The man is full of surprises. You have to give him that. I think we all knew that, once the two-sided Manafort-Cohen dung hammer fell on Tuesday, that Shabby Distraction Theater was going to open again. However, I don't think anybody predicted that its first production would be a revival of America's meddling in the affairs of South Africa.

It began, as so many of this administration*'s productions do, with something that appeared on the Fox News Channel—namely, on the new hit show, Tucker Carlson's Wonderful World of Whiteness. Thus it followed, like the night the day, that the president* leaped onto the electric Twitter machine for the purposes of going full, bullgoose-loony Cecil Rhodes.

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I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018

As it happens, the government in South Africa is engaged in a delicate program of land reform wherein farmland seized for white farmers under apartheid could be expropriated by the government without compensation. (A friend who has been active in African affairs points out that, in many cases, the land is being given to black South Africans whose families tended the land for decades in virtual serfdom. In other words, it's being given back to the actual farmers.) As to the other part, there is no "large scale killing of farmers." Crime remains a problem in South Africa, but the killing of farmers is at a 20-year low.

A sugarcane farm in South Africa. Dan Kitwood Getty Images

Ah, but these horror stories are very popular among white supremacists of many lands, who have seized on the land reform movement to scare up fantasies of "white genocide," and whose nostalgia for the good old days of apartheid remains undimmed. In other words, the President* of the United States is now openly promoting an international racist conspiracy theory as the official foreign policy of the United States. I don't think anyone needs to hear a tape of his using a racial slur to get the message.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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