Here’s the thing: President Donald Trump has the media literacy of a preschooler who hasn’t received an education outside of basic shapes and the importance of nap time. Like millions, probably billions, of people across social media, Trump doesn’t understand context or how to be discerning when it comes to the validity of “news” sources, which is comically ironic for someone who has turned “fake news” into a catch phrase that generally means any media report that is unflattering to, well, the most unflattering and unqualified president in modern history. I hesitate to even call it confirmation bias because there’s really no indication that he even “does his own research.” It seems more like White House staff members are handing him every YouTube video or headline they can scrape from the bowels of the half-cocked conspiracy portion of the internet.
Trump’s White House meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday (May 21)—where Trump spent significant time whitesplaining Ramaphosa’s own country to him— was about as clear an example of this as one could ask for (although nobody asked for it).
As many of you know, over the past few months, Trump appears to have become wholly convinced that a “white genocide” is happening to white Afrikaner farmers in South Africa. (Actually, he’s been making the claim since 2018, but he has really been ramping it up since he’s been back in office.) He’s been sounding the (false) alarm on the (non)issue for so long that, at some point, someone just needs to sit him down and ask, “Mr. President, is—is the white genocide in the room with us right now?”
Trump has been making the claims that white farmers in South Africa have been murdered en masse without presenting a shred of tangible evidence to substantiate it, but on Wednesday, he offered what I’m sure he thought was concrete, smoking gun evidence. But what he actually had was a video clip with no context, images of atrocities that did not take place in South Africa, and rows of white crosses that he believes represents the graves of white farmers, apparently, just because the crosses are the color white.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. These are articles over the last few days. Death of people. Death. Death. Death. Horrible death. Death. I don’t know. White South Africans are fleeing because of the violence and racist laws. And this is all…I’ll give these to you. So when you say, what would I like to do? I don’t know what to do. Look at this. White South African couples say that they were attacked violently,” Trump rambled. He also emphasized that the victims are “not Black.”
Let’s start with the images of rows of crosses that he passed around, appearing to believe they represent the graves of white farmers. (Spoiler alert: they do not.)
From the BBC:
The footage played by Trump in the Oval Office showed rows of white crosses stretching off into the distance along a rural road. Trump claimed: “These are burial sites right here. Burial sites. Over a thousand of white farmers.”
However, the crosses do not mark graves. The video is from a protest against the murder of white farming couple Glen and Vida Rafferty, who were ambushed and shot dead on their premises in 2020. The clip was shared on YouTube on 6 September, the day after the protests.
“It’s not a burial site, but it was a memorial,” Rob Hoatson, one of the organisers of the event, told the BBC. He said the crosses were erected as a “temporary memorial” to the couple.
Mr. Hoatson said the crosses have since been taken down.
BBC Verify has geolocated the footage to an area in KwaZulu-Natal province, near the town of Newcastle. Google Street View imagery captured in May 2023—almost three years after the footage first appeared online—shows that the crosses were no longer standing.
Even if the white crosses did represent actual graves, which they didn’t, there would have been no indication that the graves were those of white people. Trump literally had no reason to believe the (nonexistent) victims were of any particular race.
What is true is that South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world. According to the BBC, there were 26,232 murders last year, 44 of which were people in the farming community. Only eight of them were actual farmers. None of the figures, which come from the South African Police Service (SAPS), are broken down by race. The Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU), which represents farmers and compiles figures that are largely based on media reports and social media posts, found that 23 white people and nine Black people were killed in farm attacks last year.
During the sit-down with Ramaphosa, Trump also played footage from political rallies where Black people sang “Kill the Boer,” an anti-apartheid song that South African courts had deemed to be hate speech, alleging that they called for the death of white farmers. Trump claimed the song was being led by “officials” and “people that were in office.”
Nope.
More from BBC:
One of the men leading the rally was Julius Malema, who previously led the ruling ANC’s youth wing. In 2012 he left the party and has never held an official government position. He now leads a party called the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) which won 9.5% in last year’s election, entering opposition against the new multi-party coalition.
Ramaphosa told Trump the EFF is “a small minority party” and said that “our government policy is completely against what he was saying.”
To be fair, Trump also played a separate video from 2012 where former President Jacob Zuma sang the lyric “shoot the Boer.” Zuma, who left office in 2018, left the African National Congress (ANC) after it vowed to stop promoting the song shortly after Zuma sang it.
Trump also had a stack of print-outs of news articles purporting to be reports on “white genocide” in SA. (Spoiler alert: they were not.)
One image, for example, showed Red Cross workers in protective gear handling body bags.
“Look, here’s burial sites all over the place,” said Trump. “These are all white farmers that are being buried.”
According to AFP, the image was actually a screenshot from a YouTube video of Red Cross workers responding after women were raped and burned alive during a mass jailbreak in the Congolese city of Goma. The caption on the video even stated as much.
According to the United Nations, genocide is defined as murderous acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” There’s simply no evidence of that in South Africa. (Not that Trump has ever indicated that he cares about facts or could discern factual information even if he did.)
Besides Trump, do you know who has largely promoted the idea that a “genocide” of white farmers in SA is taking place? White nationalists—that’s who.
Trump is now a white nationalist on two continents.
Sad.
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