CZM Rewind: The White House Weighs in on White Genocide & Apartheid International
For the end of the year reruns, Weird Little Guys is revisiting the longest, strangest story of 2025 - the South Africa arc. Those eight episodes tell the strange story of how one little skinhead rally in California in 2012 connects to a vast international conspiracy to stop the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. ---- The White House Weighs in on White Genocide Original Air Date: 2.27.25In 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-influence https://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_5af5dcb6e4b00d7e4c1a6571 https://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-africa https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/trumps-south-africa-tweet-tucker-carlson-has-turned-white-nationalist-narrative https://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/9550050 https://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-93476 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/22/south-africa-risks-food-shortages-if-white-farmers-go-to-australia-nationals-mp-says https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/27/dutton-should-prioritise-refugees-on-nauru-not-white-south-africans-unhcr-says https://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-sa-----Apartheid International Original Air Date: 3.13.25In the last episode, we looked at a strange series of rallies held in cities across the United States in 2012 - American neo-nazis were rallying in support of white South African Farmers. But how did they get that idea in their heads? The rallies were put on by a group called The South Africa Project, run by a woman I'd never heard of. Digging into this mysterious South African, I found a lot more than I bargained for - bombings and mercenaries and an international network of fascist terror.Sources:https://www.24sata.hr/news/hsp-as-prisegnuli-na-vjernost-domovini-i-donaldu-trumpu-513281#google_vignette https://balkaninsight.com/2017/02/27/us-condemns-zagreb-neo-nazi-march-for-trump-02-27-2017/ https://www.icty.org/x/cases/naletilic_martinovic/cis/en/cis_naletilic_martinovic_en.pdf https://archive.idavox.com/index.php/2012/09/24/the-aryan-nations-show-of-farce-in-dc/ https://time.com/3927339/dylann-roof-charleston-shooting-flags/ https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,863800,00.html https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/1981/0219/021960.html https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hate-watch/anti-genocide-protests-around-nation-were-organized-neo-nazis/ Visser, Myda. 1999. University of Pretoria. DIE IDEOLOGIESE GRONDSLAE EN ONlWIKKELING VAN DIE BLANKE FASCISTIESE BEWEGINGS IN SUID-AFRIKA, 1945-1995 Hill, Ray, and Andrew Bell. The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network. Grafton, 1988. https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/volume%202.pdf https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/apartheid-early-1980sSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium.
Women began to go missing.
It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them.
The murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence.
Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Short on time, but big on true crime.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Hunting for Answers, I highlighted the story of 19-year-old Lache Dungy.
But she never knocked on that door.
She never made it inside.
And that text message would be the last time anyone would ever hear from her.
Listen to Hunting for Answers from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Malcolm Gladwell here.
This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in Northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.
And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years.
That's probably not long enough.
I didn't kill him.
From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama Murders.
Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media.
Hello, everyone.
Molly here.
There won't be a new episode this week or next week, as this Thursday is Christmas Day and next Thursday is New Year's Day.
Regardless which holidays you celebrate, I hope you're enjoying a little peace and relaxation here at the end of the year.
Whenever I have to choose which rerun will go out on the feed, whether it's for a holiday or if I'm sick or on vacation, I have a hard time picking something that makes sense.
I mean, first of all, I have so few standalone episodes.
I can't just run part one of a five-part series as a rerun.
That's ridiculous.
And the show's only been on for a year and a half or so.
So it can be hard to pick something old enough that you didn't just hear it.
But here, at the end of the year, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
When I look back at 2025, I'm pretty proud of most of the work I did on the show.
We started this year by finishing off the five-part series of episodes about Dennis Mahon, the Klansman who sent a bomb to the diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona in 2004.
A few weeks after that, I wrote a coda to that story when the city of Scottsdale bowed to pressure from the Trump administration to close that diversity office.
In the spring, I told you about one pardoned January 6th defendant who got shot on the side of a lonely state highway.
And by fall, I was writing about a different January 6th defendant making a bid for Congress.
I found funny little quirks of history, like the story of New York City mayor-elect Silran Mamdani's father, reading Marx for the first time after the FBI showed up demanding to know if he was a communist.
And I found moments of heartbreaking human kindness, like the final acts of Ricky John Best and Talisha Namkai Meche, the men who lost their lives to stop a Nazi on a train from attacking a teenage girl in a hijab.
I spent months writing about the lives of two men who were particularly close to George Lincoln Rockwell in the final years of his life.
I thought I already knew the story of the assassination of the leader of the American Nazi Party, but even I was surprised by the twists and turns that one took.
I definitely didn't set out expecting to learn so much about the New England mafia.
In 2025, I wrote about murders and lawsuits.
I learned more than I cared to know about the process of seeking an advisory opinion from the Federal Election Commission.
And I found out Risen isn't nearly as dangerous as TV shows led us to believe.
Maybe it's embarrassing to admit this, but I actually really like pretty much every episode of this show.
I love learning strange new things every week and I love sharing them with you.
But when I look back on this year, to me, there's a clear winner.
There was a series of episodes that was weirder and more surprising and more fun and more upsetting to research and write than anything else.
This series of episodes was more challenging than anything I've ever done, and it forced me to expand my own research skills in ways I could not have predicted.
It was the most far-reaching, both in terms of geography and time scale, of anything I've ever written.
It spanned centuries and continents.
I had to read government documents translated from half a dozen different languages, at least one of them from a government that doesn't exist anymore.
I read books and academic journals and doctoral dissertations.
But I also read racist prophecies and bomb-making manuals.
I used source material produced by Klansmen, the CIA, German anti-fascists, Croatian war criminals, British neo-Nazis, and South African death squad leaders.
I had to read a murderer's very bad poems.
I even watched a movie starring Dolph Lundgren.
And I loved every minute of it.
Looking back at this year, that is absolutely nuts.
That is a crazy thing to say.
