In February of 2012, racist skinheads in California rallied at the capitol building in Sacramento. They were trying to raise awareness for an imaginary problem - an ongoing genocide against white South African farmers. In February of 2025, the President of the United States signed an executive order stripping foreign aid from South Africa as punishment for that same imaginary problem. Sources:Falkof, Nicky. (2022). Worrier state: Risk, anxiety and moral panic in South Africa. Manchester University Press.Whiteness, Afrikaans, Afrikaners: Addressing Post-Apartheid Legacies, Privileges and Burdens. The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA), 2018. Holmes, Carolyn. Victimhood for an Audience: Portrayals of Extra-Lethal Violence and their Utility for Self-Identified Victimshttps://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b6672f43c3a5320c2bec900/t/5c98fd14a4222fc0ef950ccd/1553530134194/Victimhood+for+an+Audience+-+March+2019.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/23/white-farmers-trump-south-africa-tucker-carlson-far-right-influencehttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/23/trump-orders-close-study-of-south-africa-farmer-killings https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ted-cruz-staff-usaid-met-group-called-apartheid-so-called-injustice_n_5af5dcb6e4b00d7e4c1a6571https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/anti-genocide-protests-around-nation-were-organized-neo-nazis/https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/campus-group-weighs-south-african-violence-targeting-whites/https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/dangerous-myth-white-genocide-south-africa/https://africasacountry.com/2018/02/searching-for-white-genocide-in-south-africa/https://unicornriot.ninja/2018/far-right-racists-push-fake-south-africa-white-genocide-narrative/ https://goodauthority.org/news/misinformation-south-africa-new-land-act-trump-musk/ https://www.jurist.org/features/2025/02/11/explainer-understanding-the-south-africa-land-reform-law-that-provoked-trumps-ire/ https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-fearmongers-about-land-reform-south-africahttps://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/trumps-south-africa-tweet-tucker-carlson-has-turned-white-nationalist-narrativehttps://africacheck.org/sites/default/files/Final-Report-Committee-of-Inquiry-Farm-Attacks-July-2003.pdf https://africasacountry.com/2018/05/flight-of-the-boers https://www.news24.com/News24/afriforums-own-farm-murder-stats-dont-support-their-claims-20180507 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-15/dutton-wants-australia-to-help-white-south-african-farmers/9550050https://www.news24.com/news24/opinions/analysis/donald-trumps-sa-tweet-how-he-got-the-message-20180823 https://theconversation.com/peter-duttons-fast-track-for-white-south-african-farmers-is-a-throwback-to-a-long-racist-history-93476https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/22/south-africa-risks-food-shortages-if-white-farmers-go-to-australia-nationals-mp-sayshttps://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/27/dutton-should-prioritise-refugees-on-nauru-not-white-south-africans-unhcr-sayshttps://www.sabcnews.com/sabcnews/ramaphosa-hits-back-at-donald-trump-on-land-tweet/https://www.parliament.gov.za/storage/app/media/Acts/2024/Act_13_of_2024_Expropriation_Act_2024.pdf https://www.enca.com/videos/exclusive-interview-frontrunner-become-us-ambassador-saSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
He was a freaking crazy man.
He was my father, and I had no idea about any of this until now.
Crook County is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarchi.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art thieves.
We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It was big news.
I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery.
Big, big news.
A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.
I like saw.
What's going to happen?
An arrest, trial, and conviction soon follow.
He did not kill her.
There's no way.
Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free?
Did you kill her?
Listen to The Real Killer, Season 3. Hi, I'm Arturo Castro, and I've been lucky enough to do stuff like Broad City and Narcos and Roadhouse.
And now I'm starting a podcast because honestly, guys, I don't feel the space is crowded enough.
Get ready for Greatest Escapes, a new comedy podcast about the wildest true escape stories in history.
Each week, I'll be sitting down with some of the most hilarious actors and writers and comedians, people like Ed Helms, Diane Guerrero, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
I love storytelling and I love you, so I can't wait.
Listen and subscribe to Greatest Escapes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media Cool Zone Media On February 27th, 2012, 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.
A dozen similar rallies organized by the same group that were held that day in 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, and 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 protesting violence by blacks against whites in South Africa.
But news reports about the events focus on the men who were arrested, three members of Occupy Sacramento, part of the larger nationwide series of Occupy protests that had sprung up around the country a few months earlier.
In follow-up stories about the arrests, officers say the event led them to re-evaluate their strategy for confronting Occupy protesters, who they describe as aggressive towards police.
Initial reporting quotes one Occupy 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 at the Capitol?
