics/2024-05-16-bianca-van-wyk-sour-grapes-the-toxic-vintage-of-white-whine/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/23/trump-orders-close-study-of-south-africa-farmer-killings https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/23/white-farmers-trump-south-africa-tucker-carlson-far-right-influence https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/09/us-grants-asylum-to-54-white-afrikaner-south-africans https://apnews.com/article/trump-musk-whites-south-africa-us-fdef8e9d4d2186227f75b817d8e1d7eb https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk-grok-white-genocide https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-x-grok-white-genocide-holocaust-1235341267/ https://www.404media.co/why-did-grok-start-talking-about-white-genocide/ https://newrepublic.com/article/195383/trump-south-africans-takes-immigration https://apnews.com/video/trump-defends-admitting-white-south-africans-as-refugees-after-halting-resettlement-for-most-others-b3e74c6b4e584a02b798f7598dfd2132 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/us/politics/trump-south-africa-afrikaners.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/white-south-africans-refugees.html https://www.levernews.com/trump-taps-refugee-fund-to-welcome-white-south-africans-within-days/ https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/trumps-south-africa-tweet-tucker-carlson-has-turned-white-nationalist-narrative https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/post/tucker-carlson-injected-white-nationalist-propaganda-into-the-presidents-brain https://theconversation.com/south-africas-white-right-the-alt-right-and-the-alternative-103544 https://jacobin.com/2025/03/musk-looks-to-the-motherland https://jacobin.com/2025/02/musk-south-africa-white-far-right https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyj1198wy3o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-45336840 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wg5pg1xp5o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2q937wlqgo https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/the-myth-of-white-genocide-in-south-africa/?curator=alphaideas https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/dangerous-myth-white-genocide-south-africa/ Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Here we talk about the far right, their fellow travellers, and what they say to each other when they think we're not listening.
The show is hosted by Daniel Harper and me, Jack Graham.
We're both he-him.
Be aware we cover difficult, sometimes nasty subject matter, so content warnings always apply.
And welcome back to another episode of I Don't Speak German.
And this episode is, again, we're being kind of topical at the moment.
We had one covering the recent conclave over at the Vatican.
And now South Africa's kind of in the news a little bit because we've had the thing in America where Trump has fast-tracked the refugee status for several quote-unquote refugees from South Africa.
We are unfortunately topical once again.
We try not to be topical on this podcast.
That's the way you gain listeners, though.
We try to keep it as low as possible.
Oh yeah, we wouldn't want that.
So we're going to be talking in this episode a little bit about the, for want of a, and it's a horrible way of putting it, but for want of a better term, the South African farm murders phenomenon, and the conspiracy theory, I should say, and the attendant, because it's really just a part of the white genocide conspiracy theory, I think.
We would agree.
And I'm here with Daniel and we're also...
Very happy and glad to be joined by a special guest for this episode, Bianca von Veig.
Okay, so I'm Bianca von Veig.
I'm from South Africa.
One of the things that I do is I do online advocacy around specifically addressing disinformation when it comes to South Africa and also then addressing issues that are related to social justice, educating on policies, because we get...
Quite a bit of pushback from certain people and certain advocacy groups when there is any policy that may affect or change the inequality in South Africa.
So that's more or less my spiel, a little bit about me.
That is fascinating.
We've really been wanting to do an episode on this subject and related subjects for quite a while and I know that Daniel certainly has.
I've been looking for the right person to come on to help us out with talking about it.
So it's really great to have you on.
Thank you.
Yes, and your name was given to me by a Patreon member of mine who came onto one of my live shows and was like, you should contact this person.
And I'm like, great, sounds wonderful.
And then we chatted and everything worked out.
So I'm very, very happy to have made your acquaintance.
There's a part of me that wants to get right into it and there's a part of me that wants to set the stage a little bit.
The geographical breakdown of, like, where my listeners come from, I feel like it's about 50-50, kind of like North America and Europe, basically, with, you know, scattered around the world.
And so, like, as an American, we just get, like, so little, there's just very little understanding of South Africa, like, as a place.
It's like, you know, oh, it's the southern tip of Africa, and apartheid, you know, Nelson Mandela, et cetera, you know, like, very, very vague ideas.
Like, I think, like...
I think in high school I maybe got like three sentences worth of information about South Africa.
You know, what is the national capital, etc.
So I wonder if you wouldn't mind just take two minutes or so and just give us a little bit of like, what's the history?
What's the background?
You know, what is the place where you live?
Okay, so I think those three sentences that you got is generally what people know about South Africa and is the People know that we come from a painful history.
Apartheid, before then, there was the colonisation.
There was also the Dutch landed here in 1652.
But before that, people don't seem to know.
They assume that that was, you know, where everything started.
Africa has been trading with other countries before 1652.
So it wasn't like they were the first white people to come to South Africa.
By the way, it wasn't South Africa until 1910.
And then we had, after the, you know, 1994, we had our first democratic, what would you call, election.
And the ANC government came in.
And, well, there has a lot of work had to be done.
It's obviously been, there has been problems, there has been challenges.
And yes, I am willing to admit as a South African there has been corruption, but I don't see any government across the world that is corruption free.
And we have struggled with a number of things, but I should also highlight the false perception is that, you know, the National Party government, which was the apartheid government, handed over this well-oiled machine.
And then the new government took over and messed it up.
No, they handed over a machine that, first of all, had a huge amount of debt.
In fact, the ANC government paid off the debt of the National Party government.
Also, another thing is they provided services for a certain amount of people in South Africa.
Remember, we had the homelands where we just dumped people, black people, outside.
That's why we've got townships.
