Historical Parallels of Racial Ideology

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I'm Mikeael Loinger On Monday, President Trump announced a proposed expansion to the refugee program to allow ten thousand more people into the country, up from a record low of seven thousand five hundred refugee admissions For context, before twenty seventeen, the average annual cap for Republican and Democratic administrations was ninety five thousandars But there's a caveat here, Trump's new ten thousand refugees will consist solely of Africaners, white South Africans, a group that the Trump administration claims faces racial persecution in their home country We reported on this story exactly a year ago when the first round of Africaners were on their way to these shores The first group of white South Africans granted refugee status by the Trump administration arrived in the U. S. Monday The group included forty nine Africaaners, which is an ethnic group in South Africa made up of descendants of European colonists. The United States. It really rejects the egregious persecution of people on the basis of race in South Africa. and we welcome these people to the United States. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landao last May, answering a question from the BBC about why Africaners and not people from, say, war zones, had been granted refugee status criteria are making sure that refugees did not pose any challenge to our national security and that they could be assimilated easily into our country And all of these folks who have just come in today have been carefully veted pursuant to assimilated easily. Right Multiple outlets at the time reported that one of these carefully vetted Africaners had posted on X in twenty twenty three that, quote, Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group This, despite a Department of Homeland Security policy, that anti Semitic activity on social media could lead to a rejected immigration request. But as we've been told, the safe refuge of Africaners is an urgent matter. It's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write about. President Donald Trump last May. Farmers are being killed They happen to be white But whether they're white or black makes no difference to me, but white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa. There's been a problem with violent crime in South Africa. Let's put that out there first. But this idea that white farm owners are particularly victimized doesn't play out if we look at the police statistics So where does this myth come from? Carlyn Holmes is a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she specializes in South African nationalism When I spoke to her last May, she had been tracking the years long PR campaign behind the white genocide narrative. A series of activist groups have really made this their central cause. There's a really easy way to make statistics look more powerful, and that's to mess around with who actually counts as a white farm owner? Who actually counts as the victims that they're concerned about? I read one piece in Al Jazeera Even looking at data provided by some of these Africanner advocacy groups, the supposed proof showed that Just about sixty farmers across all races are killed each year in a country where there are some nineteen thousand murders annually That doesn't make a strong case No, it doesn't Full time residents of commercial farms regardless of race are actually statistically significantly less likely to experience violent crime than their urban and periurban counterparts in South Africa These activist communities have foregrounded this idea of white victimization by picking out a very small number of stories and continually focusing on them. They tend to be stories with incredibly sympathetic victims. They say, look at this particularly horrifying case that happened in twenty eighteen. And it's like, well, okay, that was seven years ago Those folks were brought to trial, the people who perpetrated that They're all serving time, those that were convicted This is not misinformation in the way that we've traditionally thought about it, where we can correct it by saying, oh, but that's factually incorrect I can hold up every statistic in the world saying, you know, white people are not significantly more likely to be targeted. But the story has become so real that it has resulted in forty nine people leaving their home and coming to Texas We've made reference to some of these activist groups callall them white rights groups. Who are they? There's a lot of them. So we have groups like Afri Forum, we have groups like the Urania movement. We have more militant groups like the AWB They historically have focused on things like language rights and self defense training and neighborhood watch patrols and some would call it vigilante activity They've recently pivoted to specifically talking about rural security and quote unquote, farm murders Partially, I think because it's been so successful for them in the international arena And to advance the narrative of this disproportionate violence levied against them, some of these Africanon groups have pointed to a COSA anti apartheid song, which they say explicitly calls for the killing of white farmers. The South African courts have weighed in on this. Elon Musk and Marco Rubio have posted about it repeatedly on X Tell me about it D Bul Buno, right? Shoot the Bur is what that song is and it was a struggle song. It was part of the anti apartheid movement that this is a song that was sung in the context of an armed struggle against a white minority regime. So it's very controversial. It's sung sometimes in Posa, sometimes in Zulu. and it was particularly brought to the forefront by a politician by the name of Julius Maima He was then the leader of the ANC Youth League. He sung it at a rally, got a lot of people fired up about this. In twenty ten, the first time that made a lot of international headlines, there was also a farm killing of a far right Africanner leader, Eugene Terblanche. And so a lot of people sort of paired those two events and said, look This is evidence. this is a causal connection between singing the song and violence against white people. And it was ruled to be a form of hate speech in twenty ten, although that ruling was then overturned in twenty twenty two. other folks like Julius Milla who has now been kicked out of the ANC and has his own political