And why would those counter-protesters believe that the group had connections to the Klan?
The Associated Press write up notes, in passing, that the three dozen rally attendees at the Capitol 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 man who organized the rally in Sacramento.
But they do include a comment from the national spokesman for the organization behind the events.
Morris Goulet 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 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, Morris Goulet was a lifelong member of the Aryan Nations who'd recently been released from prison for bank robbery.
Just beneath the surface of those rallies, Had anyone bothered to look?
Was an old 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 Little Guys.
We have to talk about white genocide.
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 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.
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.
It's an actual countdown clock to the moment the United States will hit a demographic tipping point.
When the white population drops below 50% for the first time.
As I'm writing this, they have calculated that moment to be 18 years and 221 days from now.
So, mark your calendars, I guess.
They fear what they 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, all while non-white immigrants pour 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 this fear, his 14 words.
We must secure the existence of our people.
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 14 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 force for acts of horrific violence on an individual level.
Anders Breivik, a man who murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, wrote in his manifesto, What is happening to the indigenous peoples of Western Europe and our cultures amounts to a merciless and bloody genocide.
When Bretton Tarrant murdered 51 Muslim worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, He titled his manifesto The Great Replacement, and in it he cites Breivik as an inspiration.
But it's that same feeling, this paranoid reactionary whiteness, that South African media studies professor Nikki Falcov calls an anxious 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 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.
They are being replaced.
Their cultural hegemony is at risk when immigrants bring their languages, customs, and religions with them into white countries.
Interracial marriage is making new generations less and less racially pure.
The belief in the conspiracy theories of white genocide and great replacement Go hand in hand, and they're often used interchangeably.
But for that white genocide 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 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 2012 were organized 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 a desire to kill white people.
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 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 Falcom writes in her book, Worrier state, risk, anxiety, and moral panic in South Africa.
White people are not the only victims, or indeed only the victims, of rural 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 on farms are thought to be high.
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 2003, the South African police issued their final report on an inquiry conducted into the alleged phenomenon.
In analysis of all reported incidents on farms and small holdings spanning 1998 to 2001, nearly 90% were motivated by robbery, 7% were the result of labor disputes, and only 2% were found to have any racial or political motivation in any direction.
In a country with nearly 20,000 murders annually, there are an average of 50 per year that could be classified as farm murders.
And again, almost all of those 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 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 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, quote, mobilizing around stories of violence against perceived members of their group as a way to protect their racial status.
Afrikaner 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 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 2nd, he posted...
South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of people very badly.
It's a bad situation that the radical left media doesn't want to so much as mention.
A massive human rights violation at a minimum.
It's happening for all to see.
The United States won't stand for it.
We will act.
Also, I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed.
He made an almost identical post a week later on February 9th.
And in between those two posts, he issued an executive order with the title, Addressing the Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa.
On its surface, the egregious action he's referring to is the Expropriation Act of 2024, an act of the South African parliament signed into law by the South African president in January of this year.
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 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 wasn't the first time he'd fired off a half-baked take on South African land reform.
Back in August of 2018, nearly two years and almost 5,000 tweets into his first term, he tweeted the word Africa for the first time as president.
I have asked Secretary of State Sec Pompeo to closely study the South African land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers.
South African government is now seizing land from white farmers.
At Tucker Carlson, at Fox News.
The tweet was posted at 10.38pm, less than an hour after a segment on Tucker Carlson's nightly broadcast, fear-mongering about land reform under President Ramaphosa.
We've got an exclusive investigation for you tonight.
The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has begun, and you may have seen this in the press, seizing land from his own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin color.
That is literally the definition of racism.
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 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.
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 without any compensation based purely on their ethnicity and distribute those farms to more favored groups.
Thousands have already migrated out of the country, but they've struggled to attract any sympathy abroad for some reason.
Ernst Roots is deputy CEO of Afroforum.
It's a South Africa civil rights group.
It was just in the United States to meet with a number of government officials.
Afroforum is not really best described as a civil rights organization.
That's what they call themselves, but I would proffer that Apartheid apologists is a more fitting description.
In 2016, after the group released Tainted Heroes, their documentary critical of the struggle against apartheid, a spokesman for the African National Congress called the film pure propaganda and suggested that a better film might feature the stories of the Afroforum members and the ways in which they had collaborated with the apartheid regime.
Ernst Rutt's appearance on Tucker Carlson's show was during his trip to Washington, D.C. to meet with federal government officials and right-wing think tanks.
