CZM Rewind: Blood River & Mission South Africa

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. Hello everyone, Molly here, Welcome back to
the fourth and final installment of the holiday reruns here
on Weird Little Guys. Instead of picking two random reruns
for the weeks of Christmas and New Year's I've used

(00:23):
this opportunity to run my favorite mini series of twenty
twenty five, the eight episodes I wrote back in the
spring about the international networks of right wing extremists who
were trying to hold onto apartheid in South Africa. Last week,
episodes one and two ran on Tuesday, episodes three and
four on the Thursday, and episodes five and six ran

(00:44):
on Tuesday, which makes this episodes seven and eight of
the series. Blood River originally ran on April seventeenth, and
Mission South Africa followed on May first. There was kind
of a ninth episode in the series, but it was
an afterthought and I didn't include it here. But when

(01:05):
I got back from my honeymoon a few weeks after
these episodes came out, I chased down one more loose end,
the American arms dealer who got in trouble for smuggling
guns to the groups we've been talking about in these episodes.
I just checked back in on him and he is
still suing that All you Can Eat Sushi Buffet in
Portland for asking him and his Doberman to leave the

(01:27):
restaurant after the dog put her nose in a chafing
dish of spring rolls. A bit of an anticlimactic retirement
for a guy who used to run guns for fourig
Nazi groups. I really think I could have just written
about this all year, just fifty episodes about the white
supremacists all over the world who couldn't let go of apartheid.

(01:52):
It turned out there was a lot more going on
there than I could have imagined. But this is where
I left it in May, and the final episode is
the one most badly in need of an update because
it ended in the present tense. The story was still
evolving as I was writing it, and it kept going
after I stopped. It may be something I have to

(02:15):
come back to for a full length episode for now, though,
Brent Bozell has been confirmed as the United States Ambassador
to South Africa and there is no new South African ambassador
to the United States. When I finished this series at
the end of April, there were rumors that the first

(02:36):
round of white South African refugees were on their way here,
and that group of around fifty did indeed arrive on
a chartered flight in May. A South African group claimed
in June that nine more refugees had arrived on a
commercial flight, but I can't find any official statement from
anyone about whether additional South Africans were ever brought over

(03:00):
from the BBC as recently as this week says. It's
not clear how many, or if any, additional South Africans
have been resettled in the US after that first group
in May, but apparently people are still applying for refugee resettlement.

(03:20):
At the end of this episode, you'll hear about a
group called Americaners. Back in the spring, it was very new.
It was a hastily established organization, but claimed at the
time that they were assisting white South Africans who hoped
to apply for refugee resettlement in the US. Well in September,
Americaners was formally brought on as a partner organization by

(03:43):
the US State Department, And as I'm writing this now,
a few days before Christmas, there is some news about
that the State Department outsourced the work of processing applications
for refugee resettlement on site in South Africa. The official
implementation partners in that process are Church World Services, a

(04:06):
nonprofit based in Indiana, and Americannors, a limited liability company
incorporated in Florida, but the actual work was being done
by RSC Africa, a company operated by that nonprofit, Church
World Services out of Kenya. In mid December, South African

(04:27):
authorities deported seven Kenya nationals working at the application processing center.
They had entered South Africa on tourist biasis and were
not legally allowed to work. The Americanor's website was pretty
bare bones when I looked at it back in April. Today,
now that they are an official implementation partner with the

(04:48):
US State Department, it's massive. There are pages and pages
of useful information for white South Africans looking to adjust
to life in America. There's a page explaining that it's
a common American custom to say hello to your neighbors,
and another page that lists everything you need to know

(05:09):
about hiring a maid to clean your suburban American home.
A page about American demographics suggests that quote the Midwest's
homogeneity offers a familiar feel, and it specifically notes that
Nebraska is ninety percent white. The same page advises the

(05:30):
reader to use American census data to research prospective locations.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
Knowing Georgia is thirty two percent black helps you prepare
for diverse interactions considering they are moving from Africa. I
don't know why they would need to prepare. Nevertheless, relations
between the United States and South Africa are not getting better.

(06:01):
The President of the United States keeps doubling down on
white nationalist talking points about the white genocide conspiracy theory.
So I'm sure this is a story that I'll keep
coming back to, whether I like it or not. I'll
be back soon with more weird little guys in twenty
twenty six. On December sixteenth, nineteen fifty six, all over

(06:31):
South Africa, people gathered in city squares and event halls.
Children's choirs performed, congregations gathered to sing hymns, and whole
towns turned out to hear speeches from civic leaders and
church elders. They barbecued and picnicked. They made a whole
weekend of it, with parades led by mounted police and

(06:54):
festivals headlined by government officials all over the country. People
attending events in their own towns tuned in to hear
the Prime Minister's speech. In Krugersdorp, a judge addressing the
crowd in Jermyston urged Afrikaaners not to forsake God by
tolerating communism, saying quote, everywhere is the cry for equality

(07:17):
of whites and non whites, and everywhere it is fanned
by communism. In Freddorp, a speaker waxed poetic on the
noble character of their Dutch pioneer forefathers, saying quote, they
were neither conquerors nor oppressors. They always followed a determined
policy towards the barbarians. In Vadterfal, a member of parliament

(07:40):
gave a speech about the importance of apartheid, that it
was in fact a kindness allowing the races to live
and let live, retaining their racial identities by avoiding race
Mixing that speaker mc Botha would later help design and
implement the administration of the Bantustans.

Speaker 3 (08:00):
Day.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
He told the crowd that apartheid had a far more
positive outlook than something like segregation. In Kempton Park, theologian
Petrus Dryer warned that there could be no middle ground
economic integration. Inevitably leads to social integration, which always ends
in blood mixing. Apartheid was still young in nineteen fifty six.

(08:25):
The system was still being constructed. Dryer predicted a complete
disappearance of the white race if the country failed to
quickly adopt total and complete apartheid. That celebration, the one
in Kempton Park, was presided over by festival chair William
Henry Huggett. He'd been the mayor of the city for

(08:48):
several years in the early fifties, and he was on
the board of his local branch of the National Party.
The newspaper write up about the event mentions him only briefly.
I couldn't even tell you if mister hugget gave a speech,
but I'm willing to bet that they're in the audience
listening to those warnings of impending racial annihilation. Was his daughter,

(09:12):
at twelve year old, Monica Huggett. I'm Molly Conger and
this it's weird, little guys. This is a story about

(09:41):
religious fervor. It's about myth and legend and racial holy war.
It's a story of very modern bombings and treason convictions
and planned assassinations. But it's a story rooted in history,
So first, if you'll indulge me a bit of history.

(10:04):
December sixteenth is a significant day for South Africans. Today
it's celebrated as Reconciliation Day, but it wasn't always a
day of peace. In nineteen sixty one, the newly formed
paramilitary Arm of the African National Congress m CONTO Wisizwey
announced their existence with a series of bomb blasts and

(10:25):
leaflets declaring, quote, the time comes in the life of
any nation where there remains only two choices, submit or fight.
That time has now come to South Africa. We shall
not submit, and we have no choice but to hit
back by all means within our power, in defense of
our people. In nineteen thirty, the South African Communist Party

(10:47):
held a nationwide protest encouraging black South Africans to publicly
burn their past books, the internal passports black people were
required to carry at all times. At a passbook burning
rally in urban police attacked demonstrators, killing a and C
organizer Johannes and Kosi. In twenty twelve, a series of

(11:09):
police raids were carried out, rounding up four men accused
of treason and a plot to assassinate President Jacobsuma. And
the reason that all of these things happened on December
sixteenth is the same. It's the same reason those crowds
gathered in city squares all over the country in nineteen

(11:30):
fifty six. Until the holiday was repurposed as Reconciliation Day.
In nineteen ninety five, it was celebrated as the Day
of the Vow. The holiday occupies a place of great
importance in the political ideology of the africaner nationalist. In
the eighteen thirties, Dutch speaking settlers in the British controlled

(11:51):
colony at the Cape of Good Hope began migrating north
away from British rule. Of course, the land nor of
the British colony wasn't empty, and these exploratory missions often
came into conflict with the African people whose land they
wanted to settle on. In eighteen thirty seven, one of
those bands of Dutch pioneers, known as the fore Trekkers,

(12:15):
set their sights on a bit of land in what
is now Kuasulu Natal. They approached the Zulu king dingane
An attempted to negotiate, stating a desire to live in
peace with the Zulu, but noting that they had been
victorious in prior conflicts with Zulu warriors. The negotiations did

(12:36):
not go well. Dinghane was understandably cautious in dealing with
the fur Trekers. Earlier treks North had brought the settlers
into violent conflict with the indigenous people they encountered, and
their proposal just wasn't consistent with the way the Zulu lived.
The four Trekers wanted a written contract for ownership of

(12:56):
the land in perpetuity. Neither of these things were possible
in Zulu society. Theirs was an oral culture. There were
no written treaties or contracts, and their customs and laws
didn't allow for the permanent transfer of ownership of land
held by the king. In February of eighteen thirty eight,

(13:16):
a four record delegation led by Pete Retief met with
d Ghane to sign the treaty. There are conflicting accounts
as to whether this treaty was actually signed, but d
Ghane clearly had no intention of giving the Dutch settlers
any land. The entire delegation was led to a nearby
hillside and killed. There were retaliatory attacks and skirmishes throughout

(13:40):
the year, but the settlers spent most of eighteen thirty
eight regrouping. Farmers from the Cape Colony were called up
as reinforcements, and the bit of history that matters here
came at the end of the year, the Battle of
Blood River. December of eighteen thirty eight, Andres Pretorius led

(14:03):
a caravan of fifty seven ox carts and four hundred
and sixty four trekker men into Zulu territory. The fort
Trekers were armed with guns, and the caravan had several cannons.
The battle began at dawn on December sixteenth. A surviving
member of the Zulu forces said their first charge was

(14:24):
mown down like grass by the musket fire. The Zulu
had an overwhelming numerical advantage, accounts very widely putting the
number at at least nine thousand, with some estimates ranging
as high as thirty thousand, but the fort Trekers had
a strong defensive position and they had artillery. By noon,

(14:46):
three thousand Zulu warriors were dead. The Fort Trekers had
not lost a single man in the Battle of Blood River.
There is, of course, no river with such a hideous name.
The battle was fought on the banks of the Encome River,
But on the day three thousand Zulu men were slain
in a matter of hours. The river is said to

