The White House Weighs in on White Genocide

were held that day and other cities certainly didn't. But a California Highway Patrol officer fell and scraped his knee trying to tackle a counter protester, which made the event national news with headlines like Occupy protesters clash with police officers injured. The arrests were reported by the Associated Press

in stories carried in newspapers around the country. The initial wire story opens with a cursory explanation of the underlying event, offering up the phrase a rally by a group so protesting violence by blacks against whites in South Africa, but news reports about the events focus on the men who were arrested, three members of Occupy Sacramento, part of the larger nationwide series of Occupy protests that had sprung up

around the country a few months earlier. In follow up stories about the arrests, officers say the event led them to reevaluate their strategy for confronting Occupy protesters, who they

describe as aggressive towards police. Initial reporting quotes one occupied protester who spoke to the group's motivation for showing up to counter protest, but none of the news stories follow that lead who exactly were the people who had organized the event of the Capitol and why would those counter protesters believe that the group had connections to the clan.

The Associated Press write up notes in passing that the three dozen rally attendees of the Capital were all white and almost all men, many with shaved heads and prominent tattoos, but it doesn't offer any indication that those very visible

tattoos had any particular message. The reporter doesn't quote the man who organized the rally in Sacramento, but they do include a comment from the national spokesman for the organization behind the events, Marris Gulett, told a reporter that he wasn't surprised that counter protesters had disrupted this peaceful march. What's missing from the articles, though, is that the event in Sacramento was hosted by the Golden State Skinheads, and while he may have been speaking on behalf of something

called the South Africa Project. Marris Gulett was a lifelong member of the Aryan Nations who had recently been released from prison for bank robbery. Just beneath the surface of those rallies, had anyone bothered to look, was an old woman in Louisiana. Years before she started organizing American skinheads at poorly attended rallies, she was a key player in an international terrorist plot to disrupt South Africa's first post apartheid elections. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird.

For years now, on the homepage of The Daily Stormer, there's been a little widget in the sidebar called demographic countdown. It's an actual countdown clock to the moment the United States will hit a demographic tipping point when the white population drops below fifty percent for the first time. As I'm writing this, they have calculated that moment to be eighteen years and two hundred and twenty one days from now,

So mark your calendars. I guess they fear what they call the Great Replacement, the idea that through immigration and interracial marriage, white people will become a minority in historically white majority countries. Abortion, contraception, pornography, homosexuality, all of these things are in their minds, causing white birth rates to fall, all while non white immigrants pore over the borders replacing them.

It was David Lane, a member of the neo Nazi terrorist group The Order, who coined the pithy slogan that encapsulates the fear, his fourteen words, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. David Lane wrote those words from his cell in federal prison. His idea of securing the existence of his people involved

murdering a Jewish talk radio host. David Lane died in prison, but those fourteen words have taken on a life of their own, becoming one of the most well recognized white supremacist slogans worldwide. This white extinction anxiety is a motivating for acts of horrific violence on an individual level. Anders Bravic, a man who murdered seventy seven people in Norway in twenty eleven, wrote in his manifesto quote, what is happening to the indigenous peoples of Western Europe and our cultures

amounts to a merciless and bloody genocide. When Breton Tarrant murdered fifty one Muslim worshippers at mosques in christ Church, New Zealand in twenty nineteen, he titled his manifesto The Great Replacement, and in it he cites Bravic as an inspiration. But it's that same feeling, this paranoid, reactionary whiteness, that South African media studies professor Niki Falkov calls an anxious

racial fantasy that motivates the violence of policy too. When Republican politicians froth at the mouth, spreading fear of immigrant hordes at the border and give campaign speeches about how they're all rapists, with the unspoken implication that they'll impregnate your white daughters. They're murderers, They carry deadly diseases, and they traffic poisonous drugs that will kill your white sons. That's the same fear. It originates in the same place,

