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Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Hello everyone, Molly here. There won't be

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Speaker 1: a new episode this week or next week, as this

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Speaker 1: Thursday is Christmas Day and next Thursday is New Year's Day.

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Speaker 1: Regardless which holidays you celebrate, I hope you're enjoying a

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Speaker 1: little peace and relaxation here at the end of the year.

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Speaker 1: Whenever I have to choose which rerun will go out

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Speaker 1: on the feed, whether it's for a holiday or if

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Speaker 1: I'm sick or on vacation, I have a hard time

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Speaker 1: picking something that makes sense. I mean, first of all,

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Speaker 1: I have so few standalone episodes. I can't just run

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Speaker 1: part one of a five part series as a rerun.

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Speaker 1: That's ridiculous. And the show's only been on for a

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Speaker 1: year and a half or so, so it can be

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Speaker 1: hard to pick something old enough that you didn't just

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Speaker 1: hear it. But here at the end of the year,

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Speaker 1: I knew exactly what I wanted to do. When I

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Speaker 1: look back at twenty twenty five, I'm pretty proud of

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Speaker 1: most of the work I did on the show. We

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Speaker 1: started this year by finishing off the five part series

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Speaker 1: of episodes about Dennis Mayhon, the klansman who sent a

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Speaker 1: bomb to the Diversity office in Scottsdale, Arizona, in two

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Speaker 1: thousand and four. A few weeks after that, I wrote

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Speaker 1: a coda to that story when the city of Scottsdale

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Speaker 1: bowed to pressure from the Trump administration to close that

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Speaker 1: diversity office. In the spring, I told you about one

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Speaker 1: pardoned January sixth defendant who got shot on the side

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Speaker 1: of a lonely state highway, and by fall I was

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Speaker 1: writing about a different January sixth defendant making a bid

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Speaker 1: for Congress. I found funny little quirks of history, like

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Speaker 1: the story of New York City may elect Son Donnie's

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Speaker 1: father reading Marx for the first time after the FBI

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Speaker 1: showed up demanding to know if he was a communist.

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Speaker 1: And I found moments of heartbreaking human kindness, like the

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Speaker 1: final acts of Ricky John Best and Talisian nam Kaimiche,

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Speaker 1: the men who lost their lives to stop a Nazi

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Speaker 1: on a train from attacking a teenage girl and hijab.

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Speaker 1: I spent months writing about the lives of two men

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Speaker 1: who were particularly close to George Lincoln Rockwell in the

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Speaker 1: final years of his life. I thought I already knew

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Speaker 1: the story of the assassination of the leader of the

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Speaker 1: American Nazi Party, but even I was surprised by the

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Speaker 1: twists and turns that one took. I definitely didn't set

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Speaker 1: out expecting to learn so much about the New England mafia.

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Speaker 1: In twenty twenty five, I wrote about murders and lawsuits.

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Speaker 1: I learned more than I cared to know about the

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Speaker 1: process us of seeking an advisory opinion from the Federal

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Speaker 1: Election Commission. And I found out ris And isn't nearly

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Speaker 1: as dangerous as TV shows led us to believe. Maybe

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Speaker 1: it's embarrassing to admit this, but I actually really like

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Speaker 1: pretty much every episode of this show. I love learning

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Speaker 1: strange new things every week, and I love sharing them

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Speaker 1: with you. But when I look back on this year,

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Speaker 1: to me, there's a clear winner. There was a series

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Speaker 1: of episodes that was weirder, more surprising, and more fun

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Speaker 1: and more upsetting to research and write than anything else.

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Speaker 1: This series of episodes was more challenging than anything I've

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Speaker 1: ever done, and it forced me to expand my own

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Speaker 1: research skills in ways I could not have predicted. It

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Speaker 1: was the most far reaching, both in terms of geography

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Speaker 1: and time scale, of anything I've ever written. It spanned

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Speaker 1: centuries and continents. I had to read government documents translated

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Speaker 1: from half a dozen different languages, at least one of

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Speaker 1: them from a government that doesn't exist anymore. I read

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Speaker 1: books and academic journals and doctoral dissertations, but I also

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Speaker 1: read racist prophecies and bomb making manuals. I used source

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Speaker 1: material produced by klansmen, the CIA, German anti fascists, Croatian

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Speaker 1: war criminals, British neo Nazis, and South African death squad leaders.

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Speaker 1: I had to read a murderer's very bad poems. I

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Speaker 1: even watched a movie starring Dulf Lundgren and I loved

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Speaker 1: every minute of it. Looking back at this year, that

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Speaker 1: is absolutely nuts. That is a crazy thing to say.

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Speaker 1: I spent the entirety of March in April going completely mad,

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Speaker 1: digging through archival material and Afrikaans instead of finishing planning

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Speaker 1: my own wedding. I'm not kidding. I made my husband

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Speaker 1: do it. He did a great job. I think this

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Speaker 1: worked out, but we didn't even have an officiant until

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Speaker 1: like three weeks out from the ceremony, mostly because I

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Speaker 1: couldn't tear myself away from this story. So when I

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Speaker 1: had to figure out what to run on the feed,

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Speaker 1: for back to back reruns. I knew what I wanted.

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Speaker 1: I wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance

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Speaker 1: to listen to what I think was my best work

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Speaker 1: of twenty twenty five, the eight episodes I wrote this

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Speaker 1: spring about white nationalist terrorism in the final years of

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Speaker 1: apartheid South Africa. So for the next two weeks, those

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Speaker 1: eight episodes will run two at a time, two on Tuesday,

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Speaker 1: two on Thursday. And those apisodes will run as they

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Speaker 1: were originally recorded. I haven't gone back and changed them,

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Speaker 1: but I will record a new little introduction for each pair.

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Speaker 1: It might be corrections or updates, or just some little

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Speaker 1: connection to another episode of the show for you to

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Speaker 1: think about as you're listening. This first pair of episodes,

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Speaker 1: The White House weighs In on White Genocide and Apartheid International,

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Speaker 1: originally aired on February twenty seventh and March thirteenth. Listening

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Speaker 1: back to them now, it's funny to hear that I

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Speaker 1: obviously had no idea what I was getting into when

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Speaker 1: I wrote the first episode, and by the time I

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Speaker 1: wrote the second one, I had some idea that this

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Speaker 1: might be a longer series. I do want to note

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Speaker 1: now that there is a mistake. In the second episode,

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Speaker 1: I did correct it down the line, but I misspoke

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Speaker 1: the first time I brought up James K Warner, I

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Speaker 1: called him Robert for some reason repeatedly, and then I

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Speaker 1: got so in my head about the mistake that even

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Speaker 1: when I made the correction in the fourth episode, I

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Speaker 1: accidentally called him Robert again. I have no idea why

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Speaker 1: I can't keep this straight, but it's James K. Warner,

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Speaker 1: and that is a guy we'll talk about again eventually,

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Speaker 1: so you should know it's James in this story. He's

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Speaker 1: just a name on some paperwork, but he does connect

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Speaker 1: in a lot of different places. I don't think I

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Speaker 1: actually said his name in the John Patler episodes, but

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Speaker 1: when Patler was arrested at an American Nazi Party rally

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Speaker 1: in DC over the Fourth of July weekend in nineteen

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Speaker 1: sixty one of the stormtroopers he was arrested with was

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Speaker 1: James Warner. It is a small world for these weird

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Speaker 1: little guys. And speaking of connections to other stories, this

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Speaker 1: series opens with a Nazi rally on the steps of

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Speaker 1: the state Capitol in Sacra, and that rally was hosted

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Speaker 1: by a group called the Golden State Skinheads. That's the

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Speaker 1: same skinhead group from the American Third Position Party episodes

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Speaker 1: from August and September of this year, and that rally

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Speaker 1: in Sacramento was just one of the events held all

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Speaker 1: over the country that day. In photos taken at the

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Speaker 1: event in Los Angeles, you can see William Daniel Johnson,

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Speaker 1: the lawyer who helped those Skinheads form their political party,

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Speaker 1: and the rallies that were held on this same day

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Speaker 1: in Tennessee and Pennsylvania. Those were hosted by a group

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Speaker 1: called Folksfront, the same group that organized arian Fest two

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Speaker 1: thousand and four, the event Dennis Mahon attended right before

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Speaker 1: he decided to build that bomb. I'm always saying all

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Speaker 1: of these stories are connected, but some of the connections

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Speaker 1: in these stories didn't jump out at me until I

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Speaker 1: was listening back to them this week. You don't need

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Speaker 1: to have listened to all of those episodes. It's okay

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Speaker 1: if none of that means anything to you, but it

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Speaker 1: is a fun little easter egg for anybody keeping track

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Speaker 1: as we go. Oh one more thing, My eternally patient

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Speaker 1: and infinitely talented editor Rory lent his services for some

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Speaker 1: voiceover work in one of these and when it aired

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Speaker 1: the first time. Some of you were furious and disgusted

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Speaker 1: by how good his Donald Trump impression is. I think

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Speaker 1: it was brilliant, but it is definitely a jump scare anyway,

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Speaker 1: without further ado, the first two episodes of the South

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Speaker 1: Africa arc, on February twenty seventh, twenty twelve, three people

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Speaker 1: were arrested after a rally outside the California State Capitol

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Speaker 1: Building in Sacramento. If not for those arrests, the Little

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Speaker 1: protest may not have even made the news at all.

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Speaker 1: A dozen similar rallies organized by the same group that

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Speaker 1: were held that day and other cities certainly didn't. But

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Speaker 1: a California Highway Patrol officer fell and scraped his knee

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Speaker 1: trying to tackle a counter protester, which made the event

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Speaker 1: national news with headlines like Occupy protesters clash with police

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Speaker 1: officers injured. The arrests were reported by the Associated Press

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Speaker 1: in stories carried in newspapers around the country. The initial

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Speaker 1: wire story opens with a cursory explanation of the underlying event,

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Speaker 1: offering up the phrase a rally by a group protesting

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Speaker 1: violence by blacks against whites in South Africa, but news

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Speaker 1: reports about the events focus on the men who were arrested,

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Speaker 1: three members of Occupy Sacramento, part of the larger nationwide

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Speaker 1: series of Occupy protests that had sprung up around the

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Speaker 1: country a few months earlier. In follow up stories about

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Speaker 1: the arrests, officers say the event led them to reevaluate

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Speaker 1: their strategy for confronting Occupy protesters, who they describe as

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Speaker 1: aggressive towards police. Initial reporting quotes one Occupied protester who

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Speaker 1: spoke to the group's motivation for showing up to counter protest,

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Speaker 1: but none of the news stories follow that lead who

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Speaker 1: exactly were the people who had organised the event of

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Speaker 1: the Capitol and why would those counter protesters believe that

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Speaker 1: the group had connections to the clan. The Associated Press

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Speaker 1: write up notes in passing that the three dozen rally

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Speaker 1: attendees of the Capital were all white and almost all men,

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Speaker 1: many with shaved heads and prominent tattoos, but it doesn't

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Speaker 1: offer any indication that those very visible tattoos had any

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Speaker 1: particular message. The reporter doesn't quote the man who organized

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Speaker 1: the rally in Sacramento, but they do include a comment

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Speaker 1: from the national spokesman for the organization behind the events,

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Speaker 1: Marris Gulett. Told a reporter that he wasn't surprised that

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Speaker 1: counter protesters had disrupted this peaceful march. What's missing from

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Speaker 1: the articles, though, is that the event in Sacramento was

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Speaker 1: hosted by the Golden State Skinheads, and while he may

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Speaker 1: have been speaking on behalf of something called the South

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Speaker 1: Africa Project, Marris Gulett was a lifelong member of the

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Speaker 1: Aryan Nations who had recently been released from prison for

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Speaker 1: bank robbery. Just beneath the surface of those rallies, had

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Speaker 1: anyone bothered to look, was an old woman in Louisiana.

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Speaker 1: Years before she started organizing American skinheads at poorly attended rallies,

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Speaker 1: she was a key player in an international terrorist plot

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Speaker 1: to disrupt South Africa's first post apartheid elections. I'm Molly

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Speaker 1: Conger in this is weird, little guys, we have to

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Speaker 1: talk about white genocide. I'd really rather not, but that's

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Speaker 1: just the way things are. The most important thing you

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Speaker 1: need to know about white genocide is that it is

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Speaker 1: absolutely not a real thing. It's not just not happening.

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Speaker 1: It isn't really a thing that can happen. The white

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Speaker 1: race is not dying out. White people are not subject

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Speaker 1: to a targeted campaign of extermination by any government, But

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Speaker 1: on the extreme right, there is an intense fear of

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Speaker 1: a loss of white dominance. For years now, on the

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Speaker 1: homepage of The Daily Stormer, there's been a little widget

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Speaker 1: in the sidebar called Demographic Countdown. It's an actual countdown

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Speaker 1: clock to the moment the United States will hit a

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Speaker 1: demographic tipping point when the white population drops below fifty

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Speaker 1: percent for the first time. As I'm writing this, they

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Speaker 1: have calculated that moment to be eighteen years and two

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Speaker 1: hundred and twenty one days from now, So mark your calendars.

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Speaker 1: I guess they fear what they call the Great Replacement,

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Speaker 1: the idea that through immigration and interracial marriage, white people

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Speaker 1: will become a minority in historically white majority countries. Abortion, contraception, pornography, homosexuality,

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Speaker 1: all of these things are in their minds, causing white

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Speaker 1: birth rates to fall, all while non white immigrants pour

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Speaker 1: over the borders replacing them. It was David Lane, a

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Speaker 1: member of the neo Nazi terrorist group The Order, who

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Speaker 1: coined the pithy slogan that encapsulates the sphere. His fourteen words,

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Speaker 1: we must secure the existence of our people and a

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Speaker 1: future for white children David Lane wrote those words from

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Speaker 1: his cell in federal prison. His idea of securing the

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Speaker 1: existence of his people involved murdering a Jewish talk radio host.

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Speaker 1: David Lane died in prison, but those fourteen words have

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Speaker 1: taken on a life of their own, becoming one of

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Speaker 1: the most well recognized white supremacist slogans worldwide. This white

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Speaker 1: extinction anxiety is a motivating force for acts of horrific

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Speaker 1: violence on an individual level. Anders Bravich, a man who

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Speaker 1: murdered seventy seven people in Norway in twenty eleven, wrote

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Speaker 1: in his manifesto quote, what is happening to the indigenous

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Speaker 1: peoples of Western Europe and our cultures amounts to a

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Speaker 1: merciless and bloody genocide. When Breton Tarrant murdered fifty one

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Speaker 1: Muslim worshippers at mosques in christ Church, New Zealand in

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Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, he titled his manifesto The Great Replacement, and

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Speaker 1: in it he cites Bravic as an inspiration. But it's

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Speaker 1: that same feeling, this paranoid, reactionary whiteness, that South African

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Speaker 1: media studies professor Niki Falcov calls an anxious racial fantasy

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Speaker 1: that motivates the violence of policy too. When Republican politicians

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Speaker 1: froth at the mouth spreading fear of immigrant hordes at

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Speaker 1: the border and give campaign speeches about how they're all rapists,

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Speaker 1: with the unspoken implication that they'll impregnate your white daughters.

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Speaker 1: They're murderers, they carry deadly diseases, and they traffic poisonous

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Speaker 1: drugs that will kill your white sons. That's the same fear.

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Speaker 1: It originates in the same place, and it leads us

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Speaker 1: to the same violent ends. But the great replacement myth

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Speaker 1: is just that, a myth, of course, but one about replacement.

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Speaker 1: They believe white people are being displaced. They are being replaced.

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Speaker 1: Their cultural hegemony is at risk. When immigrants bring their languages, customs,

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Speaker 1: and religions with them into white countries in a racial marriage,

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Speaker 1: is making new generations less and less racially pure. The

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Speaker 1: belief in the conspiracy theories of white genocide and great

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Speaker 1: replacement go hand in hand, and they're often used interchangeably.

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Speaker 1: But for that white genocide to be more than metaphorical,

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Speaker 1: more than a slow death of this imaginary hegemonic white culture,

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Speaker 1: there has to be actual violence against white people. If

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Speaker 1: white people are victims of an ongoing genocide. Surely you

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Speaker 1: can point to blood on someone's hands, you have to

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Speaker 1: have a body. And the example that bubbles to the

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Speaker 1: surface more often than not is the myth of the

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Speaker 1: South African farm murders, and that's what got me started

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Speaker 1: on the subject of this week's episode. Those rallies in

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Speaker 1: twenty twelve were organized by a group calling themselves the

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Speaker 1: South Africa Project, and their stated goal was to raise

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Speaker 1: awareness of the genocide of the white South African The

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Speaker 1: narrative is built around the idea that white South African

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Speaker 1: farmers are under attack, that they are being brutally murdered

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Speaker 1: in alarming numbers by black men motivated specifically by a

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Speaker 1: desire to kill white people. The very idea of the

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Speaker 1: farm murders as some discrete category of crime is a

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Speaker 1: contentious one. Have white farmers been murdered, Yes, but that's

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Speaker 1: where the truth leaves the room. As a nation, South

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Speaker 1: Africa has a higher rate of violent crime than many

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Speaker 1: other similarly situated countries, but the idea that rural white

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Speaker 1: landowners are at a uniquely high risk of being murdered

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Speaker 1: in racially motivated violent attacks is simply not true. But

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Speaker 1: it's a myth that serves a rather particular political purpose.

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Speaker 1: As Nikki Falcon writes in her book Warrior, State, Risk, Anxiety,

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Speaker 1: and moral panic in South Africa, white people are not

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Speaker 1: the only victims, or indeed only the victims of rural murders.