(15:09):
have run red with their blood. That much is true.
The Battle of Blood River was fought on December sixteenth,
eighteen thirty eight. The Day of the Vow, however, celebrates
a possibly apocryphal vow sworn by Andres Pretorius that if
God would deliver them a victory against the Zulu, their

(15:30):
descendants would forever keep that day as a holy sabbath.
They didn't, not until many decades later, anyway. Leonard Thompson,
an English historian who led Yale's Southern African Research program,
posits that the Day of the Vow is political mythology,
a piece of history that was resurrected and embellished when

(15:53):
it was politically expedient. There is some kernel of truth.
There is a contemporary count in the journals of Pretorius's secretary,
General jan Bantis, that one week before the battle, Pretorius
called his senior officers to his tent and asked them
to pray to God for victory, and he promised that
if they were victorious, he would build a church to

(16:16):
commemorate it and they did win, and he did build
that church, thus fulfilling the only portion of that promise
that we have any record of. For decades, white South
Africans did not keep December sixteenth as a holy sabbath.
An eighteen seventy seven text by a South African nationalist

(16:37):
theologian contains a history of the battle, but it makes
no mention at all of any vow or of divine intervention.
The story re emerged in the late eighteen hundreds amidst
the Boer Wars, and in eighteen eighty a ceremony was
held to renew the covenant, and in this ceremony they

(16:59):
tied the story of the four Trekker victory over Black
Africans to the present struggle for national identity against the
British Empire. There were sporadic celebrations of the holiday in
the last few decades of the nineteenth century, and the
story was evolving as a sort of founding myth. God
wanted the Africaner to have that land. God wanted whites

(17:22):
to conquer Black Africans. God gave the Africaner this land
because they were God's chosen people. When South Africa gained
independence in nineteen ten. One of the first acts of
Parliament was to make the Day of the Covenant a
national holiday. In nineteen thirty eight, at the celebration of
the one hundred year anniversary of the Battle of Blood River,

(17:45):
nationalist politician D. F. Milan addressed the crowd. He said
Blood River had decided the future of South Africa, that
it was to be a civilized Christian nation under the
authority of the white race. And now that moment, in
nineteen thirty eight, they were standing on the banks of
their own Blood River quote, seeing the dark masses gathering

(18:08):
around your isolated white race. A decade later, when Milan
was elected Prime Minister, he oversaw the implementation of apartheid.
You might be wondering at this point, why am I
telling you about this? What does this racist, fake holiday
have to do with the subject of our story, Monica

(18:29):
huggets Stone. It has everything to do with her. Her
belief in the vengeful racist god of Blood River is
central to the way she has lived her entire life.
She brings it up in almost every interview I could find.
In one podcast from twenty twenty one, she describes visiting

(18:52):
the site with her family as a child. To this day,
She believes that if the africaner renews that vow, their
God will guide their hand in slaughtering the enemies of
the white race, whoever they may be.

Speaker 4 (19:09):
And this is what I'm clinging to, is that the
God of Blood treever is not dead, even if the
enemies all over the world, and might they not only black,
the white governments of the waste caused the fall of
South Africa and Rhodesia and the rest of the white

(19:30):
colonies in Africa.

Speaker 5 (19:33):
And of course the jew has their hand in there.

Speaker 4 (19:36):
Oh, absolutely absolutely.

Speaker 1 (19:42):
The constructed mythology around the importance of that day became
so central to africanternationalists ideology and identity that for decades
there was no scholarship at all examining its historical roots.
In nineteen seventy nine, historian Flora's vent Yardsfeld was presenting
a conference paper at the University of Pretoria. He had

(20:05):
begun to question the historicity of the popular cultural narratives
about Blood River, and just as he approached the lectern
to present his paper, forty men burst into the lecture
hall and surrounded the professor. They emptied a tin of
hot tar over him and coated him in white feathers.
Those men were members of a group that had up

(20:27):
until that very moment operated entirely in secret. This was
their big public debut. The leader seized the microphone and
announced himself. He was Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the Africaner
Resistance movement. He called Vinyardsfeld's paper blasphemous, an attack on

(20:49):
the sanctity and very essence of Africaner identity. Early on,
in the process of figuring out who Monica huggets Stone was,
I saw a very strange comment. I was reading a
blog post about an internal schism within a modern day
African nationalist group called the Swedelanders. The blog was written

(21:12):
by Adrian Snyman. We'll get to him in a minute,
but in the comments under the post there was one
from Monica, posted in twenty twenty three, and she was
so sorry to see whites turning on each other instead
of focusing on the real enemy. And she ends this
rather long comment by saying, quote, the time is now

(21:34):
for the Boer people to stand together, to go on
their knees and beg forgiveness from our creator, the Great
Almighty God who created the heavens and the earth. We
have turned our backs on God and have the mistaken
idea that we ourselves are the saviors of the Boer people.
God has not abandoned us. He is waiting patiently for
the people to call upon him. Just as at Blood River,

(21:57):
he will answer again and give his children victory. And
I didn't know what that meant, so I made a
note of it, and I moved on, And then I
saw it again in a YouTube comment just a few
months ago. She wrote, may the God of Blood River
be with his children and give us victory against his enemy.

(22:20):
And then I found a series of articles she wrote
for a rabidly anti Semitic Christian identity magazine between twenty
eleven and twenty seventeen. And they're all very strange. The
Bible verses she quotes are from a translation I'd never
heard of. It's not the King James or the New International.
It's something else, entirely, something called the Ferrari Fenton Bible.

(22:44):
He was apparently a British businessman who died in nineteen twenty,
and his translation is not well regarded by biblical scholars.
He was also briefly the head of the South African
Diamond Mining Corporation group, and he believed that British people
were the true Israelites. I didn't know the Farar fent

(23:07):
and Bible was even an option, but I guess if
you're a racist South African who believes white people are
the descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, it's the
perfect choice. In those articles, she predicts a coming race war,
she agonizes over what she calls satanic attacks on the
Aryan race, and there at the end of pages of

(23:31):
apocalyptic rambling, she calls for a renewal of the vow
of Blood River and that blog. Monica's comment in twenty
twenty three on that post about internal divisions within a
right Winging Africannor group preparing for a race war, Well,
that comment wasn't her only appearance on that site. In

(23:55):
twenty eleven, the blog's author, Adrian Snyman wrote a post
with the title thank you Aryan Nations, and the post
is a response to Monica Stone. She had written privately
to Snyman to let him know that she would be
attending the Aryan Nations World Congress in September of twenty eleven,
and she'd be giving a speech about the white genocide

(24:16):
in South Africa. Snyman's post describes Monica as the only
female member of the Africaner Resistance movement to have ever
served time in prison for her involvement in the group,
and he urges his readers to email her their letters
of thanks so she can present them to the Aryan
Nations after her speech. And here's where things start to

(24:38):
go off the rails. Adrian Snyman, the author of that blog,
is a prolific writer. In his younger years, he worked
for a newspaper covering horse racing, and for decades he
cranked out dozens of novels under a variety of pseudonyms.

(24:58):
But by nineteen ninety he he'd found his calling interpreting
the prophecies of Nicklaus van Rensburg. Nicholas van Rensburg was
born in eighteen sixty four on a farm in what
is now South Africa. He never learned to write, and
he only learned to read by sounding out the words

(25:19):
of the Bible. He died in nineteen twenty six. During
the Second Boer War. He was a close companion of
General Coups de la Rey. He was also allegedly a
prophet of God. I spent too much time trying to

(25:39):
parse the prophecies. I had trouble locating any actual, original
written versions of the prophecies. I don't want to see
interpretations of them. I want to see them, and I
looked for some original source for entirely too long before
I realized they don't exist. According to Snyman, Van Rensberg's

(26:03):
daughter Anna wrote down over seven hundred of her father's visions,
but the original handwritten books were lost at the time
of her death in nineteen eighty one. The family was
not in possession of any of those writings. It appears
he's based his books on a document written in nineteen
forty two. A man who had seen those original written

(26:26):
versions of the prophecies related them orally to another man
who wrote them down sixteen years after Van Rensburg died,
and even that document was lost until Sniman received it
in nineteen ninety. There's no explanation of where it was
in between, or how he came to possess it. Very

(26:49):
unclear providence on these prophecies. There's no chain of custody
on the prophecies. Sniman has written so feverishly on the
subject for the last thirty five years. Almost everything I
can find about Van Rensburgh is written by him, and
everything else relies on his work. There are some contemporary

(27:12):
accounts of some of Van Rensburgh's visions, but it's worth
mentioning that the most spectacular examples of his predictions coming
to pass aren't ones I was able to find written
accounts of that date back to his lifetime, and the
interpretations of those prophecies that present possible modern occurrences as
their fulfillment are almost universally written by fervent Race war enthusiasts,

(27:38):
people who really really want the prophecies to be true.
And the problem with prophecies that some people really really
want to be true is that there will sometimes be
people who take matters into their own hands and try
to make them come true. Most of his visions are

(28:02):
entirely symbolic. Things like I saw a red bull and
a gray bull fighting is interpreted by his followers as
an accurate prediction of World War I, or out of
the North, a speckled black ox appears. He is looking
in our direction. The earth in our country becomes desolate,
but in Europe it becomes pitch dark, and that is

(28:25):
apparently a prediction of the Great Depression. According to Sneyman,
Van Reinzberg correctly predicted such events as every war of
the twentieth century, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster Aids, the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the election of Margaret Thatcher, Princess
Diana's divorce, Princess Diana's death, and a nineteen ninety five

(28:47):
earthquake in Japan. As for the prophecies that haven't come true,
well maybe they just haven't come true yet.

Speaker 5 (28:59):
In nineteen six he tells his friend boy Mussmann, there
will come a time when I will be once.

Speaker 4 (29:05):
Again in the news.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
In those days I see we are still fighting amongst ourselves.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
And it is over, and we will have a black government.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
Which is then that the Afrikaana's final and fiercest struggle
will begin.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
According to Snyman's books, Ben Ronzberg had a vision in
nineteen twenty five, six months before his death. The actual
text of this prophecy is word solid, something about a
goose coming out of a man's mouth, but it's interpreted
to mean that Van Rensburgh predicted that in the distant future,

(29:49):
a black man will be released from prison and that
man will attain power and under his rule the country
will be thrown into chaos, and at some point that
man will die a violent death, and on the eighth
day after his death, the day he is buried, a
civil war will begin. By his own account, Sneiman started

(30:12):
interpreting the prophecies in nineteen ninety. He published his first
book on them in nineteen ninety two, but the earliest
writing I could actually get my hands on is from
nineteen ninety five, So I can't tell you if Sneiman
always believed that this particular prophecy was about Nelson Mandela
and his release from prison in nineteen ninety and his
election as president in nineteen ninety four. But that's his

(30:34):
interpretation now, and this particular prophecy has inspired at least
two attempts to force it to come true. In late
two thousand and two, a white supremacist terrorist organization calling
itself the Booramagh set off a series of bombs in Soeto,
outside of Johannesburg. They targeted a mosque, a Buddhist temple,

(30:59):
an airport, a gas station, and railways, and those bombs
went off after the first round of arrests earlier that year.
After the wave of bombing, the group emailed newspapers taking
responsibility for the attacks. They demanded the release of the
Boramag members who'd already been arrested, but it warned that

(31:21):
it wasn't just lower ranking members of the group that
people should be worried about. Interfering with the mission of
the Boramagh was a challenge to the God of the
Blood River. If their demands weren't met, another wave of
bombings would commence. On December sixteenth, the day of the vow,

(31:55):
those bombings did not come to pass. Police responded to
the emails by raiding ninety four properties and arresting eleven
more Boromac members. Intriguingly, some of the homes that were
raided that day belonged to men we've encountered elsewhere in
this story. There were police raids at the home of
Baron Streidem the White Wolf, who went on a shooting

(32:17):
spree in nineteen eighty eight, and at the home of villem. Rata,
the former Rhodesian military officer who commanded the German mercenaries
at Radio Pratoria in nineteen ninety four. Africana Resistance Movement
member Mani Merits and Pete Rudolph, the leader of the
Order Borofolk at one of these homes, though none of

(32:38):
the reporting specifies whose police found a list of names
of the detectives who'd been investigating the boramac. The trials
took over a decade, with testimony from over two hundred people.
In the end, twenty three members of the group received
prison sentences of varying lengths between five and three thirty

(33:00):
five years. The ringleader, Mike Detoy, was the first South
African to be convicted of treason by the post apartheid government,
and because the cases spent eleven years in court, we
know a lot about them. At the group's first meeting,
members took the vow of blood River. They carried copies

(33:21):
of the vow pasted into a little book at all times,
and they gave each other code names like Rottweiler and motherfucker.
After they swore their allegiance to God and each other,
the leader of the group gave each man a single
nine millimeter bullet. In later testimony, a member said quote

(33:41):
he said, there was no turning back now. Anyone turning
back will be shot, and if you knew somebody would
betray you, you had to make sure. He was shot.
In October of two thousand and two, former President Nelson
Mandela was scheduled to travel to Limpopo for a ceremony
opening a new school. BOROMAC members placed a large bomb

(34:04):
on the side of the road they knew he would
have to travel to get there, and stretched a trip
wire across it. They were hiding in the bushes waiting
to watch the former president get blown to bits when
they heard the helicopter. They'd failed. Had Mandela not taken
a helicopter at the last minute instead of traveling the

(34:24):
final leg of his journey by car, the bomb almost
certainly would have killed him, and this they believed would
trigger Van Rensburgh's prophecies of a race war. Both their
own testimony and documents recovered in the police raids show
their dedication to the Van Rensburg prophecies. A lot of

(34:47):
their planning documents just don't make sense at all without
the context of the prophecies. One plan presupposes, without explanation,
that the violence will simply begin when a mob of
black people engage and violent midnight attacks in Johannesburg. That's
an extremely unlikely and unexplained scenario in the real world,

(35:09):
but it is something that does incite an unstoppable wave
of violence. In some of Sneman's interpretations of the prophecies,
their planning documents also fixate on the idea of amassing
their forces in a small town called Prisca. There's no
political or tactical advantage to being in Prisca, but the

(35:30):
town is mentioned more than twenty times in one of
Sneiman's books. Van Rensburg had a vision that a miracle
would occur in Prisca, that in their hour of need,
the Boers would receive much needed help from abroad. In
the prophecies, the white africaner is armed for the final
struggle in Prisca when German guns arrive. It's very important

(35:56):
in the prophecies these German guns. The guns must come
from Germany. And that's so interesting. I mean, the prophecies
are a jumbled mess and a lot of it doesn't
mean anything. They're mostly about bulls fighting and white horses
on hillsides and chickens running east. But the German guns

(36:20):
are quite concrete, and I wonder if that was on
anyone's mind. In nineteen ninety three, when Monica Huggett started
hosting German mercenaries in her home, maybe it's a coincidence
that those Germans were the ones smuggling in the guns
they hoped to use in the race war back then

(36:42):
hard to say. Over the course of the Boromag trials,
witnesses testified to almost unbelievable plots that the group never
had a chance to carry out. Members testified that they'd
considered stoking racial tension by carrying out terrace attacks intended
to appear as though the perpetrators had been Jewish or Muslim.

(37:05):
One early plan involved shooting down an American passenger plane,
but that was scrapped because it was likely to kill
white people. A police informant who'd infiltrated the group testified
that one member claimed his American contacts in the Ku
Klux Klan could help them create a poison to put
in the water supply. Another member set on the stand

(37:26):
that they'd planned to poison oranges and then leave them
on the streets of Soweto where black people might pick
them up and eat them. When the guilty verdicts were read,
Pete Rudolph stood up in the gallery and yelled in Afrikaans,
we shall overcome. How odd to see Pete Rudolph misbehaving
in the gallery twice so many years apart. It was

(37:49):
a few episodes ago now, but thirty three years before this,
in nineteen eighty, it was Pete Rudolph who stood and
applauded as the vict Commando bombers were led into the
court room. But during the trials, thirteen of those defendants
took a unorthodox approach to their defense. They challenged the

(38:12):
court's jurisdiction to even try them at all, claiming that
due to irregularities in the nineteen ninety two referendum and
the nineteen ninety four election, the current government was illegitimate
and the post nineteen ninety four constitution was not binding.
The government's position was, of course, that the nineteen ninety
two referendum had authorized the government to negotiate a new constitution.

(38:37):
That referendum, for the record, asked the question do you
support continuation of the reform process which the state president
began on two February nineteen ninety and which has aimed
at a new constitution through negotiation, And that referendum passed
with sixty nine percent of voters saying yes. Here's Monica's

(38:59):
men memory of that election.

Speaker 5 (39:01):
Just for fun, I mean. I remember my niece was
about three four years old. We walked into the voting
booths and she little as she was gay. It's the
Nazi salute, and she said, my daddy is voting.

Speaker 4 (39:17):
No.

Speaker 1 (39:22):
The BORAMAG defendants were unsuccessful, obviously, but they did try
to subpoena South Africa's last apartheid president, DEFW De Clerk,
I guess, in an attempt to prove that the government
didn't legally exist, and after the verdicts were in some
right wingers blamed to Clerk if he hadn't ended apartheid,

(39:42):
none of this would have happened in the first place.
A press release from Andres Breidenbach, leader of the far
right party HNP and chairman of a group called the
bor Afrikaner Volksfrad, attacked to Clerk. The press release read,
in part, each of the those sentences as yours personally,
because you are the real trader who subjugated our people

(40:04):
to a hostile power with cunning in deceit, and further
down the page he continues that you have not created
any git through which the poor African or people can
escape from this dispensation in a constitutional manner. Shows your
evil intent against our people. News reports at the time
say the press release was issued via his Facebook page,

(40:26):
but I couldn't dig it up there. No, Unfortunately, I
found it on Stormfront. I can't believe I'd never noticed before,
but the internet's oldest running Nazi message board has an
entire subsection where all the posts are in Afrikaans. In
a two thousand and nine dissertation by Inez Mary Stephanie

(40:48):
at the University of the vit Varsrand, the author makes
a claim that I believe but I can't find anywhere else.
She writes that in the mid nineties, the Africaner Resistance
movement didn't have their own website. I mean, it was
the nineties, how many people knew how to make a website.

(41:08):
But instead of the group just not having a website,
American clansman Don Black, Stormfront's webmaster, hosted their online presence
for them. What a strange and fascinating intersection. But back
to the press release. I wouldn't have bothered to tell

(41:30):
you Andreas Breytenbach's name if that was his only appearance
in this story. There's already too many guys I know.
But it's not no, because he had friends overseas two
and he was in Washington, d C. In September of
twenty twelve. I can't blame you if you've forgotten why

(41:52):
that's interesting. It's been a long story. It was in
September of twenty twelve that Monica hugg at Stone led
that tiny gaggle of Aryan Nations members on a march
through DC. It was her second attempt at getting public
attention for her South Africa project, raising awareness for the
white genocide of the Africaner. But what if it was

(42:16):
something else. A month before that rally, the front page
story in d Africaner, the newspaper for the far right
party HNP, said that their chairman Andres Breitenbach had decided
that there would be a march in America the following month, quote,
a march will be held in America next month. This

(42:39):
action stop genocide was initiated by the HNP. So maybe
there was some other march against white genocide somewhere in
the United States in September of twenty twelve, as possible,
I guess, But this was the only one in Washington, DC.

