TOM EATON

The influential American podcaster Tucker Carlson has doubled down on his claim that there is a campaign of “ethnic cleansing against whites in South Africa”, and it is now time for white South Africans to call bullshit in large numbers.

Carlson first mainstreamed the false claim in 2018, when he suggested to Ernst Roets, then a leader of AfriForum, that there was “a disorganised but in some sense intentional campaign to crush a racial minority within your country, and the government seems onboard with it”, a fiction that Roets did not attempt to correct.

Many others, though, have subsequently rejected and refuted the false claim of genocide, not least Roets’ former colleague, Kallie Kriel. The refutations continue to this day: last weekend, AgriSA CEO Johann Kotzé, himself a white Afrikaner who works closely with farmers, many of whom are white, wrote an op-ed for News24, stating that “South Africa does not have a genocide of white communities”.

Instead, wrote Kotzé, echoing the overwhelming evidence of many years of data, South Africa has a violent crime problem. Nobody is denying that farm attacks happen, or that they can be shockingly brutal. But there is simply no evidence to support Carlson’s claim that there is an orchestrated campaign of ethnic cleansing being carried out against whites in this country.

None of this, however, seems to have changed Carlson’s mind, or at least the minds of the people paying him to double down on his claims; and on Thursday he released a new video, almost two hours long, in which he interviewed a traumatised Afrikaner farmer who experienced extreme violence during an attack in 2010.

The interview was marketed on X with a bloody hook: “They’ve told us that ethnic cleansing against whites in South Africa isn’t happening. They say it’s a racist conspiracy theory. Leon Lotz knows they’re lying. He’s a South African farmer. His story will shock and sicken you.”

The dishonesty was familiar, as Carlson once again used a real violent crime to sell a fictional genocide, but what felt new was the clarity and brazenness of his claim. Without hedging or using euphemism, Carlson told that world that when people like Kriel and Kotzé tell us that there is no ethnic cleansing of whites in South Africa, they are lying.

We can debate why Carlson is sticking to his lie. Until recently, many believed that the “white genocide” myth was being punted by MAGA as a way to rally Donald Trump’s white supremacist base while simultaneously punishing South Africa for accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Recently, however, Carlson has turned on both Trump and Israel, making this latest move a strange one.

What is clear, though, is that a dangerous lie is being told in the name of white South Africans, which means it’s time for them to push back.

Pointing out that Tucker Carlson is lying or that Ernst Roets is presenting a cynically skewed picture of South African crime to his American donors is not a denial that farmers have been attacked. Denouncing the lie of white genocide doesn’t mean that you are supporting the ANC.

It’s not just a matter of personal dignity. We don’t yet know why people like Carlson are pushing this lie, but they clearly have plans for us, almost certainly designed to make us angrier, more partisan, less unified and therefore weaker and easier to manipulate. Lord knows, we’ve already experienced one Bell Pottinger.

Whether this is about Afrikaner secession and the possible breakup of the republic, or something far darker — we’ve all read the conspiracy theory that the US is after our rare earth minerals — the fact remains that no country in history has got stronger by splitting into small, ethnic homelands. And speaking of history: whatever you believe about the rare earth story, it is also true that both Hitler and Putin used the justification of rescuing an allegedly persecuted ethnic minority to invade and occupy sovereign states.

Second, tolerating the lie that white people have it worse in South Africa than their black compatriots, and are therefore worthy of “refugee” status in the US, is an insult both to those who fought to overthrow apartheid and to those millions of black people who still live in poverty and in the constant presence of violence because of the legacy of that racist history.

Whites are safer and richer than any other group in this country, and trying to cast them as victims of the democratic dispensation is a clear attempt to discredit and undermine the freedoms we achieved only a generation ago.

Of course, those whites who do push back against this can expect some noisy responses: whenever I write on this topic my DMs quickly fill up with rebuttals from white people telling me that I should try to spend a night on their smallholding without a weapon; that I wouldn’t be so dismissive of Roets if I’d ever witnessed my loved ones tortured; that I am clearly a shill for the ANC. Besides, they point out, I live in the Cape Town bubble, so what could I possibly know about the war zone that is the rest of South Africa?

I know that people are angry. I know that angry people are particularly vulnerable to manipulation by disinformation pumped out by foreign players. But, with all due respect, these responses are missing the point entirely and perhaps deliberately.

Pointing out that Tucker Carlson is lying or that Ernst Roets is presenting a cynically skewed picture of South African crime to his American donors is not a denial that farmers have been attacked. Denouncing the lie of white genocide doesn’t mean that you are supporting the ANC.

As for Cape Town, well, the statistics are clear: there are parts of my city that are vastly more dangerous than any farming district in the rest of the country. And the people who are suffering in those neighbourhoods or townships are not white.

Carlson is clearly not going to stop. A machine has targeted our country for reasons we don’t yet fully understand, and that machine is now running.

But white South Africans still live in a constitutional democracy with freedom of speech. We can still tell the truth and call out lies. We can declare, with hands on heart, that we love this country and hate how it’s being run. We can state, truthfully, that crime is out of control, and that the ANC is too wretched and corrupt to do anything meaningful about it. We can confirm that farmers feed this country and are vital to all our futures.

And now we must also state, as loudly and with as much conviction as we state the others, that there is no violent state oppression of white people in this country.

There is no ethnic cleaning.

There is no genocide.

And anyone who says there is is lying for money.