The Daily Reid: Out of Africa

The Trump regime has shut the door to nearly all refugees, and is violently deporting many who sought refuge in the U.S. But there is one very notable exception: white South Africans...

Last October, I wrote this Substack called The Afrikaanerization of the Republican Party.

The focus was the “coincidence” that so many of Donald Trump and JD Vance’s ideological advisers and financial backers happen to be white South Africans, and how that connects to the white exodus from South Africa after the fall of apartheid. Trump and Vance’s major South African advisers: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sacks, as well as software developer Paul Furber, alleged to be the originator of the Qanon conspiracy theory that so feuled the rise of MAGA, are all white South Africans.

In my post, which you can read here, I explained the origins of the Apprentice-related conspiracy theory that some white South Africans, both the British, British-Canadian and German expat types (like the Musk, Thiel and Sacks’ clans) and the older-era Dutch settlers who adopted an identity they call “Afrikaaner,” to give themselves the patina of African indigeneity, have clung to. To summarize, believers in the conspiracy theory believe that at any moment, white South Africans will be dispossessed of the land they dispossessed actual indigenous Africans of, and/or slaughtered in a “white genocide” akin to what their ancestors visited on the Africans they encountered upon their uninvited arrival to the continent.

Apparently, among the believers in this conspiracy theory, which is supported by exactly zero facts or history, are Tucker Carlson, and his apprentice, Donald Trump, who has now reversed his otherwise “no immigrants allowed” policy to throw open America’s doors to Afrikaaners and Afrikaaners only.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, right, greets Afrikaner refugees from South Africa, Monday, May 12, 2025, at Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Va. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

And so this week, the first tranche of a few dozen apparently desperate white “refugees” from so very Black Africa, were greeted personally by high level government officials as they disembarked their survial airlift in preparation for immediate resettlement and a fast-track to U.S. citizenship:

The first group of White South African refugees arrived in the U.S. on Monday under President Trump's executive order mandating they be prioritized for resettlement — even as the broader refugee program remains largely on hold.

The 59 Afrikaners, descendants of mainly Dutch colonists, underwent expedited reviews that took months, were brought to the U.S. on a government-chartered flight, and were greeted at Dulles International Airport by federal officials — all unconventional steps for the refugee resettlement program, which can take years to process.

Families on Monday arrived at the airport with their luggage; children donned pajamas and carried small American flags and stuffed animals as their parents walked them through a private airplane hanger.

Troy Edgar, deputy Homeland Security secretary, and Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, greeted the families, shaking hands and posing for photos.

"Welcome to America," Landau told the families. "I want you to know that you are really welcome here."

Mr. Landau was asked by a reporter, why the Afrikaaners get an exception, and this is what he said: “the criteria are, making sure that refugees did not pose any challenge to our national security, and that they could be assimilated easily into our country.” Huh… video here.

The poor, persecuted Afrikaaners…

Also, the word “refugees” is doing a lot of work in that piece above … as is the word “colonists.” Here’s a bit of actual history, from the good folks at Britannica (it will sound familiar to anyone familiar with the history of the United States, Brazil, and all of the Caribbean…) [all emphases added]

Europeans in South Africa

The first Portuguese ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, their occupants intent on gaining a share of the lucrative Arab trade with the East. Over the following century, numerous vessels made their way around the South African coast, but the only direct African contacts came with the bands of shipwreck survivors who either set up camp in the hope of rescue or tried to make their way northward to Portuguese settlements in present-day Mozambique. Both the British and the Dutch challenged the Portuguese control of the Cape sea route from the early 17th century. The British founded a short-lived settlement at Table Bay in 1620, and in 1652 the Dutch East India Company set up a small garrison under the slopes of Table Mountain for provisioning their fleets.

Settlement of the Cape Colony

The Dutch East India Company, always mindful of unnecessary expense, did not intend to establish more than a minimal presence at the southernmost part of Africa. Because farming beyond the shores of Table Bay proved necessary, however, nine men were released from their contracts with the company and granted land along the Liesbeek River in 1657. The company made it clear that the Khoekhoe were not to be enslaved, so, beginning in that same year, slaves arrived in the Cape from West and East Africa, India, and the Malay Peninsula. By the end of the century, the imprint of Dutch colonialism in South Africa was clear, with settlers, aided by increasing numbers of slaves, growing wheat, tending vineyards, and grazing their sheep and cattle from the Cape peninsula to the Hottentots Holland Mountains some 30 miles (50 km) away. A 1707 census of the Dutch at the Cape listed 1,779 settlers owning 1,107 slaves.