and it leads us to the same violent ends. But the great replacement myth is just that, a myth, of course, but one about replacement. They believe white people are being displaced. They are being replaced. Their cultural hegemony is at risk. When immigrants bring their languages, customs, and religions with them into white countries in a racial marriage, is making new generations less and less racially pure. The belief in the conspiracy theories of white genocide and great replacement go hand

in hand, and they're often used interchangeably. But for that white genosie to be more than metaphorical, more than a slow death of this imaginary hegemonic white culture, there has to be actual violence against white people. If white people are victims of an ongoing genocide, surely you can point to blood on someone's hands. You have to have a body. And the example that bubbles to the surface more often than not is the myth of the South African farm murders.

And that's what got me started on the subject of this week's episode. Those rallies in twenty twelve were organized by a group calling themselves the South Africa Project, and their stated goal was to raise awareness of the genocide of the white South African. The narrative is built around the idea that white South African farmers are under attack, that they are being brutally murdered in alarming numbers by black men motivated specifically by desire to kill white people.

The very idea of the farm murders as some discrete category of crime is a contentious one. Have white farmers been murdered, yes, But that's where the truth leaves the room. As a nation, South Africa has a higher rate of violent crime than many other similarly situated countries, But the idea that rural white landowners are at a uniquely high risk of being murdered in racially motivated violent attacks is simply not true. But it's a myth that serves a

rather particular political purpose. As Nikki Falcon writes in her book Warrior, State, Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa, white people are not the only victims, or indeed only the victims of war murders. Black laborers, though seldom spoken about in these terms, are frequently among the victims of murders perpetrated by outsiders, and they are also killed by white managers and employers. Rates of femicide and domestic violence on farms are thought to be high, affecting both black

and white women. Nonetheless, the trope of the farm murder as a specific type of violent crime featuring white victims and black killers is frequently invoked to provide evidence for the alleged genocide. In two thousand and three, the South African Police issued their final report on an inquiry conducted

into the alleged phenomenon. In analysis of all reported incidents on farms and smallholdings spanning nineteen ninety eight two thousand one, nearly ninety percent were motivated by robbery, seven percent were the result of labor disputes, and only two percent found to have any racial or political motivation in any direction.

In a country with nearly twenty thousand murders annually, there are an average of fifty per year that could be classified as farm murders, and again, almost all of those are robbery homicides, not organized political violence targeting people of a particular race. As Falkov puts it, there is evidence for murder, atrocity, even torture, there is no evidence for genocide. The genocide myth is an iteration of long standing white

justifications for racist domination. To put it another way, the intense and formative anxiety of whiteness that it is always under threat would appear among South Africans regardless of whether the farm murders happened or not. This anxiety of a

whiteness that is under violent threat is incredibly useful. Carolyn Holmes, a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, has written extensively about this phenomenon, addressing specifically the ways this myth making is marketed to a racially anxious white audience outside of South Africa, writing that white audiences are a quote mobilizing around stories of violence against perceived members of their group as a way to protect their racial status.

African nationalist groups like Afroforum and the Swedelanders tour the United States, meet with American right wing groups, produce material in English, and make appearances in American media because they know this message sells here, and lately it's really taken off. Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted something on truth Social that sent up a big red flag for me. I mean, almost all of his posts are pretty alarming, but this

one sent me scurrying into my archives. On February second, he posted.

