The recent White House missive about South African white farmers carries an ominous echo from American history. We’ve seen this white nationalist playbook before—and we know exactly where it leads.

Wilson’s “America First”: KKK Ideology in the White House

In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson screened the white supremacist propaganda “Birth of a Nation” at the White House, becoming the first president to show a film there. This wasn’t just entertainment—it was endorsement. The film portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and white Southerners as victims because they lost the Civil War, while depicting newly freed Black Americans as threats to white safety and prosperity.

Wilson’s administration didn’t just screen violent racist propaganda; it implemented it as policy. Federal workplaces were rapidly resegregated at his demand, a process that later defined South African apartheid policies. The president himself praised sensationalized fictional racist propaganda in the film as “historical accuracy,” lending his presidential authority to a narrative that painted white Americans as victims when Blacks dared to gain equality or racial progress.

Sound familiar?

“America First” and MAGA are KKK Rhetoric of Victimhood

Then, as now, the “America First” formula was simple but deadly effective:

• Present white communities as innocent victims
• Ignore historical context and systemic oppression
• Use selective anecdotes to suggest widespread threat
• Frame any discussion of historical injustice as reverse discrimination

Wilson’s rhetoric about protecting white Americans from supposed threats helped create the ideological foundation for what came next, both in America and South Africa.

The “America First” Racist Attack Plan: Wilson’s Bloody Hands

The years following Wilson’s embrace of KKK ideology witnessed an explosion of racial violence unprecedented since the Civil War:

• The Red Summer of 1919 saw coordinated racial massacres across dozens of American cities. In Chicago alone, 38 people died and over 500 were injured as white mobs, emboldened by rhetoric about protecting white neighborhoods, attacked Black communities.
• The Elaine Massacre of 1919
  in Arkansas began when Black farmers tried to organize fair market wages and prices. White authorities, primed by losing the Civil War and years of rhetoric about white economic interests being zero sum, responded with systematic slaughter of Blacks. Federal troops were sent by President Wilson to shoot the Blacks. Estimates suggest up to 240 American Blacks were systematically killed by federally sanctioned attacks on civilians (Wilson tried to suppress investigations), while only five white deaths were recorded.
• The Tulsa KKK Massacre of 1921 destroyed the prosperous Greenwood district—known as “Black Wall Street”—killing an estimated 300 people and dumping the bodies into unmarked mass graves. The violence began with false white supremacist grievances (a white woman was looked at by a Black boy) fueled by years of resentment toward Black economic success, resentment that had been validated and encouraged by the highest levels of government.

American Pattern Recognition

These weren’t isolated incidents. They were the predictable result of presidential rhetoric of “America First”:

• Legitimized white grievance narratives
• Portrayed racial progress as a threat to white safety
• Used the authority of the presidency to validate discriminatory ideologies
• Created an atmosphere where violence against minority communities seemed justified

“America First” Today is the Same as Ever

The recent White House article about South Africa follows this same dangerous template.

Fraudulently presenting white South African farmers as victims, by willfully ignoring the historical context of deadly racist apartheid and its ongoing effects, it employs the same false victimhood narrative that Wilson used to devastate American Black lives, murdering hundreds if not thousands.

Just as Wilson ignored Jim Crow segregation, let alone slavery, while portraying whites as the only victims in America, today’s rhetoric ignores apartheid while presenting whites as the primary victims of their own racial injustices.

Trump is Promoting Domestic Terrorism

History doesn’t repeat exactly, but it rhymes with frightening precision. The 1919-1921 period shows us where presidential validation of white nationalist violence narratives leads: to organized murders, destroyed communities, and “America First” crosses burning in lawns.

We cannot afford to ignore these parallels. When the White House legitimizes narratives that present victims of oppression as the threat, and white supremacist oppressors as the only real victims, we recreate the ideological conditions for violence that serves “America First” yet again.

The question isn’t whether such rhetoric will have consequences—history tells us it will. The question is whether we’ll recognize the pattern in time to prevent another Red Summer, another Elaine, another Tulsa.

Learning the Law, and Restoring Order

Recognizing the “America First” patterns isn’t about political partisanship—it’s about preventing tragedy. MAGA is literally a call to return the world to Wilson’s follies; a time when the highest office in the land validates dangerous racial narratives, to oppress non-whites with intent to transfer all power and privilege to a small select group of whites protected by propaganda and secret police.

The victims of 1919-1921 deserve to be remembered not just as casualties of racists in their time, but as warnings for ours. Their deaths remind us that presidential words have consequences, and that the “America First” front to the KKK returned because voters failed to learn from them.

We’ve been here before. We know how this story ends. The only question is whether we’re willing to write a different ending this time.

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Debunking an “America First” President: Like Shooting Racist Fish in a Barrel.

We’re not dealing with new or innovative racism in 2025, but literally the same century-old playbook being recycled by the current White House. The following logical fallacy analysis of overtly racist American government propaganda may as well be from 1915.

Key Pattern: Nearly every White House argument commits the same dumb logical error of presenting anecdotal evidence as systematic proof while strategically ignoring the far more important historical context, comparative data, and complex socioeconomic factors caused by white nationalist oppressive regimes.

Source	Type of Fallacy	Why It’s Misleading
Personal anecdote: “You can’t stay on a farm as a white person”	Hasty Generalization	Single testimony presented as universal truth; ignores broader crime statistics affecting all racial groups
New York Post: “White South African couple say they’re victims”	Cherry Picking	Highlights isolated cases while ignoring systematic data on crime rates across all demographics
Daily Mail: “Why white South Africans are fleeing”	False Cause	Assumes racial targeting without establishing causation; ignores economic factors in migration
BBC: “Afrikaner defends refugee status”	Appeal to Emotion	Uses individual hardship stories to suggest systematic persecution without statistical evidence
Breitbart: “Trump Vindicated as South Africa considers land redistribution”	Circular Reasoning	Uses partisan source to “vindicate” Trump’s own claims; ignores historical context of land ownership
BBC: “Land seizure law”	False Equivalence	Equates legal land reform (with compensation provisions) to violent seizure
BBC: “70,000 South Africans expressed interest in moving”	Bandwagon Fallacy	Uses interest in immigration as proof of persecution; ignores economic motivations
NY Times: “Kill the Boer song”	Composition Fallacy	Takes extremist political rhetoric and applies it to entire government/population
NY Times: “Killing of White Farmer becomes flash point”	Availability Heuristic	Emphasizes memorable violent incidents while ignoring broader crime context
Sky News Australia: “Anti-white racism”	Confirmation Bias	Partisan source that confirms predetermined narrative without balanced analysis
News.com.au: “Racial violence escalates”	Loaded Language	Uses inflammatory terms without providing comparative crime data
The Independent: “Taking farms from whites is justified”	Strawman Argument	Presents extremist political position as mainstream government policy
Multiple sources on “farm attacks”	Statistical Manipulation	Focuses on one crime category without context of overall crime rates or rural vs urban statistics

The Trump white supremacist “America First” regime is as wrong as the day is long.

• Those who announce they’re right, more probably are wrong
• Truth doesn’t need “golden proclamation showers” because it stands on evidence
• Emotional anecdotes emphasized over rational analysis belies the lies (Meir Kahane’s strategy of presenting Jews as perpetual victims while simultaneously advocating for Jewish supremacy and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians)
• The pleading, weak defensive posture, reveals they know their position fails basic tests
• Classic authoritarianism to prevent real power: assert truths with sock puppet popularity contests and repetition rather than proofs

President Wilson used these exact same tactics. He declared the fictional KKK propaganda film Birth of a Nation “historically accurate”, not because any historians agreed, but because he wanted his ill-gotten authority to override all factual analysis. The defensive posture admits they know that their position can’t survive scrutiny. What’s surprising is how the KKK rebranding as “America First” has normalized a racist domestic terrorism agenda that fails basic natsec scrutiny.

As a simple example, white nationalists known as the South African AWB used to ride through Black neighborhoods admittedly trying to kill Black women and children as “game”. After the end of apartheid, Black police officers were trained and stationed to defend innocent people from terrorism. Suddenly the usual white supremacist privilege ended, and AWB were stopped and killed when they drove a car into a Black neighborhood trying to shoot randomly into homes. Trump literally is trying to call these long-standing foreign terrorist groups the only victims, after law and order was established to stop their white supremacist terror tactics.

This pattern recognition isn’t academic for security professionals—it’s practical preparation for everyone countering the next wave of “America First” propaganda that will inevitably follow. Every time someone tries to present these white supremacist oppressors as victims while ignoring their victims, we now have the historical context and analytical tools to expose the lie immediately.

Here is some hilariously sharp analysis from the Guardian’s John Crace.

Even after nine years, it was still too soon to say the obvious. That Britain had voted to make itself poorer. That Brexiters had radicalised themselves. […] Most Brexit voters now think Brexit was a bad idea. They just want things to return to how they were without anyone reminding them that they had voted for it.