In the initial years of Dutch settlement at the Cape, pastoralists had readily traded with the Dutch. However, as the garrison’s demand for cattle and sheep continued to increase, the Khoekhoe became more wary. The Dutch offered tobacco, alcohol, and trinkets for livestock. Numerous conflicts followed, and, beginning in 1713, many Khoekhoe communities were ravaged by smallpox. At the same time, colonial pastoralists—the Boers, also called trekboers—began to move inland beyond the Hottentots Holland Mountains with their own herds. The Khoekhoe chiefdoms were largely decimated by the end of the 18th century, their people either dead or reduced to conditions close to serfdom on colonial farms. The San—small bands of hunter-gatherers—fared no better. Pushed back into marginal areas, they were forced to live by cattle raiding, justifying in colonial eyes their systematic eradication. The men were slaughtered, and the women and children were taken into servitude.

The trekboers constantly sought new land, and they and their families spread northeast as well as north, into the grasslands that long had been occupied by African farmers. …

…by the closing decades of the 18th century, South Africa had fallen into two broad regions: west and east. Colonial settlement dominated the west, including the winter rainfall region around the Cape of Good Hope, the coastal hinterland northward toward the present-day border with Namibia, and the dry lands of the interior. Trekboers took increasingly more land from the Khoekhoe and from remnant hunter-gatherer communities, who were killed, were forced into marginal areas, or became laborers tied to the farms of their new overlords. …

… The Portuguese and also some British, French, Americans, and Arabs traded beads, brass, cloth, alcohol, and firearms along the southeast coast in return for ivory, slaves, cattle, gold, wax, and skins. During the late 18th century, large volumes of ivory were exported annually from Delagoa Bay, and slaves were taken from the Komati and Usutu (a major tributary of the Maputo) river regions and sent to the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean and to Brazil to work on sugarcane and coffee plantations. By 1800 trade routes linked Delagoa Bay and coastal trade routes with the central interior. …

…The Cape Colony had spawned the subcolonies of Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal by the 1860s. European settlement advanced to the edges of the Kalahari region in the west, the Drakensberg and Natal coast in the east, and the tsetse-fly- and mosquito-ridden Lowveld along the Limpopo River valley in the northeast. Armed clashes erupted over land and cattle, such as those between the Boers and various Xhosa groups in the southeast beginning in the 1780s, and Africans lost most of their land and were henceforth forced to work for the settlers. The population of European settlers increased from some 20,000 in the 1780s to about 300,000 in the late 1860s. Although it is difficult to accurately estimate the African population, it probably numbered somewhere between two and four million.

Then, as often happens, the Africans got caught up in Europe’s mess…

When Great Britain went to war with France in 1793, both countries tried to capture the Cape so as to control the important sea route to the East. The British occupied the Cape in 1795, ending the Dutch East India Company’s role in the region. Although the British relinquished the colony to the Dutch in the Treaty of Amiens (1802), they reannexed it in 1806 after the start of the Napoleonic Wars. The Cape became a vital base for Britain prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the Cape’s economy was meshed with that of Britain. To protect the developing economy there, Cape wines were given preferential access to the British market until the mid-1820s. Merino sheep were introduced, and intensive sheep farming was initiated in order to supply wool to British textile mills.

The infrastructure of the colony began to change: English replaced Dutch as the language of administration; the British pound sterling replaced the Dutch rix-dollar; and newspaper publishing began in Cape Town in 1824. After Britain began appointing colonial governors, an advisory council for the governor was established in 1825, which was upgraded to a legislative council in 1834 with a few “unofficial” settler representatives. A virtual freehold system of landownership gradually replaced the existing Dutch tenant system, under which European colonists had paid a small annual fee to the government but had not acquired land ownership.

A large group of British settlers arrived in 1820; this, together with a high European birth rate and wasteful land usage, produced an acute land shortage, which was alleviated only when the British acquired more land through massive military intervention against Africans on the eastern frontier. Until the 1840s the British vision of the colony did not include African citizens (referred to pejoratively by the British as “Kaffirs”), so, as Africans lost their land, they were expelled across the Great Fish River, the unilaterally proclaimed eastern border of the colony.

… The British had chronic difficulties procuring enough labor to build towns and develop new farms. Indeed, though Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and pressured other countries to do the same, the British in Southern Africa continued to import some slaves into the Cape after that date, but in numbers insufficient to alleviate the labor problem. A ban in 1809 on Africans crossing into the Cape aggravated the labor shortage, and so the British, like the Dutch before them, made the Khoe serfs through the Caledon (1809) and Cradock (1812) codes.

