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Trump Refuses To Live By South Africa Lies

Trump Refuses To Live By South Africa Lies

And: Jew-Killing In US Capital; Belgium's Trans Totalitarianism; All Hail Grady Judd!

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Rod Dreher
May 22, 2025
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Trump Refuses To Live By South Africa Lies
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President Donald Trump is a world-historical bad ass. What else can one say after his stunning performance in the White House yesterday, in defense of the persecuted white farmers of South Africa? I’ve cued this long clip of the entire meeting between Trump and South Africa president Cyril Ramaphosa yesterday to the point where they began talking about the attacks in South Africa on white farmers. Note that it all started when a reporter asked Trump what it will take for him to be convinced that there is no such thing as “white genocide” in South Africa. Ramaphosa jumped in and said, “I will answer for President Trump.” Bad mistake:

Check out this point in the exchange, when Trump holds up printouts of photos of white farm families beaten by black militants. Some in the room — black Africans, to judge by the accents — got furious and lashed out. Trump was unmoved, saying: “Death. Death. Death. Horrible death. I don’t know. White South Africans are fleeing from the violence and the racist laws. … There is one after another. One family wiped out. I’m just looking.”

Ramaphosa replied that the official South African government’s policy is not to support Julius Malema’s extremism. OK, fine — but it happens!

“The fake news is this country won’t talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it,” Trump said, accurately. Later, he denounced “our corrupt media” who turn a blind eye to the persecution of South African whites. “If this were the other way around, it would be the biggest story,” said Trump.

At one point, Ramaphosa asks his agriculture minister, who accompanied him, to speak out. That minister is white. He tells Trump that he joined the Ramaphosa government to block the black radicals of Jacob Zuma’s and Julius Malema’s parties from taking power. Trump responded that in the videos, stadiums are full of black militants calling for murdering whites. “Why didn’t you arrest that guy?” Trump asked Ramaphosa.

At this point, Trump asked white South African golfers who were present to say a word. One of them said that it has been 35 years since apartheid ended, and yes, apartheid was horrible. “But two wrongs don’t make a right,” the white man said. He recalled that Nelson Mandela, when he came out of prison, preached reconciliation. In all the years since the end of apartheid, the African National Congress (ANC) has been the ruling power. And yet, this persecution is still happening. The golfer says he’s proud to be South African, and good things are happening there, and that he is pleased to have the US as an ally.

Another white man tells Trump that the murders go across races, that blacks are suffering too. (Yes, that is right!) He goes on to say that South Africa’s economy is in bad trouble, which has a lot to do with the mass crimes. Fair enough — but why is the economy in trouble? Because of ANC mismanagement and corruption, which has a huge racial angle!

At this point, a third white South African, of a farmer background, talks about the struggles of white farmers, which includes his extended family. The Boer points out that without successful farming, everyone in South Africa goes hungry. Talking about the struggles with crime against farmers, including theft of their equipment: “It is constant, whenever you leave, something could happen.”

Why was this so very, very satisfying? Because nobody ever, ever would expect a Western leader to do it. In the eyes of the Western ruling class, black South Africans can only ever be Good, and white South Africans can only ever be Evil. End of story. If the minority whites are being killed, robbed, beaten, and so forth by blacks, well, they deserve it (goes the thinking). Did they do anything themselves to cause apartheid (which ended 30 years ago)? Doesn’t matter — they’re white, aren’t they? Therefore, they are collectively guilty.

So it does in the so-called “international community.” A few years ago, I talked to the head of an NGO whose operation in part advocates for persecuted Christians — work that brings him often into discussion with Western diplomats. He said it is shocking to see how indifferent Western diplomats are to Christian suffering. It’s not a race thing: he explained how the ongoing massacres of Nigerian Christians by Nigerian Muslims gets explained away by Western diplomats, who say the story is really about economic scarcity driven by climate change. This, despite the fact that Boko Haram, the fundamentalist Muslim group leading the mass murders of Nigerian Christians, says otherwise.

The point is this: whatever absurd and cruel things are necessary to say and to believe to Maintain The Narrative, the ruling elites will believe, say, and act on them. Whites — especially South African whites — can only be bad; Christians too can only be bad, even if they are black, as long as they are persecuted by someone (e.g., black Muslims) who has higher Other status in the liberal mind.

And then came Trump.

To nobody’s surprise, The New York Times is crapping its pants today over the exchange. Here’s a link to the paper’s news analysis; I will post a screen grab of the headline:

“Fringe conspiracy theory.” The dead, sometimes mutilated, bodies of white farm families are a fiction of the right-wing imagination. The fact that stadiums in South Africa fill with militants chanting for the killing of white farmers, in chants led by one of the country’s most powerful black politicians — hey man, you are a racist for noticing and worrying about it.

Here are screen grabs from today’s digital front page of The Guardian, the newsletter of the UK bien-pensant professional class:

You see? Who are you going to believe, your lying eyes, or the Narrative of the liberal media?

Take a look at this. It’s Part One of a three-part documentary series that my old European Conservative colleague Sebastian Morello did about the European presence in South Africa. There are two more parts that follow. Morello says near the introduction that it’s untrue and unjust to speak of the white European settlers in South Africa as nothing but a “malignant presence” in that land. The Dutch have been there since 1652, drawn in part by the sparseness of the land. Farmers migrated there and made the land prosper. The European presence in South Africa began at the same time that the European presence in North America did. If you think that whites in North America are nothing more but brute colonizers, in part because of the white role in importing slaves, then you are a fool. Human history and culture is far, far more complex.

Morello presents the Dutch and English Europeans who settled in South Africa as “tribes,” which is a more accurate way of contextualizing their presence. Western liberals don’t want to hear that. Back in the 1980s, when I was a college liberal doing volunteer work for Amnesty International, I was surprised to learn that all over sub-Saharan Africa, ruling tribes in various countries brutalized peoples from subject tribes. This was common practice on that continent. In South Africa, the ruling tribe, or tribes, were Afrikaners and South Africans of English descent (though Afrikaners were the more dominant of the two). The system they used to brutalize the subject tribes was called apartheid, and people like me opposed it, and worked in campus activism to educate people about it, so that the US Government would try to end it.

I thought it was interesting and important to contextualize apartheid as only one example of the horrific reality of tribal politics all over Africa. I gave a paper about this in an opinion journalism-writing class. A black colleague of mine from the student paper blew up at me in the class. He accused me of racism. He was genuinely emotional about it. I tried to explain that I was in no way defending apartheid, but only making a larger point about how grim life is for all tribes out of power on the African continent. It made no difference to him. The story of Africa could only be understood in terms laid down by the black and white experience in North America. To try to see it through a different lens was, according to this young man, evil.

You want to know more about what’s happening to the white farmers of South Africa? Check this out — some of these cases are the ones Trump was referring to. Or, you could choose to trust CNN, whose correspondent in South Africa explains that Julius Malema leading a stadium full of black militants calling for the murder of white farmers (“Kill the Boers!” they chanted) was not really calling for the murder of whites, but was just being nostalgic for the old anti-apartheid struggle. Mostly peaceful race killings, I guess.

If you watch the Trump exchange in the White House at length, you will hear him repeat that the US media doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the murders of white farmers (who are being killed at 1,500 times the rate of their presence in the population). If it were not for Trump having the stones to talk about it, these people would continue to suffer in silence. The Official Narrative says that it’s not happening, and if it is happening, these white devils deserve it. To hell with the Official Narrative.

I completely side with Heather Mac Donald in this essay, in which she praised the Trump administration for the stands it is taking against received opinion. Excerpts:

The scandal of the present moment is that someone with outsize visibility has said: No more. The race hustle is over; the gender hustle is over. The denigration of traditional values and American history is over. The demonization of law enforcement: over. Being black or female will no longer be treated as an accomplishment. The only thing that matters in employment is excellence. And to realize that principle, the White House on April 23 banned the greatest enemy of meritocracy: disparate-impact analysis.

Joe Biden began and ended his presidency with an apology for the enduring stain of racism on white Americans’ souls. Donald Trump’s inaugural address celebrated the “explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers who turned a small group of colonies on the edge of a vast continent into a mighty republic.” At this point in the speech, women’s- and ethnic-studies professors were seeking a safe space.

We can be grateful to the Left for providing occasion for so much innocent merriment, such as the bioethicist at Columbia University who complained that the Trump Administration is trying to “control the language that people working in universities can use.” These are the same people who have been generating lists of proscribed terms for years and demanding loyalty oaths to “diversity.”

For the Left, however, the matter is not amusing; it is existential. Their identity is based on the notion that they alone stand between everyone who is not white and the reborn Ku Klux Klan, otherwise known as Trump supporters. Discredit that notion and the Left has nothing to live for.

The elites abroad are also terrified that America’s declaration of freedom from inherited guilt will undercut their own power, so they, too, are busily weighing in. The UN Human Rights Commissioner, speaking before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in March, denounced the dismantling of anti-discrimination programs in the United States. This “fundamental change of direction triggers fear and concern in many,” said Volker Türk. But the only people who are fearful are the globalists who might be losing their monopoly on officially approved public opinion.

Yep. I heard from a source in Brussels, who was there, that a former senior German government official went before a group of senior European churchmen and denounced J.D. Vance as a fake Catholic who is a Trojan horse of “white supremacy.” How about our J.D., so devoted to white supremacy that he married a brown woman!

Heather Mac Donald says we cannot go soft now. More:

So we must be ready. The goal of positive regime change and the antidote to backsliding are the same: the truth. We need to declare the truth about America and about Western civilization, as often and as loudly as we can.

To the postcolonialist acolytes of Edward Said, we must say: Western knowledge was not theft. It was not motivated by contempt for the “Other.” It was motivated by love of discovery, curiosity, and passion for intellectual mastery. Those interpolated Egyptologists at the Metropolitan Opera, symbolizing the illegitimate appropriation of ancient Egyptian culture by marauding Westerners, might be countered with the words of an actual Egyptologist: Jean-Francois Champollion. Champollion decoded the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, one of the great intellectual feats of the nineteenth century. As a young student in 1806, he wrote his parents:

I want to make a profound and continuous study of this ancient nation. The enthusiasm brought me by the study of their monuments, their power and knowledge filling me with admiration, all of this will grow further as I acquire new notions. Of all the people that I prefer, I shall say that none is as important to my heart as the Egyptians.

These are not the words of a bigot.

To [Metropolitan Museum director] Max Hollein and other museum directors, we must say: You have one duty and one duty only—to pass on an inheritance with joy and gratitude. You are not called to oversee an “antiracist institution”; you are called to preserve beauty and to trace through your halls that greatest of all human dramas: the evolution of artistic style. Another Burke Award honoree, Philippe de Montebello, was guided by that imperative during his exemplary tenure at the Met.

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