That's why we've got, you know, why people have to use most of their salaries to get to the economic hubs, is because they were placed outside of the urban areas just to provide cheap labour.
And the homelands are a total different story.
I mean, it was arid land, and people starved to death there.
It was terrible.
People do not understand the concept.
They just think, okay, because there was no war in 1994 and because people were excited about this rainbow nation, a term I don't like using, because I just feel that it was one group of people, the largest group of people, actually compromising so much.
I mean, we had our Truth and Conciliation Commission where people had to discuss, you know, They had to come forward about the crimes they committed because apartheid was a crime against humanity.
And that wasn't taken seriously by the actual people that committed the crimes.
It was taken seriously by the people that the crimes had been done to.
So yes, it has been a struggle.
The information that gets out there is that there is extremely...
Intense or tense negative relationships between races.
That is not the case.
We are not fearing for our lives as white people in South Africa.
We're not staying in, you know, caves or anything like that.
Well, you are.
Certainly some people pretend that to be the case.
Oh, yes.
Yes, which we should get to.
We'll get there.
We'll get there, yes.
But yes, so yes, we have issues.
But I also want to highlight that we are the most unequal country in the world.
Yes, absolutely.
And there are photos that kind of go viral on social media sometimes of the little dividing line between...
You know, the white area and then the, you know, the black area of South Africa where, you know, it's just like the same completely impoverished, you know, even today.
Yes, absolutely.
But, you know, if we just take a look at, for instance, land ownership in South Africa, 70% of the private farmland, and we're talking about agriculture holdings, is held by white individuals in South Africa.
Which means they make 70% of the population, right?
That's how that works.
So clearly this is just, right?
Well...
Sorry, I'm telling a joke.
I'm setting you up for this.
But before people take that number away, please, white people in South Africa is 8%.
Yes, yes.
Absolutely.
Because I'm so worried about the disinformation that's going around right now.
And then, you know, another, if we just look at day-to-day life, our salary disparity, for instance, in 2023, we looked at the white individuals earned a median of approximately 21,000 Rand per month, while black Africans earned around 4,684 Rand a month.
A whole, I mean, it's totally, it's four times what, you know, the difference.
So there is a lot, and we pretend like everything is equal and fair, and we're all working from the same ground.
And there's people that don't understand that, you know, yes, there are still survivors from apartheid that lived through apartheid, but their children, their grandchildren are affected, and we need to change things around.
But every time we try and change things, like, you know, we have a policy that's called Black Economic Empowerment.
You have this whole, oh, but that's reverse racism.
Right.
Or, you know, it's like apartheid again.
I feel like this point of the inequality, of just the massive, massive difference in terms of the way that, you know, and I want to ask you about kind of the ethnicities in South Africa and kind of how that's defined a little bit.
Versus, like, white people in South Africa versus non-white people in South Africa.
The idea that it's literally, like, four times the net worth, you know, or more.
You know, just, you know, that gets alighted in a lot of these conversations.
Like, oh, you're being racist towards me by trying to take my land without compensating me.
It's like, well, you own all the damn land.
You know, like, what do you mean?
Like, you know, you're doing so much better.
There's just no question.
Why should we compensate you for land that you're not even using in a lot of cases?
I have very much a layman's understanding of what's going on in South Africa, but even as a layman, I was just like, these claims from these far-right lunatics are nonsense.
The second you look into them, But even from, if we talk about expropriation...
We've got the Expropriation Act, and that is why there's such a drive from our right-wing lobby groups.
And the moment the Expropriation Act was signed in, it's not like it was a new thing.
There was an Expropriation Act previously.
I think it was from 1970, around then.
The difference there is the government just displaced a whole lot of black people, and we have a...
Ethnic group called Coloured People in South Africa.
I know that it is a derogatory term within the US, but we have an ethnic group called Coloured People.
They were just displaced.
And this was under the Expropriation Act, where government just took the land.
However, the new Expropriation Act, you have to go through an entire court process if you want to expropriate without compensation.
And there are five requirements to do that.
You know, that the land is actually a safety issue, that it's not being used.
There's a number of requirements.
So it's not like, okay, we decide we want your land and now we're going to take it.
And there's been no evidence of that ever happening.
We've had farmers actually saying that over and over again, but no one seems to be one to listen.
The lobby groups seem to be louder.
They are a well-oiled machine and they...
Yeah, so I feel like, I guess, you know, you mentioned, and again, I use the term in the South African non-American sense, obviously, with the colored population versus the black population.
And I wonder if you could speak, again, briefly, just sort of give, you know, again, the ugly Americans a little bit of a context on kind of the ethnic divides and how like black versus colored is defined.
And also, if you wouldn't mind discussing the...
Because, you know, there's also a kind of like the Boer identity versus, you know, the more kind of English descendants of people who live in South Africa.
And that seems to be another distinction is, you know, we're not just South African, we're Boers.
It seems to be an issue.
And so I don't know if you feel comfortable if you'd like to discuss that.
Black African community is 81% of our population.
And then we've got our coloured community, which is about, it's nearly 9%, 8.8%.
Then we have got our Indian-Asian community, 2.5%.
And then we've got our white people, 7.3%.
Okay.
Yes.
And that's our ethnic diversity.
And within these groups, there's significant ethnic diversity, for example.
Black Africans include groups like Zulu, Os, Perin, Tswana, you know, a whole lot of different ethnic groups.
Now, within the white population, you've got a group that call themselves Boers, and they claim that they have got a very specific culture.
And the problem is that they also claim they speak for all white Afrikaans speakers.
Okay, now Afrikaans...
And that's also another thing that I think that Americans, I think with Donald Trump, that was a little bit of a problem, was understanding that Afrikaans does not mean farmer.
