Parts 7 & 8 of the South Africa arc. Blood River Original Air Date: 4.17.25 In 2002, a terrorist group failed to assassinate Nelson Mandela. In 2012, a plot to assassinate Jacob Zuma was foiled. Both plots were attempts to fulfill a prophecy and renew a bloody covenant with God. Sources: Thompson, Leonard L. The Political Mythology of Apartheid. Yale University Press, 1986. FA Mouton (1995) F A van Jaarsveld (1922–1995) — a flawed genius?, , 27:1,5-11, DOI: 10.1080/00232089585310011https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00232089585310011 Stephney, Inez Mary. “Race, History and the Internet: The use of the Internet in White Supremacist Propaganda in the late 1990’s, with particular reference to South Africa”https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/server/api/core/bitstreams/b04bdabb-ecd9-4f99-a3ae-fff55b88f483/content Schönteich, Martin, and Henri Boshoff. “Volk”, Faith and Fatherland: The Security Threat Posed by the White Right. Institute for Security Studies, 2003. Ndlovu, Sifiso Mxolisi. “Johannes Nkosi and the Communist Party of South Africa: Images of ‘Blood River’ and King Dingane in the Late 1920s-1930.” History and Theory, vol. 39, no. 4, 2000, pp. 111–32. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678052. http://www.anc.org.za/content/formation-umkhonto-we-sizwe https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/johannes-nkosi https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/december-16-reflection-changing-south-african-heritage https://scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0259-94222024000200001 https://www.iol.co.za/news/rightwing-coup-plot-case-postponed-1491552 https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/battle-blood-river-1838 https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/origins-battle-blood-river-1838 https://web.archive.org/web/20071220164018/http://www2.univ-reunion.fr/~ageof/text/74c21e88-617.html#_ftn13 https://web.archive.org/web/20081217042554/http://history.humsci.ukzn.ac.za/files/sempapers/Adutoit2005.pdf https://www.litnet.co.za/adriaan-snyman-1938/ https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/items/a64ddcfc-49eb-4680-b59d-b342d8bc358c https://www.news24.com/news24/five-boeremag-members-found-guilty-of-conspiring-to-murder-madiba-20150430 https://mg.co.za/article/2004-08-03-boeremag-relied-on-rottweiler-and-kgb/ Snyman, Adriaan. Voice of a Prophet. Vaandel Publishers, 1999. -- Mission South Africa Original Air Date: 5.1.25 At the end of this miniseries about white supremacist terrorism in the final years of apartheid in South Africa, this episode returns to the present day as white South Africans are lining up outside the embassy in Pretoria to claim refugee status under Trump's executive order. Sources: https://www.reuters.com/world/us-focuses-persecution-claims-white-south-africans-seek-resettlement-2025-04-24/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/06/white-afrikaner-donald-trump-america-us-administration https://www.dw.com/en/us-diplomat-ejected-from-new-zealand-after-mysterious-incident/a-38016563 https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_departments/Parliamentary_Library/Research/FlagPost/2022/May/diplomatic-expulsions https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/24/australia-expels-israeli-diplomat https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59023465 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/americas/06ecuador.html https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/05/29/so-how-do-you-expel-an-ambassador-anyway/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/addressing-egregious-actions-of-the-republic-of-south-africa/ https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/topic/social/ https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/pool-reports-february-2-2025 https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-press-gaggle-after-air-force-one-arrival-february-2-2025/#15 https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/topic/calendar/ https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-african-party-accuses-white-group-treason-over-trump-attack-2025-02-10/ https://www.enca.com/news-top-stories/ramaphosa-slams-afriforum-solidarity https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-02-13-apartheid-stratcom-agents-trump-edwin-feulner/ https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/oct/24/an-indictment-of-south-africa-whites-only-town-orania-is-booming https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/south-africas-white-afrikaner-separatists-want-trumps-help-become-state-2025-04-03/ https://laist.com/news/food/milky-way-kosher-restaurant-reopens-steven-spielbergs-mom-la-legendary https://iol.co.za/news/politics/2025-03-17-eff-condemns-us-ambassador-expulsion-vows-to-block-white-supremacist-appointment/ https://www.biznews.com/interviews/2025/02/27/us-ramaphosa-financial-sanction-anc-joel-pollak https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-03-30-new-us-envoy-might-be-even-more-conservative-than-me-joel-pollak/ https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/23/africa/south-african-ambassador-ebrahim-rasool-intl/index.html https://mistra.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/MISTRA-Statement-webinar-Implications-of-changes-in-US-administration-for-South-Africa-and-Africa.pdf https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-03-18-rasool-diplomacy-and-global-power/ https://www.sajr.co.za/rasools-expulsion-a-crisis-not-a-hiccup/ https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trumps-pick-for-ambassador-to-south-africa-actively-opposed-fight-to-end-apartheid https://www.upi.com/Archives/1987/07/14/Foundation-unveils-Contra-commercials/1746553233600/ https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2025-02-19-ernst-roets-leaves-solidarity-movement-to-live-out-his-calling/ https://za.usembassy.gov/u-s-refugee-admissions-program-faqs/ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/us/politics/trump-south-africa-white-afrikaners-refugee.htmlSee 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.
Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of checking in on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
You know, we always say New Year, new me, but real change starts on the inside.
It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals.
And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season whole and empowered.
New year, real you.
Listen to checking in with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
Who catfishes a city?
Is it even safe to snort human remains?
Is that the plot of Footloo's?
I'm comedian Roy Scoville, and I'm here to tell you, Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I know he has a reputation, but it's going to catch up to him.
Gabe Ortiz is a cop.
His brother Larry, a mystery Gabe didn't want to solve until it was too late.
He was the head of this gang.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry's killed, Gabe must untangle a dangerous past, one that could destroy everything he thought he knew.
Listen to the Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media.
Hello, everyone.
Molly here.
Welcome back to the fourth and final installment of the holiday reruns here on Weird Little Guys.
Instead of picking two random reruns for the weeks of Christmas and New Year's, I've used this opportunity to run my favorite mini-series of 2025.
The eight episodes I wrote back in the spring about the international networks of right-wing extremists who were trying to hold on to apartheid in South Africa.
Last week, episodes one and two ran on Tuesday, episodes three and four on Thursday, and episodes five and six ran on Tuesday, which makes this episodes seven and eight of the series.
Blood River originally ran on April 17th, and Mission South Africa followed on May 1st.
There was kind of a ninth episode in the series, but it was an afterthought, and I didn't include it here.
But when I got back from my honeymoon a few weeks after these episodes came out, I chased down one more loose end, the American arms dealer who got in trouble for smuggling guns to the groups we've been talking about in these episodes.
I just checked back in on him and he is still suing that all-you-can-eat sushi buffet in Portland for asking him and his doberman to leave the restaurant after the dog put her nose in a chafing dish of spring rolls.
Bit of an anticlimactic retirement for a guy who used to run guns for foreign Nazi groups.
I really think I could have just written about this all year.
Just 50 episodes about the white supremacists all over the world who couldn't let go of apartheid.
It turned out there was a lot more going on there than I could have imagined.
But this is where I left it in May.
And the final episode is the one most badly in need of an update because it ended in the present tense.
The story was still evolving as I was writing it, and it kept going after I stopped.
It may be something I have to come back to for a full-length episode.
For now, though, Brent Bozel has been confirmed as the United States ambassador to South Africa.
And there is no new South African ambassador to the United States.
When I finished this series at the end of April, there were rumors that the first round of white South African refugees were on their way here.
And that group of around 50 did indeed arrive on a chartered flight in May.
A South African group claimed in June that nine more refugees had arrived on a commercial flight, but I can't find any official statement from anyone about whether additional South Africans were ever brought over.
Reporting from the BBC as recently as this week says it's not clear how many or if any additional South Africans have been resettled in the U.S. after that first group in May.
But apparently people are still applying for refugee resettlement.
At the end of this episode, you'll hear about a group called AmeriConnors.
Back in the spring, it was very new.
It was a hastily established organization that claimed at the time that they were assisting white South Africans who hoped to apply for refugee resettlement in the U.S.
Well, in September, AmeriConnors was formally brought on as a partner organization by the U.S. State Department.
And as I'm writing this now, a few days before Christmas, there is some news about that.
The State Department outsourced the work of processing applications for refugee resettlement on site in South Africa.
The official implementation partners in that process are Church World Services, a nonprofit based in Indiana, and AmeriConnors, a limited liability company incorporated in Florida.
But the actual work was being done by RSC Africa, a company operated by that nonprofit, Church World Services, out of Kenya.
In mid-December, South African authorities deported seven Kenyan nationals working at the application processing center.
They had entered South Africa on tourist visas and were not legally allowed to work.
The AmeriConnors website was pretty bare bones when I looked at it back in April.
Today, now that they are an official implementation partner with the U.S. State Department, it's massive.
There are pages and pages of useful information for white South Africans looking to adjust to life in America.
There's a page explaining that it's a common American custom to say hello to your neighbors.
And another page that lists everything you need to know about hiring a maid to clean your suburban American home.
A page about American demographics suggests that, quote, the Midwest's homogeneity offers a familiar feel.
And it specifically notes that Nebraska is 90% white.
The same page advises the reader to use American census data to research prospective locations.
Quote, knowing Georgia is 32% black helps you prepare for diverse interactions.
Considering they are moving from Africa, I don't know why they would need to prepare.
Nevertheless, relations between the United States and South Africa are not getting better.
The President of the United States keeps doubling down on white nationalist talking points about the white genocide conspiracy theory.
So, I'm sure this is a story that I'll keep coming back to, whether I like it or not.
I'll be back soon with more Weird Little Guys in 2026 on December 16th, 1956.
All over South Africa, people gathered in city squares and event halls.
Children's choirs performed.
Congregations gathered to sing hymns, and whole towns turned out to hear speeches from civic leaders and church elders.
They barbecued and picnicked.
They made a whole weekend of it, with parades led by mounted police and festivals headlined by government officials.
All over the country, people attending events in their own towns tuned in to hear the prime minister's speech in Krugersdorp.
A judge addressing the crowd in Jermiston urged Afrikaners not to forsake God by tolerating communism, saying, quote, everywhere is the cry for equality of whites and non-whites, and everywhere it is fanned by communism.
In Frederb, a speaker waxed poetic on the noble character of their Dutch pioneer forefathers, saying, quote, they were neither conquerors nor oppressors.
They always followed a determined policy towards the barbarians.
