Tuesday, November 20, 2018

Searching for white genocide in South Africa

Ultimately, the alt-right’s white nationalist field trip to South Africa is not really about Africa, but shoring up a domestic policy agenda which is anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and anti-Muslim.


(Africa is a Country) - I'm going to South Africa,” far-right UK media personality Katie Hopkins announced in January 2018, to cover the “racial war waged by black extremists who are systematically murdering white farmers.” Recently hired as a correspondent by the Rebel Media, Canada’s far-right website akin to Breitbart, Hopkins promised her feature length documentary about the “ethnic cleansing of white farmers” in South Africa would be the “first of its kind.”

This promise was immediately undercut, however, by competition from several other alt-right media personalities who also announced their own travel plans to the country at the start of this year. In the race to be the first to produce the definitive documentary on “white genocide” in South Africa, Hopkins was joined by Lauren Southern and Faith Goldy, both of whom were star contributors to the Rebel until last year.


In South Africa, Southern also met up with Jonas Nilsson, the Swedish author of “Anarcho-Fascism: Nature Reborn” who is working on an identical film project. In the end, Goldy — who was recently fired from the Rebel after appearing on a neo-Nazi podcast — cancelled her trip at the last minute, citing unknown “outside interference” and a “failure of guaranteed security on the ground.” (Southern and Hopkins both had successful trips, although Hopkins claims that she was detained prior to departure for “spreading racial hatred”).