Misinformation channels to the Oval Office

News outlets have been calling it an ambush. Excuse me, turn the lights down. Turn the lights down and just put this on. It's right behind you.

At the White House this past week, an Oval Office meeting between President Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa that began cordially took a turn when Trump started to play a video. which showed a row of hundreds of white crosses along a country road. Right here burial sites over a thousand of white farmers Trump told the South African president every cross was the burial site of a murdered white farmer in his country

This was not true. The footage was from a demonstration following the deaths of two people killed on their farm. Their killers were convicted and sent the truth has not stopped president trump from trying to bolster the false claim that there was a genocide happening against white farmers in south africa but you do allow them

To take land. No, no, no, no, to allow them to take land. Nobody can take land. When they take the land, they kill the white farmer. And when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them. This false narrative of a white genocide in South Africa has been promoted by a fringe group of right-wing Afrikaner.

In 2018, one of them appeared on the Tucker Carlson show on Fox News. I thought the whole point of the new South Africa and the reason the rest of us were excited to see it in 1994 take shape is because it rejected racial discrimination. And yet the government is now embracing it or am I missing something? No, in a free and civilized society we don't take people's stuff Again.

There's no proof of a white genocide in South Africa. NPR's Michelle Martin recently spoke with South African journalist Reedy Klobby. There is no unique crime directed at white people that has a race lens south africa has an unacceptably high crime rate the majority of victims of murder in south africa are black men Nor has the country seized the lands of white South Africans. Here's journalist Kate Bartlett reporting for NPR.

More than 30 years after the end of apartheid, white South Africans, who account for over 7% of the population here, still own the vast majority of commercial farmland. South Africa passed a controversial law in January allowing the potential expropriation of land without compensation in some circumstances. But contrary to Trump's allegations, zero land has been seized. And yet the Trump administration granted refugee status to 59 Afrikaners last week, with more expected in the future.

Consider this. This is not the first time that a falsehood that began on the fringes of the right wing made its way to the Trump White House. Coming up, I'm going to unpack how that happens. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. I'm Tanya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air. At a time of sound bites and short attention, Our show is all about the deep dive. We do long-form interviews with people Film, books, TV, music, and journalism. Here our guests open up.

you've never heard before Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and... This is Fresh Air contributor Anne-Marie Baldonado. I talked with actor Cole Escola about their hit Broadway play, Oh Mary. Cole plays an unhinged alcoholic Mary Todd Lincoln, who's an aspiring cabaret performer. If that makes no sense, that's part of the point. You can find my interview on the Fresh Air podcast.

On NPR's Throughline, witnesses were ending up dead. How the hunt for gangster Al Capone launched the IRS to power. Find NPR's Throughline wherever you get your podcasts. It's Consider This from NPR. President Trump's spreading of this false claim that South Africa is perpetrating a genocide against its white inhabitants It's just the latest example of misinformation making its way from corners of the internet into presidential statements or even policy.

To talk more about this dynamic, we are joined by NPR's Lisa Hagan. She covers how once-fringed beliefs go mainstream. Welcome. Hi, Scott. So let's start with the claims that there is a genocide of white South... which didn't come out of nowhere. No, what we're seeing is the result of an activist effort that's been underway since Trump's first term. In South Africa itself, the arguments you heard from Trump come from a small, fairly fringe group of right-wing Afrikaner.

In 2018, one of these lobbyists was featured on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News at the time. And hours later, Trump tweeted instructions to his secretary of state to look into... supposed anti-white discrimination and murder there. So the president has also obviously had a closer relationship with Elon Musk in recent years, who's from South Africa. And Musk has been promoting many of these same narratives we heard in the Oval Office.

And he's also complained for years about requirements in South Africa that companies like Musk's Starlink give 30% equity to historically disadvantaged groups. And there's a broader context here to this phrase of white genocide, right? Right. Quote-unquote, white genocide has been a mainstay of white power groups since the 1980s. And obviously, themes of black people posing a danger to whites are much, much older than that.

There's also a related strain of nostalgia and support for bygone apartheid regimes, for example, in Zimbabwe, that's become very popular among hard-right white supremacists. And this is a general pattern that we have seen over and over again, where if you are somebody who consumes news from mainstream and legacy news outlets, you are just totally bewildered by what the president and his allies are talking about. Where do many of these claims and narratives come from?

Yeah, it shouldn't really be a surprise at this point. Donald Trump has benefited for years from an extremely devoted ecosystem of media figures that range from you know, comparatively more mainstream outlets like Fox News down through conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and social media. It's an ecosystem that produces and elevates some of its own favorite narratives and jumps into action to support false claims from Trump and his supporters.

And you see motivated actors like, say, pro-Russia propagandists or promoters of racist pseudoscience being welcomed into that media bloodstream all the time. The narratives that surface are the ones that are most useful to the people who make policy or influence it. Earlier this month, for instance, when Tucker Carlson again platformed a South African white genocide activist, he framed it as, quote, what happens when you take DEI seriously.

It's important to say sometimes these narratives are based on grains of truth, like cherry picking a fraction of murders in South Africa, or they're based on nothing more than some guy in an internet comment section claiming that immigrants are eating household pets. Which, of course, took over the presidential campaign for several weeks last year. How does this kind of information environment change the way that governing is done now?

You're seeing it every day. Trump's beliefs about South Africa are dictating refugee policy. Partisan narratives about diversity initiatives have become executive orders. Anti-transgender activism has led to banning books and school libraries, now possibly eliminating gender-affirming care from the national budget. Government officials also spend resources trying to prove theories and special counsel investigations are congressional hearings.

What about those moments, though, which do happen, where something that is initially framed by a lot of the mainstream media as a conspiracy theory does end up being somewhat valid? A lot of what we're talking about has fueled the breakdown of societal trust, where people get comfortable dismissing claims that end up having some actual merit. Like Hunter Biden's laptop actually ended up in a Delaware computer shop. And Joe Biden may have been declining earlier than many people wanted to believe.

Those rare moments then reinforce the entire cycle of conspiracist storytelling that insists you can't take anything accepted by the mainstream at face value. Are there any specific examples of when these conspiracy theories boomerang back on Trump and the others who promote them from government purchase? You know, there are fewer significant examples of that than you might think.

There can definitely be uncomfortable moments where you get some social media grumbling about a government official contradicting a false narrative they've promoted in the past, like very recently, FBI officials, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. told a Fox News interviewer that Jeffrey Epstein did in fact kill himself. They've looked at the documents. And there was a moment of sort of shock about that.

Just like that example, more often than not, those moments either fade pretty quickly or you see the conspiracy media ecosystem instantly spawn more narratives that help believers ignore that. They just had to say that publicly, but they're still on our side secretly. That is NPR's Lisa Hagan. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Luis Clemens. Producer is Sammy Adams. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.

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