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Speaker 1: Black laborers, though seldom spoken about in these terms, are

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Speaker 1: frequently among the victims of murders perpetrated by outsiders, and

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Speaker 1: they are also killed by white managers and employers. Rates

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Speaker 1: of femicide and domestic violence on farms are thought to

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Speaker 1: be high, affecting both black and white women. Nonetheless, the

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Speaker 1: trope of the farm murder as a specific type of

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Speaker 1: violent crime featuring white victims and black killers is frequently

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Speaker 1: invoked to provide evidence for the alleged genocide. In two

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Speaker 1: thousand and three, the South African Police issued their final

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Speaker 1: report on an inquiry conducted into the alleged phenomenon. In

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Speaker 1: analysis of all reported incidents on farms and smallholdings spanning

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Speaker 1: nineteen ninety eight two thousand and one, nearly ninety percent

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Speaker 1: were motivated by robbery, seven percent were the result of

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Speaker 1: labor disputes, and only two percent were found to have

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Speaker 1: any racial or political motivation in any direction. In a

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Speaker 1: country with nearly twenty thousand murders annually, there are an

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Speaker 1: average of fifty per year that could be classified as

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Speaker 1: farm murders, and again all most all of those are

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Speaker 1: robbery homicides, not organized political violence targeting people of a

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Speaker 1: particular race. As Falkov puts it, there is evidence for murder, atrocity,

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Speaker 1: even torture, there is no evidence for genocide. The genocide

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Speaker 1: myth is an iteration of long standing white justifications for

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Speaker 1: racist domination. To put it another way, the intense and

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Speaker 1: formative anxiety of whiteness that it is always under threat

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Speaker 1: would appear among South Africans regardless of whether the farm

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Speaker 1: murders happened or not. This anxiety of a whiteness that

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Speaker 1: is under violent threat is incredibly useful. Carolyn Holmes, a

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Speaker 1: professor of political science at the University of Tennessee Knoxville,

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Speaker 1: has written extensively about this phenomenon, addressing specifically the ways

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Speaker 1: this myth making is marketed to a racially anxious white

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Speaker 1: audience outside of South Africa, writing that white audiences are

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Speaker 1: a quote mobilizing around stories of violence against perceived members

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Speaker 1: of their group. As a way to protect their racial status.

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Speaker 1: African nationalist groups like Afroforum and the Swedelanders tour the

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Speaker 1: United States, meet with American right wing groups, produce material

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Speaker 1: in English, and make appearances in American media because they

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Speaker 1: know this message sells here, and lately it's really taken off.

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Speaker 1: Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted something on truth Social

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Speaker 1: that sent up a big red flag for me. I mean,

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Speaker 1: almost all of his posts are pretty alarming, but this

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Speaker 1: one sent me scurrying into my archives. On February tewod

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Speaker 1: he posted.

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Speaker 2: South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of

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Speaker 2: people very badly. It's a bad situation that the radical

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Speaker 2: left media doesn't want so much as mention. A massive

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Speaker 2: human rights violation at a minimum is happening for all

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Speaker 2: to see. The United States won't stand for it. We

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Speaker 2: will act. Also. I will be cutting off all future

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Speaker 2: funding to South Africa until a full investigation of this

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Speaker 2: situation has been completed.

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Speaker 1: He made an almost identical post a week later on

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Speaker 1: February ninth, and in between those two posts, he issued

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Speaker 1: an executive order with the title addressing the egregious actions

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Speaker 1: of the Republic of South Africa on its surface The

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Speaker 1: egregious action he's referring to is the Expropriation Act of

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Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, an Act of the South African Parliament

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Speaker 1: signed into law by the South African President in January

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Speaker 1: of this year. But both his reaction to it and

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Speaker 1: his own history of engagement on the subject of South

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Speaker 1: African land reform are instructive here. He's not actually reacting

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Speaker 1: to the text of that bill. He's reacting to the

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Speaker 1: imaginary world constructed by people who wish apartheid had never ended.

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Speaker 1: I'll get into a little bit of what the Expropriation

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Speaker 1: actually says, but first let's go back in time a

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Speaker 1: few years, because, like I said, when I saw Trump's

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Speaker 1: post a few days before that executive order, I had

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Speaker 1: a feeling he was retreading old territory. This wasn't the

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Speaker 1: first time he'd fired off a half baked take on

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Speaker 1: South African land reform. Back in August of twenty eighteen,

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Speaker 1: nearly two years and almost five thousand tweets into his

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Speaker 1: first term, he tweeted the word Africa for the first time.

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Speaker 2: As president, I have asked Secretary of State sect Bomb

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Speaker 2: to closely study the South African land and farm seizures

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Speaker 2: and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. South

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Speaker 2: African government is now seizing land from white farmers at

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Speaker 2: Tucker Carlson at Fox News.

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Speaker 1: The tweet was posted at ten thirty eight pm, less

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Speaker 1: than an hour after a segment on Tucker Carlson's nightly

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Speaker 1: broadcast fearmongering about land reform under President Ramaposa.

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Speaker 3: We've got a solicit investigation for you tonight. The President

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Speaker 3: of South Africa, Siro Ramaposa, has begun and you may

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Speaker 3: have seen this in the press, seizing land from his

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Speaker 3: own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin color.

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Speaker 3: That is literally the definition of racism.

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Speaker 1: Oddly, that segment doesn't mention anything about farmers being killed.

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Speaker 1: Trump's decision to include that in his tweet indicates that

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Speaker 1: he'd been consuming right wing media about South Africa elsewhere

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Speaker 1: prior to this nightly date with Tucker Carlson's show. If

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Speaker 1: I had to guess, though, I'd say his belief in

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Speaker 1: the farm murders did probably still come from Tucker Carlson.

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Speaker 1: Just three months earlier, he'd invited the leader of a

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Speaker 1: white nationalist group onto the show to spread disinformation on

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Speaker 1: the topic.

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Speaker 3: An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans speaking, is being

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Speaker 3: targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders. But

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Speaker 3: instead of protecting them, the government just passed a law

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Speaker 3: allowing it to seize their farms that any compensation, based

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Speaker 3: purely on their ethnicity, and distribute those farms to more

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Speaker 3: favored groups. Thousands have already migrated out of the country,

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Speaker 3: but they've struggled to attack attract any sympathy abroad for

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Speaker 3: some reason. Ernst Roots is deputy CEO of Afroforum. It's

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Speaker 3: a South Africa civil rights group. He was just in

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Speaker 3: the United States to meet with a government officials.

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Speaker 1: Afroforum is not really best described as a civil rights organization,

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Speaker 1: that's what they call themselves, but I would profer that

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Speaker 1: apartheid apologists is a more fitting description. In twenty sixteen,

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Speaker 1: after the group released Tainted Heroes, their documentary critical of

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Speaker 1: the struggle against apartheid, a spokesman for the African National

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Speaker 1: Congress called the film pure propaganda and suggested that a

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Speaker 1: better film might feature the stories of the AFROFUM members

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Speaker 1: and the ways in which they had collaborated with the

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Speaker 1: apartheid regime. Arenst Ruth's appearance on Tucker Carlson's show was

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Speaker 1: during his trip to Washington, d C. To meet with

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Speaker 1: federal government officials and right wing think tanks. Along with

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Speaker 1: Afroforum CEO Kelly Krele, he met with staffers for Senator

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Speaker 1: Ted Cruz, officials from USAID, and the pair posted a

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Speaker 1: photo of themselves with National Security Advisor John Bolton. They

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Speaker 1: posted about meetings at the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation,

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Speaker 1: and the International Republican Institute. They claimed to have met

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Speaker 1: with at least one member of Congress, but they declined

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Speaker 1: to say who it was. Their May twenty eighteen tour

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Speaker 1: of the United States was meant to capitalize on the

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Speaker 1: sudden international interest in the plight of the persecuted white

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Speaker 1: South African Just two months earlier, in March of twenty eighteen,

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Speaker 1: News Corp Australia sent reporter Paul Towey on a four

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Speaker 1: week tour of South Africa. The timing is curious. This

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Speaker 1: was right on the heels of right wing media influencers

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Speaker 1: like Lauren Southern and Katie Hopkins traveling to South Africa

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Speaker 1: to make content, and for weeks Australian news outlets owned

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Speaker 1: by Rupert Murdoch, ran stories and videos about horrific violence

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Speaker 1: against white farmers, with headlines like horror hails from South

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Speaker 1: African farmers in the Australian South Africa's white farmers attacked, raped,

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Speaker 1: forced from land in the Daily Telegraph, White minority targeted

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Speaker 1: in South Africa in the Courier Mail, and wrights groups

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Speaker 1: silent on the whites of South Africa in the West Australian.

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Speaker 1: In video reports, Tooey claimed that he was quoting the

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Speaker 1: Ramaposa government when he said they were specifically targeting white

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Speaker 1: South Africans for land seizures. Australian Facebook feeds were flooded

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Speaker 1: with short videos about a pending genocide of white South Africans.

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Speaker 1: Twoy's reporting relied heavily on the misrepresented crime statistics produced

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Speaker 1: by Afroforum, and many of his stories quoted liberally from

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Speaker 1: Afroform directly or interviewed the aggrieved white farmers whose stories

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Speaker 1: had been featured in Afroform propaganda campaigns in the past.

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Speaker 1: As far as I can find, Paul Towey explicitly disclosed

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00:30:02,040 --> 00:30:06,320
Speaker 1: any relationship with afro Forum, but the group did take

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Speaker 1: credit for influencing his coverage, claiming to have provided assistance

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Speaker 1: to a prominent Australian journalist. In the midst of this,

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Speaker 1: onslaught of reporting essentially force feeding African or white nationalists

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Speaker 1: propaganda to the entire Australian public. Australian Home Affairs Minister

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Speaker 1: Peter Dutton told a reporter from the Australian right wing

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Speaker 1: tabloid The Telegraph that he'd seen some very concerning media

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Speaker 1: coverage of the violent persecution of white farmers and he

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Speaker 1: hoped to assist them in resettling in Australia. He'd ordered

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Speaker 1: his department to explore options for fast tracking humanitarian visas

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Speaker 1: for white South Africans, saying people do need help, and

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Speaker 1: they need help from a civilized country like ours. Dutton's

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Speaker 1: comments were not well received. He dismissed the criticism as

432
00:31:16,040 --> 00:31:19,760
Speaker 1: lots of outrage from crazy leftists, and he said that

433
00:31:19,760 --> 00:31:22,760
Speaker 1: the outlets who covered the story negatively, like ABC, The

434
00:31:22,800 --> 00:31:27,800
Speaker 1: Guardian and the Huftington Post were dead to him. But

435
00:31:27,840 --> 00:31:31,560
Speaker 1: the criticism wasn't just coming from the media. The United

436
00:31:31,640 --> 00:31:34,880
Speaker 1: Nations High Commissioner for Refugees issued a statement warning of

437
00:31:34,880 --> 00:31:38,040
Speaker 1: the dire conditions for refugees living in a Processing Center

438
00:31:38,080 --> 00:31:43,240
Speaker 1: on the island of Nauru, urging Australia to prioritize actual refugees.

439
00:31:45,000 --> 00:31:49,080
Speaker 1: The UNHCR Director for Asia and the Pacific said, the

440
00:31:49,120 --> 00:31:51,880
Speaker 1: decision of the government to open its migration pathways to

441
00:31:52,200 --> 00:31:56,560
Speaker 1: different categories of people is a sovereign decision, but from

442
00:31:56,560 --> 00:32:00,480
Speaker 1: the UNHCR perspective, we do encourage that resettlement upper tunities

443
00:32:00,480 --> 00:32:03,720
Speaker 1: that are for refugees and humanitarian quotas that are for

444
00:32:03,760 --> 00:32:08,240
Speaker 1: deserving cases should not be impacted by these decisions on migration.

445
00:32:10,480 --> 00:32:14,080
Speaker 1: The South African government summoned the Australian ambassador and demanded

446
00:32:14,080 --> 00:32:18,120
Speaker 1: a formal retraction of Dutton's statements, with their Foreign Affairs

447
00:32:18,120 --> 00:32:22,000
Speaker 1: minister writing the South African government is offended by the

448
00:32:22,080 --> 00:32:24,800
Speaker 1: statements which have been attributed to the Australian Home Affairs

449
00:32:24,800 --> 00:32:30,800
Speaker 1: Minister and a full retraction is expected. Australian Prime Minister

450
00:32:30,880 --> 00:32:35,360
Speaker 1: Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop managed to smooth

451
00:32:35,400 --> 00:32:38,960
Speaker 1: things out with South Africa by clarifying that Dutton's offer

452
00:32:39,320 --> 00:32:43,440
Speaker 1: did not represent the actual policies of the nation, but

453
00:32:43,520 --> 00:32:48,920
Speaker 1: Dutton never actually retracted his statement, and as for af reforms,

454
00:32:48,960 --> 00:32:51,760
Speaker 1: attempt to capitalize on that attention on their trip to

455
00:32:51,800 --> 00:32:55,680
Speaker 1: the United States, they only actually managed to meet with

456
00:32:55,800 --> 00:33:00,959
Speaker 1: staffers in Ted Cruz's office, not the Senator himself, and

457
00:33:01,000 --> 00:33:05,080
Speaker 1: a spokesman from usaid downplayed the significance of having taken

458
00:33:05,080 --> 00:33:09,080
Speaker 1: a meeting with the pair, offering a bland statement that

459
00:33:09,760 --> 00:33:13,400
Speaker 1: they take a lot of meetings. Their claim to have

460
00:33:13,480 --> 00:33:18,520
Speaker 1: met with John Bolton is an overstatement too. A spokesman

461
00:33:18,560 --> 00:33:22,560
Speaker 1: from the National Security Council clarified that Bolton had no

462
00:33:22,720 --> 00:33:25,560
Speaker 1: idea who Roots and Creole were and he had not

463
00:33:25,680 --> 00:33:28,680
Speaker 1: met with them. They'd simply run into him in the

464
00:33:28,720 --> 00:33:31,320
Speaker 1: hallway at a Fox News studio and agreed to pose

465
00:33:31,400 --> 00:33:35,320
Speaker 1: for a photo with fans. For what it's worth, the

466
00:33:35,440 --> 00:33:38,840
Speaker 1: photo of Roots with Bolton does show that Roots is

467
00:33:38,840 --> 00:33:41,200
Speaker 1: wearing the outfit he appeared in on an episode of

468
00:33:41,200 --> 00:33:44,400
Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson that aired a few days later, and the

469
00:33:44,440 --> 00:33:46,240
Speaker 1: men are standing in front of what appears to be

470
00:33:46,280 --> 00:33:49,520
Speaker 1: the kind of large garment steamer that you might find

471
00:33:49,520 --> 00:33:52,600
Speaker 1: in a dressing room in a television studio, not a

472
00:33:52,600 --> 00:33:59,680
Speaker 1: government office building. Peter Dutton was the subject of international

473
00:33:59,720 --> 00:34:05,200
Speaker 1: regis and he very nearly caused an international incident. The

474
00:34:05,280 --> 00:34:08,640
Speaker 1: leadership of Afroform had made no headway in their attempts

475
00:34:08,680 --> 00:34:12,600
Speaker 1: to meet with government officials, But none of that really matters.

476
00:34:13,880 --> 00:34:17,000
Speaker 1: The only thing that mattered in the end was that

477
00:34:17,040 --> 00:34:21,080
Speaker 1: Tucker Carlson took the bait and he put ernst Rutz

478
00:34:21,120 --> 00:34:23,560
Speaker 1: on a television program that the President of the United

479
00:34:23,560 --> 00:34:29,520
Speaker 1: States watched religiously. That segment aired on May fifteenth, twenty eighteen.

480
00:34:31,160 --> 00:34:35,400
Speaker 1: Trump didn't tweet about South Africa that night. I can't

481
00:34:35,440 --> 00:34:40,600
Speaker 1: prove he saw that episode. But three months later in August,

482
00:34:41,120 --> 00:34:43,680
Speaker 1: when Tucker Carlson had another guest on to talk about

483
00:34:43,719 --> 00:34:48,600
Speaker 1: South African land reform, the president's tweet that night wasn't

484
00:34:48,640 --> 00:34:54,040
Speaker 1: just about land reform. He specifically referenced the idea of

485
00:34:54,200 --> 00:34:58,239
Speaker 1: large scale killings of white farmers, something that hadn't been

486
00:34:58,239 --> 00:35:02,080
Speaker 1: discussed in that night's episode, but it had been the

487
00:35:02,120 --> 00:35:06,960
Speaker 1: subject of Carlson's interview with Roots back in May. That

488
00:35:07,120 --> 00:35:11,600
Speaker 1: pathway from white supremacist propaganda in South Africa to a

489
00:35:11,640 --> 00:35:17,520
Speaker 1: presidential tweet is fairly clear. Trump quoted and tagged Tucker

490
00:35:17,560 --> 00:35:20,839
Speaker 1: Carlson in his tweet, a tweet he posted forty five

491
00:35:20,880 --> 00:35:24,919
Speaker 1: minutes after the segment aired. The guest on the show

492
00:35:24,960 --> 00:35:28,360
Speaker 1: that night was a Cato Institute fellow named Marion Tupi,

493
00:35:29,320 --> 00:35:33,880
Speaker 1: so not actually a representative from Afrofum, but when Afroforum

494
00:35:33,920 --> 00:35:36,359
Speaker 1: met with various right wing think tanks back in May,

495
00:35:37,160 --> 00:35:41,320
Speaker 1: Marion Tupi was the Cato Institute policy analyst who replied

496
00:35:41,320 --> 00:35:43,920
Speaker 1: to Huffington Post's requests for comment about their meeting with

497
00:35:43,960 --> 00:35:48,040
Speaker 1: the group. He even c seed Ernst Roots in his

498
00:35:48,160 --> 00:35:52,120
Speaker 1: reply to the Huffington Post, a message that included a

499
00:35:52,600 --> 00:35:56,879
Speaker 1: bizarre comment that the current South African government was explicitly

500
00:35:57,000 --> 00:36:03,040
Speaker 1: racist and in fact comparable to the apartheid government. When

501
00:36:03,080 --> 00:36:05,680
Speaker 1: Donald Trump tweeted about South Africa for the first time

502
00:36:05,719 --> 00:36:08,840
Speaker 1: as president, he said he was going to have Secretary

503
00:36:08,840 --> 00:36:13,200
Speaker 1: of State Mike Pompeo closely study the issue of South

504
00:36:13,200 --> 00:36:17,400
Speaker 1: African farmers. But I can't actually find any kind of

505
00:36:17,400 --> 00:36:21,239
Speaker 1: official follow up to that. I found a brief mention

506
00:36:21,360 --> 00:36:24,520
Speaker 1: in an article from twenty twenty about Pompeo's first trip

507
00:36:24,600 --> 00:36:28,440
Speaker 1: to Southern Africa a Secretary of State, So I guess

508
00:36:28,440 --> 00:36:32,480
Speaker 1: we can at least deduce that closely studying the issue

509
00:36:33,200 --> 00:36:36,480
Speaker 1: didn't actually involve going to South Africa for at least

510
00:36:36,480 --> 00:36:40,360
Speaker 1: a year and a half but there's no official policy

511
00:36:40,400 --> 00:36:44,680
Speaker 1: statement or reference to any study performed. That article just

512
00:36:44,719 --> 00:36:49,400
Speaker 1: quotes Pompeo calling the proposed land reform bill disastrous for

513
00:36:49,440 --> 00:36:54,600
Speaker 1: the South African people and much like Peter Dutton's comments

514
00:36:54,600 --> 00:36:58,320
Speaker 1: in March of twenty eighteen, Trump's tweet in August twenty

515
00:36:58,360 --> 00:37:03,160
Speaker 1: eighteen was not well received by the South African government.

