Months after getting basic facts wrong during a segment devoted to a South African plan to expropriate land to correct Apartheid-era concentration of land ownership, prompting the president to tweet that he'd look into the seizure of “land from white farmers,” Fox News’ Tucker Carlson once again went down a conspiratorial rabbit hole popular with white supremacists.
And this time around, he also accused The New York Times of believing white South African farmers have it coming.
Towards the end of his broadcast Monday night, the Tucker Carlson Tonight host reminded his viewers that last summer, he told them about “the plight of farmers in South Africa,” claiming hundreds had been killed in recent years.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Instead of protecting the farmers, the government of South Africa worked to change its country’s laws to seize land without compensation,” Carlson added. “And skin color is a central motivation. Nobody denies that.”
The conservative primetime star went on to insist that land seizure in South Africa is “racist” and “indefensible as anything that happened under Apartheid,” implying that most, if not all, of the victims of violence and land seizures are white. Furthermore, Carlson asserted that the Western media is “cheering it on.”
Carlson then turned his attention to the recent murder of a South African wine farmer whose vineyard had been occupied by shack-dwellers since last year. The Times had profiled Stefan Smit earlier this year, and in the paper’s report on his murder, the Times noted that Smit had signed an agreement in April to sell the occupied land to the municipality for $3.1 million and that “it was too soon to say whether the killing was related to the dispute over land or was a random criminal act.”
“Last year, The New York Times called this show immoral for suggesting that the farm murders might be a problem,” Carlson huffed, referencing the backlash his segment from last summer received. “But there is one problem for the Times—their own interview subjects are getting murdered.”
After pointing out the Times reported on Smit and “again concluded that it’s quote ‘false’ that farm murders are a real problem,” Carlson invoked Smit’s murder to blast the paper.
“But yesterday, four men broke into his home and shot him—it was the second farm murder in the Western Cape province in the last month,” he concluded. “According to The New York Times, they deserved it."
As The Daily Beast reported last summer, experts found Carlson’s claims about raciall -motivated South African farm murders and seizures at that time to be “filled with factual errors.” Beside the proposed law applying to a wide variety of tribal groups and organizations and impacting both black and white South Africans, statistics showed that farm killings were at a 19-year low.
