The Plight of the Afrikaners Is a Clarifying Moment for Western Civilization
A tragedy that lays bare the unapologetic race-hate of the left.
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NOTE: Democrats’ vehement race-hate toward the white South Africans now facing a likely genocide is perfectly in line with their refusal to admit Jewish refugees during World War II. Nothing really changes: they may pick different races to support or to hate from time to time, but a Democrat Party not based on racism is an impossibility. Watch closely. — RDM
by Scott McKay
May 19, 2025
Last week, President Donald Trump generated a significant amount of attention by focusing on something the world has abjectly refused to focus on for the past 30 years or so.
Namely, that South Africa has devolved into a hellish failed state run by communist gangsters, and the primary victims of this devolution are the descendants of the people who established civilization there.
And that in reaction to this abysmal and outrageous development, the United States’ proper response is to offer asylum to the Afrikaners, the descendants of European settlers who formerly controlled that country but have fallen to just 5 to 7 percent of South Africa’s population and now face violence and discrimination in a place they’ve inhabited for four centuries.
Here was BBC’s treatment of a tiny number of Afrikaners arriving in America as a response to the Trump administration’s granting asylum:
A group of 59 white South Africans has arrived in the US, where they are to be granted refugee status.
President Donald Trump has said the refugee applications for the country’s Afrikaner minority had been expedited as they were victims of “racial discrimination”.
The South African government said the group were not suffering any such persecution that would merit refugee status.
The Trump administration has halted all other refugee admissions, including for applicants from warzones. Human Rights Watch described the move as a cruel racial twist, saying that thousands of people — many black and Afghan refugees — had been denied refuge in the US.
The group of white South Africans, who landed at Dulles airport near Washington DC on Monday, received a warm welcome from US authorities.
Some held young children and waved small American flags in the arrival area adorned with red, white and blue balloons on the walls.
The processing of refugees in the US often takes months, even years, but this group has been fast tracked. UNHCR — the United Nations refugee agency — confirmed to the BBC it wasn’t involved in the vetting, as is usually the case.
Asked directly on Monday why the Afrikaners’ refugee applications had been processed faster than other groups, Trump said a “genocide” was taking place and that “white farmers” specifically were being targeted.
“Farmers are being killed, they happen to be white, but whether they’re white or black makes no difference to me.”
But South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said he told Trump during a phone call the US assessment of the situation was “not true”.
“A refugee is someone who has to leave their country out of fear of political persecution, religious persecution, or economic persecution,” Ramaphosa said. “And they don’t fit that bill.”
What was the response from the Democrats to this? Well:
In a statement to the BBC, Gregory Meeks, ranking Democratic member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the Trump administration’s refugee resettlement was “not just a racist dog whistle, it’s a politically motivated rewrite of history”.
The Episcopal Church’s migration service is refusing a directive from the federal government to help resettle white South Africans granted refugee status, citing the church’s longstanding “commitment to racial justice and reconciliation.”
Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe announced the step Monday, shortly before 59 South Africans arrived at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on a private charter plane and were greeted by a government delegation.
Episcopal Migration Ministries instead will halt its decades-long partnership with the government, Rowe said.
President Donald Trump opened a fast-tracked refugee status to white South Africans, accusing their government of discrimination, even as his administration abruptly shut down the overall U.S. refugee program. The South Africans jumped ahead of thousands of would-be refugees overseas who had been undergoing years of vetting and processing.
And we’ll get to Ramaphosa in a minute, but first, let’s give a quick summary of the Democrat response to these 59 people.
Perhaps the most illuminating example of that response came from former Joe Biden hack Ashley Allison, who appeared on CNN Monday night on Abby Phillips’ show. You might have seen this:
Allison probably isn’t intelligent enough to recognize that she’s offering every one of the Right’s arguments against illegal immigration, all of which she disagrees with, in opposition to refugee status for a minority group facing prejudice and violent attacks who applied legally for asylum before arriving in America.
Here is Chris Van Hollen, the representative from Maryland in the U.S. Senate who humiliated himself by having margaritas with a wife-beating, human-trafficking illegal alien MS-13 gangster named Kilmar Garcia in El Salvador a couple of weeks ago, throwing a fit about Trump’s new asylum policy for Afrikaners:
Is Van Hollen correct? Here is Julius Malema, who runs the Economic Freedom Fighters (which is an unapologetically Communist organization different from the African National Congress, Ramaphosa’s party and that of South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela), at one of any number of his party’s rallies:
Malema’s party slogan is “Dubul’ ibhunu,” which translates from Xhosa as “Kill the Boer.” A video of him leading 90,000 people, Nuremberg-style, in chanting that murderous slogan induced an organization called AfriForum, which advocates on behalf of Afrikaners, to bring a legal case against Malema on the grounds that it violated the nation’s hate speech laws.
How’d that go? Here’s Wikipedia’s summary:
Malema, now leader of the EFF, again appeared in court in 2022 for allegedly singing the song in a case brought by Afriforum where the issue of whether or not the song was hate speech was debated. The Johannesburg High Court ruled that the chant and song were not intended to be taken seriously; that Afriforum had failed to establish a causal link between the song and violence; that the reference to Boer did not literally refer to White or Afrikaans people; that the song did not incite hatred towards White people generally; and ruled the song was not hate speech. Afriforum appealed the decision and in 2024 the Supreme Court of Appeal confirmed the High Court’s verdict that the song, as sung during the Senekal incidents, was not hate speech.