516
00:37:05,040 --> 00:37:10,040
Speaker 1: Within hours, their official Twitter account responded, tweeting South Africa

517
00:37:10,120 --> 00:37:13,800
Speaker 1: totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide

518
00:37:13,840 --> 00:37:18,120
Speaker 1: our nation and reminds us of our colonial past. Hashtag

519
00:37:18,200 --> 00:37:24,520
Speaker 1: land expropriation at real Donald Trump. The following morning, a

520
00:37:24,600 --> 00:37:28,000
Speaker 1: spokesperson for President Rama Posa called into a news broadcast

521
00:37:28,040 --> 00:37:32,000
Speaker 1: on e NCA, South Africa's most watched television news channel,

522
00:37:32,680 --> 00:37:35,359
Speaker 1: to say the government would not be using tweets to

523
00:37:35,400 --> 00:37:36,960
Speaker 1: conduct international relations.

524
00:37:40,360 --> 00:37:43,880
Speaker 4: The presidency has noticed the two which is attributed to

525
00:37:43,920 --> 00:37:48,560
Speaker 4: the US President President Donald Trump. In our view, the

526
00:37:48,600 --> 00:37:52,000
Speaker 4: treat is unfortunate and miss informed. However, we've chosen and

527
00:37:52,080 --> 00:37:55,279
Speaker 4: not to respond to it via social media. Instead, we'll

528
00:37:55,400 --> 00:37:57,960
Speaker 4: use the diplomatic channels that exist for such purposes.

529
00:38:01,440 --> 00:38:05,600
Speaker 1: Later that day, the same spokesperson whose Eladico told CNN

530
00:38:06,239 --> 00:38:09,320
Speaker 1: hysterical comments and statements do not assist in the process.

531
00:38:10,080 --> 00:38:12,799
Speaker 1: The majority of South Africans want to see land reform.

532
00:38:13,040 --> 00:38:15,960
Speaker 1: The majority of our farmers, white and black, want to

533
00:38:15,960 --> 00:38:20,480
Speaker 1: be part of this initiative. And President Cyril Ramaposa hit

534
00:38:20,560 --> 00:38:23,400
Speaker 1: back in remarks at a conference in Limpopo later that week.

535
00:38:26,080 --> 00:38:29,040
Speaker 5: I don't know what Donald Trump has to do with

536
00:38:29,160 --> 00:38:33,520
Speaker 5: South African land because he's never been here, and he

537
00:38:33,640 --> 00:38:38,960
Speaker 5: must keep his America. We will keep our South Africa.

538
00:38:39,280 --> 00:38:40,320
Speaker 2: How do as you do.

539
00:38:42,360 --> 00:38:48,400
Speaker 5: South Africa is our land. South Africa belongs to all

540
00:38:48,880 --> 00:38:53,120
Speaker 5: the people who live here in South Africa. He does

541
00:38:53,200 --> 00:39:00,960
Speaker 5: not belong to Donald Crab. He can keep his America.

542
00:39:01,760 --> 00:39:05,759
Speaker 1: But then the story just sort of went away. I

543
00:39:05,840 --> 00:39:07,880
Speaker 1: can't find much in the way of official follow up

544
00:39:07,920 --> 00:39:12,200
Speaker 1: from either government. Trump went back to tweeting and Ramaposa

545
00:39:12,239 --> 00:39:14,240
Speaker 1: went back to working on a plan for land reform.

546
00:39:16,239 --> 00:39:18,920
Speaker 1: Back in twenty eighteen, the new story Trump was reacting

547
00:39:19,000 --> 00:39:22,400
Speaker 1: to was merely a proposal to amend the South African

548
00:39:22,480 --> 00:39:28,000
Speaker 1: Constitution to clarify existing powers of expropriation, and that didn't

549
00:39:28,000 --> 00:39:33,000
Speaker 1: actually happen back then. Now, in twenty twenty five, President

550
00:39:33,040 --> 00:39:37,120
Speaker 1: Ramaposa has signed into law the Expropriation Act, which does

551
00:39:37,160 --> 00:39:41,600
Speaker 1: allow the government to expropriate privately owned land. And that

552
00:39:41,719 --> 00:39:45,920
Speaker 1: might sound very scary if you don't know what it means,

553
00:39:46,400 --> 00:39:49,319
Speaker 1: and that's certainly the emotional reaction the act's opponents are

554
00:39:49,360 --> 00:39:54,160
Speaker 1: counting on. But the power codified in the Act isn't

555
00:39:54,360 --> 00:39:59,759
Speaker 1: new to South Africa or unique to that country. Expropriation

556
00:39:59,840 --> 00:40:02,600
Speaker 1: of land in the public interest was a power already

557
00:40:02,600 --> 00:40:06,080
Speaker 1: granted to the government in South Africa's nineteen ninety four constitution.

558
00:40:07,239 --> 00:40:10,040
Speaker 1: And I'm sure you're familiar with the Fifth Amendment of

559
00:40:10,080 --> 00:40:14,520
Speaker 1: the United States Constitution, but there's more to it than

560
00:40:15,280 --> 00:40:19,879
Speaker 1: pleading the fifth Honestly, come to think of it, they

561
00:40:20,120 --> 00:40:22,720
Speaker 1: probably should have broken that one out into a couple

562
00:40:22,880 --> 00:40:26,359
Speaker 1: different amendments. But on top of giving you the right

563
00:40:26,440 --> 00:40:30,400
Speaker 1: to not incriminate yourself, the Fifth Amendment has something called

564
00:40:30,719 --> 00:40:35,080
Speaker 1: the takings Clause, which limits the power of eminent domain

565
00:40:35,520 --> 00:40:41,080
Speaker 1: by requiring just compensation. In other words, if the government

566
00:40:41,120 --> 00:40:44,640
Speaker 1: believes that it is in the public interest and they

567
00:40:44,680 --> 00:40:48,160
Speaker 1: pay you a fair price, they can take your land.

568
00:40:49,880 --> 00:40:54,759
Speaker 1: The constitutions in countries like Spain, Germany, India, and Australia

569
00:40:55,200 --> 00:41:00,399
Speaker 1: have similar provisions. What South Africa is proposing is some

570
00:41:01,080 --> 00:41:22,680
Speaker 1: unimaginable tyrannical nightmare. It's eminent domain. There is a provision

571
00:41:23,120 --> 00:41:25,160
Speaker 1: in the act that's getting quite a bit of attention.

572
00:41:26,719 --> 00:41:31,399
Speaker 1: In Trump's executive order, he writes, in.

573
00:41:31,400 --> 00:41:35,640
Speaker 2: Shocking disregard of its citizens' rights, the Republic of South

574
00:41:35,680 --> 00:41:41,839
Speaker 2: Africa recently enacted Expropriation Act thirteen of twenty twenty four

575
00:41:42,360 --> 00:41:46,000
Speaker 2: to enable the Government of South Africa to seize ethnic

576
00:41:46,080 --> 00:41:50,600
Speaker 2: minority African honors agricultural property without compensation.

577
00:41:54,560 --> 00:41:58,399
Speaker 1: Putting aside the commentary about race, the Act says nothing

578
00:41:58,400 --> 00:42:03,640
Speaker 1: at all about race or euthnicity. The without compensation language

579
00:42:04,000 --> 00:42:06,440
Speaker 1: has been the focus of much of the negative coverage

580
00:42:06,440 --> 00:42:11,600
Speaker 1: of this act. I'm not an expert on South African politics,

581
00:42:11,800 --> 00:42:16,120
Speaker 1: or constitutional law in any country, or really even the

582
00:42:16,120 --> 00:42:19,640
Speaker 1: ins and outs of eminent domain. But I did read

583
00:42:20,360 --> 00:42:25,279
Speaker 1: the Expropriation Act, and I'm not sure Trump did. It's

584
00:42:25,320 --> 00:42:28,960
Speaker 1: fifty two pages long, but each page is printed once

585
00:42:29,000 --> 00:42:31,640
Speaker 1: in English, followed by the same page in Afrikaans, so

586
00:42:32,360 --> 00:42:34,879
Speaker 1: I guess that makes it a twenty six page law.

587
00:42:36,520 --> 00:42:40,840
Speaker 1: Chapter five of the Act is called compensation for expropriation,

588
00:42:41,800 --> 00:42:46,240
Speaker 1: and it discusses in detail how compensation is calculated and paid.

589
00:42:47,280 --> 00:42:50,680
Speaker 1: There's a lot of boring bits about interest and mortgages

590
00:42:50,760 --> 00:42:54,479
Speaker 1: and taxes, but I want to talk about Chapter five,

591
00:42:55,360 --> 00:42:59,440
Speaker 1: Section twelve, and then skip on down to sub section

592
00:42:59,760 --> 00:43:05,000
Speaker 1: three D, which begins it may be just and equitable

593
00:43:05,239 --> 00:43:09,359
Speaker 1: for nil compensation to be paid where land is expropriated

594
00:43:09,400 --> 00:43:13,560
Speaker 1: in the public interest, having regard to all the relevant circumstances,

595
00:43:13,920 --> 00:43:18,200
Speaker 1: including and the four conditions laid out there. For scenarios

596
00:43:18,200 --> 00:43:20,840
Speaker 1: where it may be appropriate to offer a landowner no

597
00:43:21,040 --> 00:43:26,680
Speaker 1: compensation are things like when the land is entirely unused

598
00:43:27,080 --> 00:43:29,600
Speaker 1: because the landowner's main purpose is not to develop the

599
00:43:29,719 --> 00:43:32,680
Speaker 1: land or use it to generate income, but instead to

600
00:43:32,800 --> 00:43:36,840
Speaker 1: benefit from appreciation of its market value. Or if the

601
00:43:36,920 --> 00:43:39,680
Speaker 1: land is currently owned by an organ of the state

602
00:43:40,560 --> 00:43:43,080
Speaker 1: and they're not using that land for its core functions

603
00:43:43,120 --> 00:43:46,920
Speaker 1: and they're unlikely to require it in the future. If

604
00:43:46,960 --> 00:43:49,800
Speaker 1: the owner has abandoned the land by failing to exercise

605
00:43:49,880 --> 00:43:54,440
Speaker 1: control over it despite being reasonably capable of doing so,

606
00:43:54,640 --> 00:43:57,319
Speaker 1: or if the present value of the land is less

607
00:43:57,360 --> 00:44:00,000
Speaker 1: than the amount of direct state subsidy in the US

608
00:44:00,160 --> 00:44:05,640
Speaker 1: acquisition or improvement of the land, the furor being whipped

609
00:44:05,719 --> 00:44:07,919
Speaker 1: up about the law makes it sound like the South

610
00:44:07,960 --> 00:44:11,600
Speaker 1: African government has written a law that says white families

611
00:44:11,600 --> 00:44:13,680
Speaker 1: will be driven from their homes and stripped of all

612
00:44:13,719 --> 00:44:17,760
Speaker 1: their possessions. But the law says nothing at all about

613
00:44:17,760 --> 00:44:22,680
Speaker 1: targeting any particular group for expropriation, and the conditions under

614
00:44:22,680 --> 00:44:25,879
Speaker 1: which someone might be offered anything less than equitable compensation

615
00:44:27,160 --> 00:44:32,360
Speaker 1: would necessarily exclude land that anyone actually lived or worked on.

616
00:44:35,000 --> 00:44:38,440
Speaker 1: The goal of land reform at its core is to

617
00:44:38,480 --> 00:44:43,279
Speaker 1: address the wrongs of apartheid. The Native's Land Act of

618
00:44:43,360 --> 00:44:48,120
Speaker 1: nineteen thirteen prevented black people from buying land, setting aside

619
00:44:48,200 --> 00:44:51,319
Speaker 1: just seven percent of the country's land for use by

620
00:44:51,320 --> 00:44:56,480
Speaker 1: black South Africans. A later amendment expanded that to thirteen percent,

621
00:44:57,120 --> 00:45:02,080
Speaker 1: but the law itself wasn't repealed until nineteen ninety one.

622
00:45:02,239 --> 00:45:04,600
Speaker 1: A land audit conducted by the South African government in

623
00:45:04,600 --> 00:45:09,640
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen reported that seventy two percent of all privately

624
00:45:09,640 --> 00:45:13,200
Speaker 1: owned agricultural land in South Africa was owned by white people,

625
00:45:14,160 --> 00:45:16,960
Speaker 1: despite the fact that white people make up about seven

626
00:45:17,000 --> 00:45:22,080
Speaker 1: percent of the South African population. I couldn't actually find

627
00:45:22,120 --> 00:45:25,480
Speaker 1: any specific information about how much of that land had

628
00:45:25,600 --> 00:45:29,399
Speaker 1: changed hands over the years, but in a twenty twenty

629
00:45:29,520 --> 00:45:33,800
Speaker 1: article in the African Journal on Conflict Resolution, doctor Adoia

630
00:45:33,840 --> 00:45:38,360
Speaker 1: Achinola wrote, farm owners or farmers are predominantly made up

631
00:45:38,400 --> 00:45:41,719
Speaker 1: of the white group, who in most cases inherited the

632
00:45:41,760 --> 00:45:45,480
Speaker 1: farms from their families. A prevailing narrative is that in

633
00:45:45,520 --> 00:45:48,560
Speaker 1: most cases these lands and farms had been forcifully taken

634
00:45:48,600 --> 00:45:52,759
Speaker 1: from black South Africans during colonialism and apartheid. It may

635
00:45:52,800 --> 00:45:56,680
Speaker 1: be said, therefore, that few white farmers had genuinely bought

636
00:45:56,719 --> 00:46:03,320
Speaker 1: the lands, particularly in opposed apartheids South Africa. This isn't

637
00:46:03,320 --> 00:46:07,919
Speaker 1: a wrong of the distant past. In nineteen ninety four,

638
00:46:08,000 --> 00:46:11,640
Speaker 1: when apartheid was finally ended, the South African National Congress

639
00:46:11,680 --> 00:46:14,840
Speaker 1: announced an ambitious plan to return at least thirty percent

640
00:46:14,920 --> 00:46:19,560
Speaker 1: of the stolen land by twenty fourteen. By twenty eighteen,

641
00:46:19,600 --> 00:46:23,200
Speaker 1: though only an estimated ten percent of land had been

642
00:46:23,239 --> 00:46:27,760
Speaker 1: returned to indigenous people. The policies of the current government

643
00:46:28,120 --> 00:46:33,080
Speaker 1: won't lead to terrifying scenes of black soldiers forcing pretty

644
00:46:33,080 --> 00:46:37,000
Speaker 1: white mothers off their land at gunpoint, although that certainly

645
00:46:37,080 --> 00:46:41,600
Speaker 1: the image conjured in the white supremacist imagination. It's a

646
00:46:41,640 --> 00:46:48,120
Speaker 1: slow boring process involving petitions and judicial review. It's not

647
00:46:48,160 --> 00:46:51,560
Speaker 1: a revolution, but it is an important step in the

648
00:46:51,600 --> 00:46:57,960
Speaker 1: ongoing process of undoing apartheid. The President of the United States,

649
00:46:58,000 --> 00:47:02,799
Speaker 1: it seems, does not feel that way. His executive order

650
00:47:02,840 --> 00:47:06,560
Speaker 1: not only ends all foreign aid to South Africa, but

651
00:47:06,600 --> 00:47:10,600
Speaker 1: it allows quote africaners in South Africa who are victims

652
00:47:10,600 --> 00:47:14,759
Speaker 1: of unjust racial discrimination to be admitted and resettled in

653
00:47:14,800 --> 00:47:18,719
Speaker 1: the United States as refugees. So not only is he

654
00:47:18,760 --> 00:47:22,480
Speaker 1: saying that white South Africans are politically persecuted to such

655
00:47:22,520 --> 00:47:27,000
Speaker 1: an extent that they are refugees deserving special treatment, they

656
00:47:27,040 --> 00:47:31,600
Speaker 1: are essentially the only refugees in the world worthy of

657
00:47:31,600 --> 00:47:35,120
Speaker 1: assistance by the US government. Because he ordered an end

658
00:47:35,239 --> 00:47:38,160
Speaker 1: to refugee resettlement programs on his first day in office

659
00:47:38,239 --> 00:47:42,960
Speaker 1: last month. It probably doesn't help that the president is

660
00:47:42,960 --> 00:47:46,319
Speaker 1: heavily influenced by Elon Musk, a man with a long

661
00:47:46,440 --> 00:47:49,760
Speaker 1: history of spreading propaganda about white genocide in South Africa.

662
00:47:51,440 --> 00:47:53,680
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty three, he replied to a tweet from

663
00:47:53,680 --> 00:47:58,800
Speaker 1: an account called end Wokeness, writing, they are actually killing

664
00:47:58,840 --> 00:48:04,560
Speaker 1: white farmers every day. It's not just a threat. Musk

665
00:48:04,640 --> 00:48:08,000
Speaker 1: was born in South Africa under apartheid, and he emigrated

666
00:48:08,000 --> 00:48:11,440
Speaker 1: to Canada in nineteen eighty nine to avoid compulsory military service.

