When President Trump
tweeted Wednesday night that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into violence against, and seizures of land from, white farmers in South Africa, he wasn’t just amplifying a narrative he heard from Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Trump was also elevating a storyline that has floated around white supremacist blogs, podcasts and online forums for years. And the president’s tweet shows how these white supremacist ideas bubble up from the Internet’s darkest corners into the Oval Office.
In 2015, Dylann Roof walked into a Bible study group at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., listened quietly for an hour and then opened fire, killing nine people. A
photo that later surfaced online showed Roof wearing a jacket sporting the flag of South Africa’s apartheid regime. The 24-year-old South Carolinian clearly felt an affinity with white South Africans.
That sentiment is common across the white supremacist universe.
The neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer has published hundreds of stories about the plight of white South African farmers. Users of the white supremacist site Stormfront have been going on about the issue for years. White nationalist groups on platforms such as
Facebook are similarly
devoted the fate of South African whites.
These narratives often portray the treatment of South African whites as a critical front in an imagined global fight against white people. If whites in South Africa are treated so poorly after handing over power to the country’s black majority, the story goes, it’s just a preview of what could happen in the rest of the world as more diverse voices are allowed into the political conversation. This fear has been given a name: white genocide.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...nstream/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f58bd4a8044c
The president cares little about South Africa. He is issuing a clarion call to US white supremacist voters.
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...trump-populist-south-africa-white-supremacist
“The president of the United States has adopted a vile white supremacist hate narrative, right out of the darkest corners of the internet, and is turning it into policy.”
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