To be fair, it was Russia who radicalized British voters using American social media platforms. It was exactly the thing I presented 13 years ago, July 2012 at BSidesLV, as a dire threat.

In the early days of cinema, when women’s participation in films was itself revolutionary especially in India, a young woman named PK Rosy broke barriers by becoming the first female lead in Malayalam cinema. Her pioneering role in the 1920s film “Vigathakumaran” (The Lost Child) should have secured her place in history books forever. Instead, her legacy was systematically erased by eNadella suggested that women should trust the system to provide equal pay rather than explicitly asking for raiseslites unwilling to accept a poor woman portraying a character on screen above her “caste” in real life.

“She was likely aware of the fact that this was a new arena and making herself visible was important,” says Professor Malavika Binny of Kannur University. “People from the Pulaya community were considered slave labour and auctioned off with land. They were considered the ‘lowliest’. They were flogged, raped, tied to trees and set on fire for any so-called transgressions.”

Imagine the problems, in other words, if the Indian women who were “caste” in a system to be raped and murdered by elites suddenly acquired status such as being seen as actual people with full rights. Oh, the horror! I’m reminded of the controversy when a Microsoft CEO fired his entire AI ethics team for raising concerns about human suffering. Things haven’t changed as much as we might think, have they?

I could no longer hide my head in the sand over the fact that [the Microsoft CEO] remarks—and his almost-instant recovery—was a naked spectacle of the CEO’s upper-caste Hindu Brahmin male privilege reaching out across continents to high-five his American capitalist male supremacy.

That’s a reference to the time that Satay Nadella, as CEO of Microsoft, suggested women should trust the system to provide them equality and not explicitly request fair treatment. And on that note, Rosy belonged to the Pulaya community and faced severe oppression under the system, the kind that apparently the Microsoft CEO trusts and high-fives? Born as Rajamma in the early 1900s in Travancore (now Kerala), she overcame a system of intense oppression to pursue her passion for art, eventually catching the attention of director JC Daniel for a groundbreaking film.

The backlash was immediate and severe. Audiences were outraged by a poor woman portraying a elitist Nair character named Sarojini. During the film’s premiere, which Rosy herself was prevented from attending because of prejudice and hate, the “civilized elitist” audience rioted like fools and destroyed the theater screen. The barbaric mob then turned on her to set her house on fire, forcing her to flee for her life.

What followed reveals the devastating impact of discrimination on personal identity. Rosy was forced into hiding and cut all ties with her family. Of course she still was the talented and beautiful human the elites refused to acknowledge, but she cleverly found a loophole in obscurity and married an upper-caste man named Kesavan Pillai, took the name Rajammal, and lived the remainder of her life unknown in Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu. Even more telling of the trauma inflicted by Indian oppression of poor women: her children reportedly refused to acknowledge their mother’s Dalit identity and past as an actor in order to ensure their own survival.

Her nephew, Biju Govindan, poignantly describes this erasure:

Her children were born with an upper-caste Kesavan Pillai’s identity. They chose their father’s seed over their mother’s womb. We, her family, are part of PK Rosy’s Dalit identity before the film’s release. In the space they inhabit, caste restricts them from accepting their Dalit heritage. That is their reality and our family has no place in it.

The identity-based attacks were so vicious that no verified photographs of Rosy exist. The film reels like the screen were brutally targeted and destroyed. A provocative 2023 Google Doodle of her 120th birthday had to use a rough illustration of her beauty. Her story represents not just personal tragedy but the systematic way in which marginalized communities are held down and wiped from cultural memory to prolong their exploitation. As Govindan notes:

Rosy prioritised survival over art and, as a result, never tried to speak publicly or reclaim her lost identity. That’s not her failure – it’s society’s.

Only in recent years have filmmakers and activists begun reclaiming Rosy’s important legacy, with initiatives like the PK Rosy Film Festival celebrating Dalit cinema. Yet her story remains a powerful reminder of how elite gatekeepers control historical narratives, and how the intersection of caste and gender can lead to complete identity erasure even for those who make groundbreaking contributions. You might ask who preserved any memory of Rosy and why? The Big Indian Picture offers historians this story:

… journalist, Kunnukuzhi Mani, has been credited with being the first person to try and dig out the truth about Rosy’s life, including, but not restricted to, her involvement in Vigathakumaran. “It was at N. N. Pillai’s theatre seminar in 1968 or 69, I think. Kambisseri Karunakaran (journalist, actor and politician belonging to the Communist Party of India) told me about Rosy, a poor woman, a grass-cutter, who acted in the first film. I started investigating from then. Kambisseri gave me the information. He asked if I would do an investigation on this. I was a reporter then, an editor for the paper Kalapremi.” Kunnukuzhi met Rosy’s relatives and talked to them. He also spoke to J. C. Daniel’s relatives: “I went to Nagercoil. His siblings were there. I asked them about it. That’s how I found his house in Agastheeswaram (Tamil Nadu).” After his conversation with Daniel, Kunnukuzhi came back and wrote his first article on Rosy in Kalapremi in 1971. Since then he has written about her in several Malayalam magazines….