I spent the entirety of March and April going completely mad, digging through archival material in Afrikaans instead of finishing planning my own wedding.
I'm not kidding, I made my husband do it.
He did a great job.
I think this worked out.
But we didn't even have an officiant until like three weeks out from the ceremony.
Mostly because I couldn't tear myself away from this story.
So when I had to figure out what to run on the feed for back-to-back reruns, I knew what I wanted.
I wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance to listen to what I think was my best work of 2025: the eight episodes I wrote this spring about white nationalist terrorism in the final years of apartheid South Africa.
So for the next two weeks, those eight episodes will run two at a time.
Two on Tuesday, two on Thursday.
And those episodes will run as they were originally recorded.
I haven't gone back and changed them.
But I will record a new little introduction for each pair.
It might be corrections or updates or just some little connection to another episode of the show for you to think about as you're listening.
This first pair of episodes, The White House Weighs In on White Genocide and Apartheid International, originally aired on February 27th and March 13th.
Listening back to them now, it's funny to hear that I obviously had no idea what I was getting into when I wrote the first episode.
And by the time I wrote the second one, I had some idea that this might be a longer series.
I do want to note now that there is a mistake in the second episode.
I did correct it down the line, but I misspoke the first time I brought up James K. Warner.
I called him Robert for some reason, repeatedly.
And then I got so in my head about the mistake that even when I made the correction in the fourth episode, I accidentally called him Robert again.
I have no idea why I can't keep this straight, but it's James K. Warner.
And that is a guy we'll talk about again, eventually.
So you should know.
It's James.
In this story, he's just a name on some paperwork, but he does connect in a lot of different places.
I don't think I actually said his name in the John Patler episodes, but when Patler was arrested at an American Nazi Party rally in DC over the 4th of July weekend in 1960, one of the stormtroopers he was arrested with was James Warner.
It is a small world for these weird little guys.
And speaking of connections to other stories, this series opens with a Nazi rally on the steps of the state capitol in Sacramento.
And that rally was hosted by a group called the Golden State Skinheads.
That's the same skinhead group from the American Third Position Party episodes from August and September of this year.
And that rally in Sacramento was just one of the events held all over the country that day.
In photos taken at the event in Los Angeles, you can see William Daniel Johnson, the lawyer who helped those skinheads form their political party.
And the rallies that were held on the same day in Tennessee and Pennsylvania, those were hosted by a group called Folks Front.
The same group that organized Aryan Fest 2004, the event Dennis Mahon attended right before he decided to build that bomb.
I'm always saying all of these stories are connected.
But some of the connections in these stories didn't jump out at me until I was listening back to them this week.
You don't need to have listened to all of those episodes.
It's okay if none of that means anything to you.
But it is a fun little Easter egg for anybody keeping track as we go.
Oh, one more thing.
My eternally patient and infinitely talented editor Rory lent his services for some voiceover work in one of these.
And when it aired the first time, some of you were furious and disgusted by how good his Donald Trump impression is.
I think it was brilliant.
But it is definitely a jump scare.
Anyway, without further ado, the first two episodes of the South Africa Arc.
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 in stories carried in newspapers around the country.
The initial wire story opens with a cursory explanation of the underlying event, offering up the phrase, a rally by a group 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 reevaluate 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, Maurice Goulet was a lifelong member of the Aryan Nations who had recently been released from prison for bank robbery.
Just beneath the surface of those rallies, had anyone bothered to look, was an old 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 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 and a future for white children.
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, quote, 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 Brevik as an inspiration.
But it's that same feeling, this paranoid, reactionary whiteness that South African media studies professor Nikki Falkov 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, affecting both black and white women.
Nonetheless, the trope of the farm murder as a specific type of violent crime featuring white victims and black killers is frequently invoked to provide evidence for the alleged genocide.
In 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 Falkoff 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 Sweders 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, is 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 10.38 p.m., less than an hour after a segment on Tucker Carlson's nightly broadcast, fear-mongering about land reform under President Ramaposa.
We've got an exclusive investigation for you tonight.
The president of South Africa, Sierra Ramaposa, 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 Afra Forum.
It's a South Africa civil rights group.
He was just in the United States to meet with a number of government officials.
Afra Forum 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 Ruth'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 March of 2018, News Corps 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 Ramaposa government when he said they were specifically targeting white South Africans for land seizures.
Australian Facebook feeds were flooded with short videos about a pending genocide of white South Africans.
Touhey'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 Tuwey 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.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltson.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's Attorney General is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight, doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.
After the terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.
Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer.
Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.
We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.
From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre season two, The Butcher of Moss, available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hip podcast, Family Secrets.
Were in the car like a rolling stone came on and he said, there's a line in there about your mother.
And I said what?
What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have.
I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened.
These are just a few of the moving and important stories i'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets.
Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us.
I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships and ultimately reveal who we truly are.
Listen to Family secrets on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Join me every weekday as I share bite-sized stories of missing and murdered Black women and girls in America.
There are several ways we can all do better at protecting Black women.
My contribution is shining a light on our missing sisters and amplifying their disregarded stories.
Stories like Tamika Anderson.
As she drove toward Galvez, she was in contact with several people talking on the phone as she made her way to what should have been a routine transaction.
But Tamika never bought the car and she never returned home that day.
One podcast, one mission, save our girls.
Join the search as we explore the chilling cases of missing and murdered Black women and girls.
Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In the midst of this onslaught of reporting, essentially force-feeding Afrikaner white nationalist propaganda to the entire Australian public, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told a reporter from the Australian right-wing tabloid The Telegraph, that he'd seen some very concerning media coverage of the violent persecution of white farmers, and he hoped to assist them in resettling in Australia.
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, the South African government is offended by the statements which have been attributed to the Australian Home Affairs Minister, and a full retraction is expected.
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 Afroforum'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 Rutz 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 Rutz with Bolton does show that Rutz is wearing the outfit he appeared in on an episode of Tucker Carlson that aired a few days later.
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 Ernst 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 Tupey, so not actually a representative from Afroforum.
But when Afroforum met with various right-wing think tanks back in May, Marion Tupey was the Cato Institute policy analyst who replied to Huffington Post's request for comment about their meeting with the group.
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 landexpropriation at real Donald Trump The following morning, a spokesperson for President Ramaposa called into a news broadcast on ENCA, South Africa's most watched television news channel, to say the government would not be using tweets to conduct international relations.
The presidency has noted the tweet which is attributed to the U.S. President, President Donald Trump.
In our view, the tweet is unfortunate and misinformed.
However, we've chosen not to respond to it via social media.
Instead, we'll use the diplomatic channels that exist for such purposes.
Later that day, the same spokesperson, Kuseladico, told CNN, hysterical comments and statements do not assist in the process.
The majority of South Africans want to see land reform.
The majority of our farmers, white and black, want to be part of this initiative.
And President Cyril Ramaposa hit back in remarks at a conference in Limpopo later that week.
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.
I do as 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 Ramaposa 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 Ramaposa has signed into law the Expropriation Act, which does allow the government to expropriate privately owned land.
And that might sound very scary if you don't know what it means.
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.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's Attorney General is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight, doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.
Investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.
Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer.
Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.
We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.
From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is La Mansre season two.
The Butcher of Moss, available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets.
We were in the car, like a rolling stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother.
And I said, what?
What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have.
I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened.
These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets.
Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us.
I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are.
Listen to Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Join me every weekday as I share bite-sized stories of missing and murdered Black women and girls in America.
There are several ways we can all do better at protecting Black women.
My contribution is shining a light on our missing sisters and amplifying their disregarded stories.
Stories like Tamika Anderson.
As she drove toward Galvez, she was in contact with several people talking on the phone as she made her way to what should have been a routine transaction.
But Tamika never bought the car and she never returned home that day.
One podcast, one mission, save our girls.
Join the search as we explore the chilling cases of missing and murdered Black women and girls.
Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There is a provision in the act that's getting quite a bit of attention.
In Trump's executive order, he writes, In shocking disregard of its citizens' rights, the Republic of South Africa recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024 to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners' agricultural property without compensation.
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. Edeoy Akinola wrote, Farm owners or farmers are predominantly made up of the white group, who in most cases inherited the farms from their families.
A prevailing narrative is that in most cases, these lands and farms had been forcibly 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 U.S. 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, writing, They are actually killing white farmers every day.
It's not just a threat.
Musk was born in South Africa under apartheid, and he emigrated to Canada in 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 Pollock gave a South African TV news program the other day, but the man has all the charisma of a wet rag.
But the idea of the Breitbart editor becoming the South African ambassador did remind me of 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.
But I mean, we are seeing a genocide there.
And if we're going to take any refugees, it seems to me it ought to be particularly these white farmers who are being chosen and killed in really horrible ways.
And you can find it by doing a Google search.
You can find these web pages.
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 as well?
I am so glad you asked that question.
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 chance of you will not replace us as they marched through the University of Virginia with their torches.
But remarkably, Anne Coulter took the ball and ran with it.
And she demonstrated that she was deeply immersed in this same racist worldview.
She had these talking points ready to go.
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 seems 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.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
We have some breaking news to tell you about.
Tennessee's Attorney General is suing a Nashville doctor.
In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.
I was terrified.
Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever.
At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.
But this story isn't just about a few families' futures.
It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all.
It doesn't matter how much I fight.
It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.
It doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.
After the terrible discoveries of Saturday, investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.
Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer.
Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.
We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.
From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre season two, The Butcher of Moss, available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast, Family Secrets.
We were in the car, like a rolling stone came on, and he said, there's a line in there about your mother.
And I said, what?
What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have.
I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened.
These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets.
Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us.
I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are.
Listen to Family Secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Hunter, host of Hunting for Answers on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
Join me every weekday as I share bite-sized stories of missing and murdered black women and girls in America.
There are several ways we can all do better at protecting black women.
My contribution is shining a light on our missing sisters and amplifying their disregarded stories.
Stories like Tamika Anderson.
As she drove toward Galvez, she was in contact with several people, talking on the phone as she made her way to what should have been a routine transaction.
But Tamika never bought the car, and she never returned home that day.
One podcast, one mission, save our girls.
Join the search as we explore the chilling cases of missing and murdered black women and girls.
Listen to Hunting for Answers every weekday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Come with me for a moment, back to February of 2017.
It was just weeks after Donald Trump had been sworn in as president for his first term.
There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear.
Millions of Americans marched in Washington, D.C. to protest his presidency in its first days.
There was still some hope in those early days that maybe he hadn't meant most of what he'd said.
Maybe it was campaign bluster, hot air, and empty words.
Within a week, though, he'd signed an executive order banning travel to the United States from predominantly Muslim countries, sparking a wave of protests at airports and signaling that he intended to follow through on his xenophobic anti-immigrant campaign promises.
A month into his presidency, tens of thousands of Americans in at least 50 cities around the country rallied for a protest on President's Day, calling it Not My President's Day.
But that same week, half a world away, a very different march was taking place.
In Zagreb's city center, a few dozen men in black uniforms stood in formation, led by Drazen Kalemenik, leader of the Croatian Fascist Party HSP.
They chanted the slogans of the Ustasha, the Croatian fascist movement of the 1930s and 40s.
Alongside the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany, the Ustasha had undertaken a genocide of their own, operating their own concentration camps and slaughtering whole villages of Jews, Roma, and Serbs.
As those marchers assembled in the city square and the brass band finished playing, the men took an oath of allegiance to their Croatian homeland and to Donald Trump.
Most of those marchers had empty hands.
Some held brass instruments.
But at the front of the column, several marchers held flags.
the Croatian flag, of course, and an American flag to show their support for Donald Trump.
But one man at the very front of the line was carrying the flag of the German ultra-nationalist party NPD.
