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President Donald Trump has used his authority to expose and correct a virulent-yet-underreported variety of racial discrimination by sanctioning South Africa, a nation that human rights experts once described as planning a “genocidal massacre and also the forced displacement of whites.”

President Trump signed an executive order last Friday “Addressing Egregious Actions of The Republic of South Africa,” particularly targeting the nation for its proposed Expropriation Act, which would allow the left-wing government to confiscate land that belongs to white owners and redistribute it to black citizens. The Expropriation Act states, “It may be just and equitable for nil compensation to be paid where land is expropriated in the public interest, having regard to all relevant circumstances, including but not limited to” its abandonment. Critics say the statute’s open-ended language empowers the state with an unlimited claim on the nation’s land if any politician deems it necessary to serve a nebulous and ill-defined “public interest.”

“In shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights, the Republic of South Africa recently enacted Expropriation Act 13 of 2024, to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation,” wrote President Trump. “This [a]ct follows countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fuelling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”

The February 7 order also cites foreign policy concerns, especially the nation’s now-acrimonious relationship with the state of Israel, noting that South Africa has “taken aggressive positions towards the United States and its allies, including accusing Israel, not Hamas, of genocide in the International Court of Justice, and reinvigorating its relations with Iran to develop commercial, military, and nuclear arrangements.” South Africa has accused Tel Aviv of genocide in the Jewish nation’s response to Hamas, a complaint joined by 14 other nations including Palestine, Cuba, Nicaragua, Turkey, Ireland, and Libya. The complaint marked a new low in the ever-souring relations between the two nations. South Africa and Israel enjoyed a cordial relationship, including nuclear cooperation and a likely joint nuclear test in 1979, under the nation’s apartheid government.

President Trump’s latest action ends all foreign aid to South Africa and declares white South Africans — specifically, Dutch-descended Afrikaners (sometimes known as “Boers”), who have lived in the nation since 1652 — as refugees. It also makes it U.S. policy to “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” It further directs Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to “prioritise humanitarian relief, including admission and resettlement through the United States Refugee Admissions Program, for Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination.”

The latter policy is favoured by Elon Musk, a close Trump adviser and leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) who emigrated to the United States from South Africa. Musk recently retweeted a message that said, “White South Africans are one of the few population groups that are fiscally positive when immigrating to Europe. We should allow more immigration of White South Africans.”

Afrikaners are almost exclusively Dutch Reformed Christians.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa responded indignantly, “The South African government has not confiscated any land.” But the nation has a long history of racial wealth redistribution. And, sadly, losing their wealth is far from the only threat Afrikaners face in the new South Africa.

‘Kill the Boer’ and Warnings of ‘Genocide’

For well over a decade, South Africa’s white farmers have faced gruesome murders and dismemberments. Exact numbers are hard to come by: The South African Police Service (SAPS) reported the number of farm attacks between 2000 and 2007 but stopped abruptly in 2008.

“In the past 20 years there has been a farm attack every two days and a murder every five days, with whites of Afrikaans or English descent mainly targeted… [T]here have been 42 murders on farms this year — more than one a week. Some of these atrocities were praised on social-media sites popular with young blacks,” reported The Daily Mail in 2023. “A fifth of whites — both Afrikaans and English speakers — have left since the ANC came to power” after the first multiracial elections in 1994. Despite the high crime rate, the government has forbidden white farmers to organise neighbourhood watch patrols.

Over the last three decades, African National Congress (ANC) has presided over South Africa’s transformation into a violent and lawless society, with one of the world’s highest murder rates — seven times higher than the United States. While some murders may be acts of random violence, many have been instigated by Marxist politicians with the aim of driving Afrikaners off their land.

When he still served as president of the ANC Youth League, far-left political leader Julius Malema popularised the song “Kill the Boer!” Under his direction, the ANC Youth League “was planning this kind of genocidal massacre and also the forced displacement of whites from South Africa,” said Gregory Stanton, the leader of Genocide Watch. The ANC later expelled Malema — a Marxist who shops at Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Lacoste, and Emporio Armani — who founded his own political movement, the red beret-wearing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF).

The repercussions of his actions have spread throughout South Africa’s verdant countryside. A gang attacked white farmer Tim and Amanda Platt’s home, attacking Amanda with a bolt cutter and stabbing her with a spear. “One of them shouted, ‘Kill the Boer’ as he hit me,” recalled Amanda. “They were ruthless, but we fought back. Then they fled.”