Along with AfroForum CEO Callie Creel, 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, 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 2018 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 2018, News Corp Australia sent reporter Paul Toohey on a four-week tour of South Africa.
The timing is curious.
This was right on the heels 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 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 rights groups silent on the whites of South Africa in the West Australian.
In video reports, Toohey claimed that he was quoting the Ramaphosa 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.
Toohey's reporting relied heavily on the misrepresented crime statistics produced by Afroforum, and many of his stories quoted liberally from Afroforum directly, or interviewed the aggrieved white farmers whose stories had been featured in Afroforum propaganda campaigns in the past.
As far as I can find, Paul Toohey never explicitly disclosed any relationship with Afroforum.
But the group did take credit for influencing his coverage, claiming to have provided assistance to a prominent Australian journalist.
It takes one guy out there to say, who's that f***ing Kyle who thinks he can just get on a f***ing microphone on a podcast and start publicizing this?
From iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV comes a new true crime podcast, Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit.
And that was my mission, to snuff the f***ing life out of this guy.
He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Torn between two worlds.
I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing.
He was a freaking crazy man.
We don't know who he is, really.
He is my father.
And I had no idea about any of this until now.
Welcome to Crook County.
Series premiere February 11th.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Arturo Castro, and I've been lucky enough to do stuff like Broad City and Narcos and Roadhouse and so many commercials about back pain.
And now I'm starting a podcast because honestly, guys, I don't feel the space is crowded enough.
Get ready for Greatest Escapes, a new comedy podcast about the wildest true escape stories in history.
Each week, I'll be sitting down with some of the most hilarious actors and writers and comedians to tell them a buckwild tale from across history and time.
People like Ed Helms, Diane Guerrero, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Zoe Chow.
Titanic.
Charles Manson.
Alcatraz.
Sara Shakur.
The sketchy guy named Steve.
It's giving funny true crime.
I love storytelling and I love you, so I can't wait.
Listen and subscribe to Greatest Escapes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there?
We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds.
But what if there's something else, something much more ominous, that appears under the cover of night, silent, unseen, watching?
They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road, or look like mysterious lights.
Hovering above your home.
Drones.
Or are they?
We used our drone because it was comfortable to other people.
One minute it was there and one minute it wasn't.
Oh, that is beyond creepy.
Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically?
Yes, absolutely.
Listen to Obscurum, Invasion of the Drones, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, listeners.
I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told, Season 2. Our show is a little different from other true crime podcasts because we tell the stories in which women are not just the victims, but the heroes or the villains.
I'm also excited to tell you that you can now get access to all episodes of The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told, Season 1 and Season 2, 100% ad-free.
Plus, you'll get access to all episodes of The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told, Season 2, one week ahead of everyone else.
Available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers.
So don't wait.
Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.
In the midst of this onslaught of reporting, essentially force-feeding Afrikaner white nationalist propaganda to the entire Australian public, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told a
Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told a reporter from the Australian right-wing tabloid The Telegraph that he'd seen some very concerning media coverage of the violent persecution of white farmers and he hoped to assist them in resettling in Australia.
area.
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 as lots of outrage from crazy leftists.
And he said that the outlets who covered the story negatively, like ABC, The Guardian, and Huffington Post, were dead to him.
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 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 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, 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 Dutton never actually retracted his statement.
And as for AFRA Forum's 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 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 Creel were, and he had 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 Tucker Carlson that aired a few days later.
And the men are standing in front of what appears to be the kind of large garment steamer that you might find in a dressing room at a television studio, not a government office building.
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 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 Ernest Rutz on a television program that the President of the United States watched religiously.
That segment aired on May 15th, 2018. 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 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 and tagged Tucker Carlson in his tweet, a tweet he posted 45 minutes after the segment aired.
The guest on the show that night was a Cato Institute fellow named Marion Tupi, 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 analyst who replied to Huffington Post's request for comment about their meeting with the group.
He even cc'd Ernst Rutz in his reply to the Huffington Post, a message that included a bizarre comment that the current South African government was explicitly racist, and in fact comparable to the apartheid government.
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 a brief mention in an article from 2020 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.
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 2018, Trump's tweet in August 2018 was not well received.
By the South African government.
Within hours, their official Twitter account responded, 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 Ramaphosa called into a news broadcast on ENCA, South Africa's most watched television news channel, to say the government would not be using tweets to conduct international relations.
The presidency has noted the tweet which is attributed to the U.S. president, President Donald Trump.
In our view, the tweet is unfortunately misinformed.
However, we've chosen not to respond to it via social media.
Instead, we'll use the diplomatic channels that exist for such purposes.
