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According to experts in the history of extremism, the idea of a “white genocide” in South Africa was kicking around in white supremacist communities by at least the 1980s, as the tiny white minority was beginning to lose its grip on the apartheid system.

Sometimes, in more paranoid circles, people speculated that the South African government was tolerating or even encouraging the murders in service of a white genocide, carried out, they believed, with varying motivations, with race hatred at the simplest end of the spectrum and some kind of villainous globalist cabal plot at the other.

More recently, the idea of a white genocide against farmers became further charged when, in 2018, the African National Congress proposed changing the constitution to allow the expropriation of certain unused lands without compensation.

He also asked the South African president to step in and prevent the “genocide of white people in South Africa”—to the delight of the former leader of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa, who wrote, “In 2016 South African white genocide was a fringe issue—now, the richest man in the world, who also owns Twitter, is drawing attention to it. Things are moving in the right direction!”

As ever with Trump, it’s hard to determine how much he really knows and cares about the particular issue of “white genocide” in South Africa.