The egregious action he's referring to is the Expropriation Act of twenty twenty four, an act of the South African Parliament signed into law by the South African President in January of this year, but both his reaction to it and his own history of engagement on the subject of South African land reform are instructive here. He's not actually reacting to the text of that bill. He's reacting to the imaginary world constructed by people who wish apartheid had

never ended. I'll get into a little bit of what the Expropriation Act actually says, but first let's go back in time a few years, because, like I said, when I saw Trump's post a few days before that executive order, I had a feeling he was retreading old territory. This wasn't the first time he'd fired off a half baked

take on South Africa land reform. Back in August of twenty eighteen, nearly two years and almost five thousand tweets into his first term, he tweeted the word Africa for the first time.

a South Africa civil rights group. It was just in the United States to meet with a number of government officials.

apartheid apologists is a more fitting description. In twenty sixteen, after the group released Tainted Heroes, their documentary critical of the struggle against apartheid, a spokesman for the African National Congress called the film pure propaganda and suggested that a better film might feature the stories of the Afro Forum members and the ways in which they had collaborated with the apartheid regilme harenst Ruth's appearance on Tucker Carlson's show

was during his trip to Washington, d C. To meet with federal government officials and right wing think tanks. Along with Afrofum CEO Callie Creele, he met with staffers for Senator Ted Cruz, officials from USAID, and the pair posted a photo of themselves with National Security Advisor John Bolton. They posted about meetings at the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the International Republican Institute. They claimed to have met with at least one member of Congress, but they declined

to say who it was. Their May twenty eighteen tour of the United States was meant to capitalize on the sudden international interest in the plight of the persecuted white South African Just two months earlier, in March of twenty eighteen, News Corps Australia sent reporter Paul Towey on a four

week tour of South Africa. The timing is curious. This was right on the heel of right wing media influencers like Lauren Southern and Katie Hopkins traveling to South Africa to make content, and for weeks Australian news outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch ran stories and videos about horrific violence against white farmers, with headlines like horror Tales from South African farmers in the Australian South Africa's white farmers attacked, raped,

forced from land in the Daily Telegraph, White minority targeted in South Africa in The Courier Mail and wrights groups silent on the whites of South Africa in the West Australian. In video reports, Twoey claimed that he was quoting the Ramaposa government when he said they were specifically targeting white South Africans for land seizures. Australian Facebook feeds were flooded with short videos about a pending genocide of white South

Africans two. His reporting relied heavily on the misrepresented crime statistics produced by Afroforum, and many of his stories quoted liberally from Afroforum directly or interviewed the aggrieved white farmers whose stories had been featured in Afroforum propaganda campaigns in the past. As far as I can find, Paul Twey never explicitly disclosed any relationship with Afroforum, but the group did take credit for influencing his coverage, claiming to have

provided assistance to a prominent Australian journalist. In the midst of this onslaught of reporting, essentially force feeding African or white nationalists propaganda to the entire Australian public. Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton told a reporter from the Australian right wing town babloid The Telegraph that he'd seen some very concerning media coverage of the violent persecution of white farmers and he hoped to assist them in resettling in Australia.

He'd ordered his department to explore options for fast tracking humanitarian visas for white South Africans, saying people do need help, and they need help from a civilized country like ours. Dutton's comments were not well received. He dismissed the criticism as lots of outrage from crazy leftists, and he said that the outlets who covered the story negatively, like ABC, The Guardian and Huftington Post were dead to him. But

the criticism wasn't just coming from the media. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees issued a statement warning of the dire conditions for refugees living in a processing center on the island of Nauru, urging Australia to prioritize actual refugees.

The UNHCR Director for Asia and the Pacific said the decision of the government to open its migration pathways to different categories of people is a sovereign decision, but from the UNHCR perspective, we do encourage that resettlement opportunities that are for refugees and humanitarian quotas that are for deserving cases should not be impacted by these decisions on migration.