667
00:48:12,880 --> 00:48:17,719
Speaker 1: The South Africa he knew was one under apartheid, and

668
00:48:17,800 --> 00:48:21,840
Speaker 1: in addition to his frenetic posting about white genocide conspiracy theories,

669
00:48:22,480 --> 00:48:25,320
Speaker 1: he's also accused the South African government of having quote

670
00:48:25,680 --> 00:48:30,799
Speaker 1: openly racist laws. After he refused to participate in regulatory

671
00:48:30,840 --> 00:48:35,440
Speaker 1: hearings with the Independent Communications Authority in South Africa, his

672
00:48:35,560 --> 00:48:38,600
Speaker 1: plan to launch Starlink service in South Africa hit a roadblock.

673
00:48:39,640 --> 00:48:43,480
Speaker 1: The country requires licensees operating a national network or selling

674
00:48:43,480 --> 00:48:48,080
Speaker 1: internet services nationwide to be at least thirty percent black owned,

675
00:48:49,040 --> 00:48:54,520
Speaker 1: a requirement Musk claims is simply not possible. Trump has

676
00:48:54,600 --> 00:48:58,440
Speaker 1: yet to nominate a pick for South African Ambassador, but

677
00:48:58,480 --> 00:49:01,680
Speaker 1: the current front runner is rumored to be Breitbart Editor

678
00:49:01,719 --> 00:49:06,879
Speaker 1: in chief Joel Pollock. I considered cutting a clip from

679
00:49:06,880 --> 00:49:09,800
Speaker 1: an interview Pollock gave a South African TV news program

680
00:49:09,840 --> 00:49:12,400
Speaker 1: the other day, but the man has all the charisma

681
00:49:12,440 --> 00:49:17,200
Speaker 1: of a wet rag. But the idea of the Breitbart

682
00:49:17,280 --> 00:49:21,719
Speaker 1: editor becoming the South African Ambassador did remind me of

683
00:49:21,760 --> 00:49:26,759
Speaker 1: another video back in twenty eighteen amidst all that ongoing

684
00:49:26,800 --> 00:49:30,720
Speaker 1: public interest in Australian tabloid coverage of anti white violence

685
00:49:30,760 --> 00:49:34,800
Speaker 1: in South Africa, Breitbart News held a town hall event

686
00:49:34,840 --> 00:49:39,960
Speaker 1: in New Orleans. The topic of the event was something else,

687
00:49:40,120 --> 00:49:43,640
Speaker 1: big tech and free speech. But during the Q and

688
00:49:43,680 --> 00:49:47,880
Speaker 1: A session, and Colter came out strong in support of

689
00:49:47,880 --> 00:49:49,640
Speaker 1: white genocide conspiracy theory.

690
00:49:52,120 --> 00:49:54,680
Speaker 6: But I mean, we are seeing a genocide. They are,

691
00:49:54,719 --> 00:49:57,600
Speaker 6: and if we're going to take any refugees, it seems

692
00:49:57,600 --> 00:50:00,560
Speaker 6: to me it ought to be particularly these white farmers

693
00:50:00,600 --> 00:50:06,600
Speaker 6: who are being chosen and I'm killed in really horrible ways,

694
00:50:06,880 --> 00:50:09,520
Speaker 6: and you can find it by doing a Google search,

695
00:50:09,719 --> 00:50:12,200
Speaker 6: but you can find these web pages. It's not They're

696
00:50:12,239 --> 00:50:15,440
Speaker 6: not just going in and shooting them pointlink. They're really disgusting.

697
00:50:15,480 --> 00:50:19,799
Speaker 6: They're boiling people to death, just really sick, sick tortures.

698
00:50:22,400 --> 00:50:24,920
Speaker 1: Her answer was in response to a question from an

699
00:50:25,080 --> 00:50:30,000
Speaker 1: unnamed audience member, just a random guy at a town hall,

700
00:50:31,560 --> 00:50:33,080
Speaker 1: but I recognize that voice.

701
00:50:36,160 --> 00:50:39,600
Speaker 4: This question is for miss culture. Why do you think

702
00:50:39,600 --> 00:50:42,200
Speaker 4: the mainstream media has been silent on the genocide of

703
00:50:42,200 --> 00:50:45,320
Speaker 4: white farmers in South Africa? And why does social media

704
00:50:45,360 --> 00:50:47,160
Speaker 4: censor post about the issue, And how can we draw

705
00:50:47,200 --> 00:50:48,040
Speaker 4: attention to these.

706
00:50:48,000 --> 00:50:57,880
Speaker 6: World I am so glad you asked that question.

707
00:51:02,280 --> 00:51:06,480
Speaker 1: That's Patrick Casey. Back in twenty eighteen, he was the

708
00:51:06,560 --> 00:51:10,680
Speaker 1: leader of the white supremacist group Identity Europa. The person

709
00:51:10,760 --> 00:51:14,560
Speaker 1: injecting white genocide talking points into this Brightbart event in

710
00:51:14,600 --> 00:51:18,440
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen was the head of a white supremacist organization,

711
00:51:19,960 --> 00:51:24,759
Speaker 1: and not just any white supremacist organization. Identity Europa was

712
00:51:24,800 --> 00:51:27,640
Speaker 1: a primary organizer of the Unite the Right rally in

713
00:51:27,719 --> 00:51:33,239
Speaker 1: Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. It was Identity Europa members who

714
00:51:33,320 --> 00:51:39,000
Speaker 1: started the chance of you will Not Replace Us as

715
00:51:39,040 --> 00:51:41,680
Speaker 1: they marched through the University of Virginia with their torches.

716
00:51:43,560 --> 00:51:47,160
Speaker 1: But remarkably, Anne Colter took the ball and ran with it,

717
00:51:47,920 --> 00:51:50,880
Speaker 1: and she demonstrated that she was deeply immersed in this

718
00:51:51,040 --> 00:51:54,879
Speaker 1: same racist worldview. She had these talking points ready to go,

719
00:51:57,280 --> 00:52:02,000
Speaker 1: and he might be asking at this point, what does

720
00:52:02,120 --> 00:52:04,600
Speaker 1: any of this have to do with a few dozen

721
00:52:04,680 --> 00:52:08,440
Speaker 1: skinheads getting pelted with rocks and Sacramento in twenty twelve.

722
00:52:10,320 --> 00:52:13,759
Speaker 1: Those rallies against white genocide back in twenty twelve were

723
00:52:14,520 --> 00:52:20,000
Speaker 1: poorly attended and barely reported on the idea behind this

724
00:52:20,160 --> 00:52:24,120
Speaker 1: organizing strategy. Was pretty similar to the twenty seventeen March

725
00:52:24,160 --> 00:52:27,560
Speaker 1: against Sharia rallies. I talked about a few episodes ago,

726
00:52:27,640 --> 00:52:31,680
Speaker 1: a nationwide series of public protests designed to give the

727
00:52:31,719 --> 00:52:36,960
Speaker 1: appearance of widespread public support for a pretty unpopular racist idea.

728
00:52:38,440 --> 00:52:41,440
Speaker 1: But when Act for America pulled that stunt in twenty seventeen,

729
00:52:42,360 --> 00:52:47,200
Speaker 1: they were able to attract some mainstream Republican attendees, and

730
00:52:47,280 --> 00:52:51,880
Speaker 1: more importantly, they had access to the legitimizing force of

731
00:52:51,920 --> 00:52:56,799
Speaker 1: the right wing media ecosystem. Act for America issued their

732
00:52:56,840 --> 00:53:01,080
Speaker 1: press releases directly to Breitbart. The CEO was able to

733
00:53:01,120 --> 00:53:05,200
Speaker 1: publish her own write ups on the events on their site.

734
00:53:05,480 --> 00:53:07,920
Speaker 1: They didn't have to wait for the idea to make

735
00:53:07,960 --> 00:53:11,400
Speaker 1: its way through the human centipede of right wing media,

736
00:53:11,840 --> 00:53:16,719
Speaker 1: slowly laundering fascist ideas through intermediaries and conning journalists into

737
00:53:16,719 --> 00:53:20,960
Speaker 1: picking it up. The group that put on those rallies

738
00:53:20,960 --> 00:53:24,600
Speaker 1: against white genocide in twenty twelve didn't have that kind

739
00:53:24,640 --> 00:53:29,880
Speaker 1: of access. The South Africa Project was very obviously a

740
00:53:29,960 --> 00:53:34,480
Speaker 1: front for the Aryan Nations Chapter in Louisiana. They were

741
00:53:34,520 --> 00:53:38,200
Speaker 1: having trouble forcing their way into the conversation and attracting

742
00:53:38,239 --> 00:53:43,000
Speaker 1: any normal people to their events, But the very same idea,

743
00:53:43,960 --> 00:53:47,719
Speaker 1: presented in almost exactly the same way by a man

744
00:53:47,760 --> 00:53:51,240
Speaker 1: in a suit, made its way directly into the White

745
00:53:51,239 --> 00:53:56,480
Speaker 1: House just a few years later. The message hadn't changed,

746
00:53:57,440 --> 00:54:01,640
Speaker 1: the motivation behind it remains the same. The myth of

747
00:54:01,680 --> 00:54:06,440
Speaker 1: the South African farm murder exists to stoke white anxiety.

748
00:54:07,920 --> 00:54:12,719
Speaker 1: For africanternationalists, it's a desire to return to apartheid. For

749
00:54:12,800 --> 00:54:15,640
Speaker 1: the American audience they sell it to, it's a longing

750
00:54:15,680 --> 00:54:19,640
Speaker 1: to roll back civil rights and integration. It may be

751
00:54:19,760 --> 00:54:23,239
Speaker 1: dressed up as foreign policy, but it's no different from

752
00:54:23,280 --> 00:54:27,480
Speaker 1: the message on those flyers printed out by Aryan Nations members.

753
00:54:28,320 --> 00:54:31,280
Speaker 1: It just took the right messenger to get on Tucker

754
00:54:31,360 --> 00:54:36,640
Speaker 1: Carlson for the President to hear it. I did set

755
00:54:36,680 --> 00:54:39,839
Speaker 1: out to just write a story about those rallies and

756
00:54:39,880 --> 00:54:43,920
Speaker 1: the people involved in them, but current events keep getting

757
00:54:43,960 --> 00:54:47,960
Speaker 1: in my way. I never really know where a story

758
00:54:48,000 --> 00:54:50,560
Speaker 1: is going to take me until I have forty or

759
00:54:50,640 --> 00:54:53,720
Speaker 1: fifty browser tabs open and a dozen pages of notes

760
00:54:53,719 --> 00:54:57,879
Speaker 1: that don't really make any sense. But this one took

761
00:54:57,880 --> 00:55:03,360
Speaker 1: a hard right turn. Early on, I thought for sure

762
00:55:03,480 --> 00:55:05,880
Speaker 1: that the star of the story of these white genocide

763
00:55:05,920 --> 00:55:09,719
Speaker 1: rallies would be Billy Roper. It seemed like such an

764
00:55:09,719 --> 00:55:13,200
Speaker 1: interesting coincidence that in both of these tales of fate

765
00:55:13,320 --> 00:55:18,160
Speaker 1: grassroots rallies for racist causes, there's Billy stepping up to

766
00:55:18,200 --> 00:55:21,839
Speaker 1: the plate to hold an event in Arkansas. But when

767
00:55:21,880 --> 00:55:25,760
Speaker 1: I started probing a little deeper into the woman behind

768
00:55:25,840 --> 00:55:32,360
Speaker 1: the South Africa Project, I made an alarming discovery. Before

769
00:55:32,480 --> 00:55:36,160
Speaker 1: Monica Stone moved to a small town in Louisiana to

770
00:55:36,160 --> 00:55:41,319
Speaker 1: marry an American clansman, she lived in South Africa, and

771
00:55:41,360 --> 00:55:44,640
Speaker 1: she had a different name. And it's a name that

772
00:55:44,719 --> 00:55:49,960
Speaker 1: I found in some very strange places, like the memoir

773
00:55:50,000 --> 00:55:52,640
Speaker 1: of a British Man seeking redemption for his years in

774
00:55:52,680 --> 00:55:56,640
Speaker 1: a violent fascist movement, or deep within the text of

775
00:55:56,680 --> 00:56:02,160
Speaker 1: the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. But you'll

776
00:56:02,200 --> 00:56:05,200
Speaker 1: have to wait until next week to hear an almost

777
00:56:05,320 --> 00:56:12,360
Speaker 1: unbelievable tale of international gun smuggling, bombings and shootouts that

778
00:56:12,480 --> 00:56:34,560
Speaker 1: failed to prevent the end of apartheid. Come with me

779
00:56:34,800 --> 00:56:39,960
Speaker 1: for a moment. Back to February of twenty seventeen. It

780
00:56:40,040 --> 00:56:42,520
Speaker 1: was just weeks after Donald Trump had been sworn in

781
00:56:42,560 --> 00:56:46,040
Speaker 1: as president for his first term. There was a lot

782
00:56:46,040 --> 00:56:51,360
Speaker 1: of uncertainty, a lot of fear. Millions of Americans marched

783
00:56:51,360 --> 00:56:54,120
Speaker 1: in Washington, d C. To protest his presidency in its

784
00:56:54,160 --> 00:56:58,640
Speaker 1: first days. There was still some hope in those early

785
00:56:58,760 --> 00:57:03,040
Speaker 1: days that maybe he hadn't meant most of what he'd said,

786
00:57:03,480 --> 00:57:07,720
Speaker 1: maybe it was campaign bluster, hot air and empty words.

787
00:57:09,320 --> 00:57:12,880
Speaker 1: Within a week, though, he'd signed an executive order banning

788
00:57:12,920 --> 00:57:16,960
Speaker 1: travel to the United States from predominantly Muslim countries, sparking

789
00:57:16,960 --> 00:57:19,720
Speaker 1: a wave of protests at airports and signaling that he

790
00:57:19,800 --> 00:57:24,000
Speaker 1: intended to follow through on his xenophobic, anti immigrant campaign promises.

791
00:57:25,600 --> 00:57:29,280
Speaker 1: A month into his presidency, tens of thousands of Americans

792
00:57:29,280 --> 00:57:32,280
Speaker 1: in at least fifty cities around the country rallied for

793
00:57:32,320 --> 00:57:36,800
Speaker 1: a protest on President's Day, calling it not my President's Day.

794
00:57:38,520 --> 00:57:42,800
Speaker 1: But that same week, half a world away, a very

795
00:57:42,840 --> 00:57:48,360
Speaker 1: different march was taking place in Zagreb's city center. A

796
00:57:48,400 --> 00:57:52,160
Speaker 1: few dozen men in black uniforms stood in formation, led

797
00:57:52,160 --> 00:57:56,320
Speaker 1: by Drasen Khlemenek, leader of the Croatian Fascist Party HSP.

798
00:57:58,080 --> 00:58:01,920
Speaker 1: They chanted the slogans of the Eustache, the Croatian fascist

799
00:58:01,960 --> 00:58:06,360
Speaker 1: movement of the nineteen thirties and forties, alongside the Holocaust

800
00:58:06,360 --> 00:58:09,720
Speaker 1: carried out by Nazi Germany. The Eustasia had undertaken a

801
00:58:09,760 --> 00:58:13,720
Speaker 1: genocide of their own, operating their own concentration camps and

802
00:58:13,760 --> 00:58:19,000
Speaker 1: slaughtering whole villages of Jews, Roma and Serbs. As those

803
00:58:19,000 --> 00:58:21,680
Speaker 1: marchers assembled in the city square and the brass band

804
00:58:21,720 --> 00:58:25,360
Speaker 1: finished playing, the men took an oath of allegiance to

805
00:58:25,400 --> 00:58:51,439
Speaker 1: their Croatian homeland and to Donald Trump. Most of those

806
00:58:51,480 --> 00:58:57,400
Speaker 1: marchers had empty hands, some held brass instruments, but at

807
00:58:57,400 --> 00:59:00,760
Speaker 1: the front of the column several marchers had called flags,

808
00:59:02,080 --> 00:59:06,280
Speaker 1: the Croatian flag, of course, and an American flag to

809
00:59:06,320 --> 00:59:10,160
Speaker 1: show their support for Donald Trump. But one man at

810
00:59:10,200 --> 00:59:12,680
Speaker 1: the very front of the line was carrying the flag

811
00:59:12,720 --> 00:59:19,360
Speaker 1: of the German Ultranationalist Party NPD. The march's organizer, Drazen Klemenek,

812
00:59:20,200 --> 00:59:24,680
Speaker 1: was arrested that day for shouting zadom spremni, which is

813
00:59:25,000 --> 00:59:30,400
Speaker 1: the Croatian equivalent of yelling Siegheil in Germany, but when

814
00:59:30,400 --> 00:59:32,120
Speaker 1: he did get a chance to speak to the press,

815
00:59:32,800 --> 00:59:36,920
Speaker 1: he explained the presence of the German NPD flag. The

816
00:59:36,960 --> 00:59:41,040
Speaker 1: man who'd been carrying it was Alexander Nydeline, a representative

817
00:59:41,080 --> 00:59:44,080
Speaker 1: from NPD, and he was there to show his party's

818
00:59:44,080 --> 00:59:48,640
Speaker 1: support for HSP, but that march in February of twenty

819
00:59:48,680 --> 00:59:54,920
Speaker 1: seventeen wasn't Alexander Nydline's first visit to the Balkans. In

820
00:59:55,000 --> 00:59:59,400
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety three, Nydeline enlisted in the Convicts Battalion, a

821
00:59:59,440 --> 01:00:02,840
Speaker 1: paramilitary a unit of the Croatian Defense Council made up

822
01:00:02,880 --> 01:00:07,280
Speaker 1: of prisoners and foreign mercenaries. Its leader was later convicted

823
01:00:07,280 --> 01:00:10,640
Speaker 1: of crimes against humanity for his actions during the Bosnian War.

