The Blaze — the media empire founded by far-right pundit Glenn Beck — has now lent credence to a longstanding white supremacist conspiracy theory: that a “white genocide” is taking place in South Africa. According to the theory’s proponents, the government of South Africa is complicit in the slaughter of minority white farmers.

The conspiracy — which has existed at least since the fall of apartheid nearly thirty years ago, and has been boosted by prominent American white nationalists — is also linked to the current debate surrounding South African land reform and the plan to expropriate stolen farmland without compensation.

In an episode of his eponymous talk show, self-described comedian Chad Prather interviewed Jason Bartlett, a 32-year-old South African and proponent of the “white genocide” conspiracy. (The episode title warned that “white genocide” may be “coming to America.”)

Bartlett has been trying to raise awareness of this supposed genocide by walking from Texas to Washington, D.C. where, he hopes, he can attract the attention of President Trump. In an August 2018 tweet, President Trump demonstrated he was at least nominally interested in this conspiracy, although he has taken no official action with regard to it.

During the interview, Bartlett made unsubstantiated claims about the killings of white farmers and offered praise to vocal white nationalists. For example, he rattled off statistics about the number of farm attacks and murders that took place in 2019 before insisting on a media cover-up.

“And these are not just murders,” Bartlett insisted. “They’re disguised by the media as just little instances of thievery.” In one such incident Bartlett said his own cousin was shot in the back of the head.

Bartlett claimed that the attacks cannot be motivated by theft, since some of them are especially brutal. And he said that the “leftist media” in the U.S. are similarly turning a blind eye to the attacks because “they know that it’s coming for America and they want it to happen.”

He offered no evidence for these claims, but Prather accepted them at face value. “You saw South Africa completely divided by apartheid,” Prather said, adding that, “Apartheid is still going on, but now rather than whites on blacks it’s blacks on whites. There’s a revenge thing that’s happening.”

Keith Malinak — executive producer of Pat Gray Unleashed, another Blaze show — denounced what he believes is a racially motivated cover-up. Malinak remarked that “these murders, these horrific crimes have been happening for years,” while the United Nations refuses to discuss them.

“And so that you don’t have to say it, I will: It’s gotta be because the victims are the wrong color,” Malinak insisted. “They don’t fit the template. So if the victims of this atrocity and this genocide and this raping of a countryside are white? Eh. Whatever. Not interested.”

Prather also chimed in to say that the U.S. should grant asylum to white South Africans instead of Somali refugees.

“You got a million hard-workin’ folks, salt of the earth people, blue collar, hard-workin’ people — they’re gun owners, they’re God-lovin’, God-fearing, they’re law-abiders — and I say those are the folks that we could bring into this country versus, say, Somalian [sic] refugees who want sharia law which completely violates our constitution,” Prather said.

“And that’s exactly what we’ve seen in places like Minneapolis where Barack Obama just brought ’em in by the school bus loads, and there they sit.”

In 2018 it was reported that President Trump voiced a similarly racist sentiment when he said in a meeting that he preferred immigrants from majority white countries like Norway to immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa. Trump reportedly said Haitians “all have AIDS” while Nigerians would never “go back to their huts.”

Prather and Bartlett shared their admiration for President Trump, whom Prather called “very pro-America.” Bartlett said he admired Trump’s leadership because, in South Africa, they have no such comparable leadership. Bartlett said that the last “leader of apartheid some people had” was hacked to death and urinated on.

It is unclear to whom Bartlett was referring when he said this.

Bartlett also boosted white nationalist activists to Prather’s audience, telling them to watch a pseudo-documentary on South Africa by Katie Hopkins as well as a book written by Ernst Roets.

Hopkins has called for a homeland for white British people and once referred to a Twitter user by a racial slur. In 2017 she was forced to quit her LBC radio show after calling for a “final solution” for Muslims following the Manchester terrorist attack. And in 2018 she insisted that James Bond could only be played by a white man.

Ernst Roets is the deputy CEO of the apartheid-whitewashing Afrikaner organization AfriForum. In 2018 Roets was a guest on Freedomain Radio, the YouTube show of white nationalist philosopher Stefan Molyneux, himself a promoter of “white genocide” conspiracies and scientific racism.

That same year AfriForum’s CEO, Kallie Kriel, old a black radio host, “I don’t think apartheid was a crime against humanity.” Although Kriel attempted to backtrack his remarks, AfriForum has been a vociferous defender of apartheid symbols. After South Africa’s Equality Court declared gratuitous displays of South Africa’s apartheid-era flag hate speech, Roets tweeted a picture of it.

Bartlett himself has received praise from white nationalists, and has gone on at least one show hosted by one.

On January 14, 2020, Bartlett was interviewed by Jean-François Gariépy, host of the alt-right talk show The Public Space. “I truly hope that you succeed both at the personal level for your asylum application but also to open up a path for South African Boers who can find a place to live,” Gariépy said. “It is a very dramatic situation and we can stop it before it becomes worse.”

[The following clips are from a 50 minute episode of The Chad Prather Show]