Anglo-Boer commandos provided another source of African labor by illegally capturing San women and children (many of the men were killed) as well as Africans from across the eastern frontier. Griqua raiding states led by Andries Waterboer, Adam Kok, and Barend Barends captured more Africans from among people such as the Hurutshe, Rolong, and Kwena. Other people, such as those known as the Mantatees, were forced to become farmworkers, mainly in the eastern Cape. European farmers also raided for labor north of the Orange River.

And then, from 1899 to 1902 … the Brits and the Boers went to war…

The Anglo-Boer War was a classic David-Goliath struggle, pitting two small Boer republics against the British Empire. These were the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (the Transvaal, today Gauteng province) and the Orange Free State (now the Free State province). The war broke out on 11 October 1899, after the British government rejected a Boer ultimatum that all British soldiers be withdrawn from the Transvaal’s borders.

It was the culmination of a decades-long struggle between Afrikaner nationalism (and the ideal to be free and independent) and British imperialism. This was further fuelled by the discovery of rich goldfields in the Transvaal, and by the (in)famous empire-builder Cecil John Rhodes’s ideal of a British-controlled Africa from the Cape to Cairo.

About 450,000 white British soldiers (including volunteers from the colonies), and as many as 140,000 black and brown South African men on the side of the British, served in the war. They were pitted against not more than 79,000 Boers. This Boer force included about 2,500 foreign volunteers and several thousand white rebels from the Cape as well as a few hundred from the British colony of Natal (today KwaZulu-Natal province).

How did the war shape South Africa?

The war was supposed to be a white man’s war and a “gentleman’s war”, but from the start involved all race groups of the region. It degenerated into a total war and a precursor of many of the conflicts of the 1900s and beyond, such as the wars of liberation in the region. In some instances, it also showed characteristics of a civil war, especially in the Cape Colony, where some white colonials fought against white Cape rebels.

The war cast a shadow over South Africa and all its people. It is impossible to understand the history of the country without knowledge and insight of this far-reaching conflict.

After the Boers accepted the British terms of surrender on 31 May 1902, many Afrikaners strove to ensure that Afrikaner identity would not be jeopardised under British rule. The establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 brought the Boer and British colonies together under British authority. But it did not satisfy the expectations of Afrikaner nationalists. In 1914 Afrikaners founded the National Party.

Soon after the first world war broke out in 1914, an Afrikaner rebellion broke out, but was soon quelled. Staunch Afrikaner nationalists’ first aim was to ensure the future dominance of the Afrikaner. Once that was achieved, the focus shifted to ensure that white people in general would remain in power.

Thus the scene was set for the creation of apartheid. With it came a decades-long struggle between Afrikaner nationalism and black nationalism. To a large extent black nationalism was led by the African National Congress, established in 1912 in the wake of the Anglo-Boer War. Among other things this was because of promises of political rights, should black people support the British, that were not kept.

So yeah … the poor Afrkaaners, who are the literal group that formed the South African party that created apartheid, and who ruled Black South Africans for hundreds of years and stole 80 percent of their land, while extending the life of slavery so egregiously that Africans sided with the British in that country’s civil war, much the way enslaved Africans in America did in 1776.

Fast forward to the touching spectacle of Donald Trump, who upon resuming office, all-but shut down the State Department’s resettlement program for everyone other than white people; and who is currently cutting deals with a grab bag of apparently willing Global South regimes to whom he can sell actual Latino and Black refugees and asylum seekers, to stock those foreign prisons, rolling out the red carpet for Afrikaaner “refugees,” to save them from a made up “white genocide.”

From The Independent:

Since taking office, Donald Trump’s administration has virtually shut down refugee admissions and blocked funding for resettlement groups, stranding thousands of people who were granted entry to the United States for humanitarian protections only to have those offers rescinded.

But the president has singled out one specific group of people who will be allowed entry into the United States and appear to be on a fast track to citizenship: white South Africans.

A group of 59 white South Africans admitted to the United States as “refugees” have been “essentially extended citizenship,” Trump said on Monday.

The president claims white South Africans are victims of “genocide,” echoing a white supremacist conspiracy theory alleging immigration and forced assimilation threaten the existence of white people — a claim that has fueled racist hate and violence against minority groups as well as parallel conspiracy theories like the so-called “great replacement” theory.

Trump and his Republican allies have routinely amplified a bogus “great replacement” theory that claims Democratic officials are allowing immigrants into the country to manipulate elections. The idea is behind Trump’s anti-immigration agenda as well his executive orders and legislation in Congress taking aim at voter registration and election administration.

“When it comes to race and immigration issues, the Trump administration is about as subtle as an air raid,” America's Voice executive director Vanessa Cárdenas said in a statement to The Independent.

