On the evening of October 1st, 2016, Johan and Mariandra Heunis had finished a long day of work on their small farm in Kameeldrift, South Africa, and wished to relax in their home as the sun was setting. Their three little girls—aged 6, 4, and 2—were asleep in their bedrooms, and Mariandra was eight months pregnant with their fourth child and first son. Wanting to unwind and give their bodies plenty of time to rest before starting work on the farm and taking care of the kids the next day all over again, the couple fell asleep on the couch in front of the television. Fifteen minutes later, they were woken by the loud cocking of a gun. As their eyes adjusted to the sight of two armed assailants standing in front of them, they both startled in horror as the intruders shouted obscenities and ordered the couple not to move. Thinking quickly and staying calm, Johan told the two men that they could have any valuables in the house that they wanted, and even told them where most of the valuables were located. All he asked in return was that they not harm his wife and daughters. Upon hearing this, one of the intruders smiled sadistically and said “We’re not here to rob you. We’re here to kill you.” Johan was then shot five times at point blank range in the stomach, shoulders, and chest. The three little girls heard the shots and ran out of their bedrooms toward the grisly scene in the living room. The six-year-old daughter, overcoming the sight of her father lying in a pool of his own blood, stood between her shrieking mother and the gunmen and tried to negotiate: “I’ve got a piggy bank! You can have the money in there!” As Mariandra defied the assailants’ orders to stay on the couch and got up to hold her children, Johan—amazingly—managed the strength to rise to his knees. With five bullet wounds in his body, and with blood pouring from his nose and ears, he sobbed and once again begged the assailants “Please don’t.” One of the men then, without a word, walked over to Johan, put the gun against his head, and shot him one last time. After that, the murderer and his accomplice left the farm. Though she can’t be sure, Mariandra guesses that somehow the presence of her crying children on that fateful night was the reason she had not been raped and killed herself. Today she, her three daughters, and one son (who never got to meet his father) live elsewhere; struggling financially and emotionally, as Mariandra strives to be the sole breadwinner and ensure her children get the mental health support they need to heal from the trauma.
Nearly seven years later, in the early morning hours of August 17th, 2023, farm owners Tim and Amanda Platt were in their home in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, having breakfast when four intruders battered down their front door. Tim immediately began to fight two of the attackers, while the other two slashed Amanda with bolt cutters and beat her with lead pipes before impaling her with a spear. As all four attackers then turned their full attention onto brutalizing Tim, Amanda—with incredible strength and determination—ignored the pain of her serious injuries and ran to another room where she set off the security alarm; causing the four assailants at last to flee. Fortunately, she and Tim would survive and recover.
These are just two instances out of what’s estimated to be thousands of assaults and murders committed in the last decade in South Africa against white landowners by their black neighbors in the name of “decolonization” (despite the fact that the apartheid regime formally ended in 1994). AfriForum, a civil rights organization located in South Africa, estimates that since 2020 there have been—on average—around 300 attacks per year.
The main agitating force against white South African landowners are a group called the “Economic Freedom Fighters”. The EFF are part Marxist-Leninist political party, part militia. Donning red berets and boasting a membership of one million black South Africans, they have politicians who speak in parliament but they also have an armed vigilante wing which describe themselves as an “emancipation force”. The leader of the EFF, 44-year-old politician Julius Malema, has gained popularity and riches by shouting statements to crowds of his supporters like “This is our land. Don’t listen to any person who tells you how kind you must treat white people. If our elders were brave enough, you wouldn’t have white arrogance. If our elders were brave enough, you wouldn’t have white disrespect,” and for telling interviewers “The EFF has not officially called for the killing of white people… at least for now. I can’t guarantee the future.” And even though the African National Congress (ANC) is the political party in charge of the South African government—not the EFF—white minority farmers are accusing the ANC government of turning a blind eye to the crimes of EFF devotees.
The attacks and murders take place amid an already hostile cultural climate, where minority whites are demonized by the black majority as “descendants of colonizers who still have too much wealth”. Affirming this view, the South African parliament passed a land reform bill in January that granted the government the right to seize white-owned land (with particular emphasis on farms) without compensating the owners; putting white families in a position where, when they’re not worried about physically defending their properties from armed intruders, are now worried about having no legal recourse to defend their properties from state acquisition.
So far almost half a million white South Africans have fled South Africa for Europe, Australia, and the United States in the past four years, while—according to SACCUSA—another 67,000 whites still remaining in South Africa are awaiting visas for the U.S. alone. (The President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has called these refugees “cowards”.) On top of the murders, assaults, public hate, and land grabs, the South African government under the ANC has taken steps to ensure the white minority remains permanently powerless; passing legislation that allows employment discrimination, higher taxation rates than the rest of the population, and restrictions on how many whites can sit on corporate boards and local councils.
But you wouldn’t know any of this by watching or reading international news outlets.
You wouldn’t know about a father of three small children being executed in his living room in front of his wife. You wouldn’t know about a woman being speared. You wouldn’t know about the hundreds of white-owned farms that are being attacked by thugs or “legally seized” by the government every year. You wouldn’t know about the EFF. And you wouldn’t know about the current South African president’s blatant and aggressive disdain toward the white citizens of his country.
And you wouldn’t know about these things, because, apparently, the targeting of ethnic minority whites by communist black nationalists isn’t happening.
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From the time of the October Revolution in 1917 until the mid-1930s, American and British journalists caught up in the “romance” of communism were enthusiastic about Russia’s bold experiment in governance. This included big names in early 20th century literature and reporting like Langston Hughes, Claudia Jones, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dos Passos, Louise Thompson Patterson, Edmund Wilson, Christopher Hill, Lincoln Steffens, and Claude McKay. Seduced by the Marxist marketing ploy that seizure and redistribution of resources would lead to a nation without inequalities, prejudice, or classism, many famous and charismatic idealists deliberately ignored or excused the rumors of Stalin’s purges and crackdowns as they penned their gushing encomiums about the USSR.
The worst of these idealists was Walter Duranty.
A New York Times reporter stationed in Soviet Moscow from 1922 to 1936, Duranty is mostly infamous for using his column to dismiss reports that Stalin had starved four million rural Ukrainians by confiscating their grain and having it shipped to major cities (that is, when Duranty wasn’t busy participating in lavish opium-fueled orgies with male and female prostitutes - allegedly on the Kremlin’s dime). Writing to his American readers, Duranty insisted that any blaming of the food crisis in Ukraine on communist policy was “malignant propaganda”, and that starvation hadn’t been responsible for the death of four million people, but rather malnutrition due to disease. “Malnutrition due to disease” was a preferable explanation for mass Ukrainian deaths, because unlike starvation (which could only be interpreted as a deliberate outcome of the collectivization mandates that prioritized the resource needs of one region over another), the Communist Party could claim that malnutrition and disease were the result of lack of basic hygiene among the Ukrainians (who were considered ethnically inferior and therefore intellectually inferior).
Though the extent of Duranty’s lies and corruption was excessive even by the standards of other correspondents who were sympathetic to the communist experiment (George Orwell suspected him of being a full-on Soviet agent), his sympathetic coverage of Stalin’s nationalization of grain production ultimately won him a Pulitzer Prize and the adulation of his leftist peers stateside. The Nation—the oldest progressive magazine in the United States, founded in 1865 and still in print today—hailed Duranty’s reporting at the time as “the most enlightened and dispassionate dispatches from a great nation in the making.” And lest you be tempted to think the New York Times was blissfully unaware of the extent to which one of their reporters had been compromised, or that at the very least Duranty’s credibility in journalistic circles back then was a relic of a time when journalistic standards were not so clearly defined, there is plenty of proof that the media’s stalwart leftwing bias continued over the proceeding decades and became even stronger: In 2003, for example, Ukrainian officials called for Duranty’s Pulitzer to be posthumously revoked due to the fact that—by then—Stalin’s intentional orchestration of the famine and Duranty’s deliberate hiding of it was common knowledge (this was so well known by the early 2000s, in fact, that the New York Times was forced to print an acknowledgment), and yet the Pulitzer Board refused to revoke the prize. To this day, Walter Duranty’s “journalism” absolving Stalin of any deliberate mass murder is still shamelessly listed on the Pulitzer website as the reason for his winning the award.
And it’s here where I bring our attention back to the attacks on whites in South Africa. The South African government denies there is an atmosphere of hate toward its white minority (with President Cyril Ramaphosa going so far as to say there have been zero murders of white farmers), while the Trump administration has insisted that yes there is an atmosphere of hate toward whites and yes there have been thousands of white landowner murders. This came to a head a week ago, when President Trump held a meeting at the White House with President Ramaphosa, and confronted him—publicly—about the situation. “We have many [white South Africans] that feel they’re being persecuted, and they’re coming to the United States. So we receive them [as refugees] if we feel there’s persecution or genocide going on. People are fleeing South Africa for their own safety. Their land is being confiscated, and in many cases they’re being killed.”
The negative reaction of Western media to this was swift. The New Republic echoed President Ramaphosa’s propaganda that dead white farmers in South Africa were a “lie”, Time magazine accused Trump of “ambushing” the ANC leader, and the BBC praised Ramaphosa for enduring the American President’s “choreographed onslaught”. Having learned nothing from the actions of their disgraceful reporter nearly a century prior, the New York Times also couldn’t help but join in:
If I could get in a time machine and warn a person from the 90s or early-2000s about a problem that existed back then that got increasingly worse two-and-half decades later, the problem I would immediately think of would be the “hivemindification” of the media. Once two or three outlets get going, the others quickly fall into place and replicate the same talking points (and even the exact same key words and phrases). No mainstream news organization prides itself anymore on “standing out above the rest” or strives to employ independent-minded people. Contrarian columnists and off-script TV anchors unafraid to go up against their colleagues are now not only extinct, they’re extinct and reviled. (Hell, even investigative reporting is on its last legs; with the overwhelming majority of “reporters” being little more than glorified typists or script readers.)
And if I were talking to a person from the 90s or early-2000s about mainstream media, I would remark with disgust about how naked and obvious it became in the 2010s and 20s that the media hivemind is not meant to inform us but to manage us. I emphasize this because the media is often accused of being “out of touch”. They’re not out of touch. They fully comprehend the traditional and common sense values a majority of the public still hold. They simply are hostile to those values and make it their mission to feed the public a steady diet of the opposite. Because the goal of propaganda isn’t to persuade and recruit, the goal of propaganda is to isolate. “You don’t have to like us, you don’t have to join us, but don’t dare oppose us. We are everywhere and you are alone.”
Yet none of that is surprising. Or even, by now, really all that worthy of mentioning. The ideologically-captured media has been an enemy of the people for a long long time, and we’re not sweet summer children. Ultimately the reason “journalists” and news corporations deny a story like the mass murder of white landowners in South Africa by black communists is the same reason they denied the USSR’s systematic starvation of four million peasant Ukrainians 93 years ago: they sympathize with the cause of the aggressors, and do not believe any action the aggressors commit can be described as “evil” if a) the aggressors are part of a group deemed “historically oppressed” or “marginalized”, and b) if the evil action is in pursuit of utopian social and political goals. We’ve seen this movie before: leftists in the press and academia who sympathize with anti-Western mobs and dictators believe the ends justify the means because all that matters is power, Rose says she’ll never let Jack go, and Clark Gable doesn’t give a damn.
No, what’s worthy of highlighting about the South Africa story is that the left in recent years has gotten a lot of mileage out of the idea of “stochastic terrorism”; which is defined as “repeated use of vilifying rhetoric by a political leader or other public figure that inspires one or more of the figure’s supporters to commit acts of violence against a targeted person, group, or community”. They’ll use this term to justify legally restricting speech when it comes to Europeans protesting mass Muslim migration, or to justify the federal government cracking down on American parents protesting public school teachers that indoctrinate their children… but of course “repeated use of vilifying rhetoric by a political leader or other public figure that inspires one or more of the figure’s supporters to commit acts of violence against a targeted person, group, or community” doesn’t apply to black nationalist politicians directly calling for the murder of minority whites in their speeches to thousands of supporters. Of course stochastic terrorism doesn’t apply when a white minority are called “cowards” for wanting to leave their country because of it, or when their government scorns them because of their “colonialist ancestors” and takes their land and leaves them homeless. That’s not how this “social justice” stuff works, sugarboo.
Another thing about this story we can highlight is how mainstream media will debunk a technicality and then slyly present the debunking of the technicality as debunking a whole narrative. You’ll note that many of these headlines are specifically worded: there is no white genocide in South Africa. Meaning that while there “may be” chants and songs from South Africa’s third largest political party being played on television and radio that encourage indiscriminate slaughter of whites, and while there “may be” brutal attacks and murders on white landowners numbering annually in the hundreds, and while there “may be” government seizure of white-owned land without compensation, what is happening to white South Africans doesn’t meet all of the exact bullet points for what constitutes “genocide” according to the United Nations. This gives people the impression that Trump concocted the whole scenario in his deranged bigoted mind, when really the reality he is describing is 99% accurate except—woops!—he used the wrong word.
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The situation in South Africa is still developing, so this couldn’t be a “proper essay” of great length as per usual. But the parallel between mainstream media’s denial of what is happening to white South African landowners and the denial of the Holodomor in the 1930s was too good not to publicly draw attention to, and I hope this brief post will serve as a “snapshot” that can’t be erased. A “receipt” of sorts—to exist online forever—proving that in May 2025, leftists in the press maintained there was no mass slaughter or targeting of white minority landowners occurring in South Africa, and were openly applauding the ANC government for rebuffing the American president’s questions about it. I think “freezing this moment in time” is important for when… ya know… activists, politicians, professors, and reporters on the left later try to gaslight the public by pretending that “they never denied white persecution in South Africa” (as they’ve done with the Covid lab leak theory and as they’re doing now with former President Biden’s mental decline).
I’ll end by leaving you with this video from an independent journalist, but more importantly with the testimonies of white South Africans that I found in the comment section beneath her video:
