President Trump struck a nerve last week with his remarks about white genocide in South Africa, which he aired in dramatic fashion during an Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. The former anti-apartheid activist put on a glib performance that was celebrated by his audience of liberal journalists as a polite rebuff of Trump’s “ambush.”  

While the media rushed to dismiss Trump’s claims about white farmers being targeted and killed as wild and debunked myths, the unreliable nature of crime data in South Africa makes such a conclusive judgment impossible. Trump’s point that the authorities have turned a blind eye to racial violence is not hard to believe in any case, given the official attitude towards the hated “Boers”—the white descendants of Dutch colonists, also called Afrikaners.

Ramaphosa gave viewers a pleasing fairy tale of a harmonious multiracial democracy, even as he defended racial reparations and made light of incitement against white minorities. He even pointed to the race of the white minister of agriculture, who is also the leader of South Africa’s second-largest party, the liberal Democratic Alliance, as evidence against Trump’s charges of persecution. Besides being a total non sequitur, it was also a crude appeal to tokenism, but his dazzled media supporters did not raise any objections.

The violent rhetoric of South African politician Julius Malema, a notorious Marxist known for his murderous language towards whites, was bound to come up. Why hasn’t Malema been arrested, Trump asked, given these very explicit threats? Ramaphosa deflected, noting that Malema belongs to an opposition party.

“That is not government policy. We have a multiparty democracy in South Africa that allows people to express themselves,” Ramaphosa said.

He wasn’t lying. In fact, “Kill the Boer” is protected speech, the country’s highest court has ruled. Until relatively recently, it was treasured by the supposedly mainstream African National Congress (ANC) as a rallying cry against the residuum of Boer rule. The ANC begrudgingly agreed to stop singing it in 2012.

Malema’s political party, Economic Freedom Fighters, is far from fringe. It is the fourth-largest party in South Africa, having won 10 percent of the vote in the most recent election. “That’s not a small party. That was a stadium that holds 100,000 people, and I hardly saw an empty seat,” Trump noted.

While distancing himself from Malema’s extremism, Ramaphosa conceded that his government shares Malema’s goal of expropriating land from Afrikaners. This must be done, he said, to “deal with the past.” Oddly, he claimed that South Africa respects property rights, even as he justified forceful restitution for a political system that died 30 years ago.

Ramaphosa has been less circumspect when not performing for the White House cameras. In response to Trump’s refugee policy for Afrikaners, Ramaphosa condemned those looking to flee his country’s hostile racial climate as “cowards.” Meanwhile, South Africa’s Expropriation Act allows the property of whites to be “seized without compensation.” In other words, “stolen.” South Africa’s discriminatory policies also include explicit “equity” targets for hiring non-whites, a concept all too familiar in the United States.

Ramaphosa’s media cheerleaders, meanwhile, have downplayed South Africa’s retributionist land reform. The New York Times and like-minded outlets note that the Expropriation Act has not been used yet, that is, Afrikaners are still only potential victims of land theft.The Times engages here in a form of what Michael Anton coined as the “celebration parallax,” denying that South Africa represses its white population, while simultaneously suggesting that it would be good if it did! Similarly, in the United States, we are accustomed to the media talking heads telling us that the coming end of the white majority is a desirable thing, but if we dare to question the goodness of that outcome, the same voices deny that it is happening altogether.

Some on the left insist there is an esoteric meaning to “Kill the Boer” that requires careful analysis. CNN’s Larry Madowo claimed Trump has “weaponized” the death chant to rile up aggrieved whites. We are supposed to respect the homicidal slogan’s history as a cry against oppression during apartheid. “They have explained that this is not a literal call to attack and kill the farmer because the historical relation of that.” Have they explained it to the people breaking into Boers’ homes and killing them?

We can safely assume there is no evidence Trump could provide, short of mass graves (and even that may not suffice), that would convince his critics to condemn South Africa’s mistreatment of Afrikaners. To do that would undermine the narrative that South Africa’s post-apartheid era has been a triumphant progress toward social justice, instead of a vindictive score-settling against whites.