To review, Trump and his fellow ideologues, who also believe that the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory” and “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” and that any college student who protests against Israel or describes what that country is doing militarily to Palestinians as a genocide, must be jailed or deported, believes there is in fact only one genocide taking place on earth: the fictional against white people in South Africa, which is playing out in vicious fashion inside the minds of Trump and his supporters. Mkay. Here’s the leader of the white victimhood fanfic squad himself:

It’s giving Tuckums, who also claims that his empathy for white South African farmers has nothing to do with race … but then again, don’t white people need a homeland???

And here are the facts:

Violence against white farmers is not particularly widespread even by the admission of organizations led by Afrikaaners dedicated to tracking farm attacks in South Africa, which suffers from a high rate of violent crime in general. White farmers own about 70 percent of commercial farmland in the country, despite making up a minority of the population. Fewer than 150 attacks involving farmers occurred during the entirety of 2023, according to the Afrikaaner political group AfriForum.

Numerous news reports and studies have found that despite a recent law being passed allowing the government to seize land in some cases without compensation, those land seizures have not actually taken place. AfriForum has vowed a legal fight in the country’s court system if that program were to begin, but even advocates for Afrikaaners have tempered their allegations and rhetoric beyond what the US president displayed on Monday.

Trump would insist on Monday that US media would cover the situation in South Africa more were the racial demographics reversed and a white majority was allegedly persecuting a Black minority.

The fact that Trump exhibits what sure looks like a white persecution complex should surprise no one. He has a long history of complaining that Americans (with the “white” implied) are being victimized by Native Americans who got casinos as reparations, Japanese automakers who sold better, cheaper cars to U.S. consumers, China, Haitian and African immigrants, whom he described as coming from “shithole” (meaning Black) countries. He has described nonwhite immigrants including Haitians as pet eaters and cannibals and he and his freak patrol of an administration claim that nonwhite migrants are “invading” the U.S. through the Southern border. He seems to have a negative obsession with America’s first Black president, Barack Obama, whom he seems to believe got a Nobel Peace Prize, praise and Hollywood love, when Trump has gotten none of the above because Obama is Black and he is white. He is quick to believe that any Black or brown man or teenage boy is a rapist — which is ironic as hell, given that he was found liable for sexually abusing E Jean Carroll and defaming her, and there are nearly two dozen other women who accuse him of being a sex pest. (The former “Central Park Five” AKA the Exonerated Five are suing him for defamation.) Trump routinely uses racist language about nonwhite immigrants — implying they are “impure,” possess faulty genes, and are not even quite human. No wonder he loves the 19th century so much. He talks like an old timey race scientist…

This is a man who seems willing to believe almost any violent conspiracy theory about nonwhite people, and every persecution fable about any white person, anywhere on earth. And his refugee policy is playing out, accordingly.

That’s not wearing well with everyone, however.

The Episcopal Church is ending its refugee resettlement partnership with the federal government over the Trump administration’s “preferential treatment” of white South Africans whom Donald Trump has baselessly claimed have been targeted by “genocide.”

Presiding Episcopal Bishop Sean Rowe announced Monday in a statement that the church was calling it quits on a joint program with the federal government, shortly before 59 South Africans arrived at Dulles International Airport outside Washington on a taxpayer-funded charter flight and were warmly greeted by a Trump administration State Department delegation.

“In light of our church’s steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step” of helping the white South Africa immigrants, Rowe wrote.

“Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government.”

It has been “painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” he wrote.

Rowe noted that the “previously bipartisan U.S. Refugee Admissions Program” in which the church was active has already “essentially shut down. Virtually no new refugees have arrived, hundreds of staff in resettlement agencies around the country have been laid off, and funding for resettling refugees who have already arrived has been uncertain,” he noted.

“As Christians, we must be guided not by political vagaries, but by the sure and certain knowledge that the kingdom of God is revealed to us in the struggles of those on the margins ... and we must follow that command. Right now, what that means is ending our participation in the federal government’s refugee resettlement program and investing our resources in serving migrants in other ways.”

White South Africans, descended from the largely Dutch Afrikaners who immigrated to South Africa centuries ago, long held an elevated status over native Black residents. The Afrikaners imposed the brutally discriminatory apartheid policies until they ended in 1990 that kept a small minority in control of the country, to the suffering and impoverishment of the Black majority.

To this day white farmers continue to own roughly 70 percent of commercial farmland in the country even though white South Africans make up only about 7 percent of the population.

Earlier this year Trump promised a “rapid” whites-only “pathway to citizenship” for the Afrikaners after he was reportedly pressed on the issue by tech billionaire and DOGE hatchet man Elon Musk, who was born and raised in apartheid South Africa.

You’ve almost got to hand it to him for staying on brand.