After Charlottesville, white nationalists are winning.

Carlson mangled quite a few facts in his statements, which concerned a land-reform program that has been promised for decades amid ongoing disputes about the difficult racial and class legacies of apartheid. The idea of land reform—the goal of redistributing land and natural resources that had been sequestered away from the public—is actually tied to apartheid. It’s part of a package of reconstruction reforms already enshrined in South Africa’s constitution.

In practice, the private kleptocracy of apartheid was never entirely dismantled. White people owned upwards of 80 percent of all the country’s farmland in 1994, and still own about three-quarters today, despite making up less than a tenth of the population. So while any land reforms involving the public appropriation of agricultural land could be said to be targeted at white farmers, that’s mostly because they’re virtually the only farmers.

South Africa’s original post-apartheid plan intended to expropriate about a third of all agricultural land—on a mostly paid basis—to black Africans, as reparation and restitution for theft, exploitation, and brutality during apartheid. It’s messy and complicated, and a subject that brings up bad feelings all around. It’s not necessarily a new problem, however—despite the hysteria of Carlson and Trump. The white-genocide and white-discrimination narratives, and the associated slander against black African governance and self-determination, are based mostly on fabrications from so-called “Afrikaner-rights groups” like AfriForum. Those groups have found a receptive ear in an American white-nationalist movement obsessed with the idea of white genocide, and a new conservative political and media establishment that has crept toward openly embracing the fear of white genocide as a platform.

Previous U.S. presidents might’ve sought a firm understanding of the situation on the ground in South Africa before reacting to a six-minute segment on a TV show, and reached out to the government before echoing the talking points of white nationalists. Previous presidents are not Donald Trump.

Trump is easily impressed by lies and falsehoods that appear to support the agenda of his mostly white base, and the backlash that he has received for repeatedly spreading misinformation from hucksters, hoaxers, and hate groups hasn’t seemed to phase him. In November 2017, just a few months after his lukewarm and controversial criticism of Klansmen and Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, he received an official rebuke from British Prime Minister Theresa May after retweeting videos from the far-right group Britain First purporting to show crimes committed by Muslim immigrants. He’s repeatedly shared tweets from garden-variety racists and bigots, and he once retweeted an actual Twitter account with the name “White Genocide.” Each time, the president has either done nothing or deleted the tweet with little explanation and no apology, and he’s rarely been pressed about it.