Right, yes.
It's a language.
And Afrikaans is not even mostly spoken by white people.
It is actually spoken more by the colored community in South Africa than it is.
And even members of the black community speak Afrikaans.
On the question of Boers specifically, is that, pardon my ignorance as well, because Daniel's the ignorant American, I'm the ignorant Brit, and historically I really should know.
On the question of Boers, is this, I mean, it sounds from the way you describe it almost like it's more an ideological construction than an actual...
Ethnic group in the actual historical sense, more akin to something like when right-wingers in other parts of the world talk about being Anglo-Saxons or being Aryans even.
Is it something like that?
It is.
And they will claim that they have got a very specific culture.
They've got a language, which is not only their language.
Okay, which is Afrikaans.
And Christian values, you know, they're very strict on those kind of things.
That is what they say and why they believe that they are entitled to what we would call a nation state within South Africa.
But I should highlight...
That that, again, doesn't refer to all white African speakers in South Africa.
Right.
It's more of a...
It's a group.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's...
I mean, we see this in a lot of, like, far-right movements.
You know, they use this term.
I mean, I believe the term boar just means farmer.
Yes.
And so they use this...
I mean, hell, you could talk about, you know, in the U.S., you know, there is this sort of, you know...
White-bred, you know, homespun American.
We're farmers, and we work, you know, and it obviously has a very different context than what we're talking about, but there is this sense, it's a little bit, not so much in 2025 as it was maybe 30 years ago, but the idea of being like, we work, you know, we work on a farm, we are, and so we have these certain kind of political ideals, we have these certain kind of values, and we, you know, we don't live in cities, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, again, obviously, it's very different here, but, yeah, no, I mean, it's a...
It's a political designation that's built around this kind of idea of a propaganda piece as opposed to something that comes from this authentic culture, I think, is what I'm hearing from you?
Correct.
That is correct.
It sounds quite similar to, at least in outline, to the way it does work in America with the very heavy concentration of right-wing politics in that sort of rural farming communities, even down to the dominance of...
Right-wing evangelical Christianity and stuff like that.
It sounds remarkably analogous.
It is, actually.
They have got a lot in common.
You can actually draw the lines directly between them.
You'll also notice that when there are extremists in the right-wing in the US, If they take the time to write manifestos, you'll find that they will cite things like white genocide in South Africa, farm killings in their manifestos.
It plays a huge role.
It's even been found that they follow certain blogs from South Africa from these white genocide grifters.
And they actually follow those blogs and it's been, you know, connections have been drawn between their ideologies and what actually made them do what they did in the US, in New Zealand, I think it's New Zealand, yeah, and Norway, for instance, where they sucked farm murders, for instance.
Well, I immediately think of Dylann Roof.
Yeah, he famously had a Rhodesian flag on his jacket.
There are photos of him wearing a jacket with a Rhodesian flag on it.
I guess we are here to talk about sort of the claims of white genocide, the claims of the propaganda around the quote-unquote African farmers.
I hate that term, but there's just, I don't know, it's just what the right wing says.
I guess the way to frame this is my understanding of the way that certainly sort of the American or kind of West, the North American and to some degree the kind of European, you know, far right use of this is basically framing, look, South Africa is a place with an 8% white population.
This is our future is, you know, they're being murdered in their homes because they're white.
This is a genocide by the, you know, I hate even talking about this to someone I'm not comfortable with, but inherently Yes.
you know, the black hordes, basically.
And so, you know, saying that, like, that's the, that's the, and that's the rhetoric.
That's exactly what is like, this is coming for you.
And so I'm wondering if you, you know, this is what we come here for.
So again, I shouldn't be embarrassed to talk about it, but Look, I don't think any of us would deny that there are horrific murders being committed in South Africa against people who live and work on these farms.
The point is not to diminish the pain of these families, but there's a much more complex story than what the far right and what even the mainstream right is telling about this.
So talk to me a little bit from your perspective.
What's going on in terms of...
The farm population and these often horrific crimes.
Give us some context.
Give us some background on this, if you don't mind.
The first thing I wanted to say is that when people tell stories about farm murders in South Africa, they cherry-pick.
Okay.
So you will hear a right-wing lobby group like every forum go out.
To these conservative, like CPAC or whatever.
I think it was in Hungary previously.
And also it was in the US that Afroforum attended.
And they will then cherry pick a specific murder.
They will tell you all the gruesome details of that murder.
And I'm going to actually be very specific here.
One of the most horrendous murders was of two women in 2009, and it was an elderly mother and her daughter on a farm.
They were the Lotta women.
And this particular, this criminal actually stabbed them to death, and stabbed them to death with a broken bottle.
They were badly, badly, violently killed.
But they will go into further details.
They'll tell you the real gory details.
What they always leave out of that story is that happened in 2009.
In 2007, the same perpetrator murdered a black man exactly in the same way, with a broken bottle.
So they leave that part of the story out.
Continuously.
And yes, when you address the facts, you will immediately get a very aggressive reaction that says, but are you denying that foul murders happen?
No, we're not denying that foul murders happen.
What we are saying is that it is not racially motivated.
And the evidence just doesn't speak to the narrative.
Most of these, you know, when a criminal has been, when they finally arrest criminals, there we have got a problem is arresting people because it's just so easy to get away and to hide within rural and also to just go over the border if you have committed a crime.
So when they have arrested, we have got a professor in South Africa that has...
Done extensive research on farm murders and crime within rural areas.
He interviewed several of these perpetrators.
They are repeat offenders starting at teenage years.
Another thing that is really concerning when these lobby groups go out or when you have got a white genocide grifter, what they do is they...