party, has said this is a legitimate part of our struggle history, and we need to be able to honor the people that fought for our freedom Of course, the reason that we're speaking is that the Trump administration has elevated grievances and claims of some of these Africanonner groups, including Afr Forum How and when did they first get the president's year So in the first Trump administration, a lot of these white rights groups saw an opportunity. And so Affrey Forum, one of the major groups that have forwarded this idea of white victimhood, came to the United States. In twenty eighteen, they were wildly successful. They got meetings with people like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz They posted a photo on their social media of a meeting with John Bolton in the White House And in probably the biggest PR coup, they landed a sort of primeetime spot on Tucker Carlson's show Well, now a fascinating and significant story the media have all but ignored. an embattled minority of farmers, mostly African speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders. The Best thing that you can do to help us is to talk about this, to talk about it on public platforms and in that way, to continue to put pressure on the Ath Arican government. to tell theuth I agree In the wake of that Tucker Carlson interview, we have the first Trump tweet in twenty eighteen Trump writes that he's asked his seecretary of State, Mike Pompeo to closely study The South Africa land and farm seizures and the large scale killing of farmers What were they advocating for on this tour exactly So that's an interesting question because Aside from international attention they didn't necessarily have a policy prescription that was embedded in these tores. What they said is we need Tension, we need help Maybe we need some sort of international diplomatic pressure. We need possibly something like capacity building for the South African police forces fast forward to the present. policy did come out of this tour, ultimately. Yes, with the executive order that outlines this refugee status for Africanners The fascinating thing is that it was met with deep ambivalence by these activist communities that had worked so hard to put this issue item on the agenda of President Trump and his administration. Refugee status wasn't really on their wishlist. Not at all. they repeatedly said so since February. We want not to be refugees in another man's country. as the Irania movement say, if someone wants to help, help us here. And Strutz, the guy who was on Fox News with Tucker Carlson, was interviewed by the New York Times and he said, I'm not sure I know anybody that wants to be a refugee. We like America. We regard ourselves as friends of America But we want a future for our community here in the southern tip of the African continent. One of the current leaders of Afri Forum, Cali Creeel, said, quote, Africonners, let me be clear, cannot survive as a cultural community in the US or any other country. What they want is more power in South Africa. Exactly. And so interestingly, there was a song that Afri Forum produced in late twenty twenty four called The African ar Maxua, The Africaaner does this. The Afric Maxua And it's talking all about how we live here, we're from here, this is our home. this is where we speak our language. They're desperately trying to establish legitimacy in South Africa So the question is, what do you do When you've achieved this objective that you never set out to achieve that is wildly unpopular and you're still trying to operate in that country. These groups are sort of like a dog that caught a car, but they caught the car that they weren't chasing. They were trying to get attention. they were even trying to get sanctions. They were never trying to get refugee status. and now that they have it how that affects them domestically is a really big problem for them Another kind of lost in translation quality to all this is that people like Elon Musk, even Donald Trump, have been using the term white genocide to describe these exaggerated claims of violence against white farmers That term white genocide Ps pretty taboo in South Africa, right? And it's pretty taboo among the groups making some of these claims, No It is the term white genocide is a kind of third rail in South African politics. Afrey Fordam has very carefully walked a line. around never saying those words in that order And in fact, the only groups that are making genocide type claims are paramilitary groups in South Africa. They don't command a lot of public support But they exist. These most extreme claims come from a non resident population. And in fact, they primarily come from a non Africans population too. Elon Musk is not an Africaner He's an English South African Is it fair to say that white genocide is akin to the kind of white supremacist idea of the great replacement theory in the United States? Absolutely This sort of cross pollination of racist ideology between the United States and South Africa goes much further though than white supremacist forums It seems like every so often There will be a cataclysm of violence like Dyl Rof committing mass murder in Charleston,outh Carolina, wearing an apartheid era flag on his jacket And people will say What does that have to do with anything? And what I wanna say is that this conversation has been happening It's been happening for a century. The United States and South Africa have been intertwined sort of since South Africa became single country. And there is this attention by partarticularly a philanthropic class of Americans, people like Andrew Carnegie Who said what South Africa needs is the same thing that the US South needs. It needs a welfare state to lift up white people and it needs institutional segregation And so This took the form of a variety of laws in South Africa. So the Land Act the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, etcetera. And all of these were state efforts. to define a population of whites that would then be the beneficiaries of welfare state programs in the service of making sure that white people didn't quote fall below their racial station In what ways did South Africans look to Jim Crow era United States for inspiration on their end So one of those pieces of legislation that I had spoken about, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which was a bedrock of what was then the nascent apartheid government,