On Monday, dozens of Afrikaners arrived in the US as refugees. On this week’s On the Media, how a fringe group of white South Africans have been lobbying for Donald Trump’s attention for almost a decade — but refugee status was never on their wish list. Plus, the second episode of The Divided Dial, all about how rightwing extremists took over shortwave radio.

[01:00] Host Micah Loewinger talks with Carolyn Holmes, a professor of political science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, about the arrival of white South African refugees in the US, why Afrikaner white rights groups are objecting to the policy, and the long-standing exchange of ideas between white nationalist elites in the US and South Africa.

[16:42] Episode 2 of The Divided Dial, Season 2: You Must Form Your Militia Movements. Many governments eased off the shortwaves after the Cold War, and homegrown US-based rightwing extremists edged out shortwave peaceniks to fill the void. Reporter Katie Thornton explores how in the 1990s, US shortwave radio stations became a key organizing and recruiting ground for white supremacists and the burgeoning anti-government militia movement. On this instantaneous, international medium, they honed a strategy and a rhetoric that they would take to the early internet and beyond.

Further reading:

“Tucker Carlson, those South African white rights activists aren’t telling you the whole truth,” by Carolyn Holmes (2019)
“‘Kill the Boer’: The anti-apartheid song Musk ties to ‘white genocide’” by Nick Dall

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Why Trump is Welcoming White South Africans as Refugees. Plus, Ep 2 of The Divided Dial.

On the Media