(43:00):
That's where Andres Breytenbach was the week of Monica's Aryan
Nation's rally at the Capitol. I can't find him in
any of the photos, but that same party newspaper uses
a photo of Monica at her rally to illustrate their
story about Breytenbach delivering a letter to the ambassador in
Washington that same week. Maybe something is lost in translation here,

(43:25):
but the article appears to conclude with this statement. The
group of local protesters was also encouraged by the fact
that their spokesman, mister Andres Breytenbach, gave an interview to
the media at the embassy, and Monica obviously saw and
had no issue with the wording of this article because

(43:46):
it was proudly posted to the Arian Nation's website, which
is where I found it. But it gets even stranger.
Breytenbach wasn't the only South African who paid a visit
to the Aryan Nations in September of twenty That same month,
a man named Hein Boonsire took a trip to the

(44:06):
United States. When he was arrested for treason three months later,
it was revealed in court that he'd been trying to
secure funding from the Aryan Nations and the ku Klux Klan.
Buonsire and three others, Johann Prinslou, John Martin kiv and
Mark Trollop were arrested on December sixteenth, twenty twelve, the

(44:27):
day of the vow and the day they had planned
to assassinate South African President Jacob Zuma. The charges against
Boonsire were dropped in August of twenty thirteen, and after
a psychiatric evaluation. John Martin Kievy was committed to a
state hospital. Mark Tarlop pled guilty to conspiracy, and Johann

(44:48):
Princelou was found guilty of treason after a trial. So legally,
can I tell you that hein Buonsire was soliciting funding
for terrorism? No, I can't. He wasn't convicted of any
crime in connection to the plot. But the plot was real.
It was real enough that Johann Prinsley was convicted of

(45:10):
treason and Buonsire did make two trips to the United
States to connect with right wing groups, one just months
before his arrest. Early reporting about his arrest explicitly states
that the twenty twelve trip had been an effort to
secure financial backing from American extremist groups. But I was

(45:31):
puzzled about the economics of such a trip. I mean
guns aren't cheap, sure, but what's the return on investment
in terms of ammunition when you're looking at booking international travel.
But it's possible they needed money for more than just weapons.
Buonsire was buying land, a lot of it in Prisca.

(45:57):
There is a post from the year before his arrest
a website for believers in the Free Afrikaner movement. It's
a collection of white South Africans who want an independent state,
and the post name's Buonsire's real estate company, Hausenberg Development Cooperative,
as one of two companies allowing people to purchase shares
in a large tract of land to facilitate white resettlement.

(46:35):
Later reporting from investigative journalism outlet Amapungani says Boonsire's company
website was in twenty twelve quote in the process of
purchasing thirty thousand hectares of farmland in Prisca. But I
can't find any follow up as to whether or not
he ever successfully purchased the land for his white enclave.

(46:56):
During his trip to the United States in twenty twelve,
he appeared on episodes of one right wing podcast and
made a single appearance on a wildly fringe anti Semitic
conspiracy theory show. I spent the better part of the
day trying to dig up audio of any of those episodes,
but they seem to be lost to time. Amapungane reported

(47:19):
in twenty twelve that in one episode, Buonsire said, I
think we can assume that within the next six to
eight months, I wouldn't be surprised if we had a
full scale civil war in South Africa. It's a low
level war that's being waged against us, and at some
point any group of people or a nation would stand
up and say enough is enough. In the reporting about

(47:39):
Boonsire's American connections, it's mentioned that he'd visited once before,
but no details are provided. It seemed like that first
trip might remain a mystery until I found an open
letter Boonsire himself wrote in twenty thirteen after his charges
were dropped. In that letter, he reveals that he'd been
publishing online for years under the pseudonym Heinrich Zeman, and

(48:05):
there is a bit of writing online in Afrikaans under
that name, much of it published by the Pro African
or Action Group. But I found one essay in English,
the beast tells the almost entirely fictional story of the
author's grandparents falling victim to the ongoing white genocide in
South Africa. They are victims of these infamous farm murders,

(48:28):
hacked to death in their beds by machete wielding black men,
and he writes in gory detail about the couple's beloved dog,
dismembered by the attackers as he gave his life trying
to protect his masters. It's gruesome, it's almost pornographic in
its description of the author discovering that the dog's final

(48:49):
act was tearing the throat out of one of the
black attackers. It was published in twenty eleven by American Renaissance,
supremacist magazine run by Jared Taylor. Taylor's website notes that
the author attended the American Renaissance Conference in twenty ten,
an event that was headlined by a speaker from the

(49:10):
Belgian fascist group Flams Belong, the successor organization to Flams Block,
the neo Nazi organization that coordinated the movement of stolen
guns and mercenaries to South Africa and the nineties Bundsaire's
piece was included in a collection of essays published by
American Renaissance in twenty twenty, and the book has a

(49:31):
forward by Jared Taylor himself. I will do some episodes
on Jared Taylor one of these days. He's had an
enormous influence on American white supremacist thought over the last
forty years. His annual conference has for decades now been
a real who's who of the international extreme right. I

(49:53):
went once years ago. I mean I couldn't get inside, obviously,
I just outside in a park somewhere in Tennessee, and
all I got from my trouble was pepper sprayed and
trampled by some cops. For the average person, I would
guess the only time you've encountered Jared Taylor's name in
the news was back in twenty fifteen. He was the

(50:16):
spokesman for the Council of Conservative Citizens when they had
to make a series of public statements after the Charleston
church shooting. Dylan Rufe's manifesto made it quite clear that
he'd been radicalized by the Council of Conservative Citizens, specifically
their publications on black crime, and that's what convinced him

(50:37):
that white people were being treated unfairly. Their website set
him down the path that ended the lives of nine
people whose only crime was welcoming a stranger into their
Bible study. Like I said, Boonsire's charges were dropped when
he was arrested. In twenty twelve, he was removed as

(50:59):
the head of a newly for political party, the Federal
Freedom Party, after its founder was arrested for treason. It
obviously struggled a bit, and it rebranded as Front National
in twenty thirteen, and then rebranded again as the African
her Self Determination Party in twenty twenty. I can't tell
if Boonsi is still active and the party he started

(51:20):
seems like it would be kind of hard to go
back to canvassing for elections when you've already considered triggering
a prophecy by blowing up the president. But people can change.
I don't know. In September of twenty twelve, Monica hugget
Stone was in touch with the leader of the far
right party HNP and a man accused of treason. She

(51:42):
led a tiny Arian nation's rally at the United States
Capital and then she left. She had been living in
the United States since two thousand after marrying Jim Stone,
a retired sports news broadcaster living just outside New Orleans.
Federal Election Commission filings show that Jimstone was on the
payroll for David Duke's nineteen ninety six Senate run, but

(52:04):
the campaign didn't amount to much. Jim was apparently the
campaign press secretary and director of media relations. But the
only news story I can find that looks like it
was placed by a press secretary is the one announcing
he'd been hired for the position, So maybe he wasn't
very good at it. Jim Stone passed away in early

(52:25):
twenty twelve, and in twenty thirteen, the now widowed Monica
Stone sold their home in Mandavie, Louisiana, and returned to
her hometown of Kempton Park in South Africa. Back in
South Africa, she operates a charitable organization called the Living
Waters Foundation, and interviews in recent years always include a
request for donations. She helps orphans, you see, but only

(52:50):
white ones. She's quite meticulous about it. In twenty fifteen,
a fellow South African neo Nazi recommended donating to Monica's charity,
writing on his blog quote, She's a hardcore national socialist.
She only gives money to white children. If she gives
money to someone and she later sees them helping non whites,

(53:11):
then she cuts off the monies. I went with her
in twenty fifteen to visit an orphanage in Pretoria, the
only one run by a white woman who was doing
it only for white children. But when Monica later found
out that the woman was also helping blacks, she cut
off all donations, which I agree with batman Ian Lamprecht

(53:32):
was arrested in twenty twenty one for violating a court
order to stop harassing a Jewish professor, but that's neither
here nor there. I can't quite nail down the specifics,
but it seems Yan and Monica had a falling out
some time after twenty fifteen, but for the most part
in a movement constantly ripped apart by personal feuds and

(53:53):
power struggles and accusations of betrayal, I can't find a
single bad word about Monica Huggets. I scraped together every
existing record of her involvement in white supremacist groups from
nineteen seventy nine, when she first met Eugene tare Blanche,
through the present day, covering nearly fifty years, intersecting with

(54:15):
multiple bombing campaigns, international arms smuggling rings, and attempted coups.
She turned state's witness against her own boyfriend in nineteen
eighty And I dug through dozens of ancient blogs in
multiple languages, and I can't find a single Nazi with
a bad word to say about her. And I think

(54:37):
that's a first. There's always beef somewhere. I will have
to circle back at some point to talk about the
Swede Lenders, maybe another time. There are more recent African
nationalist group founded in the early two thousands, and they
publicly shy away from being associated with obvious neo Nazi imagery,

(54:59):
but the group is explicitly and completely centered around the
Van Rensburg prophecies. They exist to prepare their members for
the coming race war and spoiler alert in case I
don't get back to the Swede Lenders anytime soon. Their spokesman,
Simon Roche, spent most of the summer of twenty seventeen

(55:19):
traveling the United States, including attending the Unite the Right
rally here in Charlottesville, and back in that time period,
they got into a little bit of hot water in
the movement. There were allegations that Simon Roche had been
pocketing donations from other white nationalists. It was a bit
of a scandal, and in twenty eighteen he appeared on

(55:40):
an American neo Nazi podcast to address the issue, and
at some point during the show he was ambushed by
Jan Lamprecht, who is a rival of his, and it
got a little heated and it was a very lengthy,
uncomfortable interview. But at the end of all that, Simon
Roche still spoke glowingly of Monica, calling her some with
an impeccable reputation and recommending that if after all of this,

(56:04):
you're still not comfortable donating to the Swedelanders, you should
donate to Monica.

Speaker 3 (56:11):
Yeah, let me ask you this, are there other groups
that you think are reputable that are doing good work
in South Africa that if anybody has questions about the
If there are people who have questions about the integrity
of Sidelanders, who would they want to support instead of you?

Speaker 6 (56:28):
I would recommend that they support somebody like Monica Stone,
a very distinguished, decent lady who has fought for white nationalism.
She's probably a bit too right wing for me, but
she's a marvelous human being.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
So she's a bit two right wing for the race
war guy, but she's a marvelous human being, he says.
She's eighty one years old now, and she spent her
entire life in the orbit of assassins and mercenaries and
war criminals and bombers and rapists and torturers and terrorists

(57:08):
and death squad leaders and just run of the mill
neo Nazis with fantasies of racial holy war. Her religion
is quite literally one of blood. Her god is the
vengeful God of Blood River. This story is over the

(57:32):
part of it that was in the past anyway, but
I can't move on without making the consequences clear. This
is still happening. We'll leave Monica huggets Stone behind at
long last, because she was just the backstory. No. Now

(57:52):
we live in a world where these once fringe ideas
are front page news at outlets with White House presport.
And now, in twenty twenty five, the President of the
United States wants to welcome as refugees these people with
their apocalyptic visions of race war and mass extermination, these

(58:14):
people who worship the god of the Blood River. In
February of twenty twenty five, the President of the United

(58:35):
States announced first by social media and then by executive
order that a white nationalist conspiracy theory is now official
foreign policy. No longer relegated to racist message boards and
poorly attended rallies, the idea that white South Africans are
being violently persecuted is now center stage. In the months

(58:59):
since the administration has doubled down on this stance, foreign
aid to South Africa has been suspended, their ambassador has
been expelled, and now State Department officials have begun interviewing
white South Africans who have applied for refugee resettlement in
the United States. Apartheid ended in South Africa thirty one

(59:21):
years ago, but it turns out some of the same
people who fought tooth and nail to keep it back
then are still around and they haven't stopped fighting. I'm Mollikonger,
and this is weird. Little guys, you know. I don't

(59:59):
like kurrent events. I really prefer to root around the
past and piece together the odds and ends of the
life and crimes of someone who's done hurting other people.
I had a great time writing five episodes about Dennis Mahon,
a man whose career as a white supremacist activist span decades.

