Trump’s Racist “Evidence” Exposed: No, There Is No White Genocide in South Africa

 Kwei--Wed

President Trump meets President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office

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1. The Myth Exploded: MeidasTouch Investigation

According to a May 2025 exclusive from the MeidasTouch Network, Donald Trump handed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa a racist printout during their Oval Office meeting—a screenshot from a fringe Facebook page run by South African flat-earther and white supremacist Paul Hattingh.

👉 Read the full exposé: MeidasTouch Exclusive

Hattingh’s page is a cesspool of AI-generated images portraying Black South Africans as apes and glorifying Trump as a white savior. This is the “source” Trump relied on to accuse South Africa of “white genocide.” It’s not just misinformation. It’s disinformation weaponized for political gain.

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2. A Quick Historical Primer

Historical land-grabs 1652-1806

• 1652–1806: Dutch VOC settlers (later called Afrikaners or Boers) establish the Cape Colony.

• 1806–1910: British imperial forces take control, later integrating Boer republics into the Union of South Africa after brutal wars.

• 1913–1994: From the Natives Land Act to full-scale Apartheid, the state entrenches racial dispossession.

Apartheid signs at a rail station in South Africa (Wikimedia Commons)

      

• 1994–Present: Democracy is restored under Nelson Mandela, and land reform begins—but very slowly.

Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, Gauteng, on 13 May 2008 (South Africa The Good News / www.sagoodnews.co.za)

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3. Land Ownership and the Seizure Lie

White South Africans, who make up approximately 7% of the population, still own about 72% of the commercial farmland.

The 2025 Expropriation Act allows for the government seizure of only unused or abandoned land, and no commercial farms have been taken without compensation as of this writing (Reuters, Al Jazeera, 2025).

This reform is a legal, measured process—not mob confiscation, and certainly not racial revenge.

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4. Are White Farmers Being Killed in a Genocidal Campaign?

Let’s look at the actual numbers:

Year	Farm Murders	% of Total Homicides (±27,500/yr)
2023	50	< 0.2%
2024	32	≈ 0.1%

Most of these murders are robbery-motivated, not racially targeted. Both white farmers and Black farm workers have been victims. The violence is tragic, but calling it genocide is dishonest and irresponsible.

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5. The Hypocrisy: Who Gets to Be a Refugee?

Trump’s administration has fast-tracked dozens of white Afrikaners under a “persecution” narrative. At the same time, over 150,000 Afghan interpreters and allies remain in limbo, abandoned after risking their lives for U.S. forces.

This isn’t humanitarianism. It’s a white preference policy.

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6. Why the Lie Persists

The “white genocide” myth is a staple of far-right messaging around the world. It animates xenophobia, feeds algorithmic outrage, and gives political figures like Trump an easy villain: nonwhite South Africans seeking economic justice.

It’s not new. It’s just being recycled—this time from a bigot’s Facebook feed into the Oval Office.

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Conclusion: Truth Matters

South Africa is still recovering from the scars of apartheid. Yes, there is crime. Yes, land reform is overdue. But there is no campaign—state-sponsored or otherwise—to exterminate white South Africans.

Weaponizing a fake genocide narrative disrespects actual victims of genocide around the world and undermines serious global discourse.

Ramaphosa and Trump

 Michael - Alternate Thursdays

The big news in South Africa today is, of course, the meeting between Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, and Donald Trump. International diplomacy on live TV is an initiative of the new Trump administration, and afterwards words like “ambushed” were bandied around and comparisons were made to the disastrous meeting between President Zelenskyy and the US president. But Ramaphosa seems to have held his ground as well as his temper.

A number of issues have led to the low in relations between the two countries. South Africa's close ties with Russia and China through the BRICS initiative is one, although Trump seems to have better relations with Vladimir Putin than Ramaphosa does anyway.

The outspoken, and, frankly, inappropriate comments of the South African ambassador to a South African group about the Trump administration led to friction and his expulsion from the US. Ambassadors have a job. Comments like that should be reserved for their memoirs written after they’ve retired.

South Africa’s challenge to Israel at the international court was another unpopular move with the US and no doubt sparked the counter accusation of South Africa’s alleged genocide against white Afrikaner farmers that seems to have caught Trump’s fancy. Ramaphosa took with him a white support group consisting of two of Trump’s golf heroes – Retief Goosen and Ernie Els, billionaire investor Johann Rupert, and the leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, John Steenhuisen. Steenhausen is now Minister of Agriculture in the Government of National Unity. Exactly the right person, one would think, to address Trump’s concerns.

In the end, what did Trump’s ambush come down to? A collection of song clips of Julius Malema singing racist songs. Ramaphosa pointed out that Malema is a firebrand opposition politician, not a “government official” as Trump described him.

Graveyard along the highway. Not.

Then there was the field of crosses – a grave yard of murdered white farmers extending for miles, we were told. Actually, it was a protest at the murders of Glen and Vida Rafferty on their farm. There were no actual graves. There was no intension of a correlation between the number of crosses and dead farmers of any racial group.

Finally, there was a gory murder scene. This was from the DRC, nowhere near South Africa at all.

This was the evidence of genocide in South Africa. Certainly the number of murders and other crimes is appalling. Steenhuisen emphasized that South Africa has a serious crime problem. And that most of the victims are black. But that there is no evidence of a campaign to murder white farmers or drive them from their land.

Ramaphosa asked only, in Nelson Mandela’s words, that when there is a problem we sit down together and work it through from the beginning. South Africa can only hope that once the curtain came down on the White House's theatre for television, that is what happened.

My Thirty-Year Love Affair With "Shithole" Countries

 Annamaria on Monday

Here below is my post from January 2018, when then President Trump had bemoaned the immigration "only of people from shithole countries.".  This past Saturday, I commented on Jeff's post, which was a nasty indictment of President Joe Biden's presidential candidacy, based on about 23 seconds of confusion during a debate last week.  In my comment to Jeff, I referred to the post below from January 2018 and characterized it as "funny."  I brought it up because, I thought it was amusing in comparison to the tone of Saturday's blast on Biden,  I harkened back to what Jeff had said of  the words below when they were first posted. He asked me then to take down these words, because what I wrote was too "political" for MIE.  Citing my first amendment rights, I refused to do so.  Fast forward to this past Saturday.  When I compared my past "amusing" post to Jeff's long and critical one, he responded with: "You, humorous? Come-on , Sis, get real."

So here is that post of mine again.  I leave it up to you, MIE readers to decide.  Do you think this six-year-old sketch lacks humour.  Or is it amusing compared that dreadful rant from last Saturday?  Do I have to "get real" and stop trying to be funny?        

Norway is renaming itself in solidarity with the shithole countries

Stan calls him The SCROTUS.  Just this week my friend Ann Daniels gave him a new moniker: His Shitholiness--in honor of this past week's new low in Trump's presidential pronunciamentos: a declaration that some countries are shitholes.  (He would, he declared, rather that we bring in people of better countries, like Norway.)  Thereby, he vilified many of my favorite places.  And he inspired me to show you how happy it has made me, over the past thirty years or so, to visit sixteen of our sacred planet's marvelous, splendid "shitholes."

Take a look a these photos, arranged by continent.  Here they are--my favorite places that are NOT Norway:

Argentina

Bolivia

Brazil

Cuba

Ecuador

Paraguay

Jordan

Turkey

Botswana

Egypt

Two of the smiling men in this photo are of Norwegian descent.  Neither one is
wishing he had gone to Oslo instead of Cairo

Kenya

Morocco

Namibia

South Africa

Tanzania

Zambia

 

I set out here. not to try, with my photos, to prove how wonderful these countries are.  Many photos better than mine are readily viewable on the Internet.  I want to show you how happy these places have made me and my friends.  All those smiles come from being in beautiful places where we found fabulous sites and great people.  True the citizens of the shithole countries are not all tall and pale like Norwegians, but I found the them to be fun, funny, warm, welcoming, and brilliant.

His Shitholiness is famous for not stopping to think.  But if we do, we will remember that Norwegians were the most dangerous, violent, destructive immigrants in human history.  In fact, one might conclude that they invented terrorism.

Just sayin'

The case against (and for) South Africa

 Michael - Thursday

The Peace Palace in The Hague

I’ve been very loath to post anything on this issue, because feelings are running very high on both sides and that's not usually a good setting for reasoned discussion. However, on the world stage at least, this is the most important issue in which South Africa has involved itself recently. By taking Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), South Africa made few friends that it didn’t already have and annoyed a variety of important trading partners that it could ill afford to upset. Germany was so disturbed by the term "genocide" - perhaps the most loaded term in all of international law - that it joined the case supporting Israel.

So what’s it all about?

Well, there are, as always, conspiracy theories. The governing ANC has been very short of money over the past few years, even defaulting on some debts. This was no problem in Zuma’s day when he and the party had their hands in most tills. Recently, however, the gravy train has had difficulty making its usual stops, and most of the gravy has already been enjoyed. Then, suddenly and without explanation, the ANC announces that it's resolved its financial issues and that all is well. Since a national election is due this year, that’s very good news for the party. The announcement pretty well coincided with the announcement of bringing a case against Israel to the ICJ. That has led to the theory of a (very) large payout from Iran to the ANC to do its dirty work for it. However, at the moment there's no evidence for this theory.

Certainly there are political issues aplenty. The National Assembly (parliament) called for the government to break off all relations with Israel. The government took this under advisement and nothing happened until the ICJ case was brought. No doubt that will keep the Palestinian-supporting wing of the ANC quiet for a while.

The ANC started life not as a political party but as a liberation movement, and retains close ties with states that assisted it during its years in exile and retains some hostility towards those that supported the apartheid government. The ANC remains a very broad church. Views range from communists at one extreme to the president at the other. He rose, quite legally, from a trade union leader to one of the richest people in the country (before he became president). No doubt some views within the party were that the ICJ move was a way of pandering to various elements in the party without doing much damage and perhaps doing some good. If so, the government lost sight of how irritating the move would be to most western countries, which include most of its largest trading partners. The US is currently considering the renewal of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which gives favorable trading status to a variety of African countries including South Africa. The matter has to be supported by Congress, and Congress is not pleased with South Africa right now.

As for cementing support from its BRICS partners, South Africa really had little to gain. Any one of them could have done this for themselves, and they now include Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Apparently they didn’t want a high profile. Hmm…

There are also accusations of double standards and hypocrisy. If the ANC is so concerned about the injury and death of innocent civilians in war, how have they been unable to support resolutions calling out Russia for the Ukraine invasion? Putin is, according to the International Criminal Court, a war criminal, yet South Africa’s only acknowledgement of that has been to avoid a direct conflict with its international obligations by quietly arranging for Russia to send a stand-in for Putin to the recent BRICS meeting held here. It seems to me that if one is to take the high road, then it’s important to avoid detours through canyons.

Yet, there was some value to the whole exercise. The ICJ has issued a slate of interim measures. Israel may take no notice of any of these. By the same token, Israel could have ignored the whole case, but it chose to defend itself, presumably to do so in the court of public opinion. I know nothing about the legal niceties of the case, but international commentators suggest that South Africa did a good job of presenting its arguments under the leadership of John Dugard, who is an international law scholar of high standing.

Perhaps I’m being naïve, but perhaps Netanyahu will feel pressure – only one strand in pressure already developing from Israel’s major supporters including the United States – and ameliorate some of his most unattractive plans and strategies. Just as South Africa only listens to the plaudits of its allies, Israel only listens to those its own. Maybe both can learn from this experience.

One thing is clear. Hamas has achieved its stated aim of bringing the Palestinian cause back to the center of the world stage. They had no problem with sacrificing thousands of innocent Israelis and Palestinians in order to achieve that.

Why is Botswana beating South Africa???

Michael - Thursday

The Daily Maverick—a South African (mainly internet) daily—carried an article to this effect last week. You can access the original article at  How did Botswana’s economy manage to beat South Africa’s?

Of course, we’re always interested in news about Botswana and have great respect for the country, but this was a bit of a shock. The author of the piece, Maverick business editor Tim Cohen, started by noting that the citizens of Botswana (Batswana) became richer on average than South Africans in 2019 and that that situation is still the case. It now has per capita GDP of $9,200 and South Africa has $7,200. Cohen then goes into why this should not be the case.

When Botswana became independent from Britain in 1966, it had per capita GDP of $70 (!) and a total of 10km of tarred (paved) roads. (Now it has around 20,000 km of paved road.) The extent of Britain's interest in the country and its development while it was the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland can be judged by the fact that the administration of the country was from Mafikeng, which is not even in Botswana. It did have a huge windfall in that shortly after independence, De Beers discovered the world’s richest diamond deposit near the town of Jwaneng, but Cohen points out that single commodity economies don’t always do well over the long haul (c.f. Venezuela with all that oil, which is a lot more useful than diamonds are). Furthermore, the country has been ruled by one party over all that time. (Botswana has regular free and fair elections but the Botswana Democratic Party has won all of them and a tweak in the electoral system gives them regular comfortable majorities.) The small population (about two and a half million) means that relatively little money goes a long way, but economic theory does not favor small populations or one party governments, at least not for 60 years (c.f. Zimbabwe).

Cohen doesn’t really address why this might be the case, so I’ll have a go. (The Daily Maverick likes to stick more to facts than wild speculation, but I can write what I like.)

Bust of Sir Seretse Khama

In the first (and maybe most important) place, the Botswana administration is not corrupt. After independence, Seretse Khama set a model for good governance and adherence to principle, just as Nelson Mandela did in South Africa. The difference is that Botswana stuck with that model and South Africa got Jacob Zuma. Zuma is history, but the precedent he set remains and the country hasn’t recovered from it.

Jwaneng open pit mine

In the second place, Botswana negotiated a deal with De Beers. When Zambia nationalized its copper mines, it was essentially the end of the mining industry there. Anglo American accepted their return in the early 2000s, but had to spend years just renovating them and repairing the damage of mismanagement. The Botswana government realized that it had things it could do and things it should do, but developing diamond mines was not one of them.

In the third place, Botswana is a largely homogeneous country. Most of the citizens are Tswana people and almost everyone speaks Setswana and English (which remains the official language). This has avoided the tribal conflicts that are rife in South Africa, which has a very inhomogeneous population and eleven official languages.

In the fourth place, I think the British did Botswana a big favor—they didn’t get involved. Botswana was never a colony. The chiefs at the time of Queen Victoria asked Britain to protect them from the encroaching South African Boer republics. The British government was starting to have its own problems there, so agreed to do so, but never had any real interest in Botswana. It was never colonized, it was never anglicized. To this day there is both traditional law and national law. The nation is an evolution from the local governance of the past. Compare that with the chaotic background in South Africa that the ANC government inherited in 1994.

Finally, Botswana has one of the smartest detectives on the continent keeping things in order…