[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]

By now the whole world must have heard about the way in which the Episcopal Church (ECUSA) disgraced itself earlier this month. As I wrote last week, the Church withdrew from a longstanding arrangement that would require it to help resettle a group of 59 refugees who’d just been flown to the United States. True, these were refugees with a difference. Unlike most so-called refugees who have entered the U.S. in recent years, these ones were honest-to-God families – husbands, wives, and small children. Unlike other refugees, moreover, they arrived in the U.S. waving not the flag of their old country but the flag of their new one. Moreover, their gratitude was palpable. Their smiles were infectious. They gave every indication of being law-abiding, hard-working people who would be loyal American citizens and a boon to the U.S., not a burden.

Why, then, did the ECUSA give them the cold shoulder? Because of the one difference that plainly mattered to the ECUSA far more than any other: they were the wrong color. They were white, and their persecutors back in their native land, the Republic of South Africa (RSA), are black. Specifically, their persecutors are the thugs who govern that once-prosperous nation (to use the word “govern” very loosely indeed). These thugs have long made clear their intense hatred for white people, and especially for the community of white farmers to which these refugees belonged.

The situation, if you don’t already know, is as follows: although whites make up a small minority of South Africa’s population, they own most of its farmland, a state of affairs that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) considers unjust. Hence last year’s Expropriation Act, which empowers the government to seize white-owned farms without compensation. Those farms are then given to black people, almost all of whom, knowing absolutely nothing about agriculture – and insufficiently interested, it would appear, in learning anything about it – have turned lush, productive fields into desert, thereby helping to transition a once-booming economy into something approaching disaster.

The Afrikaans word for farmer is boer, and in a video that has been widely circulated on social media, Julius Malema, a member of the South African parliament and a potential successor to the current president, Cyril Ramaphosa, can be seen onstage, shouting repeatedly in front of an enthusiastic black mob: “Kill the boer, the farmer!” You would think that this video alone would settle all questions about the appropriateness of allowing these refugees into the U.S. But no. An online post by the New York Times stated that “police data” – presumably, data provided by the South African police – disprove the claim that these people’s lives were in danger. Meanwhile, an article in the Times cast the government confiscation of white-owned farmland in the most sympathetic imaginable light, and quoted Ramaphosa’s would-be clarification of the Expropriation Act: it’s “not a confiscation instrument,” he contended, “but a constitutionally mandated legal process.” Now, that’s the ultimate distinction without a difference.

As for the “Kill the boer” mantra, the Times maintained that the ANC had “distanced itself from the chant years ago” – how nice of them! – and that, in any case, respected historians had stated that it “should not be taken literally.” That’s a hoot. As if all this weren’t enough, the Times blithely dismissed as “baseless” Elon Musk’s insistence that a “genocide of white people” is underway in the land of his birth. This is, of course, the same newspaper that used words like “baseless” in rejecting the now-credited lab-origin theory of COVID, the many valid expressions of concern about the COVID vaccines, the many legitimate criticisms of draconian lockdown measures, and the entirely truthful assertions about the contents and provenance of a certain laptop.

Throughout the legacy media, there was outrage over these 59 Afrikaner families. On MSNBC, Richard Stengel insisted that “there’s no injustice” against whites in South Africa and condemned the refugees’ admission into the U.S. as “deeply and morally wrongheaded and repulsive”; Afrikaners, he asserted, “have become the darling of right-wing supremacists around the world. It’s like the Old Confederacy.” This “Old Conspiracy” line was a favorite media trope, even though the massas in today’s South Africa are black and the people working in the fields are white. Legacy-media folk also found it incredible that the 57 Afrikaners whom Trump was helping were the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators of apartheid. Yes, and the couple of million people whom we fed with the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift were the very same people who’d just fought us in World War II.

As with the leftist media, so it was with the leftist mob. Across America, Democrats who probably never lost a moment’s sleep over Biden’s admission of millions of unvetted immigrants into the U.S. (but who could recently be seen bemoaning the fate of the El Salvador gang member turned “Maryland man”) went ballistic over this planeload of families. Most of the critics seemed to be females. One smug black woman, a “career coach” named Diva Moore, made a video in which she warned the new arrivals that they won’t be accorded Secret Service protection in the U.S, where blacks are “empowered.” In short, they’ll be sitting ducks for potential assassins like Luigi Mangione and Trump’s Butler assailant, Ryan Routh. It was one more example (just like James Comey’s “8647” tweet) of how when the left doesn’t get what it wants, it talks murder.

Another woman, Denise Conroy, who is white (and who has boasted online about being “pro-black,” “pro-trans,” “anti-cop,” “anti-colonialism,” etc.), also had a message for the Afrikaners. “We don’t want you here,” she spat out. Calling Afrikaans a “dirty guttural” language, Conroy ordered them to “stop speaking it” because “nobody wants to hear that shit.” (Imagine her saying such a thing about any other language from the so-called “global South”!) Conroy went on to inform the Afrikaners that in the U.S., they wouldn’t have armies of black servants to wait on them hand and foot. Plainly she has no concept of these farmers’ lives back home. Indeed, she mocked the very notion of Afrikaners being oppressed by blacks. Blacks oppressing whites? For a properly indoctrinated leftist, such a thing just doesn’t compute.

