Plan B with Rebecca Davis

And I have been looking online for coverage and wanting to see what kind of coverage, sympathetic or critical, there has been of the Lex Libertas 3,000 white crosses displayed in Washington story and it's kind of like a void, Rebecca.

You mean in America? Yes.

Very much less coverage than in South Africa, where there has been a fair amount of buzz, but it doesn't seem to have attracted that much attention from too many media sites in America or elsewhere.

I've been looking and thinking about this a lot this week, John.

I've just written a big piece about it for DM168, the Saturday newspaper we produce.

And here's the thing.

What Ernst Rutz and Lex Libertas did, which was to specifically foreground the issue of farm murders in South Africa to Washington, is not unique and it's not the first time this has happened.

It's not the first time Washington has seen protests devoted specifically to this issue, South African farm murders.

In 2018, I discovered an almost identical event was staged to the one that Rutz put on last weekend.

Protesters displayed a kill the farmer, kill the Boer banner, and they placed 50 white crosses decorated with South African flags on the lawn outside the South African embassy.

Now, the group responsible for that was not South African, John.

It was American.

And it was called Identity Europa, which was by that stage one of the most notorious white supremacist groups in the U.S. because it helped organize protests.

The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and it is the group that is credited with popularizing the race slogan, You Will Not Replace Us.

So they were the ones staging an almost identical protest to Roots in 2018.

And in 2012, another set of protests devoted to Roots.

South African farm murders took place, one in Washington, but also in 12 American cities simultaneously, under an umbrella campaign called the South Africa Project.

And it was a very diverse

protest

in that the Anti-Defamation League reported at the time the participants represented all five major strands of organized American white supremacy.

Neo-Nazis, racial skinheads, traditional white supremacists, Christian identity adherents, and racist prison gangs.

But the major organizing body of those protests was the white supremacist group Aryan Nations.

So what this shows us is that this issue has been of particular interest and concern to one specific constituency in America, which is white supremacists, and why that would be the case.

is because research shows that one of the most durable themes in American far-right propaganda for centuries has been the idea that whites are disproportionately the victims of murder by black people, that these attacks are always motivated only by racial hatred, and that the media conspires to conceal the real scale of the crisis.

But the obvious problem for American white supremacists is that U.S. crime data does not remotely establish this as plausible because the FBI Department of Justice crime figures show more than 80 percent of white murder victims are killed by whites.