Estimates of Boer farmers murdered on their land in South Africa run into the dozens every year, something the legacy corporate propaganda press in America refuses to recognize but is nonetheless a phenomenon that is difficult to deny.
In the next election cycle, it’s said that Malema could succeed Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa said that his strategy for dealing with South Africa’s white population would be like “boiling a frog alive,” in that “[b]eing cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water.”
Of course, while Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress, isn’t chanting “Dubul’ ibhunu” at rallies, at least not so much anymore, they are using their political power to (1) dispossess the Boers from their real property and (2) look the other way when mobs of marauders descend on Afrikaner farms with pangas, the South African version of machetes, and chop the residents into bloody messes.
Above, I mentioned AfriForum. One of its founders is a writer and filmmaker named Ernst Roets, who has been doing interviews in large American podcasts in recent weeks. Here’s his interview with Jordan Peterson:
Just as interesting is Roets’ interview with Tucker Carlson and his conversation with Ben Shapiro.
What you’ll see in those interviews is that Roets, while he voices his appreciation for Trump’s offer, largely rejects asylum in America as the answer for his people. Why? Because for Afrikaners, who have a rich and stubborn heritage deeply and passionately tied to the land they settled, are as patriotic about their country as Americans are about ours.
And that is understandable, but incredibly sad. In the Carlson interview, Roets vows that he will stay in South Africa no matter what, even though he has had charges of treason filed against him — and he’s hardly alone — for having engaged in advocacy on behalf of his people.
It might be fair to call him a bitter-ender. But put yourself in his shoes and his position is understandable.
Roets comes from a community that Trump rightly recognizes has value. Condemn white South Africans for apartheid, which was certainly an unjust system, but it’s also a system that ended before 60% of the current white population was even born. And the achievements of their community are considerable.
Afrikaners are some of the world’s best farmers, for example. And in the previous century, when the world turned against South Africa over the question of apartheid, resulting in an oil embargo against that country, South Africa’s preeminent energy company, Sasol, perfected the process by which coal, in plentiful supply there, could be converted into diesel fuel at scale.
There are many beautiful places built by Afrikaners that are now owned by a government made up of communist gangsters and those people who owe them allegiance.
And the Afrikaner population of South Africa is rapidly declining due to outmigration, as grains of sand might drain from an hourglass.
The less than four million of them remaining are a hated, persecuted, and disregarded minority not all that dissimilar, in their current circumstances and more specifically to the easily foreseeable future, to the Jews of Germany.
And this might be the only place you see such a reference within the realm of “acceptable” media.
And yet Trump is offering to the Afrikaners what Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to offer to German Jewry in the 1930s — asylum.
You see the response.
Western civilization failed this test, famously, once.
European Jews were able to recover from the Holocaust, at least in some respects, by refounding Israel as their ancestral homeland state after World War II. What can the Afrikaners do?
Despite Roets’ advocacy for a decentralized South Africa where minorities like the Afrikaners are able to hold together in some form of autonomy and community, the real answer is, likely, nothing.
And this is a tragedy. Forget about the horrors of apartheid — every society is haunted by its horrors, and the Afrikaners are paying for theirs by the loss of their country to groups that hate them and cheer on their slaughter.
Should an entire Western Christian culture — its rights, its heritage, its existence — be erased out of pure political disfavor and the sins of its ancestors?
We should be better than to allow that.
I would expect, and argue, that we are better than that.
And Trump’s embrace of those Afrikaners who are willing to emigrate to America and join our culture is a clarifying moment, because those people — Gregory Meeks, Ashley Allison, Chris Van Hollen, and lots of others — who would consign them to whatever fate Cyril Ramaphosa and Julius Malema might impose on them are the ones who assign no value to our collective society.
Or to our values.
The plight of these people is a definitive test for Western civilization. A group of people who established that civilization where it did not exist in a part of the world where it is receding is in peril of disappearing from the earth, and it’s up to the West to at least save the lives of their remaining population.
If the Democrats aren’t willing to do at least that much, we should at least know definitively that this is their position.
And ask the question whether their party is worthy of outlasting the Afrikaners.
— This essay originally appeared at The American Spectator.
AFTERWORD: One last thought is necessary. The assertion by black Democrats — black nationalists — in America that the Afrikaners should “go home” to Europe after 400 years is not primarily aimed at the Afrikaners: it’s aimed at America. The “Race Marxists” (as James Lindsay rightly called the promoters of Critical Race Theory) posit a world of oppressors and victims, one in which the roles can never change, redemption can never be found, and the sins of the fathers are passed on to the sons, forever.
This is a means of manipulation, and a call to genocide, from China’s Cultural Revolution to Stalin’s Holomodor to Hitler’s Holocaust. And now the Democrats are egging it on in South Africa and agitating for it here.
Don’t let them get away with it. The time to stop Hitler was before he came to power. — RDM
What is happening around the world is horrifying: Marxism and Islam are vying to destroy civilization as we know it. The result will be a hell on earth.
Still, I can't help but think that God is allowing these things to happen to begin to align the world for the last days of the end times.
I will continue to pray for those affected, and for our country, as we don't, and can't know the day or time that Jesus returns. It might be days, it might be a thousand more years; that is not ours to know. We just need to be faithful until He returns, or takes us home.