Later that day, the same spokesperson, Kusela Diko, 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 Ramaphosa hit back in remarks at a conference in Limpopo later that week.
you I don't know what Donald Trump has to do with South African land.
Because he's never been here.
And he must keep his America.
We will keep our South Africa.
And what he must do.
South Africa is our land.
South Africa belongs to all the people who live here in South Africa.
It does not belong to Donald Trump.
He can keep his America.
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 Ramaphosa went back to working on a plan for land reform.
Back in 2018, the news story Trump was reacting to was merely a proposal to amend the South African Constitution to clarify existing powers of expropriation.
And that didn't actually happen back then.
Now, in 2025, President Ramaphosa 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.
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 1994 constitution.
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 the Takings 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 have similar provisions.
What South Africa is proposing isn't some unimaginable, tyrannical nightmare.
It's eminent domain.
It takes one guy out there to say, who's that Kyle who thinks he can just get on a microphone on a podcast and start publicizing this?
From iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV comes a new true crime podcast, Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
Meet Kenny, an enforcer for the legendary Chicago outfit.
And that was my mission, to snuff the f***ing life out of this guy.
He lived a secret double life as a firefighter paramedic for the Chicago Fire Department.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Torn between two worlds.
I'm covering up murders that these cops are doing.
Freaking crazy, man.
We don't know who he is, really.
He is my father.
And I had no idea about any of this until now.
Welcome to Crook County.
Series premiere February 11th.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there?
We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds.
But what if there's something else?
Something much more ominous that appears under the cover of night, silent, unseen, watching.
They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home.
Drones.
Or are they?
We used more drone because it was comfortable to other people.
One minute it was there and one minute it wasn't.
Oh, that is beyond creepy.
Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically?
Yes, absolutely.
Listen to Obscurum, Invasion of the Drones, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Arturo Castro, and I've been lucky enough to do stuff like Broad City and Narcos and Roadhouse and so many commercials about back pain.
And now I'm starting a podcast because honestly, guys, I don't feel the space is crowded enough.
Get ready for Greatest Escapes, a new comedy podcast about the wildest true escape stories in history.
Each week, I'll be sitting down with some of the most hilarious actors and writers and comedians to tell them a buckwild tale from across history and time.
People like Ed Helms, Diane Guerrero, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Zoe Chow.
I love storytelling and I love you, so I can't wait.
Listen and subscribe to Greatest Escapes on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, listeners.
I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, host of the podcast The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told, Season 2.
Our show is a little different from other true crime podcasts because we tell the stories in which women are not just the victims, but the heroes or the villains.
I'm also excited to tell you that you can now get access to all episodes of The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told Season 1 and Season 2 100% ad-free.
Plus, you'll get access to all episodes of The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told, Season 2, one week ahead of everyone else, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers.
So don't wait.
Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today.
There is a provision in the act that's getting quite a bit of attention.
In Trump's executive order, he writes, To enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners' agricultural property without compensation.
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 ins and outs of eminent domain.
But I did read the Expropriation Act, and I'm not sure Trump did.
It's 52 pages long, but each page is printed once in English, followed by the same page in Afrikaans, so I guess that makes it a 26-page law.
Chapter 5 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 5, Section 12, and then skip on down to Subsection 3, 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 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 they're 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 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 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 Natives Land Act of 1913 prevented Black people from buying land, setting aside just 7% of the country's land for use by Black South Africans.
A later amendment expanded that to 13%, but the law itself wasn't repealed until 1991. A land audit conducted by the South African government in 2017 reported that 72% of all privately owned agricultural land in South Africa was owned by white people, despite the fact that white people make up about 7% of the South African population.
I couldn't actually find any specific information about how much of that land had changed hands over the years.
But in a 2020 article in the African Journal on Conflict Resolution, Dr. Adeoye Akinola wrote, Farm owners or farmers are predominantly made up of the white group, who in most cases inherited the farms from their families.
A prevailing narrative is that in most cases, these lands and farms had been forcefully 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 a post-apartheid South Africa.
This isn't a wrong of the distant past.
In 1994, when apartheid was finally ended, the South African National Congress announced an ambitious plan to return at least 30% of the stolen land by 2014. By 2018, though, only an estimated 10% of land had been 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's 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, 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, Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust 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 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 2023, he replied to a tweet from an account called End Wokeness.
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 1989 to avoid compulsory military service.
The South Africa he knew was one under apartheid.
And in addition to his frenetic posting about white genocide conspiracy theories, he's also accused the South African government of having, quote, Openly racist laws after he refused to participate in regulatory hearings with the Independent Communications Authority in South Africa.