(01:00:20):
But when it came time to write a follow up episode,
I hated to have to tell you that, even though
Dennis will almost certainly die before he finish his prison sentence,
the one he got for sending a bomb to the
diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona, the current political climate finished
what he started. Republican politicians did what he couldn't do

(01:00:44):
with that bomb, and they closed that office. And we
find ourselves in something of a similar position now. These
last few episodes have been a wild, sprawling narrative about
white supremacist terrorism in South Africa in the final years
of apartheid, and I've learned a lot of history that
I'd never been exposed to before, and I've really enjoyed

(01:01:06):
digging my way out of some of these unexpected rabbit holes.
But it would be irresponsible of me to tell you
such a long story and then leave you thinking that
it was over, that it ended in nineteen ninety four,
that when apartheid ended, the international networks of right wing
extremists who'd done unspeakable things in its defense just faded away.

(01:01:31):
Because they didn't and they don't always need guns and
bombs to get what they want. So we'll end this
mini series where we started it the White House back
in February. When I started down this path, I had
just read the executive Order, the one titled addressing the

(01:01:53):
Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa. In the
week that order was signed, Trump had offered some insight
into what was going on in his head in this
post on truth social.

Speaker 7 (01:02:06):
South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of
people very badly. It's a bad situation that the radical
left media doesn't want to so much as mention. A
massive human rights violation at a minimum is happening for
all to see. The United States won't stand for it.
We will act also. I will be cutting off all

(01:02:30):
future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of
this situation has been completed.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
And that episode back in February goes into more detail
about what he's getting at here. South African President Cyril
Ramaposa had recently signed the Expropriation Act into law. There's
a lot of misinformation and fear mongering built around a
very tiny kernel of truth in there. As a quick refresher,

(01:03:03):
the Expropriation Act does allow the Government of South Africa
to expropriate land. That part's true, but only under certain
specific conditions. And it is fundamentally not really that different
from what we call eminent domain here in the United States,

(01:03:23):
and that's a power that was given to our government
by the Fifth Amendment. There's no racial component to it.
Nobody's terrorizing white farmers. There's no language at all in
the Expropriation Act about race. I spent probably too long
trying to look for clues that would help me guess

(01:03:43):
why he made that post on truth Social on February
twod Sometimes you can see a really clear direct line
which means something the president says or it does or
posts online. And the Fox News segment that he had
just been watching and that episode from back in February

(01:04:05):
makes what I think is a pretty good case for
how Trump's ideas about what's going on in South Africa
were formed back when he posted about it for the
first time in twenty eighteen, and back in twenty eighteen,
he tweeted about South African land reform for the first
time about forty five minutes after he heard about it
on an episode of Tucker Carlson. But on February second,

(01:04:29):
twenty twenty five, he made that truth social post while
he was sitting on Air Force one en route to
DC after a weekend golfing in Florida. His public schedule
for that day doesn't give us much, but he did
post several times that evening about Fox News host Mark Levin,
and he posted an old clip from Levin's show, and

(01:04:50):
he reposted one of Mark's old posts, and he posted
in all caps. Watched Mark Levin tonight on Fox News
eight pm Eastern Great Show, and Livin's show that evening
doesn't seem to have touched on the issue of South Africa,
So honestly, I couldn't tell you how the idea got
into his head that night, after a long day on
the golf course, he posted it around six nineteen pm,

(01:05:15):
and then forty minutes later, as he's sitting on the
tarmac after the plane landed, he reposted it. And as
he's leaving for the White House, a reporter asked him
about the post.

Speaker 8 (01:05:29):
So, on Pritzoto, you said that you were going to
touch it from South Africa?

Speaker 9 (01:05:33):
Were you planned to cut eight across other African nations?

Speaker 8 (01:05:36):
In white South Africa, only South Africa. Terrible things are
happening in South Africa. The leadership is doing some terrible things,
horrible things.

Speaker 10 (01:05:47):
So if that's under investigation right now, we'll make a
determination and until such time as we find out what
South Africa is doing. They're taking away land, they're confiscating land,
and actually doing things that are perhaps far worse than that.

Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
The far worse than that at the end of his
remarks is almost certainly a reference to his belief in
the white genocide conspiracy theory, that false narrative that white
farmers in South Africa are being murdered in enormous numbers.
And later that same week, in February of twenty twenty five,
Donald Trump signed the executive order cutting off aid to

(01:06:29):
South Africa. It also directed DHS and the State Department
to quote promote the resettlement of African or refugees escaping
government sponsored race based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation,
and so, in conjunction with his other executive orders ones

(01:06:50):
that suspended all other refugee resettlement operations, this now puts
white South Africans in a class all of their own.
They're the only people on Earth, who are so persecuted,
who are suffering so terribly that they are deserving of
assistance from the United States. And the executive order ignited

(01:07:13):
a flurry of activity on the right, both in the
United States and in South Africa. Far right talking heads
rushed to book South African guests, and one man in
particular was very happy to oblige. In the last two months,
Ernst Rutz has made the rounds. He's been interviewed by

(01:07:34):
Ben Shapiro, Matt Gates, Tucker Carlson, Jack Bestobic, and Jordan Peterson.
He's been on YouTube lives and shows that only exist
on Twitter. Somehow, he made an appearance on a show
hosted by Rinaldo Grause, a South African YouTuber whose political
career was stopped dead in its tracks last summer. Just

(01:07:54):
days after he was elected to parliament, his own parties
stripped him of membership after of him calling for the
murder of all black people, and he used both the
American racial slur that you're probably familiar with and a
South African equivalent. And Roots also gave an interminably long

(01:08:17):
interview to a benign sounding website called the White Papers
Policy Institute, but As it turns out, the woman interviewing
him has a long history of affiliation with neo Nazi groups,
and Ernst roots may sound familiar to you. In twenty eighteen,
he visited the United States in his capacity as the

(01:08:40):
deputy CEO of the Africaner nationalist group Afroforum. He met
with federal government officials and right wing think tanks. Notably,
he spent a day at the Heritage Foundation, took meetings
with staffers for Ted Cruz, and during that visit, he
appeared on an episode of The Talker Carlson Show back

(01:09:01):
when it was actually on TV, back when it was
appointment television for the president. And you might think that
Ernst Rutz would have nothing but praise for Trump's executive order. Right,
He's finally getting this message out, someone in power, is
finally talking about this epidemic of white farmers being murdered

(01:09:25):
in South Africa, and he is He's grateful for that, sure,
but he doesn't think Trump's proposed solution is the right one.
Here's what he said when he sat down with Tucker
Carlson at the end of February.

Speaker 11 (01:09:42):
On one part of it says that they will grand
refugee status to Africanas if they want to go to
the US, which I don't think in all fainness. We're
really grateful for the public stance taken by the US,
and in a certain sense they haven't gone far enough.
But in a certain sense I didn't. I think the
granting of refugee state is much of a solution. Some

(01:10:04):
people will take that up. But that's why I told
you the story of the Battle of Blood River and
the vow we are culturally very very attached to South Africa.

Speaker 1 (01:10:16):
And here he is telling Jordan Peterson the same thing
a few weeks later.

Speaker 11 (01:10:24):
That's why I'm so grateful that we spoke about the
history part at first. Is our concern is that if
we just leave the country, our culture dissolves and our
communal identity dissolves and we become Americans or whatever, and so.

Speaker 12 (01:10:39):
Well, plus the entire country descends into lawlessness, chaos and
everyone dies. Yep, right, because if all the white South
African farmers leave, that's one hundred percent what will happen.

Speaker 1 (01:10:55):
Ernst Rutz is a nationalist. He doesn't want to leave
South He isn't being persecuted for his whiteness. He just
misses the days when white minority rule meant the persecution
of everyone else. And in both those interviews, Ruts spoke
at some length about the importance of the Day of

(01:11:15):
the Vow, about the covenant between God and the Africaner
granting them that land they can't leave. Men like Ernst
Roots are still standing on the banks of the Blood
River waiting for God to sweep all the Africans out
of their way, and ahead of that whirlwind press junket.

(01:11:36):
In February and March, Ernst Ruts actually resigned from his
position as head of the Afrikaner Foundation, and that was
an initiative under the umbrella of the africanner interest group,
the Solidarity Movement, and Ruts says that he hadn't officially
worked for Afroforum since twenty twenty three, but Afroform and

(01:11:57):
the Africaner Foundation are both just part of the Solidarity movement.
These are just facets of the same organization, and so
now in February of twenty twenty five, he no longer
works for any of these organizations. He no longer works
for Solidarity at all, because it was Roots who got
the organization into some pretty hot water.

Speaker 11 (01:12:21):
Well, they're saying that we've the organizations that I was
involved with at the time of committed treason, that we've
been charged for treason.

Speaker 1 (01:12:28):
E've been charged with treason? Yeah for what.

Speaker 11 (01:12:31):
For speaking well, among others, for me speaking with you
about what's happened as treason? Yeah, because it's bad mouthing
your country.

Speaker 1 (01:12:41):
I mean, we've all made mistakes at work, but I
can't imagine making such a mess of things that somebody
gets charged with treason. And he's watering that down a
little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:12:53):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:12:54):
The accusation isn't just that he's bad mouthing the country.
I'm sure it's legal in southfi forget to say negative
things about the nation. But almost immediately after Trump announced
that he was cutting off aid to South Africa, a
lot of South Africans blamed Afro Forum. Members of Umkonto
was Sisway rallied outside of the police station in Cape

(01:13:16):
Town and announced that they were filing a criminal complaint
against Affro Forum, accusing them of treason. And just a
quick note for those who aren't up to date on
their South African current events, I wasn't kanto a. Sisway
is now its own political party. It does share a
name with the group that functioned as the paramilitary arm

(01:13:38):
of the African National Congress during the last decades of apartheid,
but as of a few years ago, it is a
political party.

