It doesn’t get funnier than this. The US government is planning to spend around R5.5m ($350,000) on advertising the land of the free to the white Afrikaners being genocided in South Africa. Is genocided even a word? It might as well be, since the US made up the alleged genocide in the first place.
I picture the adverts as being similar to those you see run by ambulance-chasing lawyers. “Have you or your loved ones been genocided? You could be entitled to a move to the US, where our genocides are all in the past. Apply now!”
The proposal isn’t just about advertising. A US state department proposal that The Guardian unearthed reveals that the media campaign also includes a research component into why more white Afrikaners are not applying to become refugees and accepting the gracious offer of their saviour Donald J Trump. Apparently, applications to the refugee programme have “trended lower than expected” since November 2025, when Afrikaners were allowed to apply directly online. “The document, written by the US mission in South Africa with a department research unit for the embassy in Pretoria, admits officials know little about why,” The Guardian reports.
The proposal has this priceless line in it: “There’s currently little research about why Afrikaners are not applying to request referral into the US Refugee Admissions Program.” You don’t know why white Afrikaners aren’t queuing up in droves to escape a genocide? Uh, is that possibly because a) Afrikaners aren’t idiots; and b) because there is no genocide?
Oh, how I pity the researcher who accepts this contract. How on earth do you make up a report that doesn’t include those two findings?
Perhaps we can blame this supposed lack of awareness by white (always white) Afrikaners on the suppression of the information by the South African state? Oh, no, wait, South Africa ranks 21st on the press freedom index, so it can’t be that. The US is at 64th, I see. Food for thought.
Operation Afrikaner Farce
Operation Afrikaner Freedom, or OAF for short, is going to be implemented in three phases. First, there are going to be some focus groups in places like Pretoria, Krugersdorp and Orania. Huh. You’d think at least the Oranians would know about the genocide.
Then there’s going to be a survey of 1,000 Afrikaners (and let’s just pray that they can still find that many left alive) to “test which messages work in which communities”. Because just saying “escape genocide by moving to America” isn’t landing for some reason. And the final phase of this brave attempt to get white Afrikaners to notice they’re being genocided is “a six-month digital campaign, mostly in Afrikaans with possibly some English, aimed at Afrikaners ‘interested in migrating’”.
Because the community is hard to reach through conventional social and press channels, the proposal says, the department would hire an agency with local knowledge and use “trusted messengers”.
The more suspicious among you will translate this as: “South African media isn’t in the business of publishing disinformation, so we’re going to use this opportunity to funnel some more money to the right-wing organisations and grifters who are happy to parrot any old nonsense.” Or trusted messengers, as they are described without a hint of irony.
I honestly can’t remember any other genocide where advertising campaigns were needed to make sure the people being slaughtered noticed.
The US isn’t the only country offering refuge. Africa Report reported in April that Errol Musk, father of Elon, was “working on a project to provide refugee status in Russia for South African farmers, in a project similar to one by the US government”. According to a Russian official, the initiative would resettle 50 (again, white) Afrikaner families. Musk is using the same rationale as Trump, justifying the project in an interview with Russian media “by claiming white Afrikaner farmers were being targeted for murder”.
I need hardly point out that Operation Afrikaner Freedom is really about sowing division in South Africa and is part and parcel of Trump’s broader anti-South Africa stance. This has manifested in other ways, such as the US excluding South Africa from the 2026 G20 summit, the recent visa restrictions, aid cuts and so on.
OAF is also part of US attempts to support right-wing causes across the world. The Guardian reports that $1m of the $175m that the state department diverted from the US’s Human Rights & Democracy Fund will go towards “‘advancing white Afrikaner rights’ in South Africa and for collecting data on abuses against minorities”.
Who will the lucky grifters be who get this gig? No recipient has been named as yet, but it’s nice to imagine that all that hateful rhetoric and divisive posturing will finally pay off for someone. Assuming they survive the genocide, that is.