His plan to launch Starlink service in South Africa hit a roadblock.
The country requires licensees operating a national network or selling internet services nationwide to be at least 30% Black-owned, a requirement Musk claims is simply not possible.
Trump has yet to nominate a pick for South African ambassador, but the current frontrunner is rumored to be Breitbart editor-in-chief Joel Pollack.
I considered cutting a clip from an interview Pollack 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 another video.
Back in 2018, amidst all that ongoing public interest in Australian tabloid coverage of anti-white violence in South Africa, Breitbart News held a town hall event in New Orleans.
The topic of the event was something else, big tech and free speech.
But during the Q&A session, Ann Coulter came out strong in support of white genocide conspiracy theory.
I mean, we are seeing a genocide there.
And if we're going to take any refugees, it seems to me it ought to be particularly these white farmers who are being chosen and killed in really horrible ways.
And you can find it by doing a Google search.
You can find these webpages.
They're not just going in and shooting them point blank.
They're really disgusting.
They're boiling people to death.
Just really sick, sick tortures.
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.
This question is for Ms. Coulter.
Why do you think the mainstream media has been silent 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 results?
Thank you.
I am so glad you asked that question.
One. - That's Patrick Casey.
Back in 2018, he was the leader of the white supremacist group Identity Europa.
The person injecting white genocide talking points into this Breitbart event in 2018 was the head of a white supremacist organization.
And not just any white supremacist organization.
Identity Europa was a primary organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. It was Identity Europa members who started the chants 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, and she demonstrated that she was deeply immersed in this same racist worldview.
She had these talking points ready to go.
And now you might be asking at this point, Molly, what does any of this have to do with a few dozen skinheads getting pelted with rocks in Sacramento in 2012?
Those rallies against white genocide back in 2012 were poorly attended and barely reported on.
The idea behind this organizing strategy was pretty similar to the 2017 March Against Sharia rallies I talked about a few episodes ago.
A nationwide series of public protests designed to give the appearance of widespread public support for a pretty unpopular racist idea.
But when Act for America pulled that stunt in 2017, they were able to attract some mainstream Republican attendees.
And more importantly, they had access...
to the legitimizing force of 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 journalists into picking it up.
The group that put on those rallies against white genocide in 2012 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 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.
The myth of the South African farm murder exists to stoke white anxiety.
For Afrikaner nationalists, it's a desire to return to apartheid.
For the American audience they sell it to, it's a longing to roll back civil rights and integration.
It may be dressed up as foreign policy, but it's no different from the message on those flyers printed out by Aryan Nations members.
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 events keep getting in my way.
I never really know where a story is going to take me until I have 40 or 50 browser tabs open and a dozen pages of notes that don't really make any sense.
But this one took a hard right turn early on.
I thought for sure that the star of the story of 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 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 Klansman, 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 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 that failed to prevent the end of apartheid.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagin.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.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 don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
My name is Kyle Tequila, host of the shocking new true crime podcast, Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was 17 years old.
People are dying.
Is he doing this every night?
Kenny was a Chicago firefighter who lived a secret double life as a mafia hitman.
I had a wife and I had two children.
Nobody knew anything.
He was a freaking crazy man.
He was my father, and I had no idea about any of this until now.
Crook County is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the Criminalia Podcast.
I'm Maria Tremarki.
And I'm Holly Frey.
Together, we invite you into the dark and winding corridors of historical true crime.
Each season, we explore a new theme, from poisoners to art thieves.
We uncover the secrets of history's most interesting figures, from legal injustices to body snatching.
And tune in at the end of each episode as we indulge in cocktails and mocktails inspired by each story.
Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It was big news.
I mean, white girl gets murdered, found in a cemetery.
Big, big news.
A long investigation stalls until someone changes their story.
I like saw hoping that happened.
An arrest, trial, and conviction soon follow.
He did not kill her.
There's no way.
Is the real killer rightly behind bars or still walking free?
Did you kill her?
Listen to The Real Killer, Season 3, on the iHeartRadio app.
Hi, I'm Arturo Castro, and I've been lucky enough to do stuff like Broad City and Narcos and Roadhouse.
And now I'm starting a podcast because honestly, guys, I don't feel the space is crowded enough.
Get ready for Greatest Escapes, a new comedy podcast about the wildest true escape stories in history.
Each week I'll be sitting down with some of the most hilarious actors and writers and comedians, people like Ed Helms, Diane Guerrero and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
I love storytelling and I love you, so I can't wait.