Yet Malema continues to lead raucous crowds in chanting the song, and the nation’s “Equality Court” ruled in 2023 that the song does not constitute hate speech. The centre-right opposition party, Democratic Alliance, has threatened to complain about Malema’s use of the song to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

“Early warnings of genocide are still deep in South African society, though genocide has not begun,” said Stanton in 2017.

More recently, Musk has accused Malema of “openly calling for genocide against white people.”

The U.S. government has sometimes begrudgingly admitted the perilous state of South African society under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. “Some advocacy groups asserted white farmers were racially targeted for burglaries, home invasions, and killings, while many observers attributed the incidents to the country’s high and growing crime rate. According to a civil society organization, in 2022 there were 333 attacks and 50 killings compared to 415 attacks and 55 killings in 2021,” according to the U.S. State Department.

“Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious government corruption; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic or intimate partner abuse, sexual violence, child, early, and forced marriage, and femicide; crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting members of national groups, specifically foreigners; trafficking in persons, including forced labor,” and other outrages. “The government did not take credible steps to investigate, prosecute, and punish officials who may have committed human rights abuses. There were numerous reports of impunity,” the State Department concluded.

Despite the well-documented violence, Snopes claims “large-scale” killings of white farmers in South Africa are a myth.

“No one is being persecuted in South Africa,” insisted the EFF in a response to President Trump’s order posted online last Saturday. “In light of the aggression by the USA against South Africa, we must as a nation seriously consider strengthening ties with Russia, China and nations who belong to BRICS to avoid unnecessary confrontations with maniacs such as Donald Trump.”

The present Expropriation Act seeks to codify the ongoing transfer of land under the colour of law.

Racial Socialism Has Impoverished South Africa for 31 Years

South Africa has seen race-based justice and economics since its founding as an independent nation, first under white apartheid, then under the African National Congress, which has exclusively held power in the nation since 1994. Time magazine described the ANC as waging a “low-level guerrilla war” in the nation for decades. The U.S. government classified the ANC as a terrorist group. Nelson Mandela was on the U.S. terrorist watch list until 2008, and his then-wife Winnie Mandela endorsed the brutal practice of “necklacing” (placing a tire filled with gasoline around a person’s neck, then setting it on fire) in 1986. The ANC also had close relations with Yossel Mashel “Joe” Slovo, the Lithuanian-born general secretary of the South African Communist Party and first white member of the ANC’s executive board, who served as Nelson Mandela’s Minister of Housing.

Rather than restore property rights, the ANC instituted a three-decades-long redistribution of wealth, purportedly to right ongoing historic wrongs. Yet 30 years after taking power, there seems to be no end in sight to the “reparations.”

South Africa currently has 142 race-based laws on the books, according to a study published by the Free Market Foundation and the Institute of Race Relations. The most significant are the 1998 Employment Equity Act and the 2003 Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act. The broader policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) has served as a call for socialist-style racial wealth redistribution, with demands of hiring quotas, ownership transfers, and “preferential procurement” from black-owned firms.

Under these collectivist economic policies, South African living conditions have deteriorated rapidly and continuously. “Income per capita has been falling for over a decade. Unemployment at over 33% is the world’s highest, and youth unemployment exceeds 60%. Poverty has risen to 55.5% based on the national poverty line, yet many more households depend on government transfers to sustain meager livelihoods,” found the Growth Lab at Harvard University’s Center for International Development in 2023.

Simply abandoning race-based procurements (akin to U.S. race-based set-asides) would save approximately 3% of GDP, according to the Harvard study.

Once the economic powerhouse of the continent, South Africa has resorted to rolling blackouts, because it cannot produce enough energy for its population.

The collectivist ANC continues to blame the failures of its economic policies on the nation’s white supremacist past, an age an entire generation no longer remembers. And it demands the descendants of apartheid’s beneficiaries pay for the sins of their fathers.

“South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY. It is 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,” wrote President Trump in a Truth Social post on February 2. “I will be cutting off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this situation has been completed!”

The latest executive order follows the Trump administration’s broader efforts to dismantle systemic racism in hiring and education by ending government Affirmative Action and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

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Republished with thanks to The Washington Stand. Image courtesy of Unsplash.