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Amid the flurry of executive orders from the White House in early February, it was easy to miss one of the more seemingly random ones, titled “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa.” In the order, President Donald Trump chastised the South African government for its “hateful rhetoric” and “shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights” in “seiz[ing] ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation.” The order declared an end to foreign aid to South Africa and a promise to “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.”
Now, with reporting from the New York Times, we know that the government has made good on its promises. On Sunday, the Times reported that while virtually all other refugee resettlement programs have been shuttered, the administration has established a “Mission South Africa” program, with multiple teams working in Pretoria, South Africa, to help settle Afrikaners in the U.S.
For an administration that doesn’t typically express concern about refugees or matters of global human rights, this sounded like an odd fixation. But the Afrikaners—descendants of largely Dutch colonial settlers—have long been a white population with an odd amount of political relevance in the American far right. The perceived persecution of the Afrikaners, who controlled South Africa’s major institutions until the end of apartheid, circulated as a white supremacist meme for decades; in the Trump era, it has been rehabilitated as a legitimate political grievance.
The triumph of the Afrikaners’ cause means something more than just a victory for extremists in Trump’s orbit pushing an old and confusing racist talking point. Their movement has met with success in a way it couldn’t in the first Trump administration, in part because of a cultural shift that has primed the American public to be receptive to these narratives, and in part because of unlikely allies who have taken a fringe cause and given it new energy. But more than anything, the Afrikaners’ victory shows the stark difference between the first and second Trump administration: Where before there was bluster, now there is very real action.
The notion of political violence against white Afrikaners has been around for decades. According to experts in the history of extremism, the idea of a “white genocide” in South Africa was kicking around in white supremacist communities by at least the 1980s, as the tiny white minority was beginning to lose its grip on the apartheid system. In the U.S., where there was no such dramatic loss of power for a dominant population but enough anxiety generated by the reforms of the Civil Rights Movement to foster white resentment, white supremacists were able to point to something concrete—cases of violence overseas—to try to provoke racial anxieties closer to home.
Often, these claims focused on a number of murders of white farmers in South Africa. This became a rallying cry for white solidarity in certain internet forums and more radical right-wing media bubbles, overlapping with the separate and heated issue of land reform, a decades-old promise by the dominant African National Congress political party to address some of the leftover imbalances from apartheid, which had pushed nonwhite South Africans off their properties and allowed the white minority to take control of more than 70 percent of the country’s land.
Sometimes, in more paranoid circles, people speculated that the South African government was tolerating or even encouraging the murders in service of a white genocide, carried out, they believed, with varying motivations, with race hatred at the simplest end of the spectrum and some kind of villainous globalist cabal plot at the other.
“When I started looking at white supremacist websites in 1996, it was very evident very quickly how central the idea was of white farmers in South Africa being ravaged,” said Pete Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University who studies extremist groups. “For decades, this has been a main talking point.”
In reality, as South African activists and officials have long pointed out, Afrikaner farmers have been murdered in alarming numbers simply because South Africa has an alarming murder rate overall; the white farmers are actually less likely than their Black neighbors to be victims of murder. The murders tend to stem from robberies and personal grievances, rather than any kind of coordinated genocidal aim. No murder victims’ lands have been seized by the government.
More recently, the idea of a white genocide against farmers became further charged when, in 2018, the African National Congress proposed changing the constitution to allow the expropriation of certain unused lands without compensation. This added fuel to the right-wing argument that the government tolerates the killing of farmers in order to seize their land and hand it out to Black citizens, and attracted increased international attention to the Afrikaners’ situation. The far-right Canadian influencer Lauren Southern released a 2018 documentary called Farmlands predicting a coming race war in South Africa; the British far-right commentator Katie Hopkins traveled to the country to document the “white genocide” against farmers.
In the U.S., the narratives of a white genocide were helped along by extremist groups in South Africa who actively campaigned for their cause in Washington. In 2018 the head of a group called Suidlanders presented their fears of a coming white genocide on Alex Jones’ Infowars show. Two prominent Afrikaner activists with the group AfriForum traveled to the U.S. to lobby for their cause. They met with John Bolton, Sen. Ted Cruz’s staff, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. One of the two, Ernst Roets, went on Tucker Carlson’s show and told Fox News viewers that white farmers were being tortured and killed. “White farmers are being brutally murdered in South Africa for their land,” Carlson wrote on Facebook when he shared the clip. “And no one is brave enough to talk about it.”
Trump, it seems, was watching when this aired, and on Twitter, he said he had asked then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers.” He tagged Carlson and Fox News in the tweet.
