“South Africans are currently engaged in an intense debate over the prospect of expropriation of land without compensation as one among several measures to achieve [land] reform,” he wrote. Ramaphosa proceeded to scold “commentators [who] have confined their engagement on this matter to soundbites and not to the substance.”

If that was a reference to Fox News, Ramaphosa has a point. It’s generally a bad idea to get your information from Carlson’s Fox News program about any subject other than, What are white nationalists talking about today?

Throughout the Carlson program, the screen blazed with chyrons asserting that South African land seizures had already happened: “South Africa farm seizures begin,” “Chaos in South Africa as land expropriations begin,” “South African government is now seizing land from white farmers,” “South African Land Grab: Threat of Violence and Economic Collapse."

But there have been no seizures to date. Not one farm has been taken from one white farmer without compensation. The law allowing such seizures has not passed. The constitutional amendment that would enable the law has not been enacted.

Nor is it true that South African white farmers are being massacred by angry blacks. South African crime statistics do not make it easy to ascertain how many victims of violence are rural as opposed to urban, or to identify rural victims by race. South Africa suffers appalling levels of crime and violence, and rural areas are even less well protected than cities. While still shockingly prevalent, violent crime has sharply decreased since the end of apartheid. U.S.-funded scholarship has shown that rural violence is overwhelmingly concentrated among the very poorest and among those with only a primary education—who are very unlikely to be white.

There’s no mystery why Trump would be susceptible to believing a fable of murderous blacks and victimized whites. View the same segment that Trump viewed, and you will not miss its obvious racial incitement, including the insinuation that President Barack Obama endorses the plunder of whites: “Why would former President Barack Obama, just several weeks ago, publicly praise a racist like Cyril Ramaphosa? Why would he do that?”

The correct answer to that question is that Obama praised Ramaphosa for the same reason that Western leaders generally have done so, not least British Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May. May headed a delegation of 29 U.K. corporate and financial leaders who visited South Africa this week to welcome Ramaphosa’s approach to investment and land questions. Ramaphosa is regarded by Western governments generally as the least worst alternative for South Africa, certainly in preference to his brazenly corrupt and flagrantly incompetent predecessor, Jacob Zuma.

That’s not the answer Carlson shared with his audience, though. When his guest declined to produce a sufficiently inflammatory answer to Carlson’s question about Obama, instead suggesting that Obama should call Ramaphosa to remonstrate with him, Carlson answered it himself: “I wish he’d said that in public when he’d had the chance, but of course he didn’t, being a coward.”