The South African government summoned the Australian ambassador and demanded a formal retraction of Dutton's statements, with their Foreign Affairs minister writing the South African government is offended by the statements which have been attributed to the Australian Home Affairs

Minister and a full retraction is expected. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop managed to smooth things out with South Africa by clarifying that Dutton's offer did not represent the actual policies of the nation, but Dutton never actually retracted his statement, and as for af Reforms attempt to capitalize on that attention on their trip to the United States, they only actually managed to meet with staffers in Ted Cruz's office, not the Senator himself,

and a spokesman from USAID downplayed the significance of having taken a meeting with the pair offering a bland statement that they take a lot of meetings. Their claim to have met with John Bolton is an overstatement too. A spokesman from the National Security Council clarified that Bolton had no idea who Roots and Creole were and he had not met with them. They'd simply run into him in the hallway at a Fox News studio and agreed to

pose for a photo with fans. For what it's worth, the photo of Roots with Bolton does show that Roots is wearing the outfit he appeared in on an episode of Talker Carlson that aired a few days later, and the men are standing in front of what appears to be the kind of large garment steamer that you might find in a dressing room in a television studio, not a government office building. Peter Dutton was the subject of international ridicule, and he very nearly caused an international incident.

The leadership of Afroforum had made no headway in their attempts to meet with government officials, but none of that really matters. The only thing that mattered in the end was that Tucker Carlson took the bait and he put arest Rutz on a television program that the President of the United States watched religiously. That segment aired on May fifteenth, twenty eighteen. Trump didn't tweet about South Africa that night.

I can't prove he saw that episode, But three months later in August, when Tucker Carlson had another guest on to talk about South African land reform, the president's tweet that night wasn't just about land reform. He specifically referenced the idea of large scale killings of white farmers, something that hadn't been discussed in that night's episode, but it had been the subject of Carlson's interview with Rutz back in May. That pathway from white supremacist propaganda in South

Africa to a presidential tweet is fairly clear. Trump quoted and tagged Tucker Carlson in his tweet, a tweet he posted forty five minutes after the segment aired. The guest on the show that night was a CATO Institute fellow named Marion tupe So not actually a representative from Afroforum, but when Afroforum met with various right wing think tanks back in May, Marion Tupi was the Cato Institute policy analyst who replied to Huffington Post's requests for comment about

their meeting with the group. He even c seed Ernst Roots in his reply to the Huffington Post, a message that included a bizarre comment that the current South African government was explicitly racist and in fact comparable to the apartheid government. When Donald Trump tweeted about South Africa for the first time as president, he said he was going to have Secretary of State Mike Pompeo closely study the issue of South African farmers. But I can't actually find

any kind of official follow up to that. I found a brief mention in an article from twenty twenty about Pompeo's first trip to Southern Africa as Secretary of State, so I guess we can at least deduce that closely studying the issue didn't actually involve going to South Africa for at least a year and a half. But there's no official policy statement or reference to any study performed.

That article just quotes Pompeo calling the proposed land reform bill disastrous for the South African people, and much like Peter Dutton's comments in March of twenty eighteen, Trump's tweet in August twenty eighteen was not well received by the South African government. Within hours, their official Twitter account responded, tweeting South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our

colonial past hashtag land expropriation at real Donald Trump. The following morning, a spokesperson for President Rama Posa called into a news broadcast on e NCA, South Africa's most watched television news channel, to say the government would not be using tweets to conduct international relations.

actually happen back then. Now, in twenty twenty five, President Ramaposa has signed into law the Expropriation Act, which does allow the government to expropriate privately owned land. And that might sound very scary if you don't know what it means, and that's certainly the emotional reaction. The act's opponents are counting on. But the power codified in the Act isn't

new to South Africa or unique to that country. Expropriation of land in the public interest was a power already granted to the government in South Africa's nineteen ninety four constitution. And I'm sure you're familiar with the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution. But there's more to it than pleading the fifth Honestly, come to think of it, they probably should have broken that one out into a couple

different amendments. But on top of giving you the right to not incriminate yourself, the Fifth Amendment has something called the taking's Clause, which limits the power of eminent domain by requiring just compensation. In other words, if the government believes that it is in the public interest and they pay you a fair price, they can take your land. The constitutions in countries like Spain, Germany, India, and Australia have similar provisions. What South Africa is proposing isn't some

unimaginable tyrannical nightmare. It's eminent domain. There is a provision in the Act that's getting quite a bit of attention. In Trump's executive order, he writes.

the Expropriation Act, and I'm not sure Trump did. It's fifty two pages long, but each page is printed once in English, followed by the same page in Afrikaans, so I guess that makes it a twenty six page law. Chapter five of the Act is called Compensation for expropriation, and it discusses in detail how compensation is calculated and paid.