Speaker 13 (01:13:46):
So just for clarity, the MK Party vehemently condemns the
trees and us actions of Afri Forum, which has deliberately
lobbied foreign powers to ed a game the sovereignty and
economic interests of South Africa. Their betrayal is nothing less

(01:14:06):
than an act of economic sabotage, a direct assault on
our nation's independence.

Speaker 1 (01:14:16):
For many South Africans, it was obvious Trump didn't come
up with this idea on his own. There is a
straight line between afrofums trips to the United States, their
appearances in American right wing media, their collaboration with American
think tanks, their English language propaganda videos targeting American audiences

(01:14:39):
on American platforms, and the end result, which was this
shift in US foreign policy. Even President Ramaposa has gone
on record blaming Afroform and Solidarity for spreading the lies
about South Africa that led to Trump's executive order. He
called the group unpatriotic in remarks before the National Assembly

(01:15:02):
in March.

Speaker 9 (01:15:05):
Fact whether that is treason US or not is a
matter not Obviously our law enforcement agencies need to look
at the National Prosecuting Agency needs to look at that.
But I take a dim view, in fact, a very
negative view of what has ensued as they run around

(01:15:27):
the world bed mouthing their own country and putting their
country into distribute, not by things that are happening, but
by misinformation.

Speaker 1 (01:15:42):
The matter has been confirmed to be under investigation, but
there has been no decision announced by the National Prosecuting
Authority as to whether the case will proceed. When Ramaposa
gave those remarks on March eleventh, twenty twenty five, he
wasn't just talking about Eric's rutz going on. Tucker Carlson
Roots had in fact already resigned from Solidarity by the

(01:16:05):
time he returned to the US this year. But in
late February, a delegation from Solidarity paid a visit to
the United States. They posted quite a few videos of
themselves outside various government buildings in Washington, d C. They
posted some videos of them standing in lobbies of government buildings,
and one photo that appears to show the delegation touring

(01:16:27):
the White House with visible visitors badges. There are no
photos of any members of the delegation that I could
find that show them with any actual US policymakers, but
they did take a couple of selfies in front of
a sign that says Committee on Foreign Affairs. One photo
was taken outside the office of Senator Christopher Coons, a

(01:16:50):
member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and its
Africa and Global Health Policy subcommittee. Their press releases about
this visit don't names, but they claimed to have met
with senior officials within the Trump administration during their visit.
There's no direct claim made that they met with the
President himself, although one of them did post a cartoon

(01:17:14):
style drawing of the group that features a cartoon Trump
standing with them in front of the White House, and
that has perhaps meant to insinuate that they were able
to secure an audience with the president. But one member
of the delegation posted something that is more interesting to
me than a selfie at the Capitol Building. On February

(01:17:35):
twenty seventh, Jako Kleinhans wrote Day three in Washington, d C.
Who influences US government policy A complex network of individuals, organizations,
and governmental and non governmental structures worked daily to develop
US government policy. Recent policy decisions on the relationship with
South Africa have been developed by a few key players

(01:17:57):
at influential organizations, together with policy specialists in the White
House and Congress. The Solidarity Movement delegation currently visiting the
USA met on day three with several of these influential
people with whom we have forged good relationships over the
past few years, to discuss a way forward. And underneath

(01:18:17):
this wall of text posted in Afrikaans is a selfie.
Visible in the photo behind Yako is the entrance to
the offices of the Heritage Foundation. That conservative think tank
is not, as far as I can tell, publicly commented
on the recently serviced allegations that they worked closely with

(01:18:39):
South African military intelligence to craft propaganda campaigns during the
latter years of apartheid. South African news outlet The Daily
Maverick did take extra care to note in their article
that the Heritage Foundation has made no legal challenge to
the twenty twenty one book by a former South African
policeman who claims that former Heritage Foundation president Edwin Fulner

(01:19:03):
was often consulted for advice high South African intelligence operatives
who ran the governments apartheid disinformation campaigns, and if you
can remember all the way back to the first episode
in this series, the first time Trump tweeted about South Africa,
he was watching Tucker Carlson interview a policy analyst from

(01:19:25):
the Heritage Foundation. Just something to mull over, I guess,
and whoever it was that the delegation was able to
meet with at the White House, that person received an
official memorandum from Solidarity, and they also posted that document

(01:19:46):
to their website. Much like Ernst Rutz, they're grateful to
the Trump administration for raising awareness about the plight of
the white South African but they too want the United
States to use its power to pressure South Africa to
bend to the will of whites, rather than simply offering
those aggrieved white South Africans the opportunity to settle in

(01:20:08):
the United States. Much of the text of his memorandum
reads pretty transparently as an attempt to smooth over the
whole treeson situation. They emphasize repeatedly that they do not
support Trump's decision to cut off humanitarian aid, and they
urge Washington not to suspend the African Growth and Opportunity Act.

(01:20:32):
A US law that allows some African nations, including South Africa,
tariff free access to US markets. And as much as
they appreciate Trump's offer to take Africaners as refugees, they
want to stay. One section of the memo reads, although

(01:20:52):
individuals may qualify for a resettlement program, the majority of
Africaners will still remain in South Africa. During the past
the three years, Africaners have begun to establish cultural infrastructure
in South Africa so that we can still live here
freely and safely in order for us to make a
sustainable contribution toward the country and all its people. This

(01:21:12):
is being done under the banner of the Solidarity movement,
with Solidarity and Afrofum being the largest organizations. Security structures,
social structures, job structures, training structures, and cultural structures have
been established. All of this is being done without state
support and at the bottom of that section they make

(01:21:33):
several recommendations. They recommend the United States should, instead of
offering refugee resettlement, offer direct aid to these Africaner communities
quote to assist with community infrastructure protecting Africaners. This includes
security structure, social structures, job structure, training structures, and infrastructure

(01:21:56):
to settle africaners in vulnerable places in a Hanson traded manner.
So they're saying they want help moving all of the
white people to a place in South Africa. Still they
don't want to leave South Africa, but they need help
moving all of the white people into a concentrated place.

(01:22:16):
So a place that's all white. And that sounds kind
of like a mini ethno state, a folkstot, if you will,
an island of apartheid and a sea of integration, and
that does in fact already exist. And here's where I

(01:22:39):
have to confess something to you. I overlooked something in
retrospect pretty obvious. Remember I said a few minutes ago
that Ernst Rutz had resigned from his position with Solidarity
and his trip to the United States in March of
twenty twenty five was totally separate from this delegation. Well

(01:23:00):
might not have actually been that separate. I mean they
flew here separately, they were here during different weeks, and
they claimed to be from separate organizations. Roots was here
in the United States with Used Stridum, the current CEO
of Urania, a white separatist community in South Africa's Northern

(01:23:20):
Cape province, Yako Kleinhans, the International Liaison for Solidarity, who
was here with that other delegation. He used to be
the CEO of Rania. He and his family lived there.
His wife, Magdalene, was featured in a Guardian article about
the community in twenty nineteen. She runs the call center

(01:23:42):
in Irania that recruits members and solicits donations. So they're
the same people. The Venn diagram is a circle. They
present slightly different public faces. I mean, Solidarity was allowed
into the White House while the delegation officially from Irania
was stuck doing it events like Wine Wednesday at the
New York Young Republicans Club. But it's sort of like

(01:24:06):
how sometimes the name brand ketchup and the store brand
ketchup are made at the same factory and they just
package them in different bottles. The two groups traveled the
United States separately a few weeks apart. They met with
slightly different crowds and marketed the message ever so slightly differently.
But ultimately what they want is for the United States

(01:24:29):
to officially recognize their three point five square mile whites
only town of three thousand people as an autonomous state.
And in February, while that first delegation, the one from Solidarity,
was in Washington, d C. An American neo Nazi group,
posted photos of their trip to South Africa. A regional

(01:24:52):
chapter within the Active Club Network visited Urania quote to
gain a deeper understanding of how whites can form intention communities.
During the first week of March, the delegation from Solidarity
finished out their trip in the United States with a
visit to California. Specifically, they went to Los Angeles. More specifically,

(01:25:13):
they had lunch with Joel Pollock, the editor at large
of the far right rag Breitbart. After lunch, Pollock tweeted
a photo captioned just had lunch at a kosher restaurant
owned by Steven Spielberg's mom with four gentlemen from afroform
Slash Solidarity. The South African government is investigating them for
treason for the crime of sharing their views of Americans.

(01:25:37):
The treason was delicious, okay, Joel, not to nitpick, and
first of all, super cringe, but Steven Spielberg's mom is dead, LEEA. Adler,
Spielberg's mother did open the restaurant The Milky Way in
Los Angeles in nineteen seventy seven, but the restaurant closed

(01:25:58):
after her death in twenty seventeen. Her children reopened the
restaurant in twenty nineteen. So it is still the same
restaurant in the same place, but it isn't owned by
a woman who's been dead for eight years. But it's
probably much more important that you know one other fact
about this lunch. At the time, in the first week

(01:26:19):
of March of twenty twenty five, Joel Pollock was widely
believed to be Trump's pick from ambassador to South Africa.
There'd been no official public nomination, but Pollock was out
there telling people that and going on the news in
South Africa to that effect. And after lunch, Yacho Klein
Hunts from Solidarity reposted that picture and offered his full

(01:26:43):
throated endorsement of Pollock's appointment as ambassador. But barely two
weeks after that lunch, Joel Pollock's chances of getting that
job dropped to mere zero. Things were already a little
dicey for him, considering he'd been publicly calling for sanctions
against President Cyril Ramaposa personally specifically because of South Africa's

(01:27:07):
continued opposition to the genocide and Gaza. But the nail
in the coffin really seems to have been his direct
personal involvement in the expulsion of South Africa's ambassador to
the United States. On March fourteenth, twenty twenty five, the
United States of America expelled a foreign diplomat. This sort

(01:27:31):
of thing happens from time to time. Article nine of
the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations establishes a pretty broad
authority for this quote. The receiving state may, at any time,
and without having to explain its decision, notify the sending
state that the head of the mission or any member
of the diplomatic staff of the mission is persona non grata.

