Springboks win in Baltimore

Phillip van Niekerk attended a rugby match at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore last Saturday where the Springboks defeated the All Blacks forty-three to twenty-eight to win the Test Series three to one.

Crowd was largely white and affluent

The sixty-eight thousand strong crowd at M&T Bank Stadium was predominantly white and affluent, with many Afrikaners among the Springbok supporters, though some black South Africans also attended.

National anthem sung by Jesse Clegg

The crowd stood and sang the South African national anthem together, sung by Jesse Clegg, son of the late Johnny Clegg. Van Niekerk noted this goodwill moment was something South Africans share worldwide.

Trump administration welcomes Afrikaner refugees

Miles away in Washington DC, the Trump administration has welcomed thousands of white Afrikaner refugees on the premise they are victims of persecution so severe they are the only refugees being admitted to the US.

Rubio announces visa restrictions

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the US would impose visa restrictions against South Africans responsible for or complicit in race-based discrimination, incitement of violence, and land expropriation without compensation.

“responsible for or complicit in race-based discrimination, incitement of violence, and land expropriation without compensation”

Ambassador warns of further measures

Ambassador L Brent Bozell III said the visa restrictions were only the first step in measures meant to show America's firm resolve on the matter, after earlier praising the Springboks.

Ernst Roets leads White Cross Project

Dr Ernst Roets, a central figure behind the Afrikaner persecution narrative, led South Africans to Washington DC. His Lex Libertas group and the New York Young Republican Club laid three thousand white crosses on the National Mall.

Crosses mark farm murders since nineteen ninety

The white crosses on the National Mall mark those murdered on farms since nineteen ninety. Lex Libertas lists two thousand two hundred and three farm murders in the thirty-six years since nineteen ninety.

Conference speakers announced

The White Cross Project conference will feature South African speakers including David Ansara, CEO of the Free Market Foundation; Martin van Staden, editor of the Race Law Index; Mark Oppenheimer; and James Myburgh, editor of Politicsweb.

Trump showed video of white crosses

The crosses evoke Donald Trump's Oval Office ambush of President Cyril Ramaphosa last year, when Trump dimmed the lights and showed video of white crosses, implying it was a mass burial site and proof of white genocide.

Genocide claim widely debunked

The Afrikaner genocide claim has been widely debunked in the media. Anderson Cooper's investigative piece on CBS's sixty minutes earlier this year laid the claim to rest, though every farm murder death should be mourned.

List excludes majority of murders

The crosses exclude more than one hundred fifty thousand South Africans, most of them black, who have been murdered in South Africa over the same period. Their crosses will not be placed on the National Mall.

Roets seeks white volkstaat

Roets allows the genocide fiction to live on in Washington because he hopes to use Trump administration support as leverage to advance his political agenda: constitutional change to provide for a white volkstaat, a version of apartheid's grand design.

South Africa as conservative bogeyman

Cameron Hudson, an Africa analyst, wrote that South Africa has become the bogeyman in conservative and white nationalist circles in the US as the natural end state of woke diversity, equity and inclusion policies the Trump administration opposes.

New York Young Republican Club hosts extremists

The New York Young Republican Club, co-host of the White Cross Project, invited figures with documented white nationalist and anti-Semitic histories to its December gala, including Jared Taylor of American Renaissance and roughly twenty legislators from Germany's far-right AfD party.

Neo-Nazi sympathies in Republican ranks

Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times wrote about growing neo-Nazi sympathies and white supremacist views among young staffers and operatives in their twenties and thirties in the Republican Party, with exposés piling up across multiple campaigns.

Stephen Miller's fingerprints on sanctions

Hudson says Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff for policy and architect of the mass deportation programme, has his fingerprints all over Rubio's new sanctions. Miller said in May twenty twenty-five that South Africa fits the textbook definition of race-based persecution.

“What's happening in South Africa fits the textbook definition of why the refugee programme was created.”

Midterm elections drive South Africa focus

The US is seven weeks away from midterm elections where Republicans show every sign of losing the House and possibly the Senate. Trump is using white nationalist themes and South Africa as a convenient whipping boy to mobilise the Republican base to vote.

South Africa caught in US domestic politics

South Africa is being whipsawed by a domestic US political debate that has little to do with South African foreign policy. Pretoria's leaders and diplomats have no tools to manage or respond to US domestic politics, especially one this historically and politically charged.