There's a lot of boring bits about interest and mortgages and taxes, but I want to talk about Chapter five, Section twelve, and then skip on down to sub section three, which begins it may be just and equitable for nil compensation to be paid where land is expropriated in the public interest, having regard to all the relevant circumstances, including

and the four conditions laid out there. For scenarios where it may be appropriate to offer a landowner no compensation are things like when the land is entirely unused because the landowner's main purpose is not to develop the land or use it to generate income, but instead to benefit

from appreciation of its market value. Or if the land is currently owned by an organ of the state and they're not using that land for its core functions and they are unlikely to require it in the future, if the owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise control over it despite being reasonably capable of doing so, or if the present value of the land is less than the amount of direct state subsidy in the acquisition

or improvement of the land. The furor being whipped up about the law makes it sound like the South African government has written a law that says white families will be driven from their homes and stripped of all their possessions, But the law says nothing at all about targeting any particular group for expropriation, and the conditions under which someone might be offered anything less than equitable compensation would necessarily

exclude land that anyone actually lived or worked on. The goal of land reform at its core is to address the wrongs of apartheid. The Native's Land Act of nineteen thirteen prevented black people from buying land, setting aside just seven percent of the country's land for use by black South Africans. A later amendment expanded that to thirteen percent, but the law itself wasn't repealed until nineteen ninety one.

A land audit conducted by the South African government in twenty seventeen reported that seventy two percent of all privately owned agricultural land in South Africa was owned by white people, despite the fact that white people make up about seven

percent of the South African population. I couldn't actually find any specific information about how much of that land had changed hands over the years, but in a twenty twenty article in the African Journal on Conflict Resolution, doctor Adeoya Achinola wrote, farm owners or farmers, are predominantly made up of the white group, who in most cases inn inherited the farms from their families. A prevailing narrative is that in most cases these lands and farms had been forcifully

taken from black South Africans during colonialism and apartheid. It may be said, therefore, that few white farmers had genuinely bought the lands, particularly in opposed apartheid South Africa. This isn't a wrong of the distant past. In nineteen ninety four, when apartheid was finally ended, the South African National Congress announced an ambitious plan to return at least thirty percent

of the stolen land by twenty fourteen. By twenty eighteen, though only an estimated ten percent of land had been returned to indigenous people. The policies of the current government won't lead to terrifying scenes of black soldiers forcing pretty white mothers off their land at gunpoint, although that certainly the image conjured in the white supremacist imagination. It's a slow,

boring process, involving petitions and judicial review. It's not a revolution, but it is an important step in the ongoing process of undoing apartheid. The President of the United States, it seems, does not feel that way. His executive order not only ends all foreign aid to South Africa, but it allows quote africaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination to be admitted and resettled in the United

States as refugees. So not only is he saying that white South Africans are politically persecuted to such an extent that they are refugees deserving special treatment, they are essentially the only refugees in the world worthy of assistance by the US government. Because he ordered an end to refugee resettlement programs on his first day in office last month, it probably doesn't help that the president is heavily influenced by Elon Musk, a man with a long history of

spreading propaganda about white genocide in South Africa. In twenty twenty three, he replied to a tweet from an account called end Wokeness, writing, they are actually killing white farmers every day. It's not just a threat. Musk was born in South Africa under apartheid, and he emigrated to Canada

in nineteen eighty nine to avoid compulsory military service. The South Africa, he knew, was one under apartheid, and in addition to his frenetic posting about white genocide conspiracy theories, He's also accused the South African government of having quote openly racist laws after he refused to participate in regulatory hearings with the Independent Communications Authority in South Africa. His plan to launch Starlink service in South Africa hit a roadblock.