Refuse to acknowledge white victims that have been murdered on farms by white people.
It's like they just don't matter.
Or, for instance, refuse to acknowledge black victims at all.
And that is really concerning.
I mean, because when it comes to a farm murder, there's a very specific definition for farm attacks.
So people, yeah, the...
Oh, there was 400 farm attacks, and they see this picture of a group of black people descending on white people, and that's a farm attack.
That's not even the definition.
The definition of a farm attack is that it has to happen on a farm or a small holding, that it is a violent crime that can be experienced by a farmer, a farm worker, a resident, or a visitor.
But they don't explain the definition because that will also not speak to the narrative.
There are cases ongoing now of farm workers that have been beaten to death.
But that doesn't fit into the same narrative.
It still fits into the numbers, though.
So when they go out there and they talk about a farm attack, oh my goodness, there's 400 farm attacks.
You don't know who the victims were.
So the assumption is that the victims were only white farmers.
In fact, at a stage, AfriForum was providing an indication of the victims' occupations if it was actually a murder.
They removed it.
They're not putting it in anymore.
And that tells you that something's off.
Why provide that information?
And then it came out that...
That particular year, and I think it was 2023, I think there were 50-something farm murders.
Of that, 36% were farmers.
And remember, not all farmers are white.
We have black farmers too.
So they don't give you race.
So the assumption is those 50 murders in that year were all white farmers.
And it's not true.
So there is our huge problem.
However...
I must say the right-wing lobby groups were very quick.
They're very good with, I would say, social media, getting their message out, and they're extremely well-resourced.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
Again, the propaganda, and I assume you're kind of referring to within the country, but certainly white nationalists of all types, kind of the former outright types.
I mean, for as long as I've been studying this topic, the horrible examples, Absolutely.
obviously it's not in this, but you can go back and look at literature from the 90s and from the time of the end of apartheid you see far-right people in the US using that as this is the last stand of wet existence in South Africa.
So yeah, That propaganda travels around the world to a large degree.
Yeah, again, it's so familiar, isn't it?
European racists do this cooking of the books and cherry picking and manufacturing false narratives from their distortion of facts.
They do it with crimes committed by migrants in places like Germany.
This is just what they do.
Again, it's incredibly familiar.
It's the same playbook.
I think it's time that we should get better at addressing these things.
And I'm not sure how to be proactive about it because I must say our government and also a lot of people on the, I would say, more center-left, we're always reacting to the message.
And then it's too late because they've driven that whole emotional message and they've got people invested.
We have, for instance, I can't tell you how many white genocide.
Websites and Facebook pages that are up.
And I started a little exercise, but I don't have much time for it.
So where I started looking at them and looking at the photos they use.
They use photos from autopsies in America as examples of crimes in South Africa.
You see this even like Holocaust denial circles.
You find, you know, like, oh, this photo was actually not taken anytime during World War II.
Yeah.
No, this is a common tactic.
Yes, please continue.
I was trying to interrupt you.
I think I've actually said what I wanted to say.
I'm just saying at a stage that we just need to somehow be able to get in there before the emotions run high.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Unfortunately, their propaganda work falls into a kind of cultural vacuum, which is precisely that kind of lack of knowledge about the real...
situation in South Africa that that in America and certainly I would say in Britain as well that is a problem we just don't know and and also I suppose it it plays into narratives racist narratives that people a lot of people do find immediately plausible for for pretty ugly reasons Yes.
We're sitting with a problem right now.
I mean, a good example, and I know I might be...
Jumping the gun here is the so-called South African refugees.
Yeah, no, no.
I was about to go there, so please, go ahead.
So, you've got, first of all, again, you've got a whole lot of, well, you've got 49 people.
I don't know why mainstream media is saying 59. They keep on repeating the number 59. It's 14. You mean American media has some of its facts wrong?
Shocking.
Shocking.
They all just copy each other.
You know, one person at the Associated Press hits the wrong key and suddenly that factoid is across the entire media because they just all repeat the same press releases.
According to reporting from the Associated Press, they can say whatever they want.
Yeah, no.
Yes.
Okay, so we have 49 Afrikaners that, you know, have been highly oppressed.
And they arrive there.
And as we're sitting on this end in South Africa, we start looking at the articles.
So New York Times was the first article.
And you read these articles and you think, shouldn't you have fact-checked with South Africa?
Now, we know.
Wouldn't that be nice?
So we know that this whole process was expedited.
Okay.
There is also an American guy, calls himself Colonel Chris Wyatt, that was kind of assisting.
I think he's the South African group's Moses.
Anyway, so he was assisting them.
But yes, the thing is you haven't got one farmer in your 49. Not one of those people are farmers.
So as we're busy...
Listening to their stories or reading it from the US press, we're looking at it and people are doing background checks.
And we're finding out you've got, for instance, a woman that said she owned a farm which is now questionable.
It sounds like she worked on a guest farm.
So not even a commercial farm.
So someone that was working in guest houses.
Then you've got a man that says he owned mines.
It looks like he...
Was a manager on a granite mine.
Then you have another guy that also spoke to the media.
That was the New York Times article that said, you know, if you're a white guy and you're a farmer, then you get attacked all the time.
He owned a family IT business that was failing.
These are your farmers.
Please do not, in America, give these guys land to farm.
My IT business is failing.
Clearly, I'm a refugee that needs resettlement in the US.
He's a data farmer.
But it's horrific.
The more I read, you know, because we're kind of doing the background checks, and I fortunately built up a following from America.
On TikTok.
So I started telling them now, look, you're not getting farmers.
And I said before they even left, farmers aren't leaving.
We've just had Ampo, which is our National Agricultural Expo.