824
01:00:12,160 --> 01:00:15,640
Speaker 1: Nydeline didn't stay with the unit for very long. In

825
01:00:15,680 --> 01:00:19,000
Speaker 1: the years since, he's taken issue with being called a mercenary,

826
01:00:19,640 --> 01:00:23,960
Speaker 1: arguing that he never actually got paid. Because just before

827
01:00:24,000 --> 01:00:27,560
Speaker 1: Christmas of nineteen ninety three, Nydeline and two other German

828
01:00:27,600 --> 01:00:31,720
Speaker 1: mercenaries deserted from the Convicts Battalion. They took as many

829
01:00:31,720 --> 01:00:34,840
Speaker 1: guns as they could carry and disappeared into the night.

830
01:00:36,560 --> 01:00:40,280
Speaker 1: A few weeks later, those German mercenaries and those stolen

831
01:00:40,320 --> 01:00:45,640
Speaker 1: guns turned up seven thousand miles away in South Africa.

832
01:00:48,880 --> 01:01:10,240
Speaker 1: I'm Molly Conger and this is Weird Little Guides. This

833
01:01:10,320 --> 01:01:14,200
Speaker 1: is a story about Monica Stone. I think she may

834
01:01:14,280 --> 01:01:17,080
Speaker 1: be our first weird little guy who happens to be

835
01:01:17,120 --> 01:01:21,800
Speaker 1: a woman. There was Dallas Humber, I guess the voice

836
01:01:21,800 --> 01:01:26,240
Speaker 1: of Teragram, but she wasn't the central character in that story,

837
01:01:26,560 --> 01:01:32,000
Speaker 1: just the disembodied voice urging young men to kill. Weird

838
01:01:32,000 --> 01:01:35,080
Speaker 1: little guy is a gender neutral term in my mind.

839
01:01:36,000 --> 01:01:38,520
Speaker 1: I haven't been avoiding telling the stories of women in

840
01:01:38,560 --> 01:01:41,480
Speaker 1: the white power movement. It's just that, for the most part,

841
01:01:41,960 --> 01:01:45,520
Speaker 1: the very nature of their beliefs kind of prevents women

842
01:01:45,600 --> 01:01:50,400
Speaker 1: from taking center stage, even in their own lives. But

843
01:01:50,560 --> 01:01:53,720
Speaker 1: this this is a story of a woman who has

844
01:01:53,800 --> 01:01:58,280
Speaker 1: dedicated her life to the cause, and in her case

845
01:01:58,440 --> 01:02:02,880
Speaker 1: the cause is apartheid. Like all my stories, this is

846
01:02:03,000 --> 01:02:07,680
Speaker 1: really only kind of about one weird little guy, and

847
01:02:07,760 --> 01:02:10,240
Speaker 1: this might be the widest net I've ever cast trying

848
01:02:10,240 --> 01:02:15,960
Speaker 1: to understand one person's life. The story covers decades and

849
01:02:16,040 --> 01:02:21,880
Speaker 1: spans continents. There are bombings and shootouts and murders. There's

850
01:02:21,920 --> 01:02:26,720
Speaker 1: international guns smuggling, mercenaries and paramilitaries, and war crimes, successful

851
01:02:26,720 --> 01:02:31,720
Speaker 1: assassinations and foiled terrorist plots, their trials and prison breaks,

852
01:02:31,760 --> 01:02:36,640
Speaker 1: and crimes left unpunished, some with extradition, petitions left pending

853
01:02:36,960 --> 01:02:41,760
Speaker 1: for decades with no hope of justice. There are some

854
01:02:42,160 --> 01:02:46,880
Speaker 1: familiar landmarks, names of people, and organizations I recognize, like

855
01:02:47,240 --> 01:02:50,240
Speaker 1: David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan and the Turner Diaries.

856
01:02:51,440 --> 01:02:53,120
Speaker 1: But there are people and groups in this story that

857
01:02:53,160 --> 01:02:56,400
Speaker 1: were new to me, characters we haven't met yet and

858
01:02:56,600 --> 01:03:01,080
Speaker 1: may see again in future episodes exploring these fascist friendships

859
01:03:01,120 --> 01:03:06,480
Speaker 1: across borders. But at its core, this is a story

860
01:03:06,800 --> 01:03:10,280
Speaker 1: about Monica Stone. She isn't in all the parts of

861
01:03:10,320 --> 01:03:13,360
Speaker 1: the story playing out all around her, but the context

862
01:03:13,360 --> 01:03:16,560
Speaker 1: matters more than ever, because this week we're going to

863
01:03:16,560 --> 01:03:24,400
Speaker 1: dig into a weighty idea, the fascist International. I haven't

864
01:03:24,400 --> 01:03:29,040
Speaker 1: forgotten where we started. Maybe you have. That's understandable. I

865
01:03:29,120 --> 01:03:31,200
Speaker 1: left you hanging there for a week while I recovered

866
01:03:31,200 --> 01:03:34,040
Speaker 1: from a stomach virus. But two weeks ago we were

867
01:03:34,040 --> 01:03:38,680
Speaker 1: talking about white genocide. The story began in Sacramento in

868
01:03:38,720 --> 01:03:42,680
Speaker 1: twenty twelve, a group of neo Nazi skinheads was rallying

869
01:03:42,680 --> 01:03:45,280
Speaker 1: at the state capitol in California to raise awareness of

870
01:03:45,320 --> 01:03:50,040
Speaker 1: the plight of the white South African farmer. In that episode,

871
01:03:50,080 --> 01:03:53,800
Speaker 1: I picked apart this myth, the idea that white farmers

872
01:03:53,840 --> 01:03:57,200
Speaker 1: are being slaughtered every day in a post apartheid South Africa,

873
01:03:57,880 --> 01:04:00,760
Speaker 1: that white South Africans are in danger of being completely

874
01:04:00,800 --> 01:04:05,800
Speaker 1: wiped out by a white genocide. That idea has been

875
01:04:06,080 --> 01:04:09,760
Speaker 1: quite popular among white supremacists around the world for some time.

876
01:04:10,920 --> 01:04:14,080
Speaker 1: Norwegian mass murderer Anders Bravik devoted a few pages of

877
01:04:14,120 --> 01:04:18,080
Speaker 1: his fifteen hundred page manifesto to it. When Dylan Rufe

878
01:04:18,160 --> 01:04:20,640
Speaker 1: murdered nine people at a black church in Charleston, South

879
01:04:20,640 --> 01:04:25,520
Speaker 1: Carolina in twenty fifteen, his Facebook profile photo showed him

880
01:04:25,920 --> 01:04:29,360
Speaker 1: glowering at the camera in a black jacket with two

881
01:04:29,400 --> 01:04:34,080
Speaker 1: patches on the breast, the flag of Rhodesia and the

882
01:04:34,120 --> 01:04:39,240
Speaker 1: flag of apartheid South Africa. I come across the idea

883
01:04:39,360 --> 01:04:43,080
Speaker 1: pretty often in my work. So many of my weird

884
01:04:43,080 --> 01:04:45,840
Speaker 1: little guys are obsessed with the idea of a fully

885
01:04:45,880 --> 01:04:49,800
Speaker 1: segregated society and the state violence against black people that

886
01:04:49,840 --> 01:04:55,360
Speaker 1: comes with it. But that's where the idea lived. It

887
01:04:55,400 --> 01:04:58,680
Speaker 1: lived on stormfront and on four Chan, and in manifestos

888
01:04:58,720 --> 01:05:04,200
Speaker 1: and on Nazi podcasts. Those rallies in twenty twelve were

889
01:05:04,200 --> 01:05:09,000
Speaker 1: pretty unique. The public display of the apartheid era South

890
01:05:09,000 --> 01:05:14,480
Speaker 1: African flag at an American political rally was unusual. It

891
01:05:14,520 --> 01:05:17,360
Speaker 1: was unusual enough that it was mentioned in news stories

892
01:05:17,400 --> 01:05:20,320
Speaker 1: three years later, when the flag appeared again on Dylan

893
01:05:20,400 --> 01:05:26,480
Speaker 1: Rufe's jacket, But like so many once fringe ideas, it's

894
01:05:26,520 --> 01:05:28,280
Speaker 1: part of the mainstream political discourse.

895
01:05:28,320 --> 01:05:28,520
Speaker 2: Now.

896
01:05:29,680 --> 01:05:31,880
Speaker 1: I won't retread all of that. We talked about it

897
01:05:31,880 --> 01:05:35,280
Speaker 1: in the last episode, but now the President of the

898
01:05:35,360 --> 01:05:39,040
Speaker 1: United States is repeating the talking points from the flyers

899
01:05:39,040 --> 01:05:43,600
Speaker 1: those skinheads printed out in twenty twelve. And I originally

900
01:05:43,680 --> 01:05:46,520
Speaker 1: set out to just talk about those rallies as a

901
01:05:46,560 --> 01:05:51,400
Speaker 1: sort of standalone story, this strange incident that seems to

902
01:05:51,440 --> 01:05:55,320
Speaker 1: have happened in total isolation. As far as I've been

903
01:05:55,360 --> 01:05:57,480
Speaker 1: able to find, the group behind it had never put

904
01:05:57,480 --> 01:05:59,880
Speaker 1: on a public event before, and aside from a poorly

905
01:06:00,120 --> 01:06:03,480
Speaker 1: tended follow up in DC later that same year, they

906
01:06:03,520 --> 01:06:07,440
Speaker 1: never did again. The website has been offline for years,

907
01:06:07,480 --> 01:06:11,960
Speaker 1: and there's hardly any mention of the group at all anywhere.

908
01:06:14,280 --> 01:06:17,720
Speaker 1: A lot of white supremacist groups are short lived, so

909
01:06:17,800 --> 01:06:22,040
Speaker 1: that's not really unusual, and this group, the South Africa Project,

910
01:06:22,200 --> 01:06:25,920
Speaker 1: was pretty obviously just two people running a side project

911
01:06:25,960 --> 01:06:29,600
Speaker 1: out of an Aryan nation's po box. But I can't

912
01:06:29,680 --> 01:06:34,560
Speaker 1: let anything go, so I started to dig, and it

913
01:06:34,600 --> 01:06:38,280
Speaker 1: became clear very quickly that there was a hell of

914
01:06:38,320 --> 01:06:43,640
Speaker 1: a lot more going on here than I thought. Back

915
01:06:43,680 --> 01:06:46,880
Speaker 1: in twenty twelve, when those rallies took place, both the

916
01:06:46,960 --> 01:06:50,960
Speaker 1: SPLC and the ADL had stories on their website explaining

917
01:06:51,000 --> 01:06:54,320
Speaker 1: that those events had been organized by American neo Nazis.

918
01:06:55,760 --> 01:06:59,480
Speaker 1: Both groups zeroed in on Morris Goulette, a longtime Arian

919
01:06:59,560 --> 01:07:02,160
Speaker 1: Nations made member and the man who'd given comments to

920
01:07:02,200 --> 01:07:07,040
Speaker 1: the press as the organization's spokesman. Both outlets identified several

921
01:07:07,040 --> 01:07:10,880
Speaker 1: local organizers of those assorted rallies. The Golden State Skinheads

922
01:07:10,880 --> 01:07:14,840
Speaker 1: hosted in Sacramento. Billy Roper headlined the rally in Arkansas.

923
01:07:14,920 --> 01:07:17,720
Speaker 1: Rallies in Tennessee and Pennsylvania were hosted by members of

924
01:07:17,760 --> 01:07:24,560
Speaker 1: Folksfront and so on. But in one single line in

925
01:07:24,600 --> 01:07:27,720
Speaker 1: a blog post that isn't even on the ADL's website anymore,

926
01:07:28,800 --> 01:07:34,439
Speaker 1: the events are attributed to a woman named Monica Stone.

927
01:07:35,040 --> 01:07:38,360
Speaker 1: In this passing mention crediting Stone with the idea for

928
01:07:38,400 --> 01:07:41,680
Speaker 1: the rallies. The post notes that she was a South

929
01:07:41,680 --> 01:07:46,280
Speaker 1: African immigrant and a longtime member of the Christian Defense League.

930
01:07:48,200 --> 01:07:51,000
Speaker 1: The CDL was a Christian identity group that grew out

931
01:07:51,040 --> 01:07:54,080
Speaker 1: of the same milieu as the Aryan Nations in the sixties,

932
01:07:54,120 --> 01:07:57,160
Speaker 1: but it never really achieved the same level of influence.

933
01:07:58,840 --> 01:08:03,560
Speaker 1: But that's all there is. Monica and Louisiana, Monica from

934
01:08:03,600 --> 01:08:07,880
Speaker 1: South Africa, Monica speaking at the Arian Nations World Congress

935
01:08:07,880 --> 01:08:12,080
Speaker 1: about the need for international solidarity between American neo Nazis

936
01:08:12,880 --> 01:08:18,559
Speaker 1: and africanter nationalists. But Google gives you exactly nothing about

937
01:08:18,600 --> 01:08:22,240
Speaker 1: this woman before or after this brief moment in time

938
01:08:22,960 --> 01:08:28,160
Speaker 1: in twenty twelve. And so at this point I'm locked in.

939
01:08:29,120 --> 01:08:32,960
Speaker 1: I have to know more about this woman. How did

940
01:08:33,000 --> 01:08:36,160
Speaker 1: she end up in Mandeville, Louisiana, a town of just

941
01:08:36,280 --> 01:08:39,000
Speaker 1: ten thousand people that I've only heard of because it's

942
01:08:39,000 --> 01:08:43,439
Speaker 1: where David Duke lives. So I started with the information

943
01:08:43,479 --> 01:08:47,400
Speaker 1: that I have a name, hopefully it's her real name,

944
01:08:48,240 --> 01:08:53,759
Speaker 1: a city, and some potential known associates. If her longtime

945
01:08:53,800 --> 01:08:57,040
Speaker 1: membership in the Christian Defense League is the only notable

946
01:08:57,080 --> 01:09:00,439
Speaker 1: fact about her, maybe that means she was a very

947
01:09:00,479 --> 01:09:05,439
Speaker 1: important member of the group. And lucky for me, it

948
01:09:05,520 --> 01:09:10,840
Speaker 1: turns out she was. The organization has or had, I guess,

949
01:09:10,880 --> 01:09:13,840
Speaker 1: since it's defunct as far as I can tell, been

950
01:09:13,880 --> 01:09:16,360
Speaker 1: run by a man named Robert K. Warner since the

951
01:09:16,400 --> 01:09:20,200
Speaker 1: seventies and When he took over, he moved its headquarters

952
01:09:20,240 --> 01:09:24,080
Speaker 1: from California to Louisiana to be closer to his friend

953
01:09:24,160 --> 01:09:27,760
Speaker 1: David Duke, and in addition to the Christian Defense League,

954
01:09:28,000 --> 01:09:31,479
Speaker 1: Warner also ran a Christian identity church called the New

955
01:09:31,560 --> 01:09:36,800
Speaker 1: Christian Crusade Church. Corporate filings for the church show Robert K.

956
01:09:36,920 --> 01:09:40,520
Speaker 1: Warner as an officer of the organization, which I expected,

957
01:09:41,720 --> 01:09:45,679
Speaker 1: but in twenty eleven he filed an amendment adding someone

958
01:09:45,760 --> 01:09:51,640
Speaker 1: named Monica Huggett as the church's chief financial officer, and

959
01:09:51,720 --> 01:09:55,040
Speaker 1: he changed the address on file to a residential address

960
01:09:55,120 --> 01:10:00,599
Speaker 1: in Mandeville, Louisiana. Property records for Saint Tammany Parish sure

961
01:10:00,640 --> 01:10:03,439
Speaker 1: that a mortgage was taken out at that address by

962
01:10:03,520 --> 01:10:08,000
Speaker 1: James Stone in nineteen ninety two, but after he died,

963
01:10:08,120 --> 01:10:11,240
Speaker 1: the property was sold by his widow, and on the

964
01:10:11,280 --> 01:10:16,000
Speaker 1: documents for the sale, she's listed as Monica Huggot Stone.

965
01:10:17,479 --> 01:10:19,880
Speaker 1: And that's the kind of concrete paper trail I love

966
01:10:19,960 --> 01:10:23,160
Speaker 1: to see. There's no doubt at all here that the

967
01:10:23,240 --> 01:10:27,080
Speaker 1: Monica Stone behind those twenty twelve rallies is the Monica

968
01:10:27,160 --> 01:10:31,679
Speaker 1: Huggot who married James Stone in two thousand and lived

969
01:10:31,680 --> 01:10:37,800
Speaker 1: in Mandeville, Louisiana, two miles away from David Duke. So

970
01:10:37,880 --> 01:10:45,240
Speaker 1: now I have a new name, Monica hugget And this

971
01:10:45,320 --> 01:10:49,920
Speaker 1: is where I ran into trouble. Almost immediately. Everything is

972
01:10:49,960 --> 01:10:54,759
Speaker 1: in Afrikaans. Most of the English language material about someone

973
01:10:54,840 --> 01:10:59,040
Speaker 1: named Monica Huggot is about the renowned British conductor and

974
01:10:59,200 --> 01:11:03,760
Speaker 1: baroque violin. But that is an entirely different person who

975
01:11:03,920 --> 01:11:07,639
Speaker 1: I am almost one hundred percent sure has never helped

976
01:11:07,640 --> 01:11:11,360
Speaker 1: an Italian terrorist build a bomb. Violinists have to be

977
01:11:11,439 --> 01:11:15,320
Speaker 1: very careful with their hands, you know. But they were

978
01:11:15,360 --> 01:11:19,519
Speaker 1: a handful of extremely tantalizing clues that convinced me to

979
01:11:19,560 --> 01:11:23,120
Speaker 1: power through the agony of trying to translate blury old PDFs.

