U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 12, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
President Donald Trump's new "refugee resettlement" program for white Afrikaners from South Africa was slammed by a former State Department official in the Obama administration and a former editor for Time Magazine during a segment on MSNBC with Nicolle Wallace on Monday afternoon, calling it "deeply and morally wrongheaded and repulsive."
"These are the descendants of the people who created the most diabolical system of white supremacy in human history, apartheid," said Richard Stengel. "They're not directly responsible for it, but it was a system that actually moved Black people off of the arable land. So they inherited the land that the Black people had to give up. It was called forced removal. It was something called a Bantustan policy, where they moved Black people out of the cities and farmlands into these remote areas with non-arable land. I mean, it was just one of the most, worst processes ever."
However, he continued, in the years following apartheid's dismantling, Afrikaners have become the "darling of these right-wing, white supremacist movements around the world, that it's like — it's like the Lost Cause for them, it's like the old Confederacy. They're held up as these white Christians who are being dispossessed of their land. It's like this is a modern replacement theory in a — in a country where, by the way, white people make up 7 percent of the population and own 78 percent of the farmland. So it's actually, there's no injustice here."
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"As you mentioned, it's taking places away from refugees who are really being crushed by authoritarian governments and military governments for these folks who have never had anything happen to them," he continued. "And Trump, amazingly, called it a genocide, one of the worst lies I've ever heard him say. There's just been a small handful of farmers that have been killed over the past 10 years. No land has actually been expropriated, so it's just a farce and a sham and a moral ugliness."
"What happens now that he's taken this step?" asked Wallace.
"I don't know," said Stengel. "I mean, it's like ... a 'Batman' movie or something where all the bad guys get collected under one roof. I mean, like, who else do you now go — go and find other racists who have, you know, repressed people and give them refugee status here. It's just, I don't know where it goes from here, but, I mean, you even said it. It's like a headline from The Onion. I don't even know how to get more extreme than this."
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