And all the farmers there have indicated they would never go.
Our commercial farmers spoke out initially saying they're not leaving South Africa.
They don't know where Donald Trump is getting these.
Information from.
So you're not getting farmers.
You're getting people that are most likely going away because they experienced, well, that they weren't doing well in South Africa.
I think that's the best way to do it, to say it.
And that's perfectly fine, but don't lie.
Don't get there and tell people you're farmers and you survived a farm attack.
Or you're a blatant threat of farm attack.
It just lays bare the whole deportation regime and the whole anti-immigration regime here in the U.S. Under this new Trumpist era is people who are actually fearing for their lives from gang retaliation in El Salvador or whatever are being shipped to supermax containment facilities.
And then like, oh, white people from South Africa who are under threat of African farm burners are suddenly...
Welcome with open arms.
Exactly.
It just lays bare the whole white supremacist nature of the project, ultimately.
True.
And also, another thing is, I saw that form that they needed to fill in.
They just had to say they think they were discriminated against, or there's a possibility that they'll be discriminated against in future.
Yes.
But their argument is that they, for instance, the one guy that's there, he was the one that was caught out for the anti-Semitic post.
Oh, yeah.
So someone did a deep dive on his Twitter and there were a number of anti-Semitic posts.
And it didn't matter that there were also some racist posts, but that was irrelevant.
But the anti-Semitic posts were very important.
But, for instance, he said that he was discriminated against based on his race because of employment equity policies.
So DEI policies.
But he had a black economic empowerment partner in his business.
So he was actually fronting.
So a liar, basically.
That's what you're telling me.
He's just a liar.
And you've got no farmers.
And I keep on telling Americans, you don't have farmers there.
Please don't give them land.
Well, I will speak a little bit about the American farm system is overwhelmingly owned by agribusinesses these days.
The people who work the farms are overwhelmingly employees of one of those large agribusinesses.
The number of farmers has shrunk considerably in the last 50 years, whereas the amount of farmland has gone up.
It's major companies now on all these farms.
I don't think they're giving these people farms.
They're not going to want them, though, are they?
They're not farmers.
What are they going to do with the farm?
They want nice office jobs.
They want to live in a nice house in the suburbs and have their cable TV ultimately.
But I do think that they have probably seen their mistake and their embarrassment because, I mean, You know that Elon Musk, what they did on X, playing with the AI.
Oh, God.
Mm-hmm.
So people would ask, you know, they'd ask a question, where is the street?
And then they'd get a response with, the street is there, but you know what's happening with white genocide in South Africa.
Until people started asking Brock, why are you giving us information on white genocide?
And then the AR responded.
Someone fiddled with its programming.
That is such a...
How does it feel to have one of your countrymen be the shadow president of the US right now?
Just don't call him a countryman.
Just in case people should be in any doubt about what we're talking about here with this whole line of ideology about the so-called South African white genocide of farmers and things.
What we're actually talking about here, Grok was doing that.
Grok was responding to any question because people were trolling it in the end.
People were doing it deliberately to get this response.
Grok, AI on X, was responding to any question with, well, yes and no, but also in South Africa, there's white genocide going on and so on.
And after a while, it started saying, well, we're not really sure about how many people were killed in the Holocaust as well.
It was on its way to full Holocaust denial.
And it was apparently just...
Getting there organically from having been programmed to deny the reality of what's going on in South Africa.
Fortunately, Grok is woke.
Because it then admitted that someone had programmed it.
Yeah, it did just blurt out the truth.
That's better than we expect from anything.
We live in the darkest timeline.
Everything is nonsense these days.
Of course, they've got their cover story, but I don't think anybody's really fooled about what was going on there.
No, not at all.
Elon Musk has been on this for a while.
You know, it's kind of pointless trying to pick about who influenced who, but Trump is surrounded by people who are into this.
You know, you've got Steve Bannon and what's the guy's name?
Stephen Miller?
Stephen Miller, exactly.
It completely left my mind.
And of course, he's steeped in the ideology that they've all got, that's been going around the American right for ages.
We've talked on this show about Lauren Southern and her documentary and stuff like that.
And one of the things I remember about...
This was Trump sort of riffing on a Tucker Carlson segment, because Tucker Carlson did stuff on this, obviously.
He was on this like a fly on shit.
And he was talking, I think he was actually talking to sort of a South African right-winger, and it was prompted by that program of land reform or land redistribution that you were talking about earlier.
And Trump was basically parroting talking points from that segment the next day.
And Elon Musk, I remember a tweet where he was talking about one of the parties in South Africa is openly advocating white genocide.
I think he was talking about something called the Economic Freedom Fighters, which is a political party in South Africa.
And he was specifically talking about the Kill the Boar song, Kill the Farmer song.
Can you talk a little bit about that?
What's going on with that?
Okay, so the name of that, it's actually not a song, it's part of a song, and it's a chant.
So that comes from, really from apartheid.
It was a struggle chant during that time.
It is also, people need to understand African culture.
Okay, so these, a chant is not an instruction.
Okay, it is a, it's the way African people They had certain chants, they had certain songs that people usually have during oppression.
And the chant became a huge issue because, obviously, Julius Malema used to be at the Youth League of the ANC.
The right-wing person that you are talking about is Aaron Strutz.
He was at AfriForum.
So he started his journey with AfriForum at the same time that Julius Malema was the leader of the AMC Youth League.
And Julius Malema became the black menace.
You know, this man is going to, because he was rather in your face, radical with his ideas, had no concern for how people react to what he said.
And I must say, he has...
It's a very pan-African approach, the Economic Freedom Front Party, and the chant has become a huge issue.
So what happens is, in South Africa, is that when...
Julius Malema or the EFF have an event and they'll have the chant.
Then we have AfriForum saying, look what they've done.
Now, farm murders are going to go up.
But the chant's not linked to anything like that.
In fact, I pulled out the stats the other day.
Since Julius Malema used the chant in 2010, the farm murders have gone down.
So, obviously...
It just doesn't work.
You know, the stats don't work out.
So, yes, it is something that I think at a stage, you know, there has to be a national conversation around, you know, should the chance still be done in public places?
But personally, I don't think that you can actually take something that is owned by the majority of people and represents.
a special time and represents the fight against oppression.
And the argument is that this is the fight against economic oppression.
I don't think you can just decide, listen, I'm going to take this away from you now.
You can't do that.
There has to be a stage where you have to have a conversation and meet each other, and they've got to make the decision themselves.
It doesn't bother me, but it does bother a lot of people.
You know, it's like, oh, but they're targeting farmers.
It was always, the chant has always been, I would say, part of the history, part of history.
Farmers represented the oppressors at that stage, and now it's the people that own most of the economy.
I'm not talking about farmers themselves, but white people.
So it's always going to be an issue.
And then it was declared hate speech, but then...
Our right-wing group go and take...
So it was declared hate speech.
Then they took Julius Malema and the EFF to court, and the court decided, no, it's not hate speech.
It actually must be seen in context.
It's part of history.
You can't just take it away.
It's not tied to farm murders or to any violence.
So that's it.
Obviously, when you have got a certain ideology and you see a stadium of people doing Dabu Ibunu, you can imagine how...
And also, I am sure that it pushes up the donations to AfriForum.
They should thank Julius Malema, really.
They should give him commission.
I mean, the way that the far right has used...
You said the perfect thing.
It's like, well, if you take the history and the context into account...
But of course, that's not how it's used.
They take a little snippet of it.
An angry, big, violent-looking black man screaming, kill the boar, and that's how they use this propaganda.
really nice to have someone who can speak with authority about the actual context of these things.
So again, definitely appreciate you coming on to educate us a little bit.
Again, no one listening to this podcast would have been fooled by that, but it is such powerful imagery among much of the, not even the far right, just the right these days, uses It's disgusting.
It's completely mainstream, isn't it?
Yeah.
But what they also do is they take, because he's the face of the Black Menace In South Africa, we call it the swaft gefahr.
He is the face of the black menace and the face they use.
They take snippets of things.
And like at a stage, he said, yeah, we're not planning to kill white people.
And I think, and he added yet, but they didn't look at the whole interview.
In the same interview, he indicates.
Naturalized white people in South Africa, we marry them.
We go to church with them.
We go to school.
Kids go to school together.
Anyone that says they're going to kill white people or chase them into the sea, it's like cutting off the trees.
He says this, but they don't want people to hear that because, I mean, that would be the worst message.
I mean, we marry them.
And that's Julius Malema.
He has said that.
And then when they had the court case, they took certain snippets there where the lawyer, who I must add, is also the president of another lobby group called the Institute of Race Relations, which they also push a certain, and they're very tied to the U.S. Institutes of Race Relations, the Cato Institute, actually links up with them.
We just export this crap around the world.
I'm sorry.
It's our fault.
You are problematic.
Yes.
I take that personally.
You are blaming me personally.
And for instance, they will cut his speech where the lawyer will say, do you condemn the murder of white people?
And Julius Malema says, no, I don't.
And they cut it right there.
Okay.
They don't let him finish.
He says, no, I don't condemn.
I condemn murder.
I condemn the murder of every person.
Absolutely.
But they've cut it, so all you hear is this man says he doesn't condemn the murder of white people.
And that's what they do to him continuously, because he's the face.
Yeah, I mean, he definitely, there is a huge swath of the right wing in the US who uses Julius Malema as the very portrait of the dangerous black man in power.
This is what you're looking forward, this is what we're looking forward to in a...
Less white future here in the US and presumably in Europe.
It's disgusting.
It's disgusting.
And, you know, if I were Julius Malema, would I say some of these things?
Maybe not, but, like, I don't know.
It just seems, like, dramatically overstated, you know, like what's happening.
I mean, it's just, you know, it's all a bunch of, like, bullshit right-wing propaganda, ultimately.
It's just, it's hard to, you know, it's been hard for me from outside the country to even approach this topic as, okay, My immediate sense is, okay, what's an accurate source for this?
And then how is that source using?
If I want to get at the actual numbers of people who are murdered in the country, etc.
And that's why I just never wanted to broach this topic on my own, because as an outsider, it's hard for me to...
Make declarative statements about stuff.
So again, it's very helpful having an authoritative, knowledgeable source from the country.
I can't tell you how long this would have been in our first 10 episodes if I had the ability to do it.
We are now six years into this project.
So yeah, definitely appreciate it.
One of the names that keeps coming up when I look, admittedly, cursorily, into the question of this narrative, one of the names that keeps coming up, people keep saying, well, one of the people spreading it is this guy, Steve Hoffmeyer, who I've never heard of, but apparently he's famous in South Africa.
I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about who he is and what's going on with him.
Okay, so Steve Hoffmeyer, when he was younger, was an actor, Afrikaans actor.
And also a singer.
He is still a singer.
Okay.
He is very popular amongst our more, I would say, far-right groups.
He's got extremely strong views about how things should be done.
And also he...
Made a video the other day.
For me, it always looks like he's going off on a crack rant because he's extremely aggressive.
I know it sounds terrible, but I used to engage with him online and then I just gave it up because he is someone that has very strong views, uses his social capital to spread these things.
He's extremely anti...
LGBTQIA+.