980
01:11:24,960 --> 01:11:28,120
Speaker 1: One of the first English language sources I found referring

981
01:11:28,160 --> 01:11:32,240
Speaker 1: to a South African named Monica Huggett is the final

982
01:11:32,320 --> 01:11:38,680
Speaker 1: report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The

983
01:11:38,720 --> 01:11:42,479
Speaker 1: Truth and Reconciliation Commission was authorized by President Nelson Mandela

984
01:11:42,520 --> 01:11:45,639
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety five and it was chaired by Archbishop

985
01:11:45,720 --> 01:11:49,880
Speaker 1: Desmond Tutu. The body's goal was exactly what it says

986
01:11:49,920 --> 01:11:53,639
Speaker 1: in the name, to find the truth about what happened

987
01:11:53,720 --> 01:11:56,760
Speaker 1: under apartheid and try to find a way to move

988
01:11:56,800 --> 01:12:03,400
Speaker 1: forward as a nation. I had three central tasks to

989
01:12:03,479 --> 01:12:06,320
Speaker 1: discover the causes in nature of human rights violations in

990
01:12:06,360 --> 01:12:10,080
Speaker 1: South Africa between nineteen sixty and nineteen ninety four, to

991
01:12:10,160 --> 01:12:15,320
Speaker 1: identify victims with a goal of paying reparations, and to

992
01:12:15,360 --> 01:12:20,080
Speaker 1: allow amnesty for those who fully disclosed their involvement in

993
01:12:20,120 --> 01:12:26,600
Speaker 1: politically motivated human rights violations. This wasn't a tribunal, This

994
01:12:26,800 --> 01:12:30,120
Speaker 1: was a restorative justice process. They hoped to be able

995
01:12:30,200 --> 01:12:34,840
Speaker 1: to provide amnesty to people who were honest. Over the

996
01:12:34,880 --> 01:12:37,639
Speaker 1: course of three years, the Commission heard testimony from over

997
01:12:37,720 --> 01:12:44,800
Speaker 1: twenty thousand people, both victims and perpetrators. Monica Huggett did not,

998
01:12:45,200 --> 01:12:48,160
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, ever, testify before the Commission,

999
01:12:49,360 --> 01:12:53,000
Speaker 1: but her name is in there. Specifically, it appears in

1000
01:12:53,120 --> 01:12:56,519
Speaker 1: Volume two, the seven hundred page portion of the report

1001
01:12:56,640 --> 01:13:00,559
Speaker 1: dealing with quote the Commission of Gross violations of Human Rights,

1002
01:13:01,760 --> 01:13:05,680
Speaker 1: and more specifically, it's in Chapter seven Political Violence in

1003
01:13:05,720 --> 01:13:11,320
Speaker 1: the Era of Negotiations and Transition. Unto the subheading links

1004
01:13:11,320 --> 01:13:17,599
Speaker 1: with international right wing groups, the report reads the first

1005
01:13:17,640 --> 01:13:20,840
Speaker 1: link between ultra right terrorism and foreign agencies came to

1006
01:13:20,920 --> 01:13:24,760
Speaker 1: light in nineteen eighty two when mister Fabio Maryello, mister

1007
01:13:24,840 --> 01:13:29,200
Speaker 1: Massimobulo and mister Eugenio's Office, all white foreign expatriates known

1008
01:13:29,240 --> 01:13:32,360
Speaker 1: as the White Commando, were convicted of the nineteen seventy

1009
01:13:32,400 --> 01:13:38,080
Speaker 1: nine bombing of the offices of prominent academic doctor Jan Lombard. Originally,

1010
01:13:38,080 --> 01:13:41,519
Speaker 1: mister KuPS Vermullen and Miss Monica hugget a foreign right winger,

1011
01:13:41,560 --> 01:13:44,840
Speaker 1: were arrested with them, but Huggitt turned state witness and

1012
01:13:44,960 --> 01:13:48,400
Speaker 1: Vermullin was released after a few days. Huggett's name was

1013
01:13:48,439 --> 01:13:51,160
Speaker 1: subsequently linked to the shootout in March nineteen ninety four

1014
01:13:51,600 --> 01:13:54,400
Speaker 1: between the South African Police and three German right wingers

1015
01:13:54,400 --> 01:13:58,639
Speaker 1: in the Donkerhook area. One German right winger, mister Stephen Rays,

1016
01:13:58,720 --> 01:14:02,559
Speaker 1: was arrested, mister Thomas Koons was shot dead, and a third,

1017
01:14:02,640 --> 01:14:07,640
Speaker 1: mister Horst Cleans, later arrested. A fourth, mister Alexander Nydline,

1018
01:14:08,040 --> 01:14:10,600
Speaker 1: was later charged in the Cullen and Magistrate's Court for

1019
01:14:10,680 --> 01:14:15,040
Speaker 1: illegal possession of a firearm. And I think you can

1020
01:14:15,080 --> 01:14:17,680
Speaker 1: see why I was willing to invest the effort to

1021
01:14:17,720 --> 01:14:21,200
Speaker 1: find out more about this, because that's a hell of

1022
01:14:21,240 --> 01:14:24,000
Speaker 1: a thing to find under the first rock you turn over,

1023
01:14:25,280 --> 01:14:29,759
Speaker 1: Italian terrorists bombing university offices in Pretoria nineteen seventy nine,

1024
01:14:30,479 --> 01:14:33,320
Speaker 1: German mercenaries getting into a deadly shootout with the police

1025
01:14:33,320 --> 01:14:37,519
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety four, And there she is right at

1026
01:14:37,520 --> 01:14:42,200
Speaker 1: the center of two separate acts of pro apartheid terrorism

1027
01:14:42,240 --> 01:14:49,160
Speaker 1: fifteen years apart. Now there are some problems here. First

1028
01:14:49,200 --> 01:14:52,400
Speaker 1: of all, her name is spelled wrong, only a little wrong.

1029
01:14:52,479 --> 01:14:56,240
Speaker 1: It's missing one of the teas. But Alexander Nydline's name

1030
01:14:56,320 --> 01:14:59,360
Speaker 1: is spelled so incorrectly that you couldn't find this by

1031
01:14:59,360 --> 01:15:04,320
Speaker 1: searching for his name. The report calls him Alexander niedna Loin,

1032
01:15:05,240 --> 01:15:07,600
Speaker 1: which as far as I can tell, is not anyone's

1033
01:15:07,680 --> 01:15:11,360
Speaker 1: name or a real German name at all. And the

1034
01:15:11,439 --> 01:15:14,840
Speaker 1: bombing of Professor Lombard's offices at the University of Pretoria

1035
01:15:15,360 --> 01:15:20,760
Speaker 1: happened in nineteen eighty, not nineteen seventy nine. It also

1036
01:15:20,800 --> 01:15:25,240
Speaker 1: describes Monica Huggett as a quote foreign right winger, which

1037
01:15:25,240 --> 01:15:28,439
Speaker 1: really threw me off at first. I've heard her talk.

1038
01:15:28,600 --> 01:15:32,200
Speaker 1: She sounds South African, and she's even said in multiple

1039
01:15:32,200 --> 01:15:36,400
Speaker 1: interviews that she was born and raised there the confusion

1040
01:15:36,439 --> 01:15:41,000
Speaker 1: in the report maybe because she had publicly identified herself

1041
01:15:41,280 --> 01:15:44,240
Speaker 1: as a member of the American ku Klux Klan and

1042
01:15:44,280 --> 01:15:49,160
Speaker 1: that may have been interpreted as her being American, And

1043
01:15:49,240 --> 01:15:51,240
Speaker 1: by the time the Commission was starting their work, she

1044
01:15:51,360 --> 01:15:54,120
Speaker 1: had left South Africa and was living in the United States.

1045
01:15:55,439 --> 01:15:57,280
Speaker 1: They never actually had a chance to speak to her.

1046
01:15:59,040 --> 01:16:01,320
Speaker 1: I'm willing to cut them in slack on the details here.

1047
01:16:01,720 --> 01:16:04,960
Speaker 1: They were close enough for government work, as my dad

1048
01:16:05,040 --> 01:16:06,960
Speaker 1: used to say, and they had a lot of work

1049
01:16:07,000 --> 01:16:10,600
Speaker 1: to do. But as my subsequent research shows, beyond a

1050
01:16:10,680 --> 01:16:14,479
Speaker 1: shadow of it out Monica Huggett was born and raised

1051
01:16:15,160 --> 01:16:19,679
Speaker 1: South African. But keep those four Germans in the back

1052
01:16:19,680 --> 01:16:24,240
Speaker 1: of your mind for now. We'll see them again. Alexander

1053
01:16:24,280 --> 01:16:27,759
Speaker 1: Nydline you've already met. He was the German NPD member

1054
01:16:27,840 --> 01:16:30,920
Speaker 1: swearing allegiance to Donald Trump at a Croatian Nazi rally

1055
01:16:30,920 --> 01:16:35,280
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen. According to blurry old scans of arrest

1056
01:16:35,320 --> 01:16:38,879
Speaker 1: warrants from nineteen ninety three, Stephen Rays and Thomas Kunst

1057
01:16:38,920 --> 01:16:41,880
Speaker 1: were the other two German mercenaries he deserted with just

1058
01:16:41,880 --> 01:16:46,240
Speaker 1: before Christmas that year, and just as an aside, I

1059
01:16:46,280 --> 01:16:50,040
Speaker 1: am admittedly not at all an expert on the Bosnian War,

1060
01:16:50,160 --> 01:16:53,200
Speaker 1: so it took me a minute to parse the letterhead

1061
01:16:53,200 --> 01:16:56,639
Speaker 1: on the warrants. They were issued by the non existent

1062
01:16:56,720 --> 01:17:01,799
Speaker 1: country of the Croatian Republic of Hertzeg Bosni, which explains

1063
01:17:01,840 --> 01:17:05,479
Speaker 1: why Nydeline had no problem re entering Croatia after fleeing

1064
01:17:05,520 --> 01:17:09,439
Speaker 1: as a fugitive all those years ago, and the fourth

1065
01:17:09,479 --> 01:17:15,200
Speaker 1: man forced Glens he still wanted for murder in Namibia.

1066
01:17:18,160 --> 01:17:20,720
Speaker 1: Early on in my search for more information about this

1067
01:17:21,200 --> 01:17:24,080
Speaker 1: mysterious woman at the center of these two terror plots

1068
01:17:24,120 --> 01:17:27,759
Speaker 1: carried out by foreign neo Nazis, I found a master's

1069
01:17:27,760 --> 01:17:31,160
Speaker 1: thesis submitted by Mada Visser to the University of Pretoria

1070
01:17:31,160 --> 01:17:36,439
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety nine. It's in Afrikaans but translated. The

1071
01:17:36,479 --> 01:17:40,639
Speaker 1: title is the Ideological Foundations and Development of the White

1072
01:17:40,680 --> 01:17:44,160
Speaker 1: Fascist Movements in South Africa nineteen forty five to nineteen

1073
01:17:44,200 --> 01:17:49,559
Speaker 1: ninety five. After some truly agonizing trial and error trying

1074
01:17:49,560 --> 01:17:51,679
Speaker 1: to find a way to translate a three hundred page

1075
01:17:51,680 --> 01:17:57,839
Speaker 1: PDF without paying for something, the thesis was immensely useful,

1076
01:17:59,320 --> 01:18:02,120
Speaker 1: but every clue just raised more questions, and I was

1077
01:18:02,160 --> 01:18:04,639
Speaker 1: running into dead end after dead end trying to track

1078
01:18:04,680 --> 01:18:09,240
Speaker 1: down the primary sources in the footnotes. I can find

1079
01:18:09,720 --> 01:18:13,800
Speaker 1: a lot of things, but digitized archives of forty year

1080
01:18:13,840 --> 01:18:18,200
Speaker 1: old newspapers published in another language in another country that

1081
01:18:18,360 --> 01:18:20,840
Speaker 1: might not even still exist at all. For all I know,

1082
01:18:22,439 --> 01:18:25,639
Speaker 1: I came up empty, and I was on the verge

1083
01:18:25,680 --> 01:18:29,280
Speaker 1: of total nervous collapse at the idea that there's information

1084
01:18:29,360 --> 01:18:33,559
Speaker 1: out there that is just not available to me. When

1085
01:18:33,600 --> 01:18:39,200
Speaker 1: I had another idea and I found an unlikely ally

1086
01:18:40,040 --> 01:18:45,880
Speaker 1: the Central Intelligence Agency. That's right. A special shout out

1087
01:18:45,880 --> 01:18:51,519
Speaker 1: this week goes to the CIA, more specifically the Foreign

1088
01:18:51,520 --> 01:18:55,479
Speaker 1: Broadcast Information Service, which was operated by the CIA until

1089
01:18:55,479 --> 01:18:58,160
Speaker 1: it was renamed the Open Source Center in two thousand

1090
01:18:58,200 --> 01:19:03,880
Speaker 1: and five. Originally called the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, it

1091
01:19:03,920 --> 01:19:07,360
Speaker 1: was authorized in nineteen forty one by President Roosevelt, and

1092
01:19:07,400 --> 01:19:11,920
Speaker 1: its original purpose was to record, translate, transcribe, and analyze

1093
01:19:12,080 --> 01:19:15,599
Speaker 1: propaganda radio programs produced by the Access Powers during the war.

1094
01:19:17,120 --> 01:19:20,720
Speaker 1: Over the years, its mission grew to include peacetime operations,

1095
01:19:20,760 --> 01:19:24,040
Speaker 1: and they eventually added television and print media into the mix,

1096
01:19:24,560 --> 01:19:28,240
Speaker 1: collecting and translating news from around the world and disseminating

1097
01:19:28,240 --> 01:19:33,599
Speaker 1: reports for use by intelligence agencies and diplomatic and military organizations.

1098
01:19:34,600 --> 01:19:39,240
Speaker 1: It's basically just an international news aggregator for government employees.

1099
01:19:41,040 --> 01:19:45,120
Speaker 1: And look, maybe all those old South African newspapers do

1100
01:19:45,280 --> 01:19:50,280
Speaker 1: exist somewhere. I found one, not the one I was

1101
01:19:50,320 --> 01:19:53,799
Speaker 1: looking for, not one with real journalists and investigative reporting

1102
01:19:53,840 --> 01:19:57,280
Speaker 1: like I'd hoped. The only paper I could find a

1103
01:19:57,400 --> 01:20:02,400
Speaker 1: large catalog of digitized archive was a paper called D Transfoller.

1104
01:20:03,160 --> 01:20:07,439
Speaker 1: It was an African or nationalist newspaper. That paper once

1105
01:20:07,600 --> 01:20:11,719
Speaker 1: unsuccessfully tried to sue another South African newspaper for calling

1106
01:20:11,720 --> 01:20:17,440
Speaker 1: them Nazi propaganda, but it was such overt Nazi propaganda

1107
01:20:17,479 --> 01:20:20,160
Speaker 1: that the judge dismissed the suit and ruled that the

1108
01:20:20,280 --> 01:20:24,360
Speaker 1: editor of the Transfaller quote did make his newspaper a

1109
01:20:24,439 --> 01:20:27,479
Speaker 1: tool of the Nazis in South Africa and he knew

1110
01:20:27,520 --> 01:20:29,240
Speaker 1: it end quote.

1111
01:20:30,720 --> 01:20:31,519
Speaker 2: So D.

1112
01:20:31,680 --> 01:20:44,439
Speaker 1: Transfoller wasn't exactly the resource I was hoping to find,

1113
01:20:44,600 --> 01:20:47,000
Speaker 1: But eventually I gave up trying to find old South

1114
01:20:47,040 --> 01:20:51,639
Speaker 1: African newspapers and something that was much easier to find

1115
01:20:52,080 --> 01:20:55,960
Speaker 1: were the unclassified daily reports from the Sub Saharan office

1116
01:20:55,960 --> 01:21:01,960
Speaker 1: of the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service. So just this once,

1117
01:21:02,320 --> 01:21:06,719
Speaker 1: I guess I will give a reluctant nod to the CIA.

1118
01:21:08,720 --> 01:21:11,719
Speaker 1: So now I have some contemporaneous reporting that has been

1119
01:21:12,160 --> 01:21:15,800
Speaker 1: translated into English by someone who's presumably a professional and

1120
01:21:15,920 --> 01:21:19,479
Speaker 1: not a robot, and the pieces are starting to come together.

1121
01:21:20,400 --> 01:21:22,839
Speaker 1: I can start to see the picture here. This bombing

1122
01:21:22,920 --> 01:21:26,440
Speaker 1: campaign in nineteen eighty is starting to come into focus.

1123
01:21:28,439 --> 01:21:31,640
Speaker 1: In August of nineteen eighty, a newspaper editor in Pretoria

1124
01:21:31,800 --> 01:21:37,000
Speaker 1: received a letter on letterhead bearing a symbol remarkably similar

1125
01:21:37,200 --> 01:21:40,000
Speaker 1: to the cross emblem used by the American Ku Klux Klan.

1126
01:21:41,280 --> 01:21:45,559
Speaker 1: A group calling themselves the VIT Commando or the White

1127
01:21:45,600 --> 01:21:50,400
Speaker 1: Commandos claimed responsibility for the bombing of Professor Jon Lombard's

1128
01:21:50,439 --> 01:21:54,519
Speaker 1: office at the University of Pretoria, and the group threatened

1129
01:21:54,560 --> 01:21:58,480
Speaker 1: further attacks, writing that people and organizations working toward integration

1130
01:21:59,280 --> 01:22:05,120
Speaker 1: would be warned first and then eliminated. The VIT Commando

1131
01:22:05,160 --> 01:22:07,720
Speaker 1: had formed just a few months earlier, in May or

1132
01:22:07,800 --> 01:22:12,519
Speaker 1: June of nineteen eighty. Sources vary. Monica Huggett would later

1133
01:22:12,600 --> 01:22:15,519
Speaker 1: testify that she joined the newly formed VIT Commando after

1134
01:22:15,600 --> 01:22:18,880
Speaker 1: meeting Massimo Bolo at a meeting in Pretoria in June

1135
01:22:18,920 --> 01:22:23,559
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty. As described in the memoirs of Ray Hill,

1136
01:22:23,920 --> 01:22:26,080
Speaker 1: a man who ended his lengthy career as a fascist

1137
01:22:26,200 --> 01:22:29,639
Speaker 1: organizer by playing informant for the anti fascist magazine Searchlight.