This announcement, made a year after the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was met with glee from well-known white nationalists. David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, thanked the president. As did prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer, who claimed that Trump had “changed the game” after that tweet. “Opening up space to talk about White South Africans—giving his base the permission to seriously discuss White dispossession—is a monumental achievement,” Spencer wrote.
Nothing came from Trump’s first foray into the white-genocide conversation. But there was foreshadowing of what was to come. In his Twitter thread, Spencer proposed that the Trump administration help the Afrikaners by “accepting White refugees on a special program” and cutting foreign aid to South Africa until the end of the land seizures—policies very close to the ones Trump would institute in his second administration.
Over the past decade, there has been a shift of white supremacist notions into the mainstream, Simi said. Notably, the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, long considered a fringe white supremacist belief, has taken hold in America. The theory posits that shadowy elites are purposefully bringing in immigrants and encouraging interracial marriages to erode the power of the country’s white people. It’s a theory that reflects the reality of shifting demographics in the U.S. but gives them a sinister reframe. The more extreme white nationalist message boards tend to blame the Jews; mainstream conservative media tend to blame Democrats, who are supposedly plotting to shrink the Republican voter base. The latter framing has become especially popular: According to a 2022 Associated Press poll, a third of Americans believe that “a group of people [is] trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.”
“The South African farmers are a piece of this. … [These are] issues that play off each other,” Simi said. “It mirrors what we’ve seen on so many other instances of this migration from more extreme explicit white supremacy to the most substantial bodies of power in our government.” He added: “It’s more powerful now than I’ve ever seen in my professional career.”
But there’s another notable factor to consider when thinking about this administration’s enthusiasm for the Afrikaner farmers: the presence of Elon Musk. Musk is not an Afrikaner, but he is a white South African who was raised under apartheid and has a clear personal interest in their case. In 2023 Musk stated as fact that “they” (he didn’t clarify who) “are actually killing white farmers every day.” He also asked the South African president to step in and prevent the “genocide of white people in South Africa”—to the delight of the former leader of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa, who wrote, “In 2016 South African white genocide was a fringe issue—now, the richest man in the world, who also owns Twitter, is drawing attention to it. Things are moving in the right direction!”
There’s something more to Musk’s animosity toward the South African government: He has tweeted that he believes that Starlink, his satellite internet company, was not allowed to operate in South Africa because he is “not black.” AfriForum, the pro-Afrikaner group that lobbied in the U.S., picked up Musk’s complaint, arguing that keeping the satellite network out of the country was putting rural farmers (who could use Starlink to communicate in service of self-defense) at risk of attack.
As for Trump, he has other reasons for resenting the country. On March 14 of this year, the U.S. expelled South Africa’s ambassador—Secretary of State Marco Rubio called him a “race-baiting politician who hates America and hates [Trump]”—after the ambassador, speaking in an online seminar, described the MAGA movement as driven by angst over demographic shifts and a “supremacist instinct.” Perhaps more significantly, South Africa formally accused Israel of genocide in January 2024, bringing charges in The Hague. (Trump’s nominee for ambassador to South Africa is a prominent defender of Israel.) And this January, South Africa passed its long-awaited and deeply controversial land-expropriation act, allowing the government to take and redistribute land without compensation when it is “just and equitable and in the public interest” to do so.
In February, Trump cut foreign aid to South Africa, citing both the genocide case and the alleged persecution of the Afrikaners. “A massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum, is happening for all to see,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Two days before that, Rubio had said he refused to attend the G20 Foreign Ministers meeting in South Africa, explaining that “South Africa is doing very bad things” by seizing Afrikaners’ property and that the G20 summit would discuss DEI and climate change. (In response to another Rubio post about the Afrikaners, Utah Sen. Mike Lee wondered, “Why won’t the legacy media cover the genocidal mania in South Africa?”)
As ever with Trump, it’s hard to determine how much he really knows and cares about the particular issue of “white genocide” in South Africa. This formerly fringe white supremacist talking point certainly has enough prominent promoters in his circle for him to be exposed to it. Regardless, the decision to prioritize Afrikaner refugees for admission to the United States is, at minimum, a way for Trump and Musk to assault the validity of the entire South African government on behalf of their political and business aims.
It’s hard to ignore a dark fact about all of this: One of the most central talking points for white supremacists for decades has become a useful rhetorical tool for the president of the United States. Or, as Jessie Daniels, a sociology professor at Hunter College at the City University of New York who studies internet racism, said: “What we’re witnessing is a kind of befouling the public sphere with white supremacist ideology.” And unlike in the first administration, the ideology and the rhetoric have been translated into very real action.