He actually was taken to the South African Human Rights Commission a while ago for saying that the plus includes pedophilia and zoo and bestiality.
Oh, that was a talking point in the far right here for a long time.
So yes, absolutely.
So he pushed that.
But if you look at Steve's background, you can understand his grandfather was part of the Osovar Brandtwach.
Okay, so it's like brown shirts in South Africa.
It was the group of people that were fighting against the government at that stage when South Africa decided to join Britain in the fight against the Germans at that stage, you know, again, against the Nazis.
And Steve's grandfather was against that, and they actually committed treason.
Against our government at that stage when that was going on.
And he's just kept the tradition, I guess.
I think that's the best way to put it.
But he's the equivalent of an influencer.
I think that would be it.
And he's just old and angry.
I think that's the best way to put it.
But the thing is that...
And I find it so hard in South Africa, because sometimes I just want to lose it, is that it's really harmful.
The way he conveys messages, you know, degrading Black people, telling them they must say thank you for the language and thank you for, you know, it's just really just out and out cruel kind of thing.
Like I say, most of the things that he puts out there, when I listen to him, it just sounds like a crack rant to me.
That's Steve Wolfman.
I love that talking point.
It's like, they didn't even have the wheel before we showed up.
Thank you for our language.
Thank you for...
You had no languages.
You had no culture before white people showed up.
And he was starving before we came here.
Exactly.
God, it's such a...
This right-wing fantasy, this white nationalist fantasy.
And it's always the same narrative everywhere that this happens.
I really don't.
There's nothing new.
It's never been new.
You know, it's just like we in 2025.
For instance, the narrative that's being pushed now is the ANC government did this and the ANC government did that.
We've got a government of national unity made up of 10 parties.
Our election was last year.
The ANC government fell under 50%.
But no one says that.
They don't say government of national unity because that wouldn't fit into the narrative because some of the conservative parties actually form part of the government of national unity in South Africa.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So the messages that people in the rest of the world, particularly in America, are getting from these people, they're just outright lies.
They're just outright fantasy.
They're taking advantage of the fact that they're talking to people who don't, For the most part, know anything about the history or the politics of your country that don't have the context for it, that don't have the complexities.
And not only are they cherry picking and shearing of context, but they're outright just distorting.
And clearly, I mean, I think this thing that the Trump administration is doing, bringing supposed farmers from South Africa in as refugees, it just looks...
To me, it just looks like a great big propaganda campaign.
I mean, this was something that apparently Peter Dutton in Australia wanted to do as well.
Fast-track refugee status for persecuted white South African farmers.
It just looks like a great big propaganda performance to further this narrative, the white persecution narrative.
Yes.
Absolutely.
It feeds into the great replacement theory.
And also another thing is when Peter Dutton did it, it wasn't long and he backtracked.
He started, he backtracked on that.
Because they know they're not getting farmers.
Also, they're not getting the best of our best.
And that is the major concern.
And why I am quite open and honest.
I mean, I made a video a little while ago on TikTok.
I know it's crazy.
It's a punishment.
It's part of my reparations.
So I made a video saying, please get this to the Americans.
And somehow they did.
And I've got so many American followers now.
So I've got over 100,000 followers on TikTok.
And so I've been starting to talk to the Americans about a lot of things.
And what I have found is that they didn't know anything.
They really didn't know.
Farm murders, they were just assuming what they were getting from these right-wing lobby groups, but also outright racists were spreading terrible stuff about how black people.
But the worst thing for me, look, I've got no problem with people advocating for rural safety.
I think that if that is your cause, please do that.
Because I think it's important.
I must say, even though the research shows that you're safer on a farm and in a rural area than you are in an urban area in South Africa.
But I've got no problem with that.
But what they were doing was they were manufacturing murders.
They were manufacturing rapes.
Things like that.
And that's the major concern for me.
But we are always on the back foot.
I'm hoping to make inroads in the American Unless there's a
double standard in play, I don't know.
Yeah, that's also true.
I did want to talk a little bit about Arania, I believe, and just sort of give us a little bit of, I guess, give us a quick background on that.
It's kind of heralded here in right-wing media as the all-white community, the all-white state of Arania, where basically apartheid is legal again.
And I guess give us a sense of...
What that is and kind of how it's viewed in South Africa, how people down there kind of look at it, I guess, is kind of the question I'm asking.
Okay, so Urania is held up by right-wing as this example of how great white people do when they are self-sufficient and without black people.
I should highlight that Urania is a small little town that's got about 3,000 people, and that includes children.
They're struggling to encourage people to move there.
All right.
And it's also become quite expensive.
What I found, I had a live on TikTok where a man that had lived in Urania for 10 years actually came to speak to us and I tried to not be hostile about it, but ask him certain questions.
But he didn't know a lot of things.
So it's a very closed community.
It doesn't have a police station in Urania.
So when they say there's no crime in Urania, that is also false, by the way.
Because we've just had an incident where a strange husband shot his wife in front of his child in Urania.
My concern is at a stage you are going to get stuff coming out of Urania because the security services within Urania want to keep their record clean.
It's very small.
They don't seem to understand.
They don't teach their children history, proper history.
They teach their children their version of history.
But they are also well-funded.
And there's groups in the USA that actually fund them.
Thanks again, USA.
You are very welcome.
You are welcome.
Given that the racist money is going away from the United States, I'm just trying to say thank you for taking one for the team.
The only consolation is that they're only doing it because these are pilot schemes for what they want to do in America, ultimately.
Exactly.
So it is small.
And as I say, they try and hold it up as this great place.
Another flaw in the thinking, though, is they compare Urania to the rest of South Africa.