1138
01:22:30,520 --> 01:22:33,080
Speaker 1: The meeting was a summit for leaders of the British

1139
01:22:33,120 --> 01:22:38,120
Speaker 1: fascist group National Front, the africaner nationalist group AWB, the

1140
01:22:38,120 --> 01:22:42,400
Speaker 1: far right South African Political Party HNP, and an Italian

1141
01:22:42,439 --> 01:22:47,680
Speaker 1: fascist group called Unido. So even though her involvement with

1142
01:22:47,760 --> 01:22:50,280
Speaker 1: vit Commando is the first time I can put her

1143
01:22:50,320 --> 01:22:54,559
Speaker 1: on paper involved in a terrorist organization, it was obviously

1144
01:22:54,600 --> 01:22:58,439
Speaker 1: not her first introduction to the idea. She had to

1145
01:22:58,479 --> 01:23:00,880
Speaker 1: have been deeply involved for the at least one of

1146
01:23:00,920 --> 01:23:04,160
Speaker 1: those fascist groups to have even been in the room

1147
01:23:04,360 --> 01:23:07,400
Speaker 1: where Massimo Bolo invited her to join his terrorist cell,

1148
01:23:09,280 --> 01:23:12,479
Speaker 1: and the group got started right away. Just two months

1149
01:23:12,520 --> 01:23:15,760
Speaker 1: after forming the group, the bombing of Lombard's office was

1150
01:23:15,800 --> 01:23:20,080
Speaker 1: already their third big public display. They'd started a fire

1151
01:23:20,120 --> 01:23:23,360
Speaker 1: at a drive in theater and fire bombed the Johannesburg

1152
01:23:23,400 --> 01:23:27,800
Speaker 1: headquarters of the Institute for Race Relations in December. They

1153
01:23:27,840 --> 01:23:30,920
Speaker 1: claimed responsibility for the bombing of Professor F. A. Meritz's

1154
01:23:30,960 --> 01:23:33,840
Speaker 1: office at the University of South Africa, and they would

1155
01:23:33,840 --> 01:23:36,240
Speaker 1: carry out at least four more bombings before members started

1156
01:23:36,240 --> 01:23:41,120
Speaker 1: getting arrested. The first four arrests came in early February

1157
01:23:41,160 --> 01:23:45,240
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty one, a government employee in Pretoria named W. G.

1158
01:23:45,400 --> 01:23:48,799
Speaker 1: Van Dyck, the director of the South African National Front,

1159
01:23:48,840 --> 01:23:54,720
Speaker 1: Alan Fotheringham, an Italian fascist named Massimo Bolo, and, as

1160
01:23:54,720 --> 01:23:58,800
Speaker 1: the newspaper put it at the time, mister Bolo's girlfriend,

1161
01:23:59,600 --> 01:24:05,559
Speaker 1: Miss m. Huggett of Kempton Park. Now that's the only

1162
01:24:05,600 --> 01:24:09,000
Speaker 1: source I could find alleging a romantic relationship between the pair.

1163
01:24:09,120 --> 01:24:13,880
Speaker 1: It never comes up again, so I don't know. And

1164
01:24:13,920 --> 01:24:16,280
Speaker 1: in the weeks that followed, police would arrest even more

1165
01:24:16,320 --> 01:24:21,000
Speaker 1: alleged members of the VIT Commando Fabio Miriello, an Italian

1166
01:24:21,000 --> 01:24:25,600
Speaker 1: born South African citizen who'd emigrated four years earlier, kuz Vermulin,

1167
01:24:25,880 --> 01:24:29,040
Speaker 1: the leader of the World Apartheid Movement, and an Italian

1168
01:24:29,040 --> 01:24:34,559
Speaker 1: immigrant named Eugenio Zoppie and his wife Laura Zenenga. Those

1169
01:24:34,600 --> 01:24:37,160
Speaker 1: are all the names I could find in most of

1170
01:24:37,200 --> 01:24:41,880
Speaker 1: my sources. I found a few more names in an

1171
01:24:41,960 --> 01:24:46,880
Speaker 1: unlikely place, documents released by the Italian government as part

1172
01:24:46,920 --> 01:24:50,080
Speaker 1: of their investigation into the Bologna massacre. A nineteen eighty

1173
01:24:50,120 --> 01:24:52,320
Speaker 1: bombing of a train station in Italy, will you to

1174
01:24:52,360 --> 01:24:55,879
Speaker 1: have been the work of fascist terrorists? Do list several

1175
01:24:56,000 --> 01:24:59,240
Speaker 1: additional names of Italians who were in South Africa at

1176
01:24:59,280 --> 01:25:01,120
Speaker 1: the time and leave to have been involved with the

1177
01:25:01,200 --> 01:25:05,360
Speaker 1: vid Commando, But there's no mention of those extra Italians

1178
01:25:05,400 --> 01:25:08,160
Speaker 1: in the South African or English language press as far

1179
01:25:08,200 --> 01:25:11,160
Speaker 1: as I can find. As a matter of fact, there's

1180
01:25:11,280 --> 01:25:14,880
Speaker 1: no mention of almost any of those people. Ever. Again,

1181
01:25:16,080 --> 01:25:21,439
Speaker 1: only Miriyello, Bolo, and Zoppis actually faced charges. Mariellon and

1182
01:25:21,479 --> 01:25:25,920
Speaker 1: Bolo were charged with sabotage the bombings and possession of

1183
01:25:25,960 --> 01:25:28,680
Speaker 1: a massive cache of weapons that had been stolen from

1184
01:25:28,680 --> 01:25:33,320
Speaker 1: the South African Defense Force, including fifty kilos of plastic explosives,

1185
01:25:33,520 --> 01:25:36,559
Speaker 1: sixty seven hand grenades, a couple of land mines, eight rifles,

1186
01:25:36,560 --> 01:25:39,720
Speaker 1: four pistols, a machine gun, and five thousand rounds of ammunition.

1187
01:25:41,520 --> 01:25:43,880
Speaker 1: When Bolo and Mariello went to trial later that year,

1188
01:25:44,880 --> 01:25:50,360
Speaker 1: Monica Huggett testified against them. In exchange she wasn't charged,

1189
01:25:51,800 --> 01:25:54,679
Speaker 1: she admitted that she had procured the bomb making manual

1190
01:25:54,720 --> 01:25:58,400
Speaker 1: for Bolo, books that she'd ordered from her clan contacts

1191
01:25:58,400 --> 01:26:02,280
Speaker 1: in the United States. I was a little surprised to

1192
01:26:02,280 --> 01:26:05,519
Speaker 1: see a familiar title here. One of the books she

1193
01:26:05,560 --> 01:26:08,040
Speaker 1: had sent to her from America was called The poor

1194
01:26:08,080 --> 01:26:11,719
Speaker 1: Man's James Bond, which is the same bomb making book

1195
01:26:12,000 --> 01:26:15,080
Speaker 1: that Dennis Mahon bought for the ATF informant that he

1196
01:26:15,120 --> 01:26:17,880
Speaker 1: was in love with after she expressed an interest in

1197
01:26:17,920 --> 01:26:24,320
Speaker 1: bomb making. What a Small World. Huggett also testified that

1198
01:26:24,360 --> 01:26:27,960
Speaker 1: she'd accompanied Bulow to Professor Lombard's office to scout out

1199
01:26:27,960 --> 01:26:31,280
Speaker 1: the best location to place the bomb. She explained that

1200
01:26:31,320 --> 01:26:36,200
Speaker 1: Bulow's residence had become unsuitable as a workspace after too

1201
01:26:36,240 --> 01:26:39,600
Speaker 1: many of his friends moved in, so she rented a

1202
01:26:39,600 --> 01:26:41,720
Speaker 1: property under her own name that he could use to

1203
01:26:41,760 --> 01:26:45,880
Speaker 1: work on his bombs. On the stand, Huggitt explained that

1204
01:26:46,400 --> 01:26:49,599
Speaker 1: she's a political activist. She's a member of the American

1205
01:26:49,680 --> 01:26:53,960
Speaker 1: ku Klux Klan and the VIT Commando never intended to

1206
01:26:54,080 --> 01:26:59,120
Speaker 1: endanger any human lives now, for what it's worth not

1207
01:26:59,360 --> 01:27:01,240
Speaker 1: to give this woman the benefit of the doubt. But

1208
01:27:02,160 --> 01:27:05,439
Speaker 1: despite the repeated threats to follow up with more violence,

1209
01:27:05,560 --> 01:27:09,080
Speaker 1: to take up arms, to commit actual acts of violence

1210
01:27:09,080 --> 01:27:12,960
Speaker 1: against human beings, no one was ever actually injured by

1211
01:27:13,000 --> 01:27:17,000
Speaker 1: a vit commando bomb. They went off in empty offices.

1212
01:27:18,439 --> 01:27:20,760
Speaker 1: I think she may have been telling the truth. They

1213
01:27:20,800 --> 01:27:25,320
Speaker 1: were warnings. Huggett told the court that their goal was

1214
01:27:25,360 --> 01:27:29,960
Speaker 1: to wake people up to the dangers of integration, to

1215
01:27:30,000 --> 01:27:33,719
Speaker 1: send a warning that more violence was inevitable if this creeping,

1216
01:27:34,000 --> 01:27:38,640
Speaker 1: incremental progressive reform that people were talking about were to

1217
01:27:38,640 --> 01:27:42,640
Speaker 1: actually happen. She swore the group had no intention of

1218
01:27:42,760 --> 01:27:48,559
Speaker 1: actually hurting anyone or trying to overthrow the government. By

1219
01:27:48,560 --> 01:27:51,080
Speaker 1: the end of nineteen eighty one, Mussi Moobolo had been

1220
01:27:51,120 --> 01:27:54,840
Speaker 1: sentenced to fifty two years, though forty two of those

1221
01:27:54,920 --> 01:27:57,479
Speaker 1: years would run concurrent with other abortions of the sentence,

1222
01:27:58,040 --> 01:28:00,599
Speaker 1: leaving him with just ten years to act actually serve.

1223
01:28:01,800 --> 01:28:05,760
Speaker 1: And Fabio Miriello was given nineteen years, but same deal.

1224
01:28:05,800 --> 01:28:10,080
Speaker 1: It was effectively just five, but Bolo didn't even serve

1225
01:28:10,120 --> 01:28:13,800
Speaker 1: those ten. He was released without any explanation that I

1226
01:28:13,800 --> 01:28:16,599
Speaker 1: can find, after just four years in nineteen eighty five,

1227
01:28:17,280 --> 01:28:21,639
Speaker 1: and immediately deported back to Italy. I'm not entirely sure

1228
01:28:21,680 --> 01:28:25,439
Speaker 1: what became of Muriello, but Myivisser's thesis says he was

1229
01:28:25,560 --> 01:28:28,240
Speaker 1: known to have reconnected with Monica Huggett after his release,

1230
01:28:28,920 --> 01:28:31,080
Speaker 1: and the pair both got involved with the South African

1231
01:28:31,120 --> 01:28:33,880
Speaker 1: branch of the American Neo Nazi religion, the Church of

1232
01:28:33,880 --> 01:28:40,120
Speaker 1: the Creator. As for Eugenio Zopis, the young Italian immigrant

1233
01:28:40,240 --> 01:28:43,720
Speaker 1: was charged only with the theft of the weapons. He'd

1234
01:28:43,760 --> 01:28:45,840
Speaker 1: been the one to actually steal them from the South

1235
01:28:45,880 --> 01:28:49,519
Speaker 1: African Defense Force, and he was also sentenced to five years,

1236
01:28:50,720 --> 01:28:53,240
Speaker 1: and he appealed that sentence to the court. So the

1237
01:28:53,280 --> 01:28:56,479
Speaker 1: following year, his lawyer was urging a judge to consider

1238
01:28:56,520 --> 01:29:01,680
Speaker 1: the mitigating factors. He's so young, just twenty three years old,

1239
01:29:01,880 --> 01:29:03,840
Speaker 1: and he was a brand new immigrant at the time,

1240
01:29:03,880 --> 01:29:07,519
Speaker 1: and he didn't speak any English. He'd been manipulated by

1241
01:29:07,600 --> 01:29:11,599
Speaker 1: the much older Fabio Muriello. His lawyer went as far

1242
01:29:11,600 --> 01:29:14,120
Speaker 1: as to say that Eugenio Zeppas had joined the VIT

1243
01:29:14,120 --> 01:29:18,519
Speaker 1: Commando entirely by accident, and he had no idea of

1244
01:29:18,600 --> 01:29:21,959
Speaker 1: the true nature of the organization until after he was arrested.

1245
01:29:23,360 --> 01:29:26,519
Speaker 1: The article about the dismissal of his appeal only lays

1246
01:29:26,520 --> 01:29:29,559
Speaker 1: out what his attorney said. It's not clear from the

1247
01:29:29,560 --> 01:29:34,040
Speaker 1: reporting I can find if anyone contradicted those statements in court,

1248
01:29:35,360 --> 01:29:41,320
Speaker 1: because you might have guessed, but it's not true. I

1249
01:29:41,360 --> 01:29:44,120
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier that the most complete list of names of

1250
01:29:44,160 --> 01:29:47,160
Speaker 1: those Italian fascists who were arrested in South Africa in

1251
01:29:47,160 --> 01:29:51,120
Speaker 1: connection to the vict Commando bombings was buried somewhere in

1252
01:29:51,200 --> 01:29:54,880
Speaker 1: two thousand pages of documents released by the Italian government

1253
01:29:55,360 --> 01:29:59,840
Speaker 1: related to the Bologna massacre. In August of nineteen eighty,

1254
01:30:00,560 --> 01:30:03,120
Speaker 1: the same month that the VIT Commando bombing started in

1255
01:30:03,200 --> 01:30:07,559
Speaker 1: South Africa, eighty five people were killed when a bomb

1256
01:30:07,560 --> 01:30:10,280
Speaker 1: went off inside the Bologna Central train station in Italy.

1257
01:30:12,120 --> 01:30:16,200
Speaker 1: It is, to some extent kind of a mystery still.

1258
01:30:17,280 --> 01:30:19,679
Speaker 1: There were a number of trials spanning over a decade,

1259
01:30:19,720 --> 01:30:22,959
Speaker 1: and several members of an Italian fascist group were convicted,

1260
01:30:24,160 --> 01:30:27,120
Speaker 1: but the group itself never accepted responsibility for the bombing.

1261
01:30:28,600 --> 01:30:33,280
Speaker 1: It is perhaps in some ways akin to the Oklahoma

1262
01:30:33,400 --> 01:30:37,599
Speaker 1: City bombing. Legally, we found the guy who did it,

1263
01:30:38,840 --> 01:30:40,640
Speaker 1: but there are a lot of questions we're never going

1264
01:30:40,680 --> 01:30:42,439
Speaker 1: to get answers to, and there are a lot of

1265
01:30:42,439 --> 01:30:45,200
Speaker 1: weird paths you could let your mind go down trying

1266
01:30:45,240 --> 01:30:49,200
Speaker 1: to find them. So without losing my sanity or dragging

1267
01:30:49,200 --> 01:30:54,040
Speaker 1: you into the incomprehensible depths, Suffice it to say Eugenio's

1268
01:30:54,080 --> 01:30:58,040
Speaker 1: office was not an innocent, confused young man when he

1269
01:30:58,120 --> 01:31:00,840
Speaker 1: stole a small arsenal of weapons the vit Commando in

1270
01:31:00,920 --> 01:31:04,920
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty. In nineteen seventy six, he was one of

1271
01:31:05,040 --> 01:31:08,680
Speaker 1: fifteen members of an Italian fascist group who armed with

1272
01:31:08,800 --> 01:31:12,960
Speaker 1: clubs and chains, beat a young communist organizer to death

1273
01:31:13,040 --> 01:31:16,720
Speaker 1: in a small town outside of Rome. And, contrary to

1274
01:31:16,720 --> 01:31:20,880
Speaker 1: his lawyer's claims that he had by pure coincidence, met

1275
01:31:20,880 --> 01:31:23,960
Speaker 1: and befriended a fellow Italian right after he moved to

1276
01:31:24,000 --> 01:31:27,280
Speaker 1: South Africa, only to be manipulated by this new friend

1277
01:31:27,320 --> 01:31:31,720
Speaker 1: into committee crimes. There is actually evidence that Zoppas had

1278
01:31:31,720 --> 01:31:37,440
Speaker 1: been sent to South Africa specifically to meet with Fabio Mariello.

1279
01:31:37,720 --> 01:31:40,720
Speaker 1: In the months before Zappas arrived in South Africa, a

1280
01:31:40,760 --> 01:31:44,200
Speaker 1: member of Italy's Black Order wrote Mariello that he was

1281
01:31:44,200 --> 01:31:47,920
Speaker 1: sending six members down very soon, with more to follow.

1282
01:31:49,680 --> 01:31:52,360
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty four, the newspaper of the Italian Communist

1283
01:31:52,439 --> 01:31:55,920
Speaker 1: Party listed Zappas among the names of seventy six fascist

1284
01:31:56,000 --> 01:32:00,760
Speaker 1: fugitives believed to have fled the country. Diplomatic records show

1285
01:32:00,800 --> 01:32:04,400
Speaker 1: the Italian government was requesting his extradition from Paraguay by

1286
01:32:04,479 --> 01:32:07,880
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six, and I don't know what happened to

1287
01:32:07,920 --> 01:32:20,559
Speaker 1: him after that. In what is becoming a constant refrain,

1288
01:32:21,360 --> 01:32:24,000
Speaker 1: I do want to stress that I'm not an expert

1289
01:32:24,040 --> 01:32:27,200
Speaker 1: in South African history. I'm not a scholar of the

1290
01:32:27,240 --> 01:32:30,800
Speaker 1: apartheid era. I'm not a historian. Every week I have

1291
01:32:30,880 --> 01:32:33,800
Speaker 1: to gain some new specialized knowledge to try to give

1292
01:32:33,880 --> 01:32:36,360
Speaker 1: context to the story I'm trying to tell. And there's

1293
01:32:37,000 --> 01:32:38,800
Speaker 1: only so much one person can sort out in a

1294
01:32:38,840 --> 01:32:42,599
Speaker 1: couple of days. So bear with me, because I do

1295
01:32:42,640 --> 01:32:46,280
Speaker 1: want to try to give some context here. This VIIT

1296
01:32:46,320 --> 01:32:49,960
Speaker 1: commando bombing campaign in nineteen eighty didn't come out of nowhere.

