Nary a day goes by when The Donald doesn’t send the Left into a foaming rage. Yesterday, when the president tweeted something the Left didn’t like after a segment on Tucker Carlson’s program, was typical.
The subject was the murder of South African whites and the seizure of their farmland without compensation. After Trump tweeted about it, the Left rushed to claim, with statistics that supposedly prove its point, that the president was transmitting racist propaganda.
Whether the president is right, however, doesn’t seem to be the Left’s concern. It seems concerned, to paraphrase Ann Coulter, to see how many times it can get Trump’s name in the same sentence as “racist” or “white nationalist.”
Carlson’s Comment, Trump’s Tweet
The latest trouble began when Carlson stated that the South African government is “seizing land from its own citizens, without compensation, because they are the wrong skin color. That is literally the definition of racism.”
Carlson criticized former President Barack Hussein Obama for praising the “racist government of South Africa” and its president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
And Carlson’s people had called the State Department for a statement about the land seizures, which he called “unbelievable” when he read it on the air.
Said the bureaucrats at Foggy Bottom:
We are aware of these reports and have been following this issue very closely for some time. South Africa is a strong democracy with resilient institutions including a free press and an independent judiciary. South Africans are grappling with the difficult issue of land reform through an open process of including public hearings, broad-based consultations, and active civil society engagement.
An expert from the Cato Institute discussed the seizures.
Trump Reacts
That’s when Trump reacted on Twitter, his go-to medium for sending out messages that bypass the mainstream media:
I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews.
In its report, CNSNews.com noted that the African National Congress, the communist terror group that took over South Africa after whites abdicated power in 1994, “is scrambling to meet a long-delayed pledge to rectify the consequences of eight decades of legislated restrictions on land ownership for the black majority”:
A government audit last year found that 72 percent of privately-held — as opposed to state-owned — farmland was owned by whites, who today comprise some eight percent of the population of 56 million.
South Africa’s constitution allows expropriation of land with equitable compensation — and in some cases, without compensation, when deemed to be in the public interest.
The latter provision is viewed as vague, and Ramaphosa, who became president in February, announced recently the government will propose a constitutional amendment “that outlines more clearly the conditions under which expropriation of land without compensation can be effected.”
Left Explodes
It didn’t take long for the Two Minutes Hate to begin.
Largely ignoring the main point of Carlson’s report — anti-white land seizures — the left focused on Trump’s tweet.
One example was ThinkProgress, which ran a story under this headline: “Trump tweets a favorite talking point of white nationalists — White nationalists, unsurprisingly, are now elated.”
But oddly, ThinkProgress simultaneously admitted, then denied, Trump’s tweet:
It is true that there is violence against white farmers in South Africa, but that is less to do with their race and more with South Africa’s notoriously high crime rate, affecting people from all races and backgrounds. As the Inquistr’s Pieter Howes noted, murderous brutality in South Africa affects everyone from farmers to gay/lesbian couples to immigrants. Furthermore, according to official data, black South Africans still make up nearly 9 out of 10 of all murder victims in the country — and farm murders have actually declined since their peak of 140 killings in 2001/2.
How the author or anyone else would know what motivated these killings we are not given to know, and the writer offered zero evidence to prove the claim. And the data from Howes, whatever they show, did not disprove Trump’s point.
Trump’s tweet did not mention numbers or who was being murdered, although it certainly is implied. But that implication would hardly be outrageous, if as the critics say, whites really do own 72 percent of the privately held farmland in South Africa. If true, then it follows that most of the farm attacks would be against whites, and most of those murdered would be white as well.
But that truth is irrelevant to the leftist press, such as Huffington Post. As one of its writers tweeted, “This is the result of a Nazi-to-Fox-News-to-the-White-House propaganda pipeline. Starts on alt right/Nazi message boards, ends up on Breitbart/ Daily Caller, goes to Fox News…. and then the president does a tweet.”
An outfit called Daily Intelligencer claimed that “Trump Echoes Neo-Nazi Propaganda About South Africa (That He Heard on Fox News).”
Then it had to admit the truth: that South African law does, indeed, allow the government to steal — using the euphemism “expropriate” — land from whites and give it to blacks.
And from the Atlantic: “Trump’s White-Nationalist Pipeline.”
Another day, another moral panic.