The march's organizer, Drazen Kalemenek, was arrested that day for shouting Zedom Spremni, which is the Croatian equivalent of yelling Sieg Heil in Germany.
But when he did get a chance to speak to the press, he explained the presence of the German NPD flag.
The man who'd been carrying it was Alexander Nydline, a representative from NPD, and he was there to show his party's support for HSP.
But that march, in February of 2017, wasn't Alexander Nydline's first visit to the Balkans.
In 1993, Nydline enlisted in the Convicts Battalion, a paramilitary unit of the Croatian Defense Council made up of prisoners and foreign mercenaries.
Its leader was later convicted of crimes against humanity for his actions during the Bosnian War.
Nydline didn't stay with the unit for very long.
In the years since, he's taken issue with being called a mercenary, arguing that he never actually got paid.
Because just before Christmas of 1993, Nydline and two other German mercenaries deserted from the convicts battalion.
They took as many guns as they could carry and disappeared into the night.
A few weeks later, those German mercenaries and those stolen guns turned up 7,000 miles away in South Africa.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This is a story about Monica Stone.
I think she may be our first weird little guy who happens to be a woman.
There was Dallas Humber, I guess, the voice of Terra Graham.
But she wasn't the central character in that story, just the disembodied voice urging young men to kill.
Weird little guy is a gender-neutral term, in my mind.
I haven't been avoiding telling the stories of women in the white power movement.
It's just that, for the most part, the very nature of their beliefs kind of prevents women from taking center stage, even in their own lives.
But this, this is a story of a woman who has dedicated her life to the cause.
And in her case, the cause is apartheid.
Like all my stories, this is really only kind of about one weird little guy.
And this might be the widest net I've ever cast trying to understand one person's life.
The story covers decades and spans continents.
There are bombings and shootouts and murders.
There's international gun smuggling, mercenaries and paramilitaries and war crimes, successful assassinations and foiled terrorist plots.
There are trials and prison breaks and crimes left unpunished.
Some with extradition petitions left pending for decades, with no hope of justice.
There are some familiar landmarks, names of people and organizations I recognize like David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan and the Turner Diaries.
But there are people and groups in this story that were new to me.
Characters we haven't met yet and may see again in future episodes, exploring these fascist friendships across borders.
But at its core, this is a story about Monica Stone.
She isn't in all the parts of the story playing out all around her, but the context matters more than ever, because this week we're going to dig into a weighty idea, the Fascist international.
I haven't forgotten where we started.
Maybe you have, that's understandable.
I left you hanging there for a week while I recovered from a stomach virus, but two weeks ago, we were talking about white genocide.
The story began in Sacramento in 2012.
A group of neo-Nazi skinheads was rallying at the state capitol in California to raise awareness of the plight of the white South African farmer.
In that episode, I picked apart this myth, the idea that white farmers are being slaughtered every day in a post-apartheid South Africa, that white South Africans are in danger of being completely wiped out by a white genocide.
That idea has been quite popular among white supremacists around the world for some time.
Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik devoted a few pages of his 1500-page manifesto to it.
When Dylan Roof murdered nine people at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, his Facebook profile photo showed him glowering at the camera in a black jacket with two patches on the breast.
The flag of Rhodesia and the flag of apartheid South Africa.
I come across the idea pretty often in my work.
So many of my weird little guys are obsessed with the idea of a fully segregated society and the state violence against black people that comes with it.
But that's where the idea lived.
It lived on Stormfront and on 4chan and in manifestos and on Nazi podcasts.
Those rallies in 2012 were pretty unique.
The public display of the apartheid era South African flag at an American political rally was unusual.
It was unusual enough that it was mentioned in news stories three years later when the flag appeared again on Dylan Roof's jacket.
But like so many once fringe ideas, it's part of the mainstream political discourse now.
I won't retread all of that.
We talked about it in the last episode.
But now the President of the United States is repeating the talking points from the flyers those skinheads printed out in 2012.
And I originally set out to just talk about those rallies as a sort of standalone story, this strange incident that seems to have happened in total isolation.
As far as I've been able to find, the group behind it had never put on a public event before, and aside from a poorly attended follow-up in DC later that same year, they never did again.
The website has been offline for years, and there's hardly any mention of the group at all.
Anywhere.
A lot of white supremacist groups are short-lived.
So that's not really unusual.
And this group, the South Africa Project, was pretty obviously just two people running a side project out of an Aryan nation's P.O. box.
But I can't let anything go.
So I started to dig.
And it became clear very quickly that there was a hell of a lot more going on here than I thought.
Back in 2012 when those rallies took place, both the SPLC and the ADL had stories on their website explaining that those events had been organized by American neo-Nazis.
Both groups zeroed in on Morris Goulet, a longtime Aryan Nations member, and the man who'd given comments to the press as the organization's spokesman.
Both outlets identified several local organizers of those assorted rallies, the Golden State Skinheads hosted in Sacramento, Billy Roper headlined the rally in Arkansas, rallies in Tennessee and Pennsylvania were hosted by members of Folksfront, and so on.
But in one single line, in a blog post that isn't even on the ADL's website anymore, the events are attributed to a woman named Monica Stone.
In this passing mention, crediting Stone with the idea for the rallies, the Post notes that she was a South African immigrant and a longtime member of the Christian Defense League.
The CDL was a Christian identity group that grew out of the same milieu as the Aryan nations in the 60s, but it never really achieved the same level of influence.
But that's all there is.
Monica in Louisiana.
Monica from South Africa.
Monica speaking at the Aryan Nations World Congress about the need for international solidarity between American neo-Nazis and Afrikaner nationalists.
But Google gives you exactly nothing about this woman before or after this brief moment in time in 2012.
And so at this point, I'm locked in.
I have to know more about this woman.
How did she end up in Mandeville, Louisiana?
A town of just 10,000 people that I've only heard of because it's where David Duke lives.