1297
01:32:51,280 --> 01:32:54,120
Speaker 1: When Monica Hugget testified against the men she'd helped carry

1298
01:32:54,160 --> 01:32:57,320
Speaker 1: out those attacks, she said their goal had been to

1299
01:32:57,320 --> 01:33:01,080
Speaker 1: demonstrate that many white South Africans were posed to the

1300
01:33:01,120 --> 01:33:05,800
Speaker 1: path of gradual concessions being made by the National Party.

1301
01:33:06,400 --> 01:33:09,519
Speaker 1: And I was confused by that. It will be another

1302
01:33:09,560 --> 01:33:14,280
Speaker 1: fifteen years before apartheid ended, and the National Party loved apartheid.

1303
01:33:14,960 --> 01:33:21,519
Speaker 1: What is she talking about? Apartheid is inherently violent. It

1304
01:33:21,600 --> 01:33:25,160
Speaker 1: is a form of violence in and of itself. There

1305
01:33:25,200 --> 01:33:29,759
Speaker 1: is no peaceful or kind way to run an apartheid state.

1306
01:33:30,960 --> 01:33:37,720
Speaker 1: There is no nonviolent ethno state, and that's obvious, but

1307
01:33:37,840 --> 01:33:40,879
Speaker 1: the kinds of violence and the visibility of that violence

1308
01:33:41,000 --> 01:33:44,519
Speaker 1: change from year to year. I don't mean to say

1309
01:33:44,520 --> 01:33:47,120
Speaker 1: that things like the forced removal of Black Africans from

1310
01:33:47,120 --> 01:33:50,920
Speaker 1: their homes and their lands are not violence. It is

1311
01:33:52,320 --> 01:33:56,160
Speaker 1: every action carried out in service of implementing and maintaining

1312
01:33:56,200 --> 01:34:01,519
Speaker 1: apartheid was an act of violence. But some years were

1313
01:34:01,520 --> 01:34:05,360
Speaker 1: bloodier than others, and while the political movement to end

1314
01:34:05,360 --> 01:34:11,200
Speaker 1: apartheid ebbed and flowed, two people have always and will

1315
01:34:11,280 --> 01:34:18,120
Speaker 1: always resist injustice. But in nineteen eighty, when those bombs

1316
01:34:18,120 --> 01:34:22,759
Speaker 1: went off, there was a growing awareness on all sides

1317
01:34:22,760 --> 01:34:26,600
Speaker 1: of the issue that something was going to have to change.

1318
01:34:26,840 --> 01:34:30,200
Speaker 1: Whether they liked it or not. The country was about

1319
01:34:30,240 --> 01:34:33,360
Speaker 1: to experience some of the most violent years of apartheid.

1320
01:34:35,040 --> 01:34:38,240
Speaker 1: For those committed to maintaining the status quo and holding

1321
01:34:38,280 --> 01:34:42,599
Speaker 1: on to political power, that would mean making some targeted

1322
01:34:42,640 --> 01:34:50,720
Speaker 1: compromises and more importantly, doubling down on state repression. The

1323
01:34:50,760 --> 01:34:56,920
Speaker 1: Soeto Uprising had made apartheid a pr problem. I think

1324
01:34:56,960 --> 01:35:00,600
Speaker 1: for most people, dead school children is more than a

1325
01:35:00,600 --> 01:35:03,960
Speaker 1: PR problem, but for the National Party, that's what it was.

1326
01:35:05,840 --> 01:35:08,519
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy six, thousands of students walked out of

1327
01:35:08,520 --> 01:35:11,599
Speaker 1: class in protest of a nineteen seventy four law requiring

1328
01:35:11,600 --> 01:35:16,160
Speaker 1: the use of Afrikaans in school. Students sang and held

1329
01:35:16,240 --> 01:35:19,080
Speaker 1: signs as they marched, and they planned to rally at

1330
01:35:19,080 --> 01:35:23,200
Speaker 1: a nearby stadium. Words spread to other nearby schools and

1331
01:35:23,280 --> 01:35:26,000
Speaker 1: students poured out into the streets to join the march,

1332
01:35:27,840 --> 01:35:30,559
Speaker 1: and when they heard the police had blocked their intended route,

1333
01:35:31,240 --> 01:35:35,240
Speaker 1: one of the march organizers urged calm, telling the crowd,

1334
01:35:35,920 --> 01:35:40,000
Speaker 1: brothers and sisters, I appeal to you, keep calm and cool.

1335
01:35:41,000 --> 01:35:43,360
Speaker 1: We have just received a report that the police are coming.

1336
01:35:44,160 --> 01:35:48,160
Speaker 1: Don't taunt them, don't do anything to them. Be cool

1337
01:35:48,240 --> 01:35:53,040
Speaker 1: and calm. We are not fighting. And when they encountered

1338
01:35:53,040 --> 01:35:56,920
Speaker 1: the police for the first time, for a moment it

1339
01:35:56,960 --> 01:36:02,320
Speaker 1: seemed cooler heads had prevailed on all sides, but the

1340
01:36:02,360 --> 01:36:09,280
Speaker 1: police weren't actually retreating. They were waiting for reinforcements, and

1341
01:36:09,360 --> 01:36:11,679
Speaker 1: just half an hour later, the first tear gas canister

1342
01:36:11,880 --> 01:36:17,120
Speaker 1: was fired into the crowd of children, and some of

1343
01:36:17,160 --> 01:36:24,440
Speaker 1: them ran, but most of them stayed, facing the police. Unmoving.

1344
01:36:27,240 --> 01:36:31,040
Speaker 1: According to several accounts I found, the children were singing

1345
01:36:31,960 --> 01:36:37,639
Speaker 1: when the first shot was fired. The police opened fire

1346
01:36:38,439 --> 01:36:44,920
Speaker 1: with live rounds on the crowd of children. One of

1347
01:36:44,960 --> 01:36:47,040
Speaker 1: the first children to die that day was a twelve

1348
01:36:47,080 --> 01:36:53,160
Speaker 1: year old boy named Hector Peterson. The photo of his tiny,

1349
01:36:53,479 --> 01:36:56,800
Speaker 1: limp body in the arms of an older boy, with

1350
01:36:56,880 --> 01:37:01,560
Speaker 1: Hector's sister running beside him, was seen around the world.

1351
01:37:02,760 --> 01:37:07,040
Speaker 1: Black South African photojournalists Sam and Zeema had captured the

1352
01:37:07,120 --> 01:37:14,240
Speaker 1: true face of apartheid, and people were horrified. The violence

1353
01:37:14,280 --> 01:37:17,000
Speaker 1: spread like wildfire, and the worst of it lasted for

1354
01:37:17,040 --> 01:37:23,519
Speaker 1: three days. There was an explosion of internal resistance. White

1355
01:37:23,600 --> 01:37:27,839
Speaker 1: university students marched against the killings, Black workers went on strike.

1356
01:37:28,760 --> 01:37:31,479
Speaker 1: Riots broke out in black townships all over the country.

1357
01:37:32,000 --> 01:37:38,760
Speaker 1: Buildings burned, and when the dust had settled, hundreds were dead.

1358
01:37:40,680 --> 01:37:43,920
Speaker 1: The small reforms introduced in the late seventies had nothing

1359
01:37:44,000 --> 01:37:48,120
Speaker 1: to do with the National Party softening its stance on apartheid,

1360
01:37:49,040 --> 01:37:53,400
Speaker 1: but the apartheid regime saw some advantage to reducing international

1361
01:37:53,479 --> 01:38:01,680
Speaker 1: criticism and disrupting black resistance. Amidst these tepid reforms, divisions

1362
01:38:01,720 --> 01:38:05,599
Speaker 1: grew some white South Africans who had seen those pictures

1363
01:38:05,600 --> 01:38:09,840
Speaker 1: of children's corpses now saw apartheid as what it was,

1364
01:38:11,000 --> 01:38:15,120
Speaker 1: a true evil. Others were repulsed by the violence, but

1365
01:38:15,439 --> 01:38:21,360
Speaker 1: seemed satisfied with the gestures toward reform. People like Monica Huggett,

1366
01:38:22,120 --> 01:38:25,760
Speaker 1: were worried that these promised reforms, things like repealing the

1367
01:38:25,800 --> 01:38:29,720
Speaker 1: ban on interracial relationships, would set the country on a

1368
01:38:29,840 --> 01:38:34,240
Speaker 1: road to hell. In her testimony the trial for Mariello

1369
01:38:34,320 --> 01:38:37,360
Speaker 1: and Bolo, she laid the blame on her Italian accomplices,

1370
01:38:37,560 --> 01:38:41,080
Speaker 1: but made no apologies for her own motivation, saying, on

1371
01:38:41,120 --> 01:38:45,920
Speaker 1: the stand, I was opposed to integration. I still am.

1372
01:38:48,640 --> 01:38:52,599
Speaker 1: The week Mariello and Bulo were convicted, American newspapers carried

1373
01:38:52,640 --> 01:38:56,439
Speaker 1: a four sentence wire story about the trial, noting that

1374
01:38:56,479 --> 01:39:00,000
Speaker 1: it was South Africa's first ever prosecution of white terrorists.

1375
01:39:01,439 --> 01:39:04,879
Speaker 1: How South Africa was entering its bloodiest decade of political violence.

1376
01:39:05,720 --> 01:39:08,320
Speaker 1: Someone had finally gone to jail for pro apartheid terror

1377
01:39:09,560 --> 01:39:12,160
Speaker 1: But it's significant that they were only willing to prosecute

1378
01:39:12,200 --> 01:39:16,240
Speaker 1: those Italian men. There's hardly any mention at all of

1379
01:39:16,280 --> 01:39:18,320
Speaker 1: the South African woman who served as the point of

1380
01:39:18,320 --> 01:39:22,760
Speaker 1: contact for these foreign terrorists. Many of the stories in

1381
01:39:22,800 --> 01:39:26,200
Speaker 1: South African outlets stress heavily that the group was foreign

1382
01:39:26,240 --> 01:39:30,080
Speaker 1: in origin, that its members were foreigners, that they didn't

1383
01:39:30,080 --> 01:39:33,599
Speaker 1: even speak Afrikaans, that they had no connection to any

1384
01:39:33,640 --> 01:39:39,120
Speaker 1: South African political organizations. But that assertion is complicated a

1385
01:39:39,160 --> 01:39:44,120
Speaker 1: little bit by an anecdote from ray Hill's memoirs. On

1386
01:39:44,160 --> 01:39:46,599
Speaker 1: the first day of the trial, as Below and Miriello

1387
01:39:46,720 --> 01:39:49,920
Speaker 1: entered the courtroom, a man in the gallery stood and

1388
01:39:49,960 --> 01:39:55,719
Speaker 1: applauded for them. That man, Pete Rudolph was a former

1389
01:39:55,760 --> 01:39:59,120
Speaker 1: police officer, and at the time of the trial in

1390
01:39:59,200 --> 01:40:02,760
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty one, he was a sitting member of the

1391
01:40:02,800 --> 01:40:05,760
Speaker 1: Pretoria City Council and a member of the far right

1392
01:40:05,800 --> 01:40:11,320
Speaker 1: party HNP. He would eventually leave party politics behind and

1393
01:40:11,840 --> 01:40:14,760
Speaker 1: form a white supremacist group called the Order Bora Folk

1394
01:40:15,760 --> 01:40:20,040
Speaker 1: or the Order of the Boer People. He borrowed the

1395
01:40:20,120 --> 01:40:25,959
Speaker 1: name from the plot of the Turner Diaries. After Miriello

1396
01:40:25,960 --> 01:40:29,320
Speaker 1: and Bolo were convicted, the VIC Commando ceased to exist.

1397
01:40:30,560 --> 01:40:32,920
Speaker 1: It was just one of countless short lived right wing

1398
01:40:33,000 --> 01:40:38,560
Speaker 1: organizations in a shifting political landscape. Groups formed and splintered

1399
01:40:38,600 --> 01:40:42,439
Speaker 1: and disappeared all the time. Sometimes there was even doubt

1400
01:40:42,439 --> 01:40:45,680
Speaker 1: about the actual existence of some group claiming credit for

1401
01:40:45,840 --> 01:40:48,640
Speaker 1: one attack or another, and a lot of groups had

1402
01:40:48,680 --> 01:40:53,200
Speaker 1: significantly overlapping membership. But the end of the VIC Commando

1403
01:40:53,320 --> 01:40:55,880
Speaker 1: was not the end of Monica Hugget's involvement in pro

1404
01:40:55,960 --> 01:41:01,760
Speaker 1: apartheid violence, not by a long shot. Now, in my

1405
01:41:01,840 --> 01:41:05,439
Speaker 1: timeline of events, I lose track of Monica after nineteen

1406
01:41:05,479 --> 01:41:08,559
Speaker 1: eighty one. I can't say what she was up to

1407
01:41:09,280 --> 01:41:12,439
Speaker 1: for most of the eighties, but by the time I

1408
01:41:12,520 --> 01:41:15,759
Speaker 1: find her again in the record, she's a high ranking

1409
01:41:15,800 --> 01:41:19,600
Speaker 1: member of the Africaner nationalist neo Nazi organization called the

1410
01:41:19,640 --> 01:41:25,280
Speaker 1: Africaner verstansbawaging the Africaner Resistance Movement in English or just

1411
01:41:25,400 --> 01:41:29,840
Speaker 1: AWB for short. It was founded in nineteen seventy three

1412
01:41:30,080 --> 01:41:37,360
Speaker 1: by Eugene terre Blanche, and the AWB wasn't happy with apartheid. No,

1413
01:41:38,160 --> 01:41:42,000
Speaker 1: it wouldn't do at all. Apartheid was too left wing,

1414
01:41:43,120 --> 01:41:47,240
Speaker 1: it was too liberal, and there was too much risk

1415
01:41:47,360 --> 01:41:50,520
Speaker 1: to bore identity for them to be living in proximity

1416
01:41:50,520 --> 01:41:56,840
Speaker 1: to black Africans even under apartheid conditions. They're secessionists and

1417
01:41:56,880 --> 01:41:59,040
Speaker 1: they believe the only solution to the problem is a

1418
01:41:59,120 --> 01:42:03,920
Speaker 1: pure white ethno State, a folk shop or the white

1419
01:42:03,960 --> 01:42:08,880
Speaker 1: South African. It's a little bit baffling that she was

1420
01:42:08,880 --> 01:42:12,080
Speaker 1: able to resume her activities retaining a fairly high level

1421
01:42:12,120 --> 01:42:15,120
Speaker 1: of prestige and responsibility, particularly when it came to her

1422
01:42:15,200 --> 01:42:20,880
Speaker 1: international contacts after she, you know, turned State's witness against

1423
01:42:20,880 --> 01:42:24,679
Speaker 1: Maryellow and Bolo. Surely everyone knew she'd sold them out

1424
01:42:24,680 --> 01:42:28,320
Speaker 1: to save herself, but maybe her colleagues didn't see it

1425
01:42:28,400 --> 01:42:33,080
Speaker 1: that way. Maybe she was important enough that they were

1426
01:42:33,080 --> 01:42:35,240
Speaker 1: willing to make that sacrifice to keep her on the

1427
01:42:35,280 --> 01:42:42,599
Speaker 1: outside doing whatever it was she was doing. I had

1428
01:42:42,680 --> 01:42:44,400
Speaker 1: hope to get through the end of the nineteen eighties

1429
01:42:44,400 --> 01:42:46,920
Speaker 1: in this episode, but I think we have to leave

1430
01:42:46,960 --> 01:42:51,320
Speaker 1: it here. In the mid eighties, our Italian mercenaries were

1431
01:42:51,320 --> 01:42:53,639
Speaker 1: in the wind after serving just a handful of years

1432
01:42:53,720 --> 01:42:58,280
Speaker 1: behind bars. I can't find Monica no matter how hard

1433
01:42:58,280 --> 01:43:00,679
Speaker 1: I squint at old TV news bus role of South

1434
01:43:00,680 --> 01:43:06,240
Speaker 1: African Nazi rallies. But I think she's there somewhere. And

1435
01:43:06,320 --> 01:43:10,040
Speaker 1: next week, before we rejoin Monica in her own story,

1436
01:43:11,000 --> 01:43:13,600
Speaker 1: we'll pick up in nineteen eighty nine with one of

1437
01:43:13,600 --> 01:43:17,479
Speaker 1: our German mercenaries, five years before shooting it out with

1438
01:43:17,520 --> 01:43:20,320
Speaker 1: the cops, just days before the nineteen ninety four South

1439
01:43:20,320 --> 01:43:25,080
Speaker 1: African election, Horst Glens was trying to prevent a different

1440
01:43:25,760 --> 01:43:30,960
Speaker 1: African nation from holding its first democratic, multi racial elections.

1441
01:43:31,880 --> 01:43:36,799
Speaker 1: He failed both times, but in nineteen eighty nine, Clem's

1442
01:43:36,840 --> 01:43:40,360
Speaker 1: in his South African Nazi terror Celle took two lives

1443
01:43:41,080 --> 01:43:57,320
Speaker 1: in a failed attempt to prevent Namibian independence. Weird Little

1444
01:43:57,320 --> 01:43:59,720
Speaker 1: Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.

1445
01:44:00,120 --> 01:44:03,280
Speaker 1: It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conker. Our

1446
01:44:03,320 --> 01:44:06,720
Speaker 1: executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show

1447
01:44:06,800 --> 01:44:09,840
Speaker 1: is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme

1448
01:44:09,920 --> 01:44:12,840
Speaker 1: music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me

1449
01:44:12,920 --> 01:44:15,519
Speaker 1: at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I

1450
01:44:15,560 --> 01:44:19,040
Speaker 1: will definitely read it, but I almost certainly won't answer it.

1451
01:44:19,040 --> 01:44:22,880
Speaker 1: It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show.

1452
01:44:22,880 --> 01:44:25,000
Speaker 1: We have our listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

1453
01:44:26,080 --> 01:44:28,240
Speaker 1: Just don't post anything that's going to make you one

1454
01:44:28,240 --> 01:44:29,240
Speaker 1: of my real guys.