Instead of comparing Urania, for instance, to a Royal Bafukeng village, which is in Mahikeng.
And if they did that comparison, you'll notice that you'll find that Royal Bafukeng villages are probably ahead when it comes to certain indicators.
And I can go to Royal Bafukeng.
And, you know, if you're a white person, they're not going to throw you out.
Just like I can go to the Zulu Kingdom and I can lease lands.
But Urania, it's not our only all-white enclave, by the way.
We've also got a little place called Kleinfontaine, just outside Pretoria.
It's also just all-white.
But they don't work there.
They make use of, you know, employment opportunities outside of Kleinfontaine, but they live in this little enclave.
The same with Orania.
They got jobs in the rest of the country, and they work overseas, for instance.
So it's not like it's that self-sufficient.
We're basically just talking about glorified, gated communities by the sound.
There you go.
Exactly.
Well, of which we have plenty.
There are a ton of de facto or de jure white-only spaces in the United States, particularly in the South, where I grew up.
But yeah, absolutely.
But I must also say, it was established before 1994.
It was land bought by the son-in-law of H.F. Woot.
Right, okay, the plot dilutes.
Okay, so Karl Boshoff is the son-in-law of H.F. Woot, so it makes sense.
The other thing I was going to ask you about is, and I'm sure we could do a whole episode on these people, the Suitlanders.
And Simon Roche comes up a lot in terms of the far right.
I think he spent about a year in this country just touring and doing interviews about South African farm murders and went on every right-wing radio show that would take him, and I listened to all of them back in the day.
I have spent many more hours than I'd care to recount listening to this man speak.
How is that viewed?
I mean, I don't know.
I kind of think of Simon Roche and the Zutlanders and their kind of weird religious cult as kind of a joke.
How are they seen in South Africa?
It is seen as kind of a joke.
It's a very scared group of people that believe in strange things from a guy called Nikola Sina van Rensburg, a boor mystic, I guess.
Who had a hygiene problem.
Anyway, not educated or anything like that.
And he predicted that future race war, civil war in South Africa.
And they're just a very scared little group.
I don't think they play any role on social media or do much.
They would probably have, you'll have your Simon Roush.
That will go over to the US and take advantage of collecting donations.
That would be his issue.
I mean, they had the whole view of the Night of the Long Knives.
They also called it Uhuru.
And that described that violent uprising against white South Africans.
And it hasn't happened yet.
Yet, yet, you know.
I'm just going to add the yet.
Tomorrow, it's definitely going to happen.
I mean, this white genocide, you know that the whole white genocide thing has been running, but the farm murders linked to white genocide was pre-1994.
It was a national party initiative.
It was highly focused on, because during the struggle, What happened was farms were used for housing commandos, and so they were also attacked at that stage.
Farms were then attacked.
And so this whole farm murder and light genocide thing was pre-1994.
Right.
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, again, I could...
Pick your brain for four more hours if I wanted to.
I hope you've enjoyed this time and I hope that you would be welcome to come back anytime if you want to talk about this.
Talk about anything or pick our brains or whatever you want to do.
Jack, did you have anything else or should we wrap up?
Just to remind the listeners if they want to hear the charming Simon Roche in action.
They can listen back to our Cantwell on Grindr episode where we did play a clip of him guesting on Cantwell's show.
I think the point was to illustrate Cantwell's real attitude towards LGBTQ plus people as opposed to the pose of sympathy that he was attempting at one point.
And yeah, so there's a clip of Roche and Cantwell talking where Roche basically goes into an unhinged anti-gay rant about the Southern Baptist Convention and Cantwell just says...
Yes, you're very passionate about that.
Anyway, moving on.
Yeah, so if you want to hear this person, then we've got you covered.
Yeah, I could do an episode on Simon Roche, for sure.
It's certainly not that we've done this episode.
I have the material, I promise you.
Bianca, thank you very much for being on.
Tell us where you can find, where the audience can find your work, you know, what we should do to kind of keep ourselves informed with what you're doing and about this issue from a South African perspective.
Okay, so my stuff is online.
So what I do is I do the social advocacy.
I'm on X, which is scary.
We can just call it Twitter.
It's fine.
So I'm on X as Bianca from Vague16.
I'm on TikTok as Bianca says 3. And then we've also started a little YouTube show, myself and two other white ladies from South Africa.
Both of them live on farms and are called White Wine, but like in white and then wine, W-H-I-N-E.
I love it.
I love it.
Where we address certain topics, but we just started on the...
My main issue where I do a lot of my content, because I've noticed my reach is better, is TikTok.
And that is the Bianca Says 3. And I do a lot of address disinformation, I address crime, and I address politics within South Africa.
And far murders and white genocide.
I just personally went and subscribed to the white wine.
YouTube channel, so I'm looking forward to it.
I probably would have discovered you.
I am allergic.
As I said to Bianca when we were playing this, I am actively allergic to the whole TikTok phenomenon.
I am just too old.
I am too stuck in my ways.
TikTok does not make any sense to me.
I am so happy that it's working for you.
It's clearly something that you're doing very well.
I'm very happy for it, but I cannot.
I cannot do TikTok.
I'm sorry.
It's not a thing for me.
It's a scary place.
I'm used to scary places, but usually not like that.
Anyway.
But yes, for anybody who isn't too scared of TikTok to check out Bianca, that link and all the other links will be in the description of the episode.
Absolutely.
Thank you.
Well, thank you so much once again, Bianca, for coming on the show and being so incredibly informative about this issue, filling in the blanks for our listeners.
It's been...
Amazing.
And as Daniel says, welcome to come back anytime you like.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
No, it's been our pleasure.
And with that, thank you listeners for listening the way you do.
