TRUMP’S WHITE NATIONALIST SANCTUARY
It's worse than it looks
The first families of white Afrikaner refugees arrived in the US this week under the Trump administration's only asylum seeker program that allows people into the country. Our friends at the Bulwark have a piece out today highlighting these new residents' less-than-charitable thoughts about people who don’t look like them. And while those thoughts are bad, the reason they’re here is worse.
This US policy is based on misinformation built on a South African white nationalist trope and is the latest result of Washington, DC’s corrupt lobbying culture.
Huddled pale masses
We don’t throw around the term “white nationalist” lightly. But here it’s literally accurate. The talking point about white genocide in South Africa originated with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups and has circulated in US far-right circles for years. Molly Conger has a fascinating podcast where you can go deep on this. I refer to her podcast here liberally.
South Africa’s white supremacist groups have peddled this “white genocide” conspiracy theory in Washington for years.
In 2018, Trump tweeted about “the large-scale killing of [white] farmers” and land grabs in South Africa, echoing a segment on Fox News. It was, er, fake news then, just like it is now. This came right after a round of lobbying in Washington by these South African white nationalists.
A white nationalist lie
Trump’s claim centers on South Africa’s land expropriation law. According to the worldview Trump puts forward about it, marauding [black] gangs hunt white farmers.
That’s not a thing. His executive order cites, “hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.” Nope. The South African government may be corrupt, incompetent and even run by pro-Russian politicians (ahem), but they aren’t genocidal.
South Africa is an exceedingly violent country. It has the highest murder rate of almost all countries that record such statistics. But white genocide has nothing to do with it. White South Africans, who make up 9% of the population, are, in fact, underrepresented among the murder victims on a per capita basis, reflecting factors like wealth and access to private security services. Notably, hardly any South African murders happened on farms, and whites still own 70% of South Africa’s farmland.
Stratcom lives
South Africa's apartheid regime may have died, but its disinformation survives in Washington’s corrupt lobbying culture. According to Paul Rasmus, a former apartheid-era operative in Stratcom, South Africa’s information warfare unit, in his book "Confessions of Stratcom Hitman," the South African apartheid regime targeted influential institutions in Washington, and they specifically singled out the Heritage Foundation.
We’ve all been victims of and unintentional vectors of disinformation – i.e., propaganda – whether we realize it or not. The important thing is learning from it and having the mettle to change your propaganda-skewed point of view.
Alas, the Heritage Foundation and its allies chose to lean into the propaganda.
Heritage Foundation
For years, AfriForum – a self-described Afrikaner “civil rights” group – and its sister organization, Solidarity, have courted influencers in Washington. During a 2018 visit, AfriForum’s leaders, CEO Kallie Kriel and Deputy CEO Ernst Roets, spent a day at Heritage. They also went to USAID, met with Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), were interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox, bumped into then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, and even hosted a conference. Ben Shapiro, Matt Gaetz, Jack Posobiec, and Jordan Peterson also interviewed the AfriForum's leaders. Importantly, all these meetings featured their white nationalist lie about persecuted whites.
When AfriForum and Solidarity representatives returned to Washington after the 2025 order, Heritage was again on the schedule.
Impactful visits
In August 2018, President Trump tweeted about "South Africa's land seizures and large scale killing of farmers." It followed the above-mentioned lobbying by AfriForum's Ernst Roets and Kallie Kriel in May 2018.
On February 7, 2025 President Trump signed an executive order which, among other things, directed the halting of foreign aid or assistance to South Africa and ordered the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to prioritize humanitarian relief, including refugee resettlement, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of "unjust racial discrimination." As an aside, Elon Musk managed to slip in some corrupt Starlink business development into the mix. We wrote about it here at the time. Also in February of this year, a Solidarity Movement delegation visited Washington. It announced that they visited with senior Trump administration officials (one photo appears to show a White House visitors badge). They took photos in front of the "Committee on Foreign Affairs" and in front of Sen Chris Coons’s office. A member of the delegation, Jako Kleinhans, posted, "several of these [are] influential people with whom we have forged good relationships over the past few years," and they also shared a memorandum with the White House. Then, for good measure, in the first week of March, Kleinhans had lunch in Los Angeles with Joel Pollock, the editor at large of Breitbart. At the time, Pollack was rumored to be Trump’s pick for ambassador to South Africa.
Did all this lobbying result in Trump’s tweets and drive policy? I can’t say for certain, but it warrants further investigation, in addition to the other items listed in our February newsletter on the origins of Trump’s South Africa policy.
Policy fallout
The profound real-world harm of the decision to freeze critical aid for treating HIV/AIDS, one report now predicts 500,000 excess deaths in South Africa alone over ten years. And, of course, the US expelled the ambassador, an unprecedented move for America in its dealings with supposedly friendly countries.
On the ground, Trump’s Afrikaner refugee program has taken on an almost surreal quality. The US Embassy in Pretoria was inundated with inquiries once the offer was announced – over 67,000 people expressed interest in relocating, according to a South African business group that collected names for the embassy. For context, as of last year, about 70 South African refugees were living in the United States.
In private, some DHS officials cited “administrative pressure to approve” white asylum cases. And, around this mini-exodus, a grassroots support network sprouted. Informal WhatsApp groups and a website called “Amerikaners” popped up to help people navigate the process, the leader of which has been seen sporting a MAGA hat. “We reached a point where we can’t do this anymore [in South Africa],” said Katia Beeden. Trump has validated their cause.
Our broken media
The Afrikaner refugee episode is a primary exhibit for the failure of American media to falsify what is, at its core, a scam. Instead, it has fueled it. “It is ironic,” South Africa’s foreign ministry noted, “to cast economically privileged Afrikaners as ‘refugees’ while genuine refugees from other parts of the world are being turned away”. For the administration to welcome what are, in effect, white, middle-class economic migrants as refugees, while cracking down on much needier Latino migrants and asylum seekers, ending Temporary Protected Status for 9,000 Afghan refugees, and throwing the status of Ukrainian refugees into doubt, highlights the racial and political aspects of the policy. Then there is the fact that the Afrikaners will be able to apply for permanent residency and, ultimately, citizenship. Given the circumstances, it’s reasonable to expect that most will become GOP voters. In short, the American right has hit on a way to engage in exactly the sort of demographic engineering – even if at a small scale – of which they accuse the left, a la the “Great Replacement” theory.
This is strategic corruption at its grossest. In the span of a few months, Trump’s refugee program for white South Africans has morphed from a fringe talking point into American policy. Once confined to white nationalist circles, this talking point now carries the imprimatur of the United States government (and you). It will result in half a million deaths in South Africa.
What should surprise you is that the method by which this happened is legal – corrupt but legal. No law will ever end gullibility when you have a president who will believe anything from the conservative media ecosystem, and when you have a GOP political class filled by careerists who appear to do nothing but validate and excuse this crazy nonsense.
Only a functioning media ecosystem will fix this. We don’t think of our broken, bifurcated media as a vector for corruption, but it is. Propaganda in the social media age works in part because the algorithms fuel confirmation bias. Otherwise, good people don’t consume the information they need to make informed decisions. And when you have an administration as easily swayed as this, K Street circles it like vultures over carrion.
You can safely assume that most Trump voters have not read any of the links in this piece. Share those links with them. Sure, share this piece, too. Help round out their media diet. These are your neighbors, not Afrikaner sleeper cells. This isn’t about swaying votes or convincing them about something about Trump. This is about giving them facts that they have not been privy to.
You can disempower Trump and the K Street lobbyists by helping bridge the information Iron Curtain that social media has erected in our communities.