In Vaderfal, a member of parliament gave a speech about the importance of apartheid, that it was in fact a kindness, allowing the races to live and let live, retaining their racial identities by avoiding race mixing.
That speaker, M. C. Botha, would later help design and implement the administration of the Bantu stands.
And that day, he told the crowd that apartheid had a far more positive outlook than something like segregation.
In Kempton Park, theologian Petrus Dreyer warned that there could be no middle ground.
Economic integration inevitably leads to social integration, which always ends in blood mixing.
Apartheid was still young in 1956.
The system was still being constructed.
Dreyer predicted a complete disappearance of the white race if the country failed to quickly adopt total and complete apartheid.
That celebration, the one in Kempton Park, was presided over by festival chair William Henry Huggett.
He'd been the mayor of the city for several years in the early 50s, and he was on the board of his local branch of the National Party.
The newspaper write-up about the event mentions him only briefly.
I couldn't even tell you if Mr. Huggett gave a speech.
But I'm willing to bet that there in the audience, listening to those warnings of impending racial annihilation, was his daughter, a 12-year-old Monica Huggett.
I'm Mollie Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This is a story about religious fervor.
It's about myth and legend and racial holy war.
It's a story of very modern bombings and treason convictions and planned assassinations.
But it's a story rooted in history.
So first, if you'll indulge me, a bit of history.
December 16th is a significant day for South Africans.
Today it's celebrated as Reconciliation Day.
But it wasn't always a day of peace.
In 1961, the newly formed paramilitary arm of the African National Congress, McConto Wisizwe, announced their existence with a series of bomb blasts and leaflets declaring, quote, the time comes in the life of any nation where there remains only two choices, submit or fight.
That time has now come to South Africa.
We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defense of our people.
In 1930, the South African Communist Party held a nationwide protest, encouraging Black South Africans to publicly burn their passbooks, the internal passports black people were required to carry at all times.
At a pass book burning rally in Durban, police attacked demonstrators, killing ANC organizer Johannes Nkosi.
In 2012, a series of police raids were carried out, rounding up four men accused of treason and a plot to assassinate President Jacob Zuma.
And the reason that all of these things happened on December 16th is the same.
It's the same reason those crowds gathered in city squares all over the country in 1956.
Until the holiday was repurposed as Reconciliation Day, 1995, it was celebrated as the Day of the Vow.
The holiday occupies a place of great importance in the political ideology of the Afrikaner nationalist.
In the 1830s, Dutch-speaking settlers in the British-controlled colony at the Cape of Good Hope began migrating north, away from British rule.
Of course, the land north of the British colony wasn't empty, and these exploratory missions often came into conflict with the African people whose land they wanted to settle on.
In 1837, one of those bands of Dutch pioneers, known as the Fortrekers, set their sights on a bit of land in what is now KwaZulu-Natal.
They approached the Zulu king Dingane and attempted to negotiate, stating a desire to live in peace with Zulu, but noting that they had been victorious in prior conflicts with Zulu warriors.
The negotiations did not go well.
Dingane was understandably cautious in dealing with the Fortrekers.
Earlier treks north had brought the settlers into violent conflict with the indigenous people they encountered.
And their proposal just wasn't consistent with the way the Zulu lived.
The Fortrekers wanted a written contract for ownership of the land in perpetuity.
And neither of these things were possible in Zulu society.
Theirs was an oral culture.
There were no written treaties or contracts.
And their customs and laws didn't allow for the permanent transfer of ownership of land held by the king.
In February of 1838, a four trekker delegation led by Peter Tief met with Dengane to sign the treaty.
There are conflicting accounts as to whether this treaty was actually signed.
But Dengane clearly had no intention of giving the Dutch settlers any land.
The entire delegation was led to a nearby hillside and killed.
There were retaliatory attacks and skirmishes throughout the year.
But the settlers spent most of 1838 regrouping.
Farmers from the Cape Colony were called up as reinforcements.
And the bit of history that matters here came at the end of the year.
The Battle of Blood River.
In December of 1838, Andries Pretorius led a caravan of 57 oxcarts and 460 Four Trekker men into Zulu territory.
The Fortrekers were armed with guns and the caravan had several cannons.
The battle began at dawn on December 16th.
A surviving member of the Zulu forces said their first charge was mown down like grass by the musket fire.
The Zulu had an overwhelming numerical advantage.
Accounts vary widely, putting the number at at least 9,000, with some estimates ranging as high as 30,000.
But the Fortrekers had a strong defensive position, and they had artillery.
By noon, 3,000 Zulu warriors were dead.
The Fortrekers had not lost a single man in the Battle of Blood River.
There is, of course, no river with such a hideous name.
The battle was fought on the banks of the Nkome River.
But on the day 3,000 Zulu men were slain in a matter of hours, the river is said to have run red with their blood.
That much is true.
The Battle of Blood River was fought on December 16th, 1838.
The Day of the Vow, however, celebrates a possibly apocryphal vow sworn by Andres Pretorius, that if God would deliver them a victory against the Zulu, their descendants would forever keep that day as a holy Sabbath.
They didn't.
Not until many decades later, anyway.
Leonard Thompson, an English historian who led Yale's Southern African Research Program, posits that the Day of the Vow is political mythology, a piece of history that was resurrected and embellished when it was politically expedient.
There is some kernel of truth.
There is a contemporary account in the journals of Pretorius' Secretary General, Jan Bantias, that one week before the battle, Pretorius called his senior officers to his tent and asked them to pray to God for victory.
And he promised that if they were victorious, he would build a church to commemorate it.
And they did win, and he did build that church, thus fulfilling the only portion of that promise that we have any record of.
For decades, white South Africans did not keep December 16th as a holy Sabbath.
An 1877 text by a South African nationalist theologian contains a history of the battle, but it makes no mention at all of any vow or of divine intervention.
The story re-emerged in the late 1800s, amidst the Boer Wars, and in 1880, a ceremony was held to renew the covenant.
And in this ceremony, they tied the story of the four-treker victory over Black Africans to the present struggle for national identity against the British Empire.
There were sporadic celebrations of the holiday in the last few decades of the 19th century.
and the story was evolving as a sort of founding myth.
God wanted the Afrikaner to have that land.
God wanted whites to conquer black Africans.
God gave the Afrikaner this land because they were God's chosen people.
When South Africa gained independence in 1910, one of the first acts of parliament was to make the Day of the Covenant a national holiday.
In 1938, at the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the Battle of Blood River, nationalist politician D.F. Milan addressed the crowd.
He said Blood River had decided the future of South Africa, that it was to be a civilized Christian nation under the authority of the white race.
And now, in that moment, in 1938, they were standing on the banks of their own Blood River, quote, seeing the dark masses gathering around your isolated white race.
A decade later, when Milan was elected prime minister, he oversaw the implementation of apartheid.
You might be wondering at this point, why am I telling you about this?
What does this racist fake holiday have to do with the subject of our story, Monica Huggett Stone?
It has everything to do with her.
Her belief in the vengeful racist God of Blood River is central to the way she's lived her entire life.
She brings it up in almost every interview I could find.
In one podcast from 2021, she describes visiting the site with her family as a child.
To this day, she believes that if the Afrikaner renews that vow, their God will guide their hand in slaughtering the enemies of the white race, whoever they may be.
And this is what I'm clinging to, is that the God of Blood Trevor is not it, even if the enemies all over the world and my they're not only black, the white governments of the West caused the fall of South Africa and Rhodesia and the rest of the white colonies in Africa.
And of course, the Jew has their hand in there.
Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
The constructed mythology around the importance of that day became so central to Afrikaner nationalist ideology and identity that for decades there was no scholarship at all examining its historical roots.
In 1979, historian Flores van Jarsfeld was presenting a conference paper at the University of Pretoria.
He had begun to question the historicity of the popular cultural narratives about Blood River.
And just as he approached the lectern to present his paper, 40 men burst into the lecture hall and surrounded the professor.
They emptied a tin of hot tar over him and coated him in white feathers.
Those men were members of a group that had, up until that very moment, operated entirely in secret.
This was their big public debut.
The leader seized the microphone and announced himself.
He was Eugene Terblanche, leader of the Afrikaner resistance movement.
He called Venjarsfeld's paper blasphemous, an attack on the sanctity and very essence of Afrikaner identity.
Early on in the process of figuring out who Monica Huggett Stone was, I saw a very strange comment.
I was reading a blog post about an internal schism within a modern-day Afrikaner nationalist group called the Swedelanders.
The blog was written by Adrian Snyman.
We'll get to him in a minute.
But in the comments under the post, there was one from Monica, posted in 2023.
And she was so sorry to see whites turning on each other instead of focusing on the real enemy.
And she ends this rather long comment by saying, quote, The time is now for the Boer people to stand together, to go on their knees and beg forgiveness from our Creator, the great Almighty God who created the heavens and the earth.
We have turned our backs on God and have the mistaken idea that we ourselves are the saviors of the Boer people.
God has not abandoned us.
He is waiting patiently for the people to call upon him.
Just as at Blood River, he will answer again and give his children victory.
And I didn't know what that meant.
So I made a note of it and I moved on.
And then I saw it again in a YouTube comment just a few months ago.
She wrote, May the God of Blood River be with his children and give us victory against his enemy.
And then I found a series of articles she wrote for a rapidly anti-Semitic Christian identity magazine between 2011 and 2017.
And they're all very strange.
The Bible verses she quotes are from a translation I'd never heard of.
It's not the King James or the New International, it's something else entirely, something called the Farrar Fenton Bible.
He was, apparently, a British businessman who died in 1920.
And his translation is not well regarded by biblical scholars.
He was also briefly the head of the South African diamond mining corporation, the De Beers Group.
And he believed that British people were the true Israelites.
I didn't know the Farrar-Fenton Bible was even an option, but I guess if you're a racist South African who believes white people are the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, it's the perfect choice.
In those articles, she predicts a coming race war.
She agonizes over what she calls satanic attacks on the Aryan race.
And there at the end of pages of apocalyptic rambling, she calls for a renewal of the vow of Blood River.
And that blog, Monica's comment in 2023 on that post about internal divisions within a right-wing Afrikaner group preparing for a race war.
Well, that comment wasn't her only appearance on that site.
In 2011, the blog's author, Adrian Snyman, wrote a post with the title, Thank You, Aryan Nations.
And the post is a response to Monica Stone.
She had written privately to Snyman to let him know that she would be attending the Aryan Nations World Congress in September of 2011, and she'd be giving a speech about the white genocide in South Africa.
Snyman's post describes Monica as the only female member of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement to have ever served time in prison for her involvement in the group.
And he urges his readers to email her their letters of thanks so she can present them to the Aryan nations after her speech.
And here's where things start to go off the rails.
Adrian Snyman, the author of that blog, is a prolific writer.
In his younger years, he worked for a newspaper covering horse racing.
And for decades, he cranked out dozens of novels under a variety of pseudonyms.
But by 1990, he'd found his calling.
Interpreting the prophecies of Niklas van Rensberg.
Nicholas van Rensberg was born in 1864 on a farm in what is now South Africa.
He never learned to write and he only learned to read by sounding out the words of the Bible.
He died in 1926.
During the Second Boer War, he was a close companion of General Cous de la Rey.
He was also, allegedly, a prophet of God.
I spent too much time trying to parse the prophecies.
I had trouble locating any actual original written versions of the prophecies.
I don't want to see interpretations of them.
I want to see them.
And I looked for some original source for entirely too long before I realized they don't exist.
According to Snyman, Van Rensberg's daughter Anna wrote down over 700 of her father's visions.
But the original handwritten books were lost.
At the time of her death in 1981, the family was not in possession of any of those writings.
It appears he's based his books on a document written in 1942.
A man who had seen those original written versions of the prophecies related them orally to another man who wrote them down 16 years after Van Rensburg died.
And even that document was lost until Snyman received it in 1990.
There's no explanation of where it was in between or how he came to possess it.
Very unclear provenance on these prophecies.
There's no chain of custody on the prophecies.
Snyman has written so feverishly on the subject for the last 35 years that almost everything I can find about Van Rensberg is written by him.
And everything else relies on his work.
There are some contemporary accounts of some of Van Rensberg's visions, but it's worth mentioning that the most spectacular examples of his predictions coming to pass aren't ones I was able to find written accounts of that date back to his lifetime.
And the interpretations of those prophecies that present possible modern occurrences as their fulfillment are almost universally written by fervent race war enthusiasts.
People who really, really want the prophecies to be true.
And the problem with prophecies that some people really, really want to be true is that there will sometimes be people who take matters into their own hands and try to make them come true.
Most of his visions are entirely symbolic.
Things like, I saw a red bull and a gray bull fighting is interpreted by his followers as an accurate prediction of World War I. Or, out of the north, a speckled black ox appears.
He is looking in our direction.
The earth in our country becomes desolate, but in Europe it becomes pitch dark.
And that is apparently a prediction of the Great Depression.
According to Snyman, Van Rensburg correctly predicted such events as every war of the 20th century, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, AIDS, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the election of Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana's divorce, Princess Diana's death, and a 1995 earthquake in Japan.
As for the prophecies that haven't come true, well, maybe they just haven't come true yet.
In 1916, he tells his friend, Boy Mussman, there will come a time when I will be once again in the news.
In those days, I see we are still fighting amongst ourselves.
Then it is over and we will have a black government.
It is then that the Afrikaner's final and fiercest struggle will begin.
According to Snyman's books, Ben Rendsburg had a vision in 1925, six months before his death.
The actual text of this prophecy is word salad, something about a goose coming out of a man's mouth.
But it's interpreted to mean that Van Rensberg predicted that in the distant future, a black man will be released from prison.
And that man will attain power.
And under his rule, the country will be thrown into.
And at some point, that man will die a violent death.
And on the eighth day after his death, the day he is buried, a civil war will begin.
By his own account, Snyman started interpreting the prophecies in 1990.
He published his first book on them in 1992.
But the earliest writing I could actually get my hands on is from 1995.
So I can't tell you if Snyman always believed that this particular prophecy was about Nelson Mandela and his release from prison in 1990 and his election as president in 1994, but that's his interpretation now.
And this particular prophecy has inspired at least two attempts to force it to come true.
In late 2002, a white supremacist terrorist organization calling itself the Boromag set off a series of bombs in Soweto, outside of Johannesburg.
They targeted a mosque, a Buddhist temple, an airport, a gas station, and railways.
And those bombs went off after the first round of arrests earlier that year.
After the wave of bombing, the group emailed newspapers, taking responsibility for the attacks.
They demanded the release of the Boromag members who'd already been arrested.
But it warned that it wasn't just lower-ranking members of the group that people should be worried about.
Interfering with the mission of the Boromag was a challenge to the God of the Blood River.
If their demands weren't met, another wave of bombings would commence on December 16th, the Day of the Vow.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
And what is this?
How is that not a story we all know?
What's this?
Where is that?
Why is it wet?
Boy, do we have a show for you?
From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and big money players comes Crimeless.
Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalist, and me, Rory Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws.
Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime.
Who catfishes a city and meets some memorable anti-heroes?
There are thousands of angry horny monkeys.
Clap if you think she's a witch and it freaks you out.
He has x-ray vision.
How could I not follow him?
Honestly, I gotta follow him.
He can see right through me.
Listen to Crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
I 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
I just fail and started screaming.
If you lost someone you loved in the most horrific way.
I said 22 times.
The police, right?
But what if the person you're supposed to go to for help is the one you're the most afraid of?
This dude is the devil.
He's a snake.
He'll hurt you.
I'm Nikki Richardson, and this is The Girlfriends, Untouchable.
Detective Roger Golupski spent decades intimidating and sexually abusing black women across Kansas City, using his police badge to scare them into silence.
This is the story of a detective who seemed above the law until we came together to take him down.
I told Roger Goloopski, I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
Listen to the girlfriends Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know, we always say new year, new me, but real change starts on the inside.
It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals.
Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of checking in on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season whole and empowered.
New year, real you.
Listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Those bombings did not come to pass.
Police responded to the emails by raiding 94 properties and arresting 11 more Boromag members.
Intriguingly, some of the homes that were raided that day belonged to men we've encountered elsewhere in this story.
There were police raids at the home of Baron Strydem, the white wolf who went on a shooting spree in 1988, and at the home of Willem Rata, the former Rhodesian military officer who commanded the German mercenaries at Radio Pretoria in 1994, Afrikaner Resistance Movement member Mani Meritz, and Pete Rudolph, the leader of the Ordo Borafolk.
At one of these homes, though none of the reporting specifies whose, police found a list of names of the detectives who'd been investigating the Boromag.
The trials took over a decade, with testimony from over 200 people.
In the end, 23 members of the group received prison sentences of varying lengths, between 5 and 35 years.
The ringleader, Mike Dutoy, was the first South African to be convicted of treason by the post-apartheid government.
And because the cases spent 11 years in court, we know a lot about them.
At the group's first meeting, members took the vow of Blood River.
They carried copies of the vow pasted into a little book at all times.
And they gave each other code names like Rottweiler and Motherfucker.
After they swore their allegiance to God and each other, the leader of the group gave each man a single 9mm bullet.
In later testimony, a member said, quote, he said there was no turning back now.
Anyone turning back will be shot.
And if you knew somebody would betray you, you had to make sure he was shot.
In October of 2002, former president Nelson Mandela was scheduled to travel to Limpopo for a ceremony opening a new school.
Boromag members placed a large bomb on the side of the road they knew he would have to travel to get there and stretched a tripwire across it.
They were hiding in the bushes, waiting to watch the former president get blown to bits when they heard the helicopter.
They'd failed.
Had Mandela not taken a helicopter at the last minute instead of traveling the final leg of his journey by car, the bomb almost certainly would have killed him.
And this, they believed, would trigger Van Rensburg's prophecies of a race war.
Both their own testimony and documents recovered in the police raids show their dedication to the Van Rensberg prophecies.
A lot of their planning documents just don't make sense at all without the context of the prophecies.
One plan presupposes, without explanation, that the violence will simply begin when a mob of black people engage in violent midnight attacks in Johannesburg.
That's an extremely unlikely and unexplained scenario in the real world, but it is something that does incite an unstoppable wave of violence in some of Snyman's interpretations of the prophecies.
Their planning documents also fixate on the idea of amassing their forces in a small town called Prisca.
There's no political or tactical advantage to being in Prisca, but the town is mentioned more than 20 times in one of Snyman's books.
Van Rensberg had a vision that a miracle would occur in Prisca, that in their hour of need, the Boers would receive much-needed help from abroad.
In the prophecies, the white Afrikaner is armed for the final struggle in Prisca when German guns arrive.
It's very important in the prophecies, these German guns, the guns must come from Germany.
And that's so interesting.
I mean, the prophecies are a jumbled mess.
A lot of it doesn't mean anything.
They're mostly about bulls fighting and white horses on hillsides and chickens running east.
But the German guns are quite concrete.
And I wonder if that was on anyone's mind in 1993, when Monica Huggett started hosting German mercenaries in her home.
Maybe it's a coincidence that those Germans were the ones smuggling in the guns they hoped to use in the race war back then.
Hard to say.
Over the course of the Boromag trials, witnesses testified to almost unbelievable plots that the group never had a chance to carry out.
Members testified that they'd considered stoking racial tension by carrying out terrorist attacks intended to appear as though the perpetrators had been Jewish or Muslim.
One early plan involved shooting down an American passenger plane, but that was scrapped because it was likely to kill white people.
A police informant who'd infiltrated the group testified that one member claimed his American contacts in the Ku Klux Klan could help them create a poison to put in the water supply.
Another member said on the stand that they'd planned to poison oranges and then leave them on the streets of Soweto where black people might pick them up and eat them.
When the guilty verdicts were read, Pete Rudolph stood up in the gallery and yelled in Afrikaans, we shall overcome.
How odd to see Pete Rudolph misbehaving in the gallery twice so many years apart.
It was a few episodes ago now, but 33 years before this, in 1980, it was Pete Rudolph who stood and applauded as the Vit Commando bombers were led into the courtroom.
But during the trials, 13 of those defendants took a unorthodox approach to their defense.
They challenged the court's jurisdiction to even try them at all, claiming that due to irregularities in the 1992 referendum and the 1994 election, the current government was illegitimate and the post-1994 constitution was not binding.
The government's position was, of course, that the 1992 referendum had authorized the government to negotiate a new constitution.
That referendum, for the record, asked the question, do you support continuation of the reform process which the state president began on 2 February 1990 and which has aimed at a new constitution through negotiation?
And that referendum passed with 69% of voters saying yes.
Here's Monica's memory of that election, just for fun.
I mean, I remember my niece was about three, four years old.
We walked into the voting booth and she, little as she was, gave the Nazi salute and she said, my daddy is voting no.
The Bohemag defendants were unsuccessful, obviously.
But they did try to subpoena South Africa's last apartheid president, F.W. de Klerk.
I guess in an attempt to prove that the government didn't legally exist.
And after the verdicts were in, some right-wingers blamed de Klerk.
If he hadn't ended up harthy, none of this would have happened in the first place.
A press release from Andries Breitenbach, leader of the far-right party, HNP, and chairman of a group called the Bohr Afrikaner Volksrad, attacked de Klerk.
The press release read in part, each of those sentences is yours personally because you are the real traitor who subjugated our people to a hostile power with cunning and deceit.
And further down the page, he continues, that you have not created any gate through which the Bohr Afrikaner people can escape from this dispensation in a constitutional manner shows your evil intent against our people.
News reports at the time say the press release was issued via his Facebook page.
But I couldn't dig it up there.
No, unfortunately, I found it on Stormfront.
I can't believe I'd never noticed before, but the internet's oldest running Nazi message board has an entire subsection where all the posts are in Afrikaans.
In a 2009 dissertation by Inez Merie Stephanie at the University of the Wittwaterstrand, the author makes a claim that, I believe, but I can't find anywhere else.
She writes that in the mid-90s, the Afrikaner resistance movement didn't have their own website.
I mean it was the 90s, how many people knew how to make a website?
But instead of the group just not having a website, American Klansman Don Black, Stormfront's webmaster, posted their online presence for them.
What a strange and fascinating intersection.
But back to the press release.
I wouldn't have bothered to tell you Andries Breitenbach's name if that was his only appearance in this story.
There's already too many guys, I know.
But it's not.
No, because he had friends overseas too.
And he was in Washington, D.C. in September of 2012.
I can't blame you if you've forgotten why that's interesting.
It's been a long story.
It was in September of 2012 that Monica Huggett Stone led that tiny gaggle of Aryan nations members on a march through DC.
It was her second attempt at getting public attention for her South Africa project, raising awareness for the white genocide of the Afrikaner.
But what if it was something else?
A month before that rally, the front page story in Die Afrikaner, the newspaper for the far-right party HNP, said that their chairman, Andries Breitenbach, had decided that there would be a march in America the following month.
Quote, a march will be held in America next month.
This action, stop genocide, was initiated by the HNP.
So maybe there was some other march against white genocide somewhere in the United States in September of 2012.
That's possible, I guess.
But this was the only one in Washington, D.C.
And that's where Andries Breitenbach was the week of Monica's Aryan Nations rally at the Capitol.
I can't find him in any of the photos.
But that same party newspaper uses a photo of Monica at her rally to illustrate their story about Breitenbach delivering a letter to the ambassador in Washington that same week.
Maybe something is lost in translation here.
But the article appears to conclude with this statement.
The group of local protesters was also encouraged by the fact that their spokesman, Mr. Andries Breitenbach, gave an interview to the media at the embassy.
And Monica obviously saw and had no issue with the wording of this article because it was proudly posted to the Aryan Nations website, which is where I found it.
But it gets even stranger.
Breitenbach wasn't the only South African who paid a visit to the Aryan nations in September of 2012.
That same month, a man named Hein Bunsaier took a trip to the United States.
When he was arrested for treason three months later, it was revealed in court that he'd been trying to secure funding from the Aryan nations and the Ku Klux Klan.
Bunsayer and three others, Johan Prinzlu, John Martin Keevie, and Mark Trollop, were arrested on December 16th, 2012, the day of the vow, and the day they had planned to assassinate South African President Jacob Zuma.
The charges against Bunsayer were dropped in August of 2013.
And after a psychiatric evaluation, John Martin Keevie was committed to a state hospital.
Mark Trollope pled guilty to conspiracy.
And Johan Prinzlu was found guilty of treason after a trial.
So legally, can I tell you that Hein Bunsayer was soliciting funding for terrorism?
No, I can't.
He wasn't convicted of any crime in connection to the plot.
But the plot was real.
It was real enough that Johan Prinsley was convicted of treason.
And Bunsheyer did make two trips to the United States to connect with right-wing groups.
One just months before his arrest.
Early reporting about his arrest explicitly states that the 2012 trip had been an effort to secure financial backing from American extremist groups.
But I was puzzled about the economics of such a trip.
I mean, guns aren't cheap, sure, but what's the return on investment in terms of ammunition when you're looking at booking international travel?
But it's possible they needed money for more than just weapons.
Bunsire was buying land, a lot of it, in Prisca.
There is a post from the year before his arrest on a website for believers in the Free Afrikaner movement.
It's a collection of white South Africans who want an independent state.
And the post names Bunsire's real estate company, Hausenberg Development Cooperative, is one of two companies allowing people to purchase shares in a large tract of land to facilitate white resettlement.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
And what is this?
How is that not a story we all know?
What's this?
Where is that?
Why is it wet?
Boy, do we have a show for you?
From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and big money players comes Crimeless.
Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalist, and me, Rory Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws.
Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime.
Who catfishes a city and meets some memorable anti-heroes.
There are thousands of angry horny monkeys.
Clap if you think she's a witch and it freaks you out.
He has x-ray vision.
How can I not follow him?
Honestly, I got to follow him.
He can see right through me.
Listen to Crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm investigative journalist Melissa Geltson.
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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
I just feel and started screaming.
If you lost someone you loved in the most horrific way.
I said that was shot 22 times.
The police, right?
But what if the person you're supposed to go to for help is the one you're the most afraid of?
This dude is the devil.
He's a snake.
He'll hurt you.
I got you.
I'm Nikki Richardson, and this is The Girlfriends, Untouchable.
Detective Roger Golubski spent decades intimidating and sexually abusing black women across Kansas City, using his police badge to scare them into silence.
This is the story of a detective who seemed above the law until we came together to take him down.
I told Roger Golovsky, I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
Listen to the girlfriends Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know, we always say New Year, new me, but real change starts on the inside.
It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals.
Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of checking in on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season, whole and empowered.
New year, real you.
Listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Later reporting from investigative journalism outlet Amapungani says Boonsire's company website was in 2012, quote, in the process of purchasing 30,000 hectares of farmland in Prisca.
But I can't find any follow-up as to whether or not he ever successfully purchased the land for his white enclave.
During his trip to the United States in 2012, he appeared on six episodes of one right-wing podcast and made a single appearance on a wildly fringe anti-Semitic conspiracy theory show.
I spent the better part of the day trying to dig up audio of any of those episodes, but they seem to be lost to time.
Amapungane reported in 2012 that in one episode, Bunzaier said, I think we can assume that within the next six to eight months, I wouldn't be surprised if we had a full-scale civil war in South Africa.
It's a low-level war that's being waged against us.
And at some point, any group of people or a nation would stand up and say, enough is enough.
In the reporting about Bunzeier's American connections, it's mentioned that he'd visited once before, but no details are provided.
It seems like that first trip might remain a mystery until I found an open letter Bunzaier himself wrote in 2013 after his charges were dropped.
In that letter, he reveals that he'd been publishing online for years under the pseudonym Heinrich Zeyman.
And there is a bit of writing online in Afrikaans under that name, much of it published by the Pro-Afrikaner Action Group.
But I found one essay in English.
The piece tells the almost entirely fictional story of the author's grandparents falling victim to the ongoing white genocide in South Africa.
They are victims of these infamous farm murders, hacked to death in their beds by machete-wielding black men.
And he writes in gory detail about the couple's beloved dog, dismembered by the attackers as he gave his life trying to protect his masters.
It's gruesome.
It's almost pornographic in its description of the author discovering that the dog's final act was tearing the throat out of one of the black attackers.
It was published in 2011 by American Renaissance, the white supremacist magazine run by Jared Taylor.
Taylor's website notes that the author attended the American Renaissance Conference in 2010, an event that was headlined by a speaker from the Belgian fascist group Flams Belang, the successor organization to Flams Block, the neo-Nazi organization that coordinated the movement of stolen guns and mercenaries to South Africa in the 90s.
Bunzier's piece was included in a collection of essays published by American Renaissance in 2020, and the book has a foreword by Jared Taylor himself.
I will do some episodes on Jared Taylor one of these days.
He's had an enormous influence on American white supremacist thought over the last 40 years.
His annual conference has, for decades now, been a real who's who of the international extreme right.
I went once, years ago.
I mean, I couldn't get inside, obviously.
I just stood outside in a park somewhere in Tennessee, and all I got for my trouble was pepper sprayed and trampled by some cops.
For the average person, I would guess the only time you've encountered Jared Taylor's name in the news was back in 2015.
He was the spokesman for the Council of Conservative Citizens when they had to make a series of public statements after the Charleston church shooting.
Dylan Roof's manifesto made it quite clear that he'd been radicalized by the Council of Conservative Citizens, specifically their publications on black crime.
And that's what convinced him that white people were being treated unfairly.
Their website set him down the path that ended the lives of nine people whose only crime was welcoming a stranger into their Bible study.
Like I said, Bunzeier's charges were dropped.
When he was arrested in 2012, he was removed as the head of a newly formed political party, the Federal Freedom Party.
After its founder was arrested for treason, it obviously struggled a bit and it rebranded as Front Nationale in 2013 and then rebranded again as the Afrikaner Self-Determination Party in 2020.
I can't tell if Bunzeier is still active in the party he started.
Seems like it would be kind of hard to go back to canvassing for elections when you've already considered triggering a prophecy by blowing up the president, but people can change.
I don't know.
In September of 2012, Monica Huggett Stone was in touch with the leader of the far-right party, HNP, and a man accused of treason.
She led a tiny Aryan nations rally of the United States Capitol, and then she left.
She'd been living in the United States since 2000 after marrying Jim Stone, a retired sports news broadcaster living just outside New Orleans.
Federal Election Commission filings show that Jim Stone was on the payroll for David Duke's 1996 Senate run, but the campaign didn't amount to much.
Jim was apparently the campaign press secretary and director of media relations.
But the only news story I can find that looks like it was placed by a press secretary is the one announcing he'd been hired for the position.
So maybe he wasn't very good at it.
Jim Stone passed away in early 2012.
And in 2013, the now-widowed Monica Stone sold their home in Mandeville, Louisiana, and returned to her hometown of Kempton Park in South Africa.
Back in South Africa, she operates a charitable organization called the Living Waters Foundation.
And interviews in recent years always include a request for donations.
She helps orphans, you see, but only white ones.
She's quite meticulous about it.
In 2015, a fellow South African neo-Nazi recommended donating to Monica's charity, writing on his blog, quote, she's a hardcore national socialist.
She only gives money to white children.
If she gives money to someone and she later sees them helping non-whites, then she cuts off the monies.
I went with her in 2015 to visit an orphanage in Pretoria, the only one run by a white woman who was doing it only for white children.
But when Monica later found out that the woman was also helping blacks, she cut off all donations, which I agree with.
That man, Jan Lamprecht, was arrested in 2021 for violating a court order to stop harassing a Jewish professor.
But that's neither here nor there.
I can't quite nail down the specifics, but it seems Jan and Monica had a falling out sometime after 2015.
But for the most part, in a movement constantly ripped apart by personal feuds and power struggles and accusations of betrayal, I can't find a single bad word about Monica Huggetstone.
I scraped together every existing record of her involvement in white supremacist groups from 1979 when she first met Eugene Terreblanche through the present day, covering nearly 50 years, intersecting with multiple bombing campaigns, international arms smuggling rings, and attempted coups.
She turned state's witness against her own boyfriend in 1980.
And I dug through dozens of ancient blogs in multiple languages.
And I can't find a single Nazi with a bad word to say about her.
And I think that's a first.
There's always beef somewhere.
I will have to circle back at some point to talk about the Swedenders, maybe another time.
They're a more recent Afrikaner nationalist group founded in the early 2000s.
And they publicly shy away from being associated with obvious neo-Nazi imagery.
But the group is explicitly and completely centered around the Van Rensburg prophecies.
They exist to prepare their members for the coming race war.
And spoiler alert, in case I don't get back to the Swedenders anytime soon, their spokesman, Simon Roche, spent most of the summer of 2017 traveling the United States, including attending the Unite the Right rally here in Charlottesville.
And back in that time period, they got into a little bit of hot water in the movement.
There were allegations that Simon Roche had been pocketing donations from other white nationalists.
It was a bit of a scandal.
And in 2018, he appeared on an American neo-Nazi podcast to address the issue.
And at some point during the show, he was ambushed by Jan Lamprecht, who is a rival of his.
And it got a little heated and it was a very lengthy, uncomfortable interview.
But at the end of all that, Simon Roche still spoke glowingly of Monica, calling her someone with an impeccable reputation and recommending that if after all of this, you're still not comfortable donating to the Swedenders, you should donate to Monica.
Let me ask you this.
Are there other groups that you think are reputable that are doing good work in South Africa that if anybody has questions about, if there are people who have questions about the integrity of Sidelanders, who would they want to support instead of you?
I would recommend that they support somebody like Monica Stone, a very distinguished, decent lady who has fought for white nationalism.
She's probably a bit too right-wing for me, but she's a marvelous human being.
So she's a bit too right-wing for the race war guy.
But she's a marvelous human being, he says.
She's 81 years old now.
And she spent her entire life in the orbit of assassins and mercenaries and war criminals and bombers and rapists and torturers and terrorists and death squad leaders and just run-of-the-mill neo-Nazis with fantasies of racial holy war.
Her religion is quite literally one of blood.
Her god is the vengeful god of Blood River.
This story is over.
The part of it that was in the past, anyway.
But I can't move on without making the consequences clear.
This is still happening.
We'll leave Monica Huggettstone behind at long last because she was just the backstory.
No, now we live in a world where these once-fringe ideas are front-page news at outlets with White House press credentials.
Now, in 2025, the President of the United States wants to welcome as refugees these people with their apocalyptic visions of race war and mass extermination.
These people who worship the God of the Blood River.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
And what is this?
How is that not a story we all know?
What's this?
Where is that?
Why is it wet?
Boy, do we have a show for you?
From Smartless Media, Campside Media, and big money players comes Crimeless.
Join me, Josh Dean, investigative journalist, and me, Rory Scoville, comedian, as we celebrate the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
We'll look into some of the silliest ways folks have broken the laws.
Honestly, it feels more like a high-level prank than a crime.
Who catfishes a city and meets some memorable anti-heroes?
There are thousands of angry horny monkeys.
Clap if you think she's a witch and it freaks you out.
He has x-ray vision.
How could I not follow him?
Honestly, I gotta follow him.
He can see right through me.
Listen to Crimeless on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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.
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.
Who would you call if the unthinkable happened?
I just fail and start a screaming.
If you lost someone you loved in the most horrific way.
I said we shot 22 times.
The police, right?
But what if the person you're supposed to go to for help is the one you're the most afraid of?
This dude is the devil.
He's a snake.
He'll hurt you.
I got you.
I'm Nikki Richardson, and this is The Girlfriends, Untouchable.
Detective Roger Golupski spent decades intimidating and sexually abusing black women across Kansas City, using his police badge to scare them into silence.
This is the story of a detective who seemed above the law until we came together to take him down.
I told Roger Goloopski, I said, you're going to see my face till the day that you die.
Listen to the girlfriends Untouchable on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You know, we always say new year, new me, but real change starts on the inside.
It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals.
Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of checking in on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season whole and empowered.
New year, real you.
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In February of 2025, the President of the United States announced, first by social media and then by executive order, that a white nationalist conspiracy theory is now official foreign policy.
No longer relegated to racist message boards and poorly attended rallies, the idea that white South Africans are being violently persecuted is now center stage.
In the months since, the administration has doubled down on this stance.
Foreign aid to South Africa has been suspended.
Their ambassador has been expelled.
And now State Department officials have begun interviewing white South Africans who have applied for refugee resettlement in the United States.
Apartheid ended in South Africa 31 years ago.
But it turns out some of the same people who fought tooth and nail to keep it back then are still around.
And they haven't stopped fighting.
i'm molly conger and this is weird little guys you know i don't like current events
I really prefer to root around in the past and piece together the odds and ends of the life and crimes of someone who's done hurting other people.
I had a great time writing five episodes about Dennis Mahon, a man whose career as a white supremacist activist spanned decades.
But when it came time to write a follow-up episode, I hated to have to tell you that even though Dennis will almost certainly die before he finishes prison sentence, the one he got for sending a bomb to the diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona, the current political climate finished what he started.
Republican politicians did what he couldn't do with that bomb, and they closed that office.
And we find ourselves in something of a similar position now.
These last few episodes have been a wild, sprawling narrative about white supremacist terrorism in South Africa in the final years of apartheid.
And I've learned a lot of history that I'd never been exposed to before, and I've really enjoyed digging my way out of some of these unexpected rabbit holes.
But it would be irresponsible of me to tell you such a long story and then leave you thinking that it was over.
That it ended in 1994.
That when apartheid ended, the international networks of right-wing extremists who'd done unspeakable things in its defense just faded away.
Because they didn't.
And they don't always need guns and bombs to get what they want.
So we'll end this mini-series where we started it.
The White House.
Back in February, when I started down this path, I had just read the executive order, the one titled, Addressing the Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa.
And the week that order was signed, Trump had offered some insight into what was going on in his head in this post on Truth Social.
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.
And that episode back in February goes into more detail about what he's getting at here.
South African President Cyril Ramaposa had recently signed the Expropriation Act into law.
There's a lot of misinformation and fear-mongering built around a very tiny kernel of truth in there.
As a quick refresher, the Expropriation Act does allow the government of South Africa to expropriate land.
That part's true.
But only under certain specific conditions, and it is fundamentally not really that different from what we call eminent domain here in the United States.
And that's a power that was given to our government by the Fifth Amendment.
There's no racial component to it.
Nobody's terrorizing white farmers.
There's no language at all in the Expropriation Act about race.
I spent probably too long trying to look for clues that would help me guess why he made that post on Truth Social on February 2nd.
Sometimes you can see a really clear, direct line between something the president says or does or posts online and the Fox News segment that he had just been watching.
And that episode from back in February makes what I think is a pretty good case for how Trump's ideas about what's going on in South Africa were formed back when he posted about it for the first time in 2018.
And back in 2018, he tweeted about South African land reform for the first time about 45 minutes after he heard about it on an episode of Tucker Carlson.
But on February 2nd, 2025, he made that Truth Social post while he was sitting on Air Force One, en route to DC after a weekend golfing in Florida.
His public schedule for that day doesn't give us much.
But he did post several times that evening about Fox News host Mark Levin.
And he posted an old clip from Levin's show, and he reposted one of Mark's old posts, and he posted, in all caps, watch Mark Levin tonight on Fox News 8 p.m. Eastern Great Show.
And Levin's show that evening doesn't seem to have touched on the issue of South Africa.
So honestly, I couldn't tell you how the idea got into his head that night after a long day on the golf course.
He posted it around 6.19 p.m.
And then 40 minutes later, as he's sitting on the tarmac after the plane landed, he reposted it.
And as he's leaving for the White House, a reporter asked him about the post.
So on Christopher's toll, you said that you were going to cut aid from South Africa.
Well, you plan to put aid across other African nations, and why South Africa?
No, it's only South Africa.
Terrible things are happening in South Africa.
The leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things.
So that's under investigation right now.
We'll make a determination.
And until such time as we find out what South Africa is doing, they're taking away land, they're confiscating land, and actually they're doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.
The far worse than that at the end of his remarks is almost certainly a reference to his belief in the white genocide conspiracy theory.
That false narrative that white farmers in South Africa are being murdered in enormous numbers.
And later that same week, in February of 2025, Donald Trump signed the executive order cutting off aid to South Africa.
And it also directed DHS and the State Department to, quote, promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees, escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.
And so, in conjunction with his other executive orders, ones that suspended all other refugee resettlement operations, this now puts white South Africans in a class all of their own.
They're the only people on earth who are so persecuted, who are suffering so terribly, that they are deserving of assistance from the United States.
And the executive order ignited a flurry of activity on the right, both in the United States and in South Africa.
Far-right talking heads rushed to book South African guests, and one man in particular was very happy to oblige.
In the last two months, Ernst Rutz has made the rounds.
He's been interviewed by Ben Shapiro, Matt Gates, Tucker Carlson, Jack Bisobic, and Jordan Peterson.
He's been on YouTube lives and shows that only exist on Twitter somehow.
He made an appearance on a show hosted by Ronaldo Krause, a South African YouTuber whose political career was stopped dead in its tracks last summer, just days after he was elected to parliament.
His own party stripped him of membership after a video serviced of him calling for the murder of all black people.
And he used both the American racial slur that you're probably familiar with and a South African equivalent.
And Rutz also gave an interminably long interview to a benign-sounding website called the White Papers Policy Institute.
But as it turns out, the woman interviewing him has a long history of affiliation with neo-Nazi groups.
And Ernst Rutz may sound familiar to you.
In 2018, he visited the United States in his capacity as the deputy CEO of the Afrikaner nationalist group Afroforum.
He met with federal government officials and right-wing think tanks.
Notably, he spent a day at the Heritage Foundation.
He took meetings with staffers for Ted Cruz.
And during that visit, he appeared on an episode of the Tucker Carlson show.
Back when it was actually on TV.
Back when it was appointment television for the president.
And you might think that Ernst Rutz would have nothing but praise for Trump's executive order.
Right?
He's finally getting this message out.
Someone in power is finally talking about this epidemic of white farmers being murdered in South Africa.
And he is, he's grateful for that, sure.
But he doesn't think Trump's proposed solution is the right one.
Here's what he said when he sat down with Tucker Carlson at the end of February.
And one part of it says that they will grant refugee status to Afrikaners if they want to go to the U.S. Which I don't think, in all fairness, we're really grateful for the public stance taken by the U.S.
And in a certain sense, they haven't gone far enough.
But in a certain sense, I don't think the granting of refugee status is much of a solution.
Some people will take that up, but that's why I told you the story of the Battle of Blood River and the vow.
We are culturally very, very attached to South Africa.
And here he is telling Jordan Peterson the same thing a few weeks later.
That's why I'm so grateful that we spoke about the history part at first.
our concern is that if we just leave the country, our culture dissolves and our communal identity dissolves and we become Americans or whatever.
And so, well, plus the entire country descends into like lawlessness, chaos, and everyone dies.
Yep.
Right.
Because if all the white South African farmers leave, that's 100% what will happen.
Ernst Rutz is a nationalist.
He doesn't want to leave South Africa.
He isn't being persecuted for his whiteness.
He just misses the days when white minority rule meant the persecution of everyone else.
And in both of those interviews, Rutz spoke at some length about the importance of the Day of the Vow, about the covenant between God and the Afrikaner granting them that land.
They can't leave.
Men like Ernst Rutz are still standing on the banks of the Blood River, waiting for God to sweep all the Africans out of their way.
And ahead of that whirlwind press junket in February and March, Ernst Rutz actually resigned from his position as head of the Afrikaner Foundation.
And that was an initiative under the umbrella of the Afrikaner interest group, the Solidarity Movement.
And Rutz says that he hadn't officially worked for Afriforum since 2023.
But Afraforum and the Afrikaner Foundation are both just part of the Solidarity Movement.
These are just facets of the same organization.
And so now in February of 2025, he no longer works for any of these organizations.
He no longer works for Solidarity at all.
Because it was Rutz who got the organization into some pretty hot water.
Well, they're saying that we've, the organizations that I was involved with at the time have committed treason.
They've been charged for treason.
You've been charged with treason?
Yeah.
For what?
For speaking, well, among others, for me speaking with you about what's happening.
That's treason?
Yeah, because it's bad-mouthing your country.
I mean, we've all made mistakes at work.
But I can't imagine making such a mess of things that somebody gets charged with treason.
And he's watering that down a little bit, right?
The accusation isn't just that he's bad-mouthing the country.
I'm sure it's legal in South Africa to say negative things about the nation.
But almost immediately after Trump announced that he was cutting off aid to South Africa, a lot of South Africans blamed Afroforum.
Members of McNonto Osizwe rallied outside of the police station in Cape Town and announced that they were filing a criminal complaint against Afroforum, accusing them of treason.
And just a quick note for those who aren't up to date on their South African current events, I wasn't.
McOnto Asizwe is now its own political party.
It does share a name with the group that functioned as the paramilitary arm of the African National Congress during the last decades of apartheid, but as of a few years ago, it is a political party.
So, just for clarity.
The MK Party vehemently condemns the treasonous actions of Afri Forum, which has deliberately lobbied foreign powers to act against the sovereignty and economic interests of South Africa.
Their betrayal is nothing less than an act of economic sabotage, a direct assault on our nation's independence.
For many South Africans, it was obvious.
Trump didn't come up with this idea on his own.
There is a straight line between Afroforum's trips to the United States, their appearances in American right-wing media, their collaboration with American think tanks, their English-language propaganda videos targeting American audiences on American platforms, and the end result, which was this shift in U.S. foreign policy.
Even President Ramaposa has gone on record blaming Afroform and Solidarity for spreading the lies about South Africa that led to Trump's executive order.
He called the group unpatriotic in remarks before the National Assembly in March.
Fact, whether that is treasonous or not, is a matter that obviously our law enforcement agencies need to look at.
The National Prosecuting Agency needs to look at that.
But I take a dim view, in fact, a very negative view of what has ensued as they run around the world, badmouthing their own country and putting their country into disrepute, not by things that are happening, but by misinformation.
The matter has been confirmed to be under investigation, but there has been no decision announced by the National Prosecuting Authority as to whether the case will proceed.
When Ramaposa gave those remarks on March 11th, 2025, he wasn't just talking about Ernst Rutz going on Tucker Carlson.
Rutz had, in fact, already resigned from Solidarity by the time he returned to the U.S. this year.
But in late February, a delegation from Solidarity paid a visit to the United States.
They posted quite a few videos of themselves outside various government buildings in Washington, D.C.
They posted some videos of them standing in lobbies of government buildings and one photo that appears to show the delegation touring the White House with visible visitors badges.
There are no photos of any members of the delegation that I could find that show them with any actual U.S. policymakers, but they did take a couple of selfies in front of a sign that says, Committee on Foreign Affairs.
One photo was taken outside the office of Senator Christopher Koons, a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and its Africa and Global Health Policy Subcommittee.
Their press releases about this visit don't name names, but they claim to have met with senior officials within the Trump administration during their visit.
There's no direct claim made that they met with the president himself, although one of them did post a cartoon-style drawing of the group that features a cartoon Trump standing with them in front of the White House, and that is perhaps meant to insinuate that they were able to secure an audience with the president.
But one member of the delegation posted something that is more interesting to me than a selfie at the Capitol building.
On February 27th, Jako Kleinhans wrote, Day three in Washington, D.C. Who influences U.S. government policy?
A complex network of individuals, organizations, and governmental and non-governmental structures work daily to develop U.S. government policy.
Recent policy decisions on the relationship with South Africa have been developed by a few key players at influential organizations, together with policy specialists in the White House and Congress.
The Solidarity Movement delegation currently visiting the USA met on day three with several of these influential people, with whom we have forged good relationships over the past few years, to discuss a way forward.
And underneath this wall of text, posted in AFRICONS, is a selfie.
Visible in the photo behind Yako is the entrance to the offices of the Heritage Foundation.
That conservative think tank has not, as far as I can tell, publicly commented on the recently surfaced allegations that they worked closely with South African military intelligence to craft propaganda campaigns during the latter years of apartheid.
South African news outlet the Daily Maverick did take extra care to note in their article that the Heritage Foundation has made no legal challenge to the 2021 book by a former South African policeman who claims that former Heritage Foundation president Edwin Fullner was often consulted for advice by South African intelligence operatives who ran the government's apartheid disinformation campaigns.
And if you can remember, all the way back to the first episode in this series, the first time Trump tweeted about South Africa, he was watching Tucker Carlson interview a policy analyst from the Heritage Foundation.
Just something to mull over, I guess.
And whoever it was that the delegation was able to meet with at the White House, that person received an official memorandum from Solidarity.
And they also posted that document to their website.
Much like Ernst Rutz, they're grateful to the Trump administration for raising awareness about the plight of the white South African.
But they too want the United States to use its power to pressure South Africa to bend to the will of whites, rather than simply offering those aggrieved white South Africans the opportunity to settle in the United States.
Much of the text of this memorandum reads pretty transparently as an attempt to smooth over the whole treason situation.
They emphasize repeatedly that they do not support Trump's decision to cut off humanitarian aid, and they urge Washington not to suspend the African Growth and Opportunity Act, a U.S. law that allows some African nations, including South Africa, tariff-free access to U.S. markets.
And as much as they appreciate Trump's offer to take Afrikaners as refugees, they want to stay.
One section of the memo reads, Although individuals may qualify for a resettlement program, the majority of Afrikaners will still remain in South Africa.
During the past 30 years, Afrikaners have begun to establish cultural infrastructure in South Africa so that we can still live here freely and safely in order for us to make a sustainable contribution toward the country and all its people.
This is being done under the banner of the Solidarity Movement, with Solidarity and Afroforum being the largest organizations.
Security structures, social structures, job structures, training structures, and cultural structures have been established.
All of this is being done without state support.
And at the bottom of that section, they make several recommendations.
They recommend the United States should, instead of offering refugee resettlement, offer direct aid to these Afrikaner communities, quote, to assist with community infrastructure protecting Afrikaners.
This includes security structures, social structures, job structures, training structures, and infrastructure to settle Afrikaners in vulnerable places in a concentrated manner.
So they're saying they want help moving all of the white people to a place in South Africa still.
They don't want to leave South Africa, but they need help moving all of the white people into a concentrated place.
So a place that's all white.
And that sounds kind of like a mini-ethno state, a Volkstadt, if you will, an island of apartheid and a sea of integration.
And that does in fact already exist.
And here's where I have to confess something to you.
I overlooked something, in retrospect, pretty obvious.
Remember I said a few minutes ago that Ernst Rutz had resigned from his position with Solidarity and his trip to the United States in March of 2025 was totally separate from this delegation.
Well, it might not have actually been that separate.
I mean, they flew here separately.
They were here during different weeks and they claimed to be from separate organizations.
Rutz was here in the United States with Just Strydem, the current CEO of Orania, a white separatist community in South Africa's northern Cape province.
Jako Kleinhans, the international liaison for Solidarity, who was here with that other delegation, he used to be the CEO of Irania.
He and his family live there.
His wife Magdalene was featured in a Guardian article about the community in 2019.
She runs the call center in Irania that recruits members and solicits donations.
So they're the same people.
The Venn diagram is a circle.
They present slightly different public faces.
I mean, Solidarity was allowed into the White House, while the delegation officially from Irania was stuck doing events like Wine Wednesday at the New York Young Republicans Club.
But it's sort of like how sometimes the name brand ketchup and the store brand ketchup are made at the same factory and they just package them in different bottles.
The two groups traveled the United States separately, a few weeks apart.
They met with slightly different crowds and marketed the message ever so slightly differently.
But ultimately, what they want is for the United States to officially recognize their 3.5 square mile whites-only town of 3,000 people as an autonomous state.
And in February, while that first delegation, the one from Solidarity, was in Washington, D.C., an American neo-Nazi group posted photos of their trip to South Africa.
A regional chapter within the Active Club network visited Irania, quote, to gain a deeper understanding of how whites can form intentional communities.
During the first week of March, the delegation from Solidarity finished out their trip in the United States with a visit to California.
Specifically, they went to Los Angeles.
More specifically, they had lunch with Joel Pollock, the editor-at-large of the far-right rag Breitbart.
After lunch, Pollock tweeted a photo captioned, just had lunch at a kosher restaurant owned by Steven Spielberg's mom with four gentlemen from Afroforum slash Solidarity.
The South African government is investigating them for treason for the crime of sharing their views with Americans.
The treason was delicious.
Okay, Joel, not to nitpick, and first of all, super cringe, but Steven Spielberg's mom is dead.
Leah Adler, Spielberg's mother, did open the restaurant, the Milky Way, in Los Angeles in 1977, but the restaurant closed after her death in 2017.
Her children reopened the restaurant in 2019, so it is still the same restaurant in the same place, but it isn't owned by a woman who's been dead for eight years.
But it's probably much more important that you know one other fact about this lunch.
At the time, in the first week of March of 2025, Joel Pollock was widely believed to be Trump's pick for ambassador to South Africa.
There'd been no official public nomination, but Pollock was out there telling people that and going on the news in South Africa to that effect.
And after lunch, Jako Kleinhans from Solidarity reposted that picture and offered his full-throated endorsement of Pollock's appointment as ambassador.
But barely two weeks after that lunch, Joel Pollock's chances of getting that job dropped to near zero.
Things were already a little dicey for him, considering he'd been publicly calling for sanctions against President Cyril Ramaposa personally, specifically because of South Africa's continued opposition to the genocide in Gaza.
But the nail in the coffin really seems to have been his direct personal involvement in the expulsion of South Africa's ambassador to the United States.
On March 14th, 2025, the United States of America expelled a foreign diplomat.
This sort of thing happens from time to time.
Article 9 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations establishes a pretty broad authority for this.
Quote, the receiving state may at any time and without having to explain its decision notify the sending state that the head of the mission or any member of the diplomatic staff of the mission is persona non-grata.
It wasn't uncommon during the Cold War, usually after allegations of espionage, whether real or imagined.
And it can be a way for a country to send a political message to say to a country, we're kind of upset with you right now.
Even if the diplomatic staff themselves haven't done anything wrong.
Several countries expelled Syrian diplomats in 2012 in response to the murder of civilians in Haula.
In 2021, President Erdogan declared diplomats from 10 countries persona non grata in Turkey after those countries' governments had called for the release of an imprisoned Turkish activist.
Several Israeli diplomats were expelled from Britain and Australia in 2010 after both countries discovered that Israel had used forged British and Australian passports to carry out assassinations in Dubai.
In 2011, the U.S. ambassador to Ecuador was expelled after Wikileaks revealed that she believed President Correa had been aware of corruption within his police force.
And the United States responded by expelling Ecuador's ambassador in return.
And sometimes it's not even political.
The decision may be the result of personal misconduct by a member of the diplomatic staff.
With some rather specific exceptions, ambassadors and their staff have diplomatic immunity.
They can't be prosecuted, but they can be expelled.
So for example, in 2017, New Zealand had to expel an American diplomat after the man got into some kind of violent physical altercation and the American government refused to waive his diplomatic immunity so that he could be prosecuted.
In 2012, the Philippines expelled a Panamanian diplomat accused of rape.
Honestly, a lot of the examples of this that I found were related to lower-level embassy staff who got drunk, got a DUI, got into fights, or committed some kind of sex crime.
There have also been more than a few cases of diplomats accused of using their position to facilitate drug trafficking.
So it does happen.
It doesn't even seem particularly rare, especially if you're including these examples of lower-level embassy staff who maybe got in a bar fight.
But it doesn't usually happen by tweet.
Let's work backwards.
At 4:42 p.m. Eastern Time on March 14, 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted, South Africa's ambassador to the United States is no longer welcome in our great country.
Ibrahim Rasul is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates POTUS.
We have nothing to discuss with him, and so he is considered persona non-grata.
That last bit is in all caps, which is why I had to yell it.
And for the record on that read, I did pronounce Ibrahim Rasul's name, Ibrahim Rasul, which is his name.
But in this, I guess, official State Department tweet, Marco Rubio did misspell his name as Emrahim Rasool.
So take that as you will.
But Rubio's tweet included a link to a Breitbart article, the headline of which is, South African Ambassador Ibrahim Rasul, colon, Trump is leading global white supremacist movement.
The article, written by Joel Pollock, had gone up earlier that same day.
Article might not be the right word for it.
I don't know what you call what appears on Breitbart's website.
But Pollock only actually wrote six sentences in the original piece.
But those sentences frame the actual content.
It's a video clip accompanied by a transcript of the video of statements made by South African Ambassador Ibrahim Rasul during a webinar hosted by the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, a South African think tank just called Mistra for short.
What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency at home.
And I think I've illustrated abroad as well.
He was speaking to a small group of academics.
And Rasul is talking about the ways in which American politics have changed.
He later explained to a reporter, my remarks were speaking to South African intelligentsia, intellectuals, political leaders, and others to alert them to a changed tradition in the United States that the old way of doing business with the U.S. was not going to work.
Now, I watched most of that webinar.
I'm not going to lie to you, it's two hours long.
I didn't watch all of it.
I watched most of that webinar.
But I watched all of the parts where Ibrahim Razul is speaking.
And nothing he said felt shocking to me.
He wasn't being hysterical or hyperbolic.
He's not tearing his hair and gnashing his teeth.
He had some interesting observations about the way the white South African functions as a rhetorical dog whistle for white victimhood within Trump's narrative, but he didn't say anything wild.
He's not calling for violence or talking about radical shifts in policy.
He's a diplomat, right?
He was just making correct observations about the political climate that it is his job to navigate.
But those remarks, with Joel Pollack's six sentences of commentary, made their way to Marco Rubio within hours.
And by that afternoon, Rubio had declared Rasul persona non grata and ordered him to leave the United States.
When Rasul arrived home in South Africa on March 23rd, he issued a statement.
He's standing by what he said about the Trump administration.
And his four-page statement has some real bangers.
It goes pretty hard as far as diplomatic statements go.
Quote, when we have been the victims of apartheid and saw how it cannot tolerate free speech, an independent judiciary, or even peaceful dissent, then we can smell the birth of chauvinism globally, sense the fear it engenders, hear its words, and see its signs.
And Rasul says that, quote, in meetings with senators and congress members and in the weekly forums we addressed of think tanks and business associations and in the few meetings with the administration, we were forced to discuss seriously how Afrikaners could be refugees in the USA, while ANC leaders are threatened with personal sanctions.
We had to avoid arguing how there was a genocide in Israel.
But diplomacy is not the art of lying.
It is the art of telling the truth gently and constructively.
Pollock seized on one line of that statement in particular, a parenthetical mention of an anonymous participant in the webinar, who Rasul calls one ex-South African anti-intellectual hatchet man hiding under a pseudonym.
And that's obviously a reference to Joel Pollock.
Rasool is implying that Pollock himself not only joined that webinar live, but participated in it without disclosing his name or affiliation.
And in this case, his affiliation would be editor of American conservative website Breitbart.com and also current contender for American Ambassador to South Africa.
Because during the Q ⁇ A portion, the moderator read submitted questions out loud.
And when he did so, he read the question asker's name.
And when the question was from a reporter, the name of the outlet.
The very first question, though, was from Anonymous.
First, because I'd like to start with something funny.
An anonymous comment for Ambassador Rasool.
Ambassador Rasool's analysis of the US may be correct.
However, he's doing South Africa no service by speaking this way.
His job is to represent South African interests in Washington, not to be a left-wing militant, Ambassador Rasool.
Now, can I tell you for sure that that question was submitted by Joel Pollock?
Of course not.
But that appears to be what Ibrahim Rasool is implying in his statement, that he believes that.
Pollock tweeted a screenshot of that portion of the statement and said, Ex-Ambassador Ibrahim Rasul believes he was done in by a spy.
Good luck hunting.
I watched his remarks on YouTube after they had been publicly available at Mistra's channel for hours.
Is incompetence a defense to defamation in South African law?
So Pollock is in this tweet insinuating that he could sue Ibrahim Rasool for defamation for implying that Pollock was in the webinar.
I don't know anything about South African law, but I don't think in an American court, a claim of defamation would hold up because he didn't actually say Joel Pollock's name.
I guess if Joel Pollock identifies publicly as an anti-intellectual hatchet man, he's welcome to make that argument in court, but I digress.
Because back to his actual claim.
He's saying he wasn't in the webinar live.
He watched the replay on YouTube hours after the event ended.
And the problem with that is that it isn't true.
The webinar was live.
You could pre-register and participate in the Zoom meeting, or you could just watch it live on YouTube.
And the event was from 10 a.m. to noon, Johannesburg time.
And that means that it started at 4 a.m. here on the East Coast and 1 a.m. in California, which is where Joel Pollock lives.
And I'm reasonably certain he was indeed in California that day because the night before he posted a photo of the sunset and that morning he posted a photo of the sunrise.
And both photos were posted at the time that the sun rose and set in the part of California where he lives.
And there are visible palm trees.
So when Joel Pollock tweeted the link to his article at 8.45 a.m. Eastern Time, that's 5.45 a.m. where he lives.
And the source code for the webpage shows that the article went live at 8.35 a.m. Eastern.
Again, that's 5.35 a.m. Pacific.
And that's two and a half hours after the event ended.
Those six sentences didn't take two hours to write, but he would have had to download the entire video, cut the sections he wanted to post, transcribe those sections, and get everything onto the website.
The other problem, though, is not how long it would have taken to cut the clips.
It's that he could not have watched a two-hour video and then written the article if he didn't start watching the video until, quote, hours after the event ended and the final video was available for playback online.
An op-ed written by the director of the think tank that hosted the event takes aim at Pollock, arguing that it was no accident that his article made its way to the White House so quickly.
Quote, Rasul has been articulating these views in other interactions with U.S. audiences.
The difference in this case is that Joel Pollock at Breitbart News, himself campaigning to be U.S. ambassador in South Africa, selectively quoted from Rasul's presentation deliberately to incite the U.S. administration.
But Joel Pollock got what he wanted.
Kind of.
He got Ibrahim Rasul expelled from the United States.
Got him fired.
Ibrahim Rasul isn't the ambassador to the United States anymore.
It's a bit of a monkey's paw situation for Joel Pollock, though.
The whole affair ended up ruining his own ambitions of becoming an ambassador.
Within days of all this going down, Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters Party vowed that they would block Pollock from entering South Africa at all if he was appointed ambassador.
And they said that they could ensure President Ramaposo wouldn't accept the appointment.
A presidential spokesman was a little more diplomatic about this, but they did go on the record that the president was concerned about the possibility of Pollock being appointed ambassador because, quote, he is engaged in a very divisive and very damaging manner towards South Africa and South Africa-related issues.
By March 26, just 12 days after Pollock's post cost Ambassador Rasul his job, it was clear that he'd cost himself the ambassador job too.
Trump posted on Truth Social that he would be nominating Brent Bozell as the United States ambassador to South Africa.
Brent Bozell is not a better choice.
There's a lot of history behind that name, especially considering he shares it with his father, Leo Brent Bozel II.
He was William F. Buckley's best friend and Joseph McCarthy's speechwriter.
And then there is, of course, his son, Leo Brent Bozel IV, who was convicted of five felonies before getting pardoned along with all of the other January 6 rioters.
And we can't get into all that.
Not today.
The thing you might be interested to know about Leo Brent Bozel III is that he pretty actively opposed the idea of ending apartheid.
And not just as a casual private opinion, this wasn't an ugly thought he was having at home by himself.
No, in 1987, he was the head of the National Conservative Political Action Committee.
And in that capacity, he signed on as a coalition partner for a group called the Coalition Against ANC Terrorism.
And that year, the group hosted a summit to oppose a meeting between the U.S. Secretary of State and Oliver Tambo, who was at the time the leader of the African National Congress.
And speakers at the summit that they held included policy analysts from groups like the Heritage Foundation.
They also brought in a South African political activist named John Gogatya.
Gogatya was the founder and leader of a political organization in South Africa.
It was, allegedly, a group of black moderates who opposed multiracial democracy.
Gogatya actually made several trips to the United States to lobby against U.S. sanctions on the apartheid regime.
He did turn out to be employed by South African military intelligence, but you probably already guessed that.
That same year, 1987, Bozel produced a series of television commercials urging Americans to write to the White House to express their support for the Nicaraguan Contras.
Before the commercials were released, Bozell attended a screening of the videos with his special guest, Death Squad leader Adolfo Calero.
So there's definitely some baggage there for Bozel.
The South African party that he was calling terrorists in 1987 holds the presidency right now.
Cyril Ramaposa, the current president of South Africa, was one of the African National Congress's negotiators during the talks that ended apartheid.
While there was some public uncertainty as to whether Ramaposa would admit Pollock as an ambassador, I haven't seen any speculation that the president would refuse to accept Bozell.
But honestly, once Trump posted that online that he was going to nominate Bozel, there was not a lot of follow-up to that.
So I guess we'll have to wait and see if he's even confirmed.
Because among the countless problems created every day by the current administration is this lack of follow-up.
It seems like every day the president just fires off some half-baked demand that doesn't really have any clear force of law or plan for implementation.
And maybe some government office is working on implementing the new policy and maybe they aren't.
It's hard to say.
That executive order back in February called for the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security to prioritize humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program for Afrikaners.
And then a month later, on March 7th, he posted on Truth Social, Any farmer with family from South Africa seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety will be invited to the United States of America with a rapid pathway to citizenship.
This process will begin immediately.
A few weeks later, the website for the U.S. Embassy in South Africa posted a very generic set of FAQs about the refugee admissions program.
But it doesn't have any information specific to this program or any particular timeline.
It just directs those who are interested in inquiring about the program to send a message to a State Department email address, PretoriaPRMINFO.
And the PRM there is the abbreviation for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration.
So at the very least, we know the State Department set up an email address for this.
And a few days after that page went up, the New York Times reported that they had obtained documents outlining a plan that the administration was calling Mission South Africa.
And phase one of the plan was already underway.
The State Department had dispatched teams to convert vacant office space in Pretoria for use by U.S. officials who are going to go over there and review the over 8,000 applications that had already been received.
And then last week, on April 24th, Reuters reported that U.S. refugee officers had in fact flown to Pretoria to begin interviewing the applicants whose applications were successfully reviewed.
And they report that at least 30 Afrikaners who had applied for refugee resettlement have had their applications approved.
The sources are all unnamed, and the White House and the embassy declined to comment.
Anonymous Department of Homeland Security employees told Reuters that applicants who claim to have been persecuted by black South Africans had gained preliminary approval.
Another employee told the outlet, I imagine some will be denied as we do in all cases, but I think there is administrative pressure to approve these.
The article is careful to note that they attempted to and were unable to verify the stories of persecution that were shared with them by several of the applicants.
And the article ends with a quote from the only person who gave their name, a woman named Katya Beden.
Beden works with a very newly formed organization called AmeriConers.
According to their website, their mission is to assist South Africans in navigating this process and successfully move to the United States as refugees.
The homepage has a very helpful set of FAQs.
Here are basics like, do I need a visa?
Do I need a lawyer?
And they say no on both of those.
You don't need that.
It's going to be easy.
They assure the reader that, of course, you can take your pets with you.
The job market is great there and you don't need any vaccinations.
My favorite question, though, is, will I have to prove persecution?
And the answer is no, you don't have to prove it.
Quote, no, you don't.
This requirement only occurs when an individual slash group initiates the refugee status request where the circumstances in the problem country are unknown.
In the South Africa case, the U.S. is not only aware of the racial prejudice towards minorities, but President Trump himself has laid out the case to that effect.
So there you have it.
This is the most obvious and clear-cut case of persecution that has ever existed in human history.
People who are fleeing active genocides, active war zones, have to do this.
But if you're a white person in South Africa, it's very obvious that you are suffering, so don't even bother.
And the site assures prospective refugees that this program isn't just for farmers.
Even though Trump seems to have been motivated by the twin boogeymen of farm murders and farm seizures, issues that, even if they were real, would only affect farmers.
But the site assures the reader that all Afrikaners are eligible.
Guidance from the administration has been muddled and rare and contradictory.
In several of his comments, Trump is definitely using the word farmers.
But in the executive order, he does use the word Afrikaners.
A statement from a State Department official used the language, descendants of settlers being abused by the government.
And a State Department document just says, disfavored minorities.
And it sounds like everyone is just trying to avoid saying white people.
And I guess that's good news for Katya Beden, that woman who works for the Americaners website.
She was wearing a Make America Great Again hat when she showed up at the embassy for her interview, but she isn't a farmer.
According to her personal website, she is a self-love coach.
For just $200 an hour, You can call Katya on Zoom for a one-on-one faith-based trauma recovery session to heal from your toxic relationships.
It's audio only, though.
She is not going to turn on the camera.
Not even if you buy the $2,000 12-week self-love journey mentoring package.
Aside from Beden, everyone Reuters spoke to declined to be named in the article.
So it's hard to sort out how many people went in for interviews, what their stories are, if they're all sincere.
But I did find one woman on Facebook who has been posting in multiple groups for Afrikaners interested in moving to the United States.
And she actually started posting about this a few days before the New York Times broke the story that U.S. officials had begun conducting the interviews in Pretoria.
So I'm inclined to believe she is talking about a real thing that happened because she couldn't have pulled this from the news.
So a few days before that story broke, a woman named Annalee posted, Hi everybody.
My husband and I just finished our preliminary interview with the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria.
From what I understand, the interviewers were delegates slash representatives of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, U.S. Department of State, just sent to South Africa for this week's interviews, traveling back to the U.S. tonight.
She stated in our invitational email that this interview was to collect information on individuals' experience, not for official application.
She was very polite, asked just a few basic questions, then spent most of the 90 plus minutes asking, listening, and typing our life experiences and instances where slash when we were affected, deprived, persecuted, or wronged due to our race.
A lot of detail was asked.
Most of the focus was on these specific experiences.
And she goes on to say that she doesn't have much more information, but she was told that she'll hear from Homeland Security in the coming weeks and that officers from the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program will be arriving in South Africa sometime soon.
Annalie and her husband do not appear to be farmers.
Her husband is a real estate agent.
They have several adult children and they appear to be financially secure enough to enjoy the occasional international vacation.
But I think it's really interesting that she noted how fixated that State Department employee was on collecting anecdotes about white persecution.
They spent most of that hour and a half long interview trying to get them to talk about times where they'd experienced anti-white racism.
And then just last week, on April 25th, Katya Beden, that employee of the AmeriConnects Network, tweeted that the first South African families approved for resettlement in the United States will arrive here, quote, next week.
Which, if she's telling the truth, would mean that they could already be here as you're listening to this.
The administration is still not offered any clear explanation of how the process works or if it's already underway.
So it's possible she's making that up to keep people hopeful, to keep them going to her website.
But it's equally possible that the Trump administration plucked a couple of the most racist families in South Africa and just put them on a plane to Georgia or something.
We don't know.
Will Trump follow through on any part of this?
Hard to say.
There is so much more to say about this story, especially because turns out it isn't over.
But I know this story has been going on for too long because I'm starting to recognize the words when I open a webpage that's in Afrikaans.
I had imagined a much tidier ending to this story.
One that I poured two months and more than 50,000 words into.
But to be quite honest with you, I watched way too much Trucker Carlson this week, and I'm trying to have a wedding in a couple of days.
I won't be back with brand new full-length episodes for the next two weeks, but I am going to try to get something together so that there's something for you on your feed while I'm gone, so you won't miss me too much.
So be good to each other.
And please, don't do anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Norly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gigan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
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.
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.
Hey, everybody, it's Michelle Williams, host of checking in on the Black Effect Podcast Network.
You know, we always say new year, new me, but real change starts on the inside.
It starts with giving your mind and your spirit the same attention you give your goals.
And on my podcast, we talk mental health, healing, growth, and everything you need to step into your next season whole and empowered.
New year, real you.
Listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Have you ever listened to those true crime shows and found yourself with more questions than answers?
Who catfishes a city?
Is it even safe to snort human remains?
Is that the plot of Footloo's?
I'm comedian Rory Scoville, and I'm here to tell you, Josh Dean and I have a new podcast that celebrates the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals.
It's called Crimeless, a true crime comedy podcast.
Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I know he has a reputation, but it's going to catch up to him.
Gabe Ortiz is a cop.
His brother Larry, a mystery Gabe didn't want to solve until it was too late.
He was the head of this gang.
Took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it.
When Larry's killed, Gabe must untangle a dangerous past, one that could destroy everything he thought he knew.
Listen to the Brothers Ortiz on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.