As you’ve no doubt heard, when South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, appeared in the White House yesterday, President Trump challenged him on the fact that South Africa’s white farmers are being targeted with a new land confiscation law, and are also the victims of targeted attacks, another layer of hazard in a land rife with violent crime. It’s for this reason that Trump gave visas to a paltry 58 white South Africans, sending the Democrats—the same ones who’ve been complacent as upwards of 32 million illegal aliens breached our borders—into paroxysms of race-based rage.

When Ramaphosa denied that white South Africans are being officially and unofficially targeted, Trump said au contraire, and brought out the receipts. After Trump showed a video of a huge rally during which South African politician Julius Malema led the tens of thousands of assembled rally-goers in an old apartheid-era chant of “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer,” reporters instantly tried to change the subject by talking about the jet Qatar is giving to the U.S. government, Trump dragged it back to South Africa, flipping through a stack of articles his aides had handed him.

I’ve queued up the video to begin where he brings out those other receipts:

Three of those sources are from American Thinker. One might be this essay by Olivia Murray, although it’s a little hard to tell. The other is this one, which I wrote: “Let’s talk about Africa, which is where tribalism takes you.” \

The point of my post is that the Democrat party’s efforts to bring racial tribalism to America can only lead to disaster, and I pointed to Africa as an example of the societal collapse that comes from focusing on tribalism.

Two of those examples came from South Africa. The first is the new law in South Africa that allows the government to confiscate white-owned farms with no or minimal compensation in the name of racial rebalancing. The second is the horrific story of the South African government persecuting miners trying to scrape a living out of a land that has fallen apart thanks to race-obsessed, communist politics.

And then there was the third example, about a full-scale tribal attack in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which saw “hundreds of women...raped and burned alive...” I used a screen grab from Reuters news footage of the aftermath of that attack to illustrate the post—and was careful to acknowledge the source of that screen grab.

The image caught Trump’s eye, and he misunderstood it to refer to South Africa: “Look at that. Here’s burial sites all over the place. These are all white farmers that are being buried...”

Michael Tracey noticed the error and challenged it, telling readers that my essay correctly assigns the image to the Congo:

Simply look up the "American Thinker" article he's waving a printout of, and you'll discover the image is a YouTube screenshot depicting an incident from February in which Congolese women prisoners were reportedly killed. Maybe like 5 minutes of preparation would've been helpful pic.twitter.com/yORXedQ2Wl

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) May 22, 2025

Tracey is correct that getting details wrong can weaken one’s fundamental position—but that doesn’t mean that the position is wrong. For the left, though, the details are a way to change the conversation, diverting attention from the indisputable big issue. An analogy would be a hypothetical scenario in which the left argues that Trump, by mislabeling the “gargoyles” on Paris’s Notre Dame as “goblins,” was also wrong to call Notre Dame a cathedral. It’s a mistake, but an inconsequential one.

Shortly after Michael Tracey put up that tweet, I received a polite email from a reporter at Reuters asking me to comment on Trump’s misinterpreting that image.

Reuters later published a report accurately entitled “Trump’s image of dead ‘white farmers’ came from Reuters footage in Congo, not South Africa.” The same essay also quoted me accurately, and without misrepresentation, although not in full:

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Andrea Widburg, managing editor at American Thinker and the author of the post in question, wrote in reply to a Reuters query that Trump had “misidentified the image.”

She added, however, that the post, which referred to what it called Ramaphosa’s “dysfunctional, race-obsessed Marxist government”, had “pointed out the increasing pressure placed on white South Africans.”

However, to the extent that the same essay then launched into a peroration about the fact that the claimed genocide is a “conspiracy theory that has circulated in far-right chat rooms for years,” and “is based on false claims,” I want to quote my email in full because it makes a point I think worth making.

To give context, the alleged false claims are, first, that there is a genocide against whites in rural regions, which the government has long ignored. Per Reuters, “[t]he government strongly denies this.” The real issue is that everyone in South Africa is getting murdered:

South Africa has one of the world's highest murder rates, with an average of 72 a day, in a country of 60 million people. Most victims are Black.

Second, the government hasn’t been appropriating land. It’s just been “attempting to redress inequalities in land ownership that are a legacy of apartheid and colonialism.” However, after having unavailingly tried to “encourage white farmers to sell their land willingly,” it was forced to sign a law authorizing...you guessed, appropriation without compensation.

Third, the “kill the Boer” is an old song, without meaning today. So, no biggy.

Fourth, the crosses along the road weren’t burial sites; they were symbolic markers. So again, Trump got a detail wrong. But gargoyle or goblin, it’s still a cathedral. Same goes for the Congo photo error.

With that context, here’s my letter to Reuters, and the end of this post:

Thank you for your inquiry.

While President Trump misidentified the image, he was correct that the essay pointed out the increasing pressure placed on white South Africans, whether with a new law that enables the government to use race as a reason to seize private property without compensation or the fact that white farmers are being targeted for violence and murder.

We know the latter point is true because South Africa is home to a political movement that can get tens of thousands of people in a stadium to chant enthusiastically, “Kill the Boer. Kill the farmer.” Nor is it a defense against the violence directed at whites to say that South Africa is an exceptionally dangerous country for all who live there. If a specific demographic is being targeted for death within the context of greater violence, that makes things worse, not better.

And of course, the larger point of my post was that it is incredibly foolish for the Democrat party to break America into racial tribes, rather than focusing on the miracle that, out of many, we Americans became one. Nelson Mandela, a great man, recognized that South Africa could survive only by resisting tribalism. His political heirs have thrown away that wisdom and have turned their country into an increasingly dysfunctional place that cannot keep the lights on or the water running, something that harms all residents without regard to the color of their skin.

Sincerely,

Image: YouTube screen grab.