(01:27:54):
It wasn't uncommon during the Cold War, usually after allegations
of espionage, whether real or imagined, and it can be
a way for a country to send a political message
to say to a country, we're kind of upset with
you right now, even if the diplomatic staff themselves haven't
done anything wrong. Several countries expelled Syrian diplomats in twenty

(01:28:17):
twelve in response to the murder of civilians Inhala. In
twenty twenty one, President Aragon declared diplomats from ten countries
persona non Grata and Turkey after those countries governments had
called for the release of an imprisoned Turkish activist. Several
Israeli diplomats were expelled from Britain and Australia in twenty

(01:28:37):
ten after both countries discovered that Israel had used forged
British and Australian passports to carry out assassinations in Dubai.
In twenty eleven, the US ambassador to Ecuador was expelled
after Wikiliks revealed that she believed President Korea had been
aware of corruption within his police force. In the United

(01:28:58):
States responded by expelling Ecuador's ambassador in return. And sometimes
it's not even political. The decision may be the result
of personal misconduct by a member of the diplomatic staff.
With some rather specific exceptions, ambassadors and their staff have
diplomatic immunity. They can't be prosecuted, but they can be expelled.

(01:29:22):
So for example, in twenty seventeen, New Zealand had to
expel an American diplomat after the man got into some
kind of violent physical altercation and the American government refused
to waive his diplomatic community so that he could be prosecuted.
In twenty twelve, the Philippines expelled the Panamanian diplomatic used
of rape. Honestly, a lot of the examples of this

(01:29:44):
that I found were related to lower level embassy staff
who got drunk, got a dui, got into fights, or
committed some kind of sex crime. There have also been
more than a few cases of diplomatic use used of
using their position to facilitate drug trafficking. So it does happen.

(01:30:07):
It doesn't even seem particularly rare, especially if you're including
these examples of lower level embassy staff who maybe got
in a bar fight, but it doesn't usually happen. By tweet,
let's work backwards. At four forty two pm Eastern Time.

(01:30:27):
On March fourteenth, twenty twenty five, Secretary of State Marco
Rubio tweeted South Africa's ambassador to the United States is
no longer welcome in our great country. Ibrahim Rasul is
a race baiting politician who hates America and hates Potus.
We have nothing to discuss with him, and so he

(01:30:47):
is considered persona non growd up. That last bit is
in all caps, which is why I had to yell it,
and for the record, on that read, I did pronounce
Ibra Hume Rusul's name Ibrahim Razul, which is his name.
But in this I guess official State Department tweet, Marco

(01:31:11):
Rubio did misspell his name as Emrahim Rascoul, so take
that as you will. But Rubio's tweet included a link
to a Breitbart article, the headline of which is South
African Ambassador Ibrahim Razul Colan Trump is leading global white

(01:31:31):
supremacist movement. The article, written by Joel Pollock, had gone
up earlier that same day. Article might not be the
right word for it. I don't know what you call
what appears on Breitbart's website, but Pollock only actually wrote
six sentences in the original piece, but those sentences frame

(01:31:55):
the actual content. It's a video clip accompanied by a
trescript of the video of statements made by South African
Ambassador Ibrahim Russell during a webinar hosted by the Mapungubwe
Institute for Strategic Reflection, a South African think tank just
called MISTRA for short.

Speaker 2 (01:32:16):
What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency
those who are in power by mobilizing a supremacism against
the incumbency at home. And I think i've Illustrated abroad

(01:32:36):
as well.

Speaker 1 (01:32:40):
He was speaking to a small group of academics and
rasoul Is talking about the ways in which American politics
have changed. He later explained to a reporter, my remarks
were speaking to South African intelligentsia, intellectuals, political leaders, and
others to alert them to a changed tradition in the
United States that the old way of doing business with

(01:33:02):
the US was not going to work.

Speaker 2 (01:33:05):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:33:05):
I watched most of that webinar. I'm not gonna lie
in his two hours long I didn't watch all of it.
I watched most of that webinar, but I watched all
of the parts where Ibrahim Razula speaking, and nothing he
said felt shocking to me. He wasn't being hysterical or hyperbolic.
He's not tearing his hair and gnashing his teeth. He

(01:33:28):
had some interesting observations about the way the white South
African functions as a rhetorical dog whistle for white victimhood
within Trump's narrative. But he didn't say anything wild. He's
not calling for violence or talking about radical shifts in policy.
He's a diplomat, right. He was just making correct observations

(01:33:51):
about the political climate that it is his job to navigate,
but those remarks, with Joel Pollock's sixth sentence commentary made
their way to Marco Rubio within hours, and by that afternoon,
Rubio had declared Rasoul persona nograda and ordered him to

(01:34:11):
leave the United States. When Rozoul arrived home in South
Africa on March twenty third, he issued a statement He's
standing by what he said about the Trump administration, and
his four page statement has some real bangers. It goes
pretty hard as far as diplomatic statements go. Quote, when

(01:34:33):
we have been the victims of apartheid and saw how
it cannot tolerate free speech and independent judiciary or even
peaceful dissent, then we can smell the birth of chauvinism
globally since the fear it engenders, hear its words and
see its signs. And Rasoul says that quote. In meetings

(01:34:54):
with Senators and congress members, and in the weekly forums
we addressed of think tanks and businesses soociations, and in
the few meetings with the administration, we were forced to
discuss seriously how africaners could be refugees in the USA.
While A and C leaders are threatened with personal sanctions.
We had to avoid arguing how there was a genocide

(01:35:17):
in Israel. But diplomacy is not the art of lying.
It is the art of telling the truth gently and constructively.
Pollack sees on one line of that statement, in particular,
a parenthetical mention of an anonymous participant in the webinar,
who Razoul calls one ex South African anti intellectual hatchetman

(01:35:40):
hiding under a pseudonym, and that's obviously a reference to
Joel Pollock. Rasoul is implying that Pollock himself not only
joined that webinar alive, but participated in it without disclosing
his name or affiliation, and in this case his affiliation

(01:36:00):
would be editor of American conservative website brightbart dot com
and also current contender for American Ambassador to South Africa.
Because during the Q and A portion, the moderator read
submitted questions out loud, and when he did so, he
read the question asker's name, and when the question was

(01:36:23):
from a reporter, the name of the outlet. The very
first question though, was from anonymous.

Speaker 14 (01:36:34):
First, because I like to start with something funny, an
anonymous comment for Ambassador to Soul Ambassador to Szool's analysis
of the US may be correct. However, he's doing South
Africa and no service by speaking this way. His job
is to represent South African interests in Washington, not to
be a left wing militant ambassador to Soul.

Speaker 1 (01:36:57):
Now, can I tell you for sure that that question
was submitted by Joel Pollock. Of course not, but that
appears to be what Ibrahim Rasoul is implying in his
statement that he believes that Pollock tweeted a screenshot of
that portion of the statement and said ex Ambassador Ibrahim
Ruscoul believes he was done in by a spy. Good

(01:37:19):
luck hunting. I watched his remarks on YouTube after they
had been publicly available at Miestra's channel for hours. Is
in competence and defense to defamation in South African law.
So Pollack is in this tweet insinuating that he could
sue Ibrahim Rescoul for defamation for implying that Pollock was

(01:37:43):
in the webinar. I don't know anything about South African law,
but I don't think in an American court a claim
of defamation would hold up because he didn't actually say
Joel Pollock's name. I guess if Joel Pollock identifies publicly
as an anti intellectual hatchet man. He's welcome to make

(01:38:03):
that argument in court. But I digress, because back to
his actual claim. He's saying he wasn't in the webinar live.
He watched the replay on YouTube hours after the event ended.
And the problem with that is that it isn't true.
The webinar was live. You could pre register and participate

(01:38:26):
in the Zoom meeting, or you could just watch it
live on YouTube. And the event was from ten am
to noon Johannesburg time, and that means that it started
at four am here on the East Coast and one
am in California, which is where Joel Pollack lives. And

(01:38:46):
I'm reasonably certain he was indeed in California that day
because the night before he posted a photo of the sunset,
and that morning he posted a photo of the sun rise,
and both photos were posted at the time that the
sun rose and set in the part of California where
he lives, and there are visible palm trees. So when

(01:39:09):
Joel Pollock tweeted the link to his article at eight
forty five am Eastern Time, that's five forty five am
where he lives, and the source code for the web
page shows that the article went live at eight thirty
five am Eastern. Again, that's five thirty five am Pacific,
and that's two and a half hours after the event ended.

(01:39:34):
Those six sentences didn't take two hours to write, but
he would have had to download the entire video, cut
the sections he wanted to post, transcribe those sections, and
get everything onto the website. The other problem, though, is
not how long it would have taken to cut the clips.
It's that he could not have watched a two hour

(01:39:56):
video and then written the article if he didn't start
watching the video until quote hours after the event ended
and the final video was available for playback online. An
op ed written by the director of the think tank
that hosted the event takes aim at Pollock, arguing that

(01:40:17):
it was no accident that his article made its way
to the White House so quickly. Quote Russeul has been
articulating these views and other interactions with US audiences. The
difference in this case is that Joel Pollack at Breitbart
News himself, campaigning to be US Ambassador in South Africa,
selectively quoted from Russeul's presentation deliberately to incite the US administration.

(01:40:44):
But Joel Pollock got what he wanted, kind of. He
got Ibrahim Russell expelled from the United States, got him fired.
Ibrahim russeul isn't the ambassador to the United States anymore.
It's a bit of a monkey's pause situation for Joel Pollock,
though the whole affair ended up ruining his own ambitions

(01:41:05):
of becoming an ambassador. Within days of all this going down,
Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighter's party vowed that they would
block Pollock from entering South Africa at all if he
was appointed ambassador, and they said that they could ensure
President Ramaposo wouldn't accept the appointment. A presidential spokesman was

(01:41:26):
a little more diplomatic about this, but they did go
on the record that the President was concerned about the
possibility of Pollock being appointed ambassador because quote, he is
engaged in a very divisive and very damaging manner towards
South Africa and South Africa related issues. By March twenty six,

(01:41:47):
just twelve days after Pollock's post cost Ambassador to School
his job, it was clear that he'd cost himself the
ambassador's job too. Trump boasted on truth Social that he
would be nominating Brent Bozell as the United States Ambassador
to South Africa. Brent Mozelle is not a better choice.