So I started with the information that I have.
A name.
Hopefully it's her real name.
A city.
And some potential known associates.
If her longtime membership in the Christian Defense League is the only notable fact about her, maybe that means she was a very important member of the group.
And lucky for me, it turns out she was.
The organization has, or had, I guess, since it's defunct as far as I can tell, been run by a man named Robert K. Warner since the 70s.
And when he took over, he moved its headquarters from California to Louisiana to be closer to his friend David Duke.
And in addition to the Christian Defense League, Warner also ran a Christian identity church called the New Christian Crusade Church.
Corporate filings for the church show Robert K. Warner as an officer of the organization, which I expected.
But in 2011, he filed an amendment, adding someone named Monica Huggett as the church's chief financial officer.
And he changed the address on file to a residential address in Mandeville, Louisiana.
Property records for St. Tammany Parish show that a mortgage was taken out at that address by James Stone in 1992.
But after he died, the property was sold by his widow.
And on the documents for the sale, she's listed as Monica Huggett Stone.
And that's the kind of concrete paper trail I love to see.
There's no doubt at all here that the Monica Stone behind those 2012 rallies is the Monica Huggett who married James Stone in 2000 and lived in Mandeville, Louisiana, two miles away from David Duke.
So now I have a new name, Monica Huggett.
And this is where I ran into trouble almost immediately.
Everything is in Afrikaans.
Most of the English language material about someone named Monica Huggett is about the renowned British conductor and Baroque violinist.
But that is an entirely different person who I am almost 100% sure has never helped an Italian terrorist build a bomb.
Violinists have to be very careful with their hands, you know?
But there were a handful of extremely tantalizing clues that convinced me to power through the agony of trying to translate blurry old PDFs.
One of the first English language sources I found referring to a South African named Monica Huggett is the final report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was authorized by President Nelson Mandela in 1995, and it was chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
The body's goal was exactly what it says in the name.
To find the truth about what happened under apartheid and try to find a way to move forward as a nation.
The TRC had three central tasks.
To discover the causes and nature of human rights violations in South Africa between 1960 and 1994.
To identify victims with a goal of paying reparations, and to allow amnesty for those who fully disclosed their involvement in politically motivated human rights violations.
This wasn't a tribunal.
This was a restorative justice process.
They hoped to be able to provide amnesty to people who were honest.
Over the course of three years, the commission heard testimony from over 20,000 people, both victims and perpetrators.
Monica Huggett did not, as far as I can tell, ever testify before the commission.
But her name is in there.
Specifically, it appears in Volume 2, the 700-page portion of the report dealing with, quote, the Commission of Gross Violations of Human Rights.
And more specifically, it's in Chapter 7, Political Violence in the Era of Negotiations and Transition.
Under the subheading, Links with International Right-Wing Groups, the report reads, The first link between ultra-right terrorism and foreign agencies came to light in 1982 when Mr. Fabio Mariello, Mr. Massimo Bolo, and Mr. Eugenio Zopis, all white foreign expatriates known as the White Commando, were convicted of the 1979 bombing of the offices of prominent academic Dr. Jan Lombard.
Originally, Mr. Kuz Vermoulen and Miss Monica Huggett, a foreign right-winger, were arrested with them.
But Huggett turned state witness and Vermoulen was released after a few days.
Huggett's name was subsequently linked to the shootout in March 1994 between the South African police and three German right-wingers in the Donkerhoek area.
One German right-winger, Mr. Stephen Reyes, was arrested.
Mr. Thomas Koontz was shot dead.
And a third, Mr. Horst Klens, later arrested.
A fourth, Mr. Alexander Nydlein, was later charged in the Kullinen Magistrates Court for illegal possession of a firearm.
And I think you can see why I was willing to invest the effort to find out more about this.
Because that's a hell of a thing to find under the first rock you turn over.
Italian terrorists bombing university offices in Pretoria in 1979, German mercenaries getting into a deadly shootout with the police in 1994.
And there she is, right at the center of two separate acts of pro-apartheid terrorism, 15 years apart.
Now, there are some problems here.
First of all, her name is spelled wrong.
Only a little wrong, it's missing one of the Ts.
But Alexander Nydlein's name is spelled so incorrectly that you couldn't find this by searching for his name.
The report calls him Alexander Niedneloin.
Which as far as I can tell is not anyone's name or a real German name at all.
And the bombing of Professor Lombard's offices at the University of Pretoria happened in 1980, not 1979.
It also describes Monica Huggett as a, quote, foreign right-winger, which really threw me off at first.
I've heard her talk.
She sounds South African.
And she's even said in multiple interviews that she was born and raised there.
The confusion in the report may be because she had publicly identified herself as a member of the American Ku Klux Klan, and that may have been interpreted as her being American.
And by the time the commission was starting their work, she had left South Africa and was living in the United States.
They never actually had a chance to speak to her.
I'm willing to cut them some slack on the details here.
They were close enough for government work, as my dad used to say, and they had a lot of work to do.
But as my subsequent research shows beyond a shadow of a doubt, Monica Huggett was born and raised South African.
But keep those four Germans in the back of your mind for now.
We'll see them again.
Alexander Nydlein, you've already met.
He was the German NPD member swearing allegiance to Donald Trump at a Croatian Nazi rally in 2017.
According to blurry old scans of arrest warrants from 1993, Stephen Reyes and Thomas Kunst were the other two German mercenaries he deserted with just before Christmas that year.
And just as an aside, I am admittedly not at all an expert on the Bosnian war, so it took me a minute to parse the letterhead on the warrants.
They were issued by the non-existent country of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg, Bosnia, which explains why Nydline had no problem re-entering Croatia after fleeing as a fugitive all those years ago.
And the fourth man, Forst Klens?
He's still wanted for murder in Namibia.
Early on in my search for more information about this mysterious woman at the center of these two terror plots carried out by foreign neo-Nazis, I found a master's thesis submitted by Maida Visser to the University of Pretoria in 1999.
It's in Afrikaans, but translated, the title is, The Ideological Foundations and Development of the White Fascist Movements in South Africa, 1945 to 1995.
After some truly agonizing trial and error, trying to find a way to translate a 300-page PDF without paying for something, the thesis was immensely useful.
But every clue just raised more questions, and I was running into dead end after dead end trying to track down the primary sources in the footnotes.
I can find a lot of things, but digitized archives of 40-year-old newspapers published in another language, in another country, that might not even still exist at all, for all I know.
I came up empty.
And I was on the verge of total nervous collapse at the idea that there's information out there that is just not available to me.
When I had another idea.
And I found an unlikely ally.
The Central Intelligence Agency.
That's right.
A special shout out this week goes to the CIA.
More specifically, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which was operated by the CIA until it was renamed the Open Source Center in 2005.
Originally called the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, it was authorized in 1941 by President Roosevelt.
And its original purpose was to record, translate, transcribe, and analyze propaganda radio programs produced by the Axis powers during the war.
Over the years, its mission grew to include peacetime operations, and they eventually added television and print media into the mix, collecting and translating news from around the world and disseminating reports for use by intelligence agencies and diplomatic and military organizations.
It's basically just an international news aggregator for government employees.
And look, maybe all those old South African newspapers do exist somewhere.
I found one, not the one I was looking for, not one with real journalists and investigative reporting like I'd hoped.
No, the only paper I could find a large catalog of digitized archives for was a paper called Detransvaler.
It was an Afrikaner nationalist newspaper.
That paper once unsuccessfully tried to sue another South African newspaper for calling them Nazi propaganda.
But it was such overt Nazi propaganda that the judge dismissed the suit and ruled that the editor of the Transvaaler, quote, did make his newspaper a tool of the Nazis in South Africa, and he knew it.
End quote.
So the Transballer wasn't exactly the resource I was hoping to find.
But eventually I gave up trying to find old South African newspapers.
And something that was much easier to find were the unclassified daily reports from the sub-Saharan Office of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service.
So, just this once, I guess.
I will give a reluctant nod to the CIA.
So now I have some contemporaneous reporting that has been translated into English by someone who's presumably a professional and not a robot.
And the pieces are starting to come together.
I can start to see the picture here.
This bombing campaign in 1980 is starting to come into focus.
In August of 1980, a newspaper editor in Pretoria received a letter on Letterhead bearing a symbol remarkably similar to the cross emblem used by the American Ku Klux Klan.
A group calling themselves the Vitcommando, or the White Commandos, claimed responsibility for the bombing of Professor Jan Lombard's office at the University of Pretoria.
And the group threatened further attacks, writing that people and organizations working toward integration would be warned first and then eliminated.
The Vit Commando had formed just a few months earlier, in May or June of 1980.
Sources vary.
Monica Huggett would later testify that she joined the newly formed Vit Commando after meeting Massimo Bolo at a meeting in Pretoria in June of 1980.
As described in the memoirs of Ray Hill, a man who ended his lengthy career as a fascist organizer by playing informant for the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, the meeting was a summit for leaders of the British fascist group National Front, the Afrikaner nationalist group AWB, the far-right South African political party HNP, and an Italian fascist group called UNIDO.
So even though her involvement with Vitcommando is the first time I can put her on paper involved in a terrorist organization, it was obviously not her first introduction to the idea.
She had to have been deeply involved with at least one of those fascist groups to have even been in the room where Massimo Bolo invited her to join his terrorist cell.
And the group got started right away.
Just two months after forming the group, the bombing of Lombard's office was already their third big public display.
They'd started a fire at a drive-in theater and firebombed the Johannesburg headquarters of the Institute for Race Relations.
In December, they claimed responsibility for the bombing of Professor F.A. Maritz's office at the University of South Africa.
And they would carry out at least four more bombings before members started getting arrested.
The first four arrests came in early February of 1981.
A government employee in Pretoria named W.G. Van Dyck, the director of the South African National Front, Alan Fotheringham, an Italian fascist named Massimo Bolo, and as the newspaper put it at the time, Mr. Bolo's girlfriend, Miss M. Huggett of Kempton Park.
Now that's the only source I could find alleging a romantic relationship between the pair.
It never comes up again, so I don't know.
And in the weeks that followed, police would arrest even more alleged members of the Vitcommando.
Fabio Miriello, an Italian-born South African citizen who'd emigrated four years earlier, Kuz Vermoulen, the leader of the World Apartheid Movement, and an Italian immigrant named Eugenio Zopis and his wife Laura Zenenga.
Those are all the names I could find in most of my sources.
I found a few more names in an unlikely place.
Documents released by the Italian government as part of their investigation into the Bologna massacre, a 1980 bombing of a train station in Italy believed to have been the work of fascist terrorists, do list several additional names of Italians who were in South Africa at the time and believed to have been involved with the Vitcommando.
But there's no mention of those extra Italians in the South African or English language press as far as I can find.
As a matter of fact, there's no mention of almost any of those people, ever again.
Only Miriello, Bolo, and Zopis actually faced charges.
Miriello and Bolo were charged with sabotage, the bombings, and possession of a massive cache of weapons that had been stolen from the South African Defense Force, including 50 kilos of plastic explosives, 67 hand grenades, a couple of landmines, eight rifles, four pistols, a machine gun, and 5,000 rounds of ammunition.
When Bolo and Miriello went to trial later that year, Monica Huggett testified against them.
In exchange, she wasn't charged.
She admitted that she had procured the bomb-making manual for Bolo, books that she'd ordered from her clan contacts in the United States.
I was a little surprised to see a familiar title here.
One of the books she had sent to her from America was called The Poor Man's James Bond, which is the same bomb-making book that Dennis Mahan bought for the ATF informant that he was in love with after she expressed an interest in bomb-making.
What a small world.
Huggett also testified that she'd accompanied Bolo to Professor Lombard's office to scout out the best location to place the bomb.
She explained that Bolo's residence had become unsuitable as a workspace after too many of his friends moved in.
So she rented a property under her own name that he could use to work on his bombs.
On the stand, Huggett explained that she's a political activist.
She's a member of the American Ku Klux Klan.
And the Vit Commando never intended to endanger any human lives.
Now, for what it's worth, not to give this woman the benefit of the doubt, but despite their repeated threats to follow up with more violence, to take up arms, to commit actual acts of violence against human beings, no one was ever actually injured by a Vit Commando bomb.
They went off in empty offices.
I think she may have been telling the truth.
They were warnings.
Huggett told the court that their goal was to wake people up to the dangers of integration, to send a warning that more violence was inevitable if this creeping, incremental, progressive reform that people were talking about were to actually happen.
She swore the group had no intention of actually hurting anyone or trying to overthrow the government.
By the end of 1981, Massimo Bolo had been sentenced to 52 years, though 42 of those years would run concurrent with other portions of the sentence, leaving him with just 10 years to actually serve.
And Fabio Miriello was given 19 years, but same deal, it was effectively just five.
But Bolo didn't even serve those 10.
He was released without any explanation that I can find after just four years in 1985 and immediately deported back to Italy.
I'm not entirely sure what became of Miriello, but Maito Visser's thesis says he was known to have reconnected with Monica Huggett after his release.
And the pair both got involved with the South African branch of the American neo-Nazi religion, the Church of the Creator.
As for Eugenio Zopez, the young Italian immigrant was charged only with the theft of the weapons.
He'd been the one to actually steal them from the South African Defense Force.
And he was also sentenced to five years.
And he appealed that sentence to the court.
So the following year, his lawyer was urging a judge to consider the mitigating factors.
He's so young.
He's just 23 years old.
And he was a brand new immigrant at the time and he didn't speak any English.
He'd been manipulated by the much older Fabio Muriello.
His lawyer went as far as to say that Eugenio Zopez had joined the Vit Commando entirely by accident and he'd had no idea of the true nature of the organization until after he was arrested.
The article about the dismissal of his appeal only lays out what his attorney said.
It's not clear from the reporting I can find if anyone contradicted those statements in court.
Because you might have guessed, but it's not true.
I mentioned earlier that the most complete list of names of those Italian fascists who were arrested in South Africa in connection to the Vitcommando bombings was buried somewhere in 2,000 pages of documents released by the Italian government related to the Bologna massacre.
In August of 1980, the same month that the Vitcommando bombing started in South Africa, 85 people were killed when a bomb went off inside the Bologna Central Train Station in Italy.
It is, to some extent, kind of a mystery still.
There were a number of trials spanning over a decade and several members of an Italian fascist group were convicted.
But the group itself never accepted responsibility for the bombing.
It is, perhaps, in some ways, akin to the Oklahoma City bombing.
Legally, we found the guy who did it.
But there are a lot of questions we're never going to get answers to, and there are a lot of weird paths you could let your mind go down trying to find them.
So without losing my sanity or dragging you into the incomprehensible depths, suffice it to say, Eugenio Zopis was not an innocent, confused young man when he stole a small arsenal of weapons for the Vit Commando in 1980.
In 1976, he was one of 15 members of an Italian fascist group who, armed with clubs and chains, beat a young communist organizer to death in a small town outside of Rome.
And contrary to his lawyers' claims that he had, by pure coincidence, met and befriended a fellow Italian right after he moved to South Africa, only to be manipulated by this new friend into committing crimes.
There is actually evidence that Zappas had been sent to South Africa, specifically to meet with Fabio Miriello.
In the months before Zappas arrived in South Africa, a member of Italy's Black Order wrote Miriello that he was sending six members down very soon, with more to follow.
In 1984, the newspaper of the Italian Communist Party listed Zappas among the names of 76 fascist fugitives believed to have fled the country.
Diplomatic records show the Italian government was requesting his extradition from Paraguay by 1986.
and I don't know what happened to him after that.
In what is becoming a constant refrain, I do want to stress that I'm not an expert in South African history.
I'm not a scholar of the apartheid era.
I'm not a historian.
Every week I have to gain some new specialized knowledge to try to give context to the story I'm trying to tell.
And there's only so much one person can sort out in a couple of days, so bear with me.
Because I do want to try to give some context here.
This Vitcommando bombing campaign in 1980 didn't come out of nowhere.
When Monica Huggett testified against the men she'd helped carry out those attacks, she said their goal had been to demonstrate that many white South Africans were opposed to the path of gradual concessions being made by the National Party.
And I was confused by that.
It would be another 15 years before apartheid ended, and the National Party loved apartheid.
What is she talking about?
Apartheid is inherently violent.
It is a form of violence in and of itself.
There is no peaceful or kind way to run an apartheid state.
There is no non-violent ethno-state.
And that's obvious.
But the kinds of violence and the visibility of that violence change from year to year.
I don't mean to say that things like the forced removal of black Africans from their homes and their lands are not violence.
It is.
Every action carried out in service of implementing and maintaining apartheid was an act of violence.
But some years were bloodier than others.
And while the political movement to end apartheid ebbed and flowed too, people have always and will always resist injustice.
But in 1980, when those bombs went off, there was a growing awareness on all sides of the issue that something was going to have to change, whether they liked it or not.
The country was about to experience some of the most violent years of apartheid.
For those committed to maintaining the status quo and holding on to political power, that would mean making some targeted compromises and more importantly, doubling down on state repression.
The Soweto uprising had made apartheid a PR problem.
I think for most people, dead school children is more than a PR problem.
But for the National Party, that's what it was.
In 1976, thousands of students walked out of class in protest of a 1974 law requiring the use of Afrikaans in school.
Students sang and held signs as they marched, and they planned to rally at a nearby stadium.
Word spread to other nearby schools and students poured out into the streets to join the march.
And when they heard the police had blocked their intended route, one of the march organizers urged calm, telling the crowd, brothers and sisters, I appeal to you, keep calm and cool.
We have just received a report that the police are coming.
Don't taunt them.
Don't do anything to them.
Be cool and calm.
We are not fighting.
And when they encountered the police for the first time, for a moment, it seemed cooler heads had prevailed on all sides.
But the police weren't actually retreating.
They were waiting for reinforcements.
And just half an hour later, the first tear gas canister was fired into the crowd of children.
And some of them ran.
But most of them stayed, facing the police, unmoving.
According to several accounts I found, the children were singing when the first shot was fired.
The police opened fire with live rounds on the crowd of children.
One of the first children to die that day was a 12-year-old boy named Hector Peterson.
The photo of his tiny, limp body in the arms of an older boy, with Hector's sister running beside him, was seen around the world.
Black South African photojournalist Sam and Zema had captured the true face of apartheid.
And people were horrified.
The violence spread like wildfire and the worst of it lasted for three days.
There was an explosion of internal resistance.
White university students marched against the killings.
Black workers went on strike.
Riots broke out in black townships all over the country.
Buildings burned.
And when the dust had settled, hundreds were dead.
The small reforms introduced in the late 70s had nothing to do with the National Party softening its stance on apartheid.
But the apartheid regime saw some advantage to reducing international criticism and disrupting black resistance.
Amidst these tepid reforms, divisions grew.
Some white South Africans who'd seen those pictures of children's corpses now saw apartheid as what it was, a true evil.
Others were repulsed by the violence, but seemed satisfied with the gestures toward reform.
People like Monica Huggett were worried that these promised reforms, things like repealing the ban on interracial relationships, would set the country on a road to hell.
In her testimony at the trial for Miriello and Bolo, she laid the blame on her Italian accomplices, but made no apologies for her own motivation, saying on the stand, I was opposed to integration.
I still am.
The week Miriello and Bolo were convicted, American newspapers carried a four-sentence wire story about the trial, noting that it was South Africa's first ever prosecution of white terrorists.
As South Africa was entering its bloodiest decade of political violence, someone had finally gone to jail for pro-apartheid terror.
But it's significant that they were only willing to prosecute those Italian men.
There's hardly any mention at all of the South African woman who served as the point of contact for these foreign terrorists.
Many of the stories in South African outlets stress heavily that the group was foreign in origin, that its members were foreigners, that they didn't even speak Afrikaans, that they had no connection to any South African political organizations.
But that assertion is complicated, a little bit, by an anecdote from Ray Hill's memoirs.
On the first day of the trial, as Bolo and Miriello entered the courtroom, a man in the gallery stood and applauded for them.
That man, Pete Rudolph, was a former police officer.
And at the time of the trial in 1981, he was a sitting member of the Pretoria City Council and a member of the far-right party HNP.
He would eventually leave party politics behind and form a white supremacist group called the Order Boerfolk, or the Order of the Boer People.
He borrowed the name from the plot of the Turner Diaries.
After Muriello and Bolo were convicted, the Wit Commando ceased to exist.
It was just one of countless short-lived right-wing organizations in a shifting political landscape.
Groups formed and splintered and disappeared all the time.
Sometimes there was even doubt about the actual existence of some group claiming credit for one attack or another, and a lot of groups had significantly overlapping membership.
But the end of the Wit Commando was not the end of Monica Huggett's involvement in pro-apartheid violence.
Not by a long shot.
Now in my timeline of events, I lose track of Monica after 1981.
I can't say what she was up to for most of the 80s.
But by the time I find her again in the record, she's a high-ranking member of the Afrikaner nationalist neo-Nazi organization called the Afrikaner Verstansbewegen, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement in English, or just AWB for short.
It was founded in 1973 by Eugene Terreblanche.
And the AWB wasn't happy with apartheid.
No, it wouldn't do at all.
Apartheid was too left-wing.
It was too liberal.
And there was too much risk to Boer identity for them to be living in proximity to black Africans, even under apartheid conditions.
They're secessionists.
And they believe the only solution to the problem is a pure white ethnostate.
A Volkstadt for the white South African.
It's a little bit baffling that she was able to resume her activities, retaining a fairly high level of prestige and responsibility, particularly when it came to her international contacts.
After she, you know, turned state's witness against Mariello and Bolo.
Surely everyone knew she'd sold them out to save herself.
But maybe her colleagues didn't see it that way.
Maybe she was important enough that they were willing to make that sacrifice to keep her on the outside doing whatever it was she was doing.
I had hoped to get to the end of the 1980s in this episode, but I think we have to leave it here.
The mid-80s.
Our Italian mercenaries were in the wind after serving just a handful of years behind bars.
I can't find Monica.
No matter how hard I squint at old TV news B-roll of South African Nazi rallies, but I think she's there somewhere.
And next week, before we rejoin Monica in her own story, we'll pick up in 1989 with one of our German mercenaries.
Five years before shooting out with the cops, just days before the 1994 South African election, Horst Klens was trying to prevent a different African nation from holding its first democratic multiracial elections.
He failed both times.
But in 1989, Klenz and his South African Nazi terror cell took two lives in a failed attempt to prevent Namibian independence.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conker.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my real guys.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltsin.
My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.
It doesn't matter how much I fight, doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this, it doesn't matter how much justice we get.
None of it's going to get me pregnant.
Listen to what happened in Nashville on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium.
Women began to go missing.
It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them.
The murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence.
Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Short on time, but big on true crime.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Hunting for Answers, I highlighted the story of 19-year-old Lache Dungie.
But she never knocked on that door.
She never made it inside.
And that text message would be the last time anyone would ever hear from her.
Listen to Hunting for Answers from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Malcolm Glaubal here.
This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.
And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years.
That's probably not long enough.
I didn't kill him.
From Revisionist History, this is The Alabama Murders.
Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.