Nor did she, or any of these commentators, appear to know the first thing about South African history. They were uniformly unaware that the Afrikaners, far from pushing the Zulus off their lands, had actually lived in what is now South Africa before the Zulus came. They appeared not to know that a great many white South Africans were active opponents of apartheid and had high hopes for the new colorblind society that they were promised by the likes of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Never did they imagine that they – or their children or grandchildren – might someday have to flee for their lives.

These commentators also parroted the lie that no white-owned farms have been expropriated. I’d recommend that they watch Dave Rubin’s recent conversation with South African businessman Rob Hershov, who talked about the expropriation, and a recent video by South African William Petzer about the dismal fate of expropriated farms. Lauren Southern’s harrowing documentary Farmlands paints a vivid picture of the Afrikans farmers’ torment under the ANC. One striking detail: far from sipping juleps on wraparound porches like antebellum rice planters, many Afrikaner farmers, in order to protect themselves from marauding blacks, have to close off parts of their homes with massive gates of the kind you see in a bank vault. It’s a haunting sight.

A couple of recent South African podcasts illuminate the attitudes of that country’s blacks. On one, the host called whites “an inferior species to us.” On another, a black South African urged his countrymen to jettison the race- and revolution-obsessed ANC leaders and their Soviet-style regulations on business, and to encourage foreign investment along the same lines as countries like Singapore and Taiwan. To watch all of these programs is to recognize that the persecution of white farmers is only one small part of an approach to statecraft that is rooted in the old grievances of the apartheid era, the ragged doctrines of Marxism-Leninism, and the more recent fatuities of Critical Race Theory.

Also illuminating was President Ramaphosa’s comment about the refugees. He called them “cowards.” Meanwhile, a government spokesperson accused them of fleeing “racial justice.” Racial justice? What’s that supposed to mean? Is it just a pretty way of saying “kill the boers”? It certainly sounds like a term that Hitler could have coined. Interestingly, the Presiding Bishop of the ECUSA, Sean Rowe, used it himself when seeking to justify his refusal to help resettle those 59 Afrikaners. Because the ECUSA has a “long commitment to racial justice and reconciliation,” he explained, helping oppressed Afrikaners – small children included – is “not in line with anything we’re about.”

Remarkable. I’m not familiar with Bishop Rowe, so I looked up a recent interview with him. Some of his answers, in the present context, are striking. Commenting on the resignation of Anglican Primate Justin Welby, who’d mishandled a child sexual abuse case, Rowe professed to be grieved “that the church does not always live up to its ideal as a place where all of God’s children are safe.” Rowe went on to admit that the ECUSA, like other denominations, has been “untrustworthy or partisan or judgmental or out of touch” and lamented its “inability to live up to our own values.” Not least, he vowed to continue the ECUSA’s involvement in resettling refugees.

Little did Bishop Rowe imagine that he might soon be called upon to help people who’d been terrorized by his racist black buddies in South Africa – a request that, if complied with, would actually have seen him safeguarding “God’s children,” eschewing partisanship, and living up to the “values” (presumably Christian values) that he professed in that interview. Alas, instead of following Christ, Rowe chose to throw in his lot with the execrable Ramaphosa and company. May God have mercy on the dark soul of this whited sepulchre.

Well, it’s all just terribly sad. But it’s worse than that – more than that. Under knaves like Rowe and Ramaphosa, the ECUSA and the RSA are headed downhill fast. The ECUSA, once the Tiffany’s – the Cadillac! the Veuve Clicquot! – of mainline American Protestantism, is bleeding members by the day; the RSA, once the economic powerhouse of Africa, is seeing its economy shrink steadily. This isn’t good news for devout Episcopalians or patriotic South Africans, but it’s not surprising, either: a Church that puts an ecclesial brand of woke ideology ahead of Christian love, and a country that chooses a racist version of woke ideology over racial equality before the law, may make perfect international partners, but neither of them can long provide a happy home to decent, devout, and democratic-minded people. Something’s got to give. Soon enough, it’s clear, both the ECUSA and the RSA as we know them now will be no more.

And about that, one thing is clear: as the ECUSA and RSA implode, there will be more and more Episcopalians and South Africans looking for a new home. The Episcopalians will have a smorgåsbord of possibilities open to them; the South Africans, perhaps not. If Democrats return to power in Washington, they’ll almost certainly follow their own concept of racial justice – and their own political interests – and open the floodgates again to gangsters, child traffickers, rapists, and murderers from Latin America, even as they close the doors to worthy immigrants like these 59 Afrikaners, not to mention (for example) freedom-loving Christians from the Muslim world. Which is one of the many reasons why we need to ensure that the Trump administration – and, afterwards, equally MAGA-minded custodians of the Constitution – continue to call the shots in the United States of America. Otherwise, in the long run, we’ll all be sunk.