(01:42:14):
There's a lot of history behind that name, especially considering
he shares it with his father, Leo Brent Mozell the Second.
He was William F. Buckley's best friend and Joseph McCarthy's
speech writer. And then there is of course his son,
Leo Brent Bozell the fourth, who was convicted of five
felonies before getting pardoned along with all of the other

(01:42:36):
January six rioters. And we can't get into all that
not today. The thing you might be interested to know
about Leo Brent Mozell the Third is that he pretty
actively opposed the idea of ending apartheid, and not just
as a casual private opinion. This wasn't an ugly thought

(01:42:57):
he was having at home by himself.

Speaker 4 (01:43:00):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:43:01):
In nineteen eighty seven he was the head of the
National Conservative Political Action Committee, and in that capacity he
signed on as a coalition partner for a group called
the Coalition Against a n C Terrorism, and that year
the group hosted a summit to oppose a meeting between
the US Secretary of State and Oliver Tambo, who was

(01:43:22):
at the time the leader of the African National Congress.
And speakers at the summit that they held included policy
analysts from groups like the Heritage Foundation. They also brought
in a South African political activist named John Gogotya. Gogatya
was the founder and leader of a political organization in

(01:43:44):
South Africa. It was allegedly a group of black moderates
who opposed multi racial democracy. Gogotya actually made several trips
to the United States to lobby against US sanctions on
the apartheid regime. He did turn out to be employed
by South African military intelligence, but you probably already guessed that.

(01:44:09):
That same year, nineteen eighty seven, Bozell produced a series
of television commercials urging Americans to write to the White
House to express their support for the Nicaraguan contras. Before
the commercials were released, Bozell attended a screening of the
videos with his special guest, Death Squad leader Adolfo Calero.

(01:44:31):
So there's definitely some baggage there for Bozell. The South
African Party that he was calling terrorists in nineteen eighty
seven holds the presidency right now. Cyril Ramaposa, the current
President of South Africa, was one of the African National
Congress's negotiators during the talks that ended apartheid. While there

(01:44:54):
was some public uncertainty as to whether Ramaposa would admit
Pollock as an ambassador, I haven't seen any speculation that
the President would refuse to accept Bozell. But honestly, once
Trump posted that online that he was going to nominate Bozell,
there was not a lot of follow up to that,
so I guess we'll have to wait and see if

(01:45:15):
he's even confirmed. Because among the countless problems created every
day by the current administration is this lack of follow up.
It seems like every day the President just fires off
some half baked demand that doesn't really have any clear
force of law or plan for implementation, and maybe some

(01:45:38):
government office is working on implementing the new policy, and
maybe they aren't. It's hard to say. That Executive order
back in February called for the Secretary of State and
the Secretary of Homeland Security to prioritize humanitarian relief, including
admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program

(01:45:58):
for Africanners, and then a month later on March seventh,
he posted on truth Social any farmer with family from
South Africa seeking to flee that country for reasons of
safety will be invited to the United States of America
with a rapid pathway to citizenship. This process will begin immediately.

(01:46:20):
A few weeks later, the website for the US Embassy
in South Africa posted a very generic set of FAQs
about the refugee admissions program, but it doesn't have any
information specific to this program or any particular timeline. It
just directs those who are interested in inquiring about the
program to send a message to a State Department email

(01:46:43):
address Pretoria PRM info, and the PRM there is the
abbreviation for the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration,
so at the very least we know the State Department
set up an email address for this and a few
days after that page went up, The New York Times

(01:47:04):
reported that they had obtained documents outlining a plan that
the administration was calling Mission South Africa, and phase one
of the plan was already under way. The State Department
had dispatched teams to convert vacant office space in Pretoria
for use by US officials who are going to go
over there and review the over eight thousand applications that

(01:47:26):
had already been received. And in last week, on April
twenty fourth, Reuters reported that US refugee officers had in
fact flown to Pretoria to begin interviewing the applicants whose
applications were successfully reviewed, and they report that at least
thirty Afrikaners who had applied for refugee resettlement have had

(01:47:49):
their applications approved.

Speaker 7 (01:47:51):
The sources are.

Speaker 1 (01:47:52):
All unnamed, and the White House and the Embassy declined
to comment. Anonymous Department of Homeland Security and playes told
Reuters that applicants who claim to have been persecuted by
black South Africans had gained preliminary approval. Another employee told
the outlet, I imagine some will be denied, as we

(01:48:13):
do in all cases, but I think there is administrative
pressure to approve these. The article is careful to note
that they attempted to and were unable to verify the
stories of persecution that were shared with them by several
of the applicants, and the article ends with a quote

(01:48:35):
from the only person who gave their name, a woman
named Katya Biden. Biden works with a very newly formed
organization called Americaners. According to their website, their mission is
to assist South Africans in navigating this process and successfully
moved to the United States as refugees. The homepage has

(01:48:57):
a very helpful set of FAQs your basics like do
I need a visa? Do I need a lawyer? And
they say no on both of those, you don't need
that It's going to be easy. They assure the reader
that of course you can take your pets with you.
The job market is great there, and you don't need
any vaccinations. My favorite question, though, is will I have

(01:49:22):
to prove persecution? And the answer is no, you don't
have to prove it. Quote no, you don't. This requirement
only occurs when an individual slash group initiates the refugee
status request where the circumstances in the problem country are unknown.
In the South Africa case, the US is not only

(01:49:44):
aware of the racial prejudice towards minorities, but President Trump
himself has laid out the case to that effect. So
there you have it. This is the most obvious and
clear cut case of persecution that has ever existed in
human history. People who are fleeing active genocides, active war
zones have to do this. But if you're a white

(01:50:08):
person in South Africa, it's very obvious that you are suffering,
so don't even bother. And the site assures prospective refugees
that this program isn't just for farmers, even though Trump
seems to have been motivated by the twin boogeymen of
farm murders and farm seizures, issues that even if they

(01:50:29):
were real, would only affect farmers, but the site assures
the reader that all Africaners are eligible. Guidance from the
administration has been muddled and rare and contradictory. In several
of his comments, Trump is definitely using the word farmers,

(01:50:52):
but in the Executive Order he does use the word Afrikaners.
A statement from a State Department official used the language
descendants of settlers being abused by the government, and a
State Department document just says disfavored minorities. And it sounds
like everyone is just trying to avoid saying white people.

(01:51:17):
And I guess that's good news for Katya Beeden, that
woman who works for the Americaners website. She was wearing
a make America Great Again hat when she showed up
at the embassy for her interview, But she isn't a farmer.
According to her personal website, she is a self love coach.
For just two hundred dollars an hour, you can call

(01:51:39):
Katya on Zoom for a one on one faith based
trauma recovery session to heal from your toxic relationships. It's
audio only, though, she is not going to turn on
the camera, not even if you buy the twenty dollars
twelve week Self Love Journey mentoring package. Aside from Biden,

(01:52:01):
everyone Reuter spoke to declined to be named in the article,
so it's hard to sort out how many people went
in for interviews, what their stories are if they're all
sincere But I did find one woman on Facebook who
has been posting in multiple groups for Africaners interested in
moving to the United States, and she actually started posting

(01:52:22):
about this a few days before The New York Times
broke the story that US officials had begun conducting the
interviews in Pretoria. So I'm inclined to believe she is
talking about a real thing that happened, because she couldn't
have pulled this from the news. So a few days
before that story broke. A woman named Anna Lee posted, Hi, everybody,

(01:52:44):
my husband and I just finished our preliminary interview with
the US Embassy in Pretoria. From what I understand, the
interviewers were delegates SLASH, representatives of the Bureau of Population
Refugees in Migration US Department of State just sent to
South Africa for this week's interviews, traveling back to the
US tonight. She stated in our invitational email that this
interview was to collect information on individual's experience, not for

(01:53:06):
official application. She was very polite, asked us a few
basic questions, then spent most of the ninety plus minutes asking, listening,
and typing our life experiences and instances where SLASH when
we were affected, deprived, persecuted, or wronged due to our race.
A lot of detail was asked. Most of the focus

(01:53:27):
was on these specific experiences, and she goes on to
say that she doesn't have much more information, but she
was told that she'll hear from Homeland Security in the
coming weeks and that officers from the US Refugee Admissions
program will be arriving in South Africa sometime soon. Unnily
and her husband do not appear to be farmers. Her

(01:53:50):
husband is a real estate agent. They have several adult children,
and they appear to be financially secure enough to enjoy
the occasional international vacation. But I think it's really interesting
that she noted how fixated that State Department employee was
on collecting anecdotes about white persecution. They spent most of

(01:54:13):
that hour and a half long interview trying to get
them to talk about times where they'd experienced anti white racism.
And then just last week, on April twenty fifth, Katya Beden,
that employee of the Americaners Network, tweeted that the first
South African families approved for resettlement in the United States

(01:54:34):
will arrive here quote next week, which, if she's telling
the truth, would mean that they could already be here
as you're listening to this. The administration has still not
offered any clear explanation of how the process works or
if it's already underway, So it's possible she's making that

(01:54:55):
up to keep people hopeful, to keep them going to
her Website's equally possible that the Trump administration plucked a
couple of the most racist families in South Africa and
just put them on a plane to Georgia or something
we don't know will Trump follow through on any part

(01:55:16):
of this hard to say there is so much more
to say about this story, especially because turns out it
isn't over. But I know this story has been going
on for too long because I'm starting to recognize the
words when I open a web page that's in Afrikaans.

(01:55:37):
I had imagined a much tidier ending to this story,
one that I poured two months and more than fifty
thousand words into. But to be quite honest with you,
I watched way too much Trucker Carlson this week, and
I'm trying to have a wedding in a couple of days.
I won't be back with brand new, full length episodes

(01:55:58):
for the next two weeks, but I am going to
try to get something together so that there's something for
you on your feed while I'm gone, so you won't
miss me too much. So be good to each other,
and please don't do anything that's going to make you
one of my weird Little guys. Weird Little Guys is

(01:56:25):
a production of the Poolsoe Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written,
and recorded by me Mollie Conger. Our executive producers are
Sophie Lichterman, and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
the wildly talented Rory Gigan. The theme music was composed
by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little
Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it,
but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal.

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