The country requires life operating a national network or selling internet services nationwide to be at least thirty percent black owned, a requirement must claims is simply not possible. Trump has yet to nominate a pick for South African Ambassador, but the current front runner is rumored to be Breitbart Editor in chief Joel Pollock. I considered cutting a clip from an interview Pollock gave a South African TV news program the other day, but the man has all the charisma

of a wet rag. But the idea of the Breitbart editor becoming the South African Ambassador did remind me of another video. Back in twenty eighteen, amidst all that ongoing public interest in Australian tabloid coverage of anti white violence in South Africa, Breitbart News held a town hall event in New Orleans. The topic of the event was something else, big tech and speech. But during the Q and A session and Coulter came out strong in support of white genocide conspiracy theory.

Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. It was Identity Europa members who started the chance of you will Not Replace Us as they marched through the University of Virginia with their torches. But remarkably, Ann Coulter took the ball and ran with it, and she demonstrated that she was deeply immersed in this

same racist worldview. She had these talking points ready to go, and you might be asking at this point, Mollie, what does any of this have to do with a few dozen skinheads getting pelted with rocks and Sacramento in twenty twelve. Those rallies against white genocide back in twenty twelve were

poorly attended and barely reported on. The idea behind this organizing strategy was pretty similar to the twenty seventeen March against Sharia rallies I talked about a few episodes ago, a nationwide series of public protests designed to give the appearance of widespread public support for a pretty unpopular racist idea. But when Act for America pulled that stunt in twenty seven.

They were able to attract some mainstream Republican attendees, and more importantly, they had access to the legitimizing force of the right wing media ecosystem. Act for America issued their press releases directly to Breitbart, and their CEO was able to publish her own write ups on the events on their site. They didn't have to wait for the idea to make its way through the human centipede of right wing media, slowly laundering fascist ideas through intermediaries and conning

journalists into picking it up. The group that put on those rallies against white genocide in twenty twelve didn't have that kind of access. The South Africa Project was very obviously a front for the Aryan Nations Chapter in Louisiana. They were having trouble forcing their way into the conversation and attracting any normal people to their events, But the very same idea, presented in almost exactly the same way by a man in a suit, made its way directly

into the White House just a few years later. The message hadn't changed, the motivation behind it remains the same. The myth of the South African Farm murder exists to stoke white anxiety. For African internationalists, it's a desire to return to apartheid. For the American audience they sell it to, it's a longing to roll back civil rights and integration. It may be dressed up as foreign policy, but it's no different from the message on those flyers printed out

by Aryan Nations members. It just took the right messenger to get on Tucker Carlson for the President to hear it. I did set out to just write a story about those rallies and the people involved in them, but current events keep getting in my way. I never really know where a story is going to take me until I have forty or fifty browser tabs open and a dozen pages of notes that don't really make any sense. But

this one took a hard right turn. Early on, I thought for sure that the star of the story of these white genocide rallies would be Billy Roper. It seemed like such an interesting coincidence that in both of these tales of fake grassroots rallies for racist causes, there's Billy stepping up to the plate to hold an event in Arkansas. But when I started probing a little deeper into the woman behind the South Africa Project. I made an alarming discovery.

Before Monica Stone moved to a small town in Louisiana to marry an American clansman, she lived in South Africa, and she had a different name. And it's a name that I found in some very strange places, like the memoir of a British Man seeking redemption for his years in a violent fascist movement, or deep within the text

of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. But you'll have to wait until next week to hear an almost unbelievable tale of international gun smuggling, bombings and shootouts that failed to prevent the end of apartheid. Weird Little Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Mollie Kunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme

music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me at Weird Little Guy Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I almost certainly will not answer it. It's nothing personal. I don't answer any of my emails. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys