SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
At the White House this past week, a meeting between President Trump and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa began cordially but took a turn.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Turn the lights down, turn the lights down, and just put this on. It's right behind you.
DETROW: President Trump started to play a video, which showed a row of hundreds of white crosses alongside a country road.
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TRUMP: These are burial sites right here, burial sites - over 1,000 - of white farmers.
DETROW: Trump told the South African president that each cross was the burial site of a murdered white farmer in his country. This was not true. The footage was from a demonstration following the deaths of two people killed on their farm. Their killers were convicted and sentenced. But the truth has not stopped President Trump from trying to bolster the false claim that there was a genocide happening against white farmers in South Africa.
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TRUMP: But you do allow them to take land.
PRESIDENT CYRIL RAMAPHOSA: No, no, no, no.
TRUMP: You do allow them to take land.
RAMAPHOSA: Nobody can take land...
TRUMP: And then when they take the land, they kill the white farmer. And when they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them.
RAMAPHOSA: No, no. There is quite...
TRUMP: Nothing happens.
DETROW: This false narrative came from a fringe group of right-wing Afrikaners. In 2018, one of them appeared on "The Tucker Carlson Show" on Fox News.
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TUCKER CARLSON: I thought the whole point of the new South Africa and the reason the rest of us were excited to see it in 1994 take shape is because it rejected racial discrimination. And yet, the government is now embracing it, or am I missing something?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: No. In a free and civilized society, we don't take people's stuff.
DETROW: Again, there's no proof of a white genocide in South Africa. NPR's Michel Martin recently spoke with South African journalist Redi Tlhabi.
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REDI TLHABI: There is no unique crime directed at white people that has a race lens. South Africa has an unacceptably high crime rate. The majority of victims of murder in South Africa are Black men.
DETROW: Nor has the country seized the land of white South Africans. Here's journalist Kate Bartlett reporting for NPR.
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KATE BARTLETT: More than 30 years after the end of Apartheid, white South Africans, who account for over 7% of the population here, still own the vast majority of commercial farm land. South Africa passed a controversial law in January allowing the potential expropriation of land without compensation in some circumstances. But contrary to Trump's allegations, zero land has been seized.
DETROW: And yet, the Trump administration granted refugee status to 59 Afrikaners last week with more expected in the future. This is not the first time that a falsehood that began on the fringes of the right wing made its way into the Trump White House. NPR's Lisa Hagen covers how once-fringe beliefs go mainstream. She's with me now to talk about how that happens. Welcome.
LISA HAGEN, BYLINE: Hi, Scott.
DETROW: So let's start with the claims that there is a genocide of white South Africans, which didn't come out of nowhere.
HAGEN: No, what we're seeing is the result of an activist effort that's been underway since Trump's first term. In South Africa itself, the arguments you heard from Trump come from a small, fairly fringe group of right-wing Afrikaners. In 2018, one of these lobbyists was featured on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News at the time, and hours later, Trump tweeted instructions to his secretary of state to look into supposed antiwhite discrimination and murder there.
So the president has also obviously had a closer relationship with Elon Musk in recent years, who's from South Africa, and Musk has been promoting many of these same narratives we heard in the Oval Office this week. And he's also complained for years about requirements in South Africa that companies like Musk's Starlink give 30% equity to historically disadvantaged groups.
DETROW: And there's a broader context here to this phrase of white genocide, right?
HAGEN: Right. Quote-unquote "white genocide" has been a mainstay of white power groups since the 1980s. And obviously, themes of Black people posing a danger to whites are much, much older than that. There's also a related strain of nostalgia and support for bygone apartheid regimes - for example, in Zimbabwe - that's become very popular among hard right white supremacists.
DETROW: And this is a general pattern that we have seen over and over again, where if you are somebody who consumes news from mainstream and legacy news outlets, you are just totally bewildered by what the president and his allies are talking about. Where do many of these claims and narratives come from?
HAGEN: Yeah, it shouldn't really be a surprise at this point. Donald Trump has benefited for years from an extremely devoted ecosystem of media figures that range from, you know, comparatively more mainstream outlets like Fox News down through conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and social media influencers. It's an ecosystem that produces and elevates some of its own favorite narratives and jumps into action to support false claims from Trump and his supporters. And you see motivated actors like, say, pro-Russia propagandists or promoters of racist pseudoscience being welcomed into that media bloodstream all the time.
The narratives that surface are the ones that are most useful to the people who make policy or influence it. Earlier this month, for instance, when Tucker Carlson again platformed a South African white genocide activist, he framed it as, quote, "what happens when you take DEI seriously." It's important to say sometimes these narratives are based on grains of truth, like cherry-picking a fraction of murders in South Africa, or they're based on nothing more than some guy in an internet comment section claiming that immigrants are eating household pets.
DETROW: Which, of course, took over the presidential campaign for several weeks last year - how does this kind of information environment change the way that governing is done, though?
HAGEN: You're seeing it every day. Trump's beliefs about South Africa are dictating refugee policy. Partisan narratives about diversity initiatives have become executive orders. Anti-transgender activism has led to banning books in school libraries, now possibly eliminating gender-affirming care from the national budget. Government officials also spend resources trying to prove theories in special counsel investigations or congressional hearings.
DETROW: What about those moments, though, which do happen, where something that is initially framed by a lot of the mainstream media as a conspiracy theory does end up being somewhat valid?
HAGEN: A lot of what we're talking about has fueled the breakdown of societal trust, where people get comfortable dismissing claims that end up having some actual merit. Like, Hunter Biden's laptop actually ended up in a Delaware computer shop, and Joe Biden may have been declining earlier than many people wanted to believe. And those rare moments then reinforce the entire cycle of conspiracist storytelling that insists you can't take anything accepted by the mainstream at face value.
DETROW: Are there any specific examples of when these conspiracy theories, you know, boomerang back on Trump and the others who promote them from government purchase?
HAGEN: You know, there are fewer significant examples of that than you might think. There can definitely be uncomfortable moments where you get some social media grumbling about a government official contradicting a false narrative they promoted in the past. Like, very recently, FBI officials Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, you know, told a Fox News interviewer that Jeffrey Epstein did, in fact, kill himself. They've looked at the documents. And there was a moment of sort of shock about that, but just like that example, more often than not, those moments either fade pretty quickly, or you see the conspiracy media ecosystem instantly spawn more narratives that help believers ignore that contradiction. They just had to say that publicly, but they're still on our side secretly.
DETROW: That is NPR's Lisa Hagen. Thank you so much.
HAGEN: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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