The recent case of a Harvard scientist – facing Trumped up criminal charges to contrive her deportation to Russia – bears disturbing similarities to historical patterns of scientific persecution.

Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard scientist, has been in a correctional facility in Louisiana for the past three months since being detained.

Examining the Nazi targeting of scientists reveals patterns that help contextualize current American concerns.

The Nazi Blueprint for Scientific Suppression

• Legal and Administrative Mechanisms
  The Nazi assault on science began with the seemingly bureaucratic “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” in April 1933. This measure removed Jews and political opponents from academic positions, displacing over 1,600 scholars including Nobel laureates Albert Einstein, Max Born, and James Franck.
• Border Control as Scientific Control
  As conditions worsened, the regime weaponized border controls and passport restrictions. Scientists found their travel documents invalidated or were denied permission to take research materials out of the country. Those with international connections were particularly targeted as potential “knowledge transferors.”
• Forced Returns and Exploitation
  For scientists who escaped, the regime attempted to force their return through family threats, citizenship revocation, and property confiscation. Those who remained faced an impossible choice: abandon their work or serve the regime, as exemplified by Werner Heisenberg’s eventual leadership of the German nuclear program or chemist Walter Thiel’s slaves of “1930s Silicon Valley” forced by him to develop rocket propulsion for bombing UK cities.

  

Petrova’s Case: Disturbing Parallels

Petrova’s situation contains alarming echoes of this pattern:

A tiny, minor customs infraction (failing to declare scientific samples for her own science lab) escalated without explanation through immediate visa cancellation, prompting Judge Reiss to question, “Where does a customs and border patrol officer have the authority on his or her own to revoke a visa?”

The answer comes from 1930s Nazi German history, which modeled itself on America First doctrines of the late 1800s. The systems of oppression relied heavily on lower-level officials who took local initiative to implement what they perceived as Hitler’s will, often without explicit orders – a symptom of fascism historians recognize as “working towards the Führer.”

Nazi border officials and customs agents were among the first to exercise broad discretionary powers that went beyond their formal authority. They would often make life-altering decisions about who could leave the country and what they could take with them, who could live or die, similar to the customs officer in Petrova’s case unilaterally revoking her visa.

This administrative overreach was central to how the Nazi system operated. Officials at all levels began taking actions they believed aligned with the regime’s goals without needing explicit directives. This is documented in cases where customs officials prevented scientists from taking research materials or personal belongings when leaving Germany, even when there was no formal law prohibiting it.

Ian Kershaw, a prominent historian of Nazi Germany, described this phenomenon where lower-level bureaucrats would “anticipate the Führer’s wishes” and act on their own initiative to implement what they believed leadership wanted – often going beyond their formal authority. The result was a system where persecution could operate through seemingly mundane administrative channels without requiring explicit orders from the top.

…radicalisation and atrocities in Nazi Germany were often driven by subordinates competing for advancement and aiming to follow Hitler’s broadly outlined wishes.

The intention to deport Petrova to Russia, a country she fled in 2022 fearing political persecution, closely mirrors the cruel Nazi practice of forced returns that refugee scientists of the 1930s “Silicon Valley” death camps dreaded for reasons obvious today.

The timing of her alleged criminal charges – filed three months after detention and immediately following a judge’s scheduling of a bail hearing – reveals these charges may be a specific loophole to undermine the law, a mechanism to ensure continued detention rather than admit the actual infraction is too tiny to even warrant detention.

The broader pattern affecting other academics creates what Massachusetts Attorney General called a “reckless and cruel misuse of power to punish and terrorize noncitizen members of the academic community.” Academia is expected now to be punished in America for acts of scientific rigor and integrity, rewarded only for displays of devotion and loyalty to Trump.

Consequences and Lessons

The Nazi persecution created the greatest intellectual migration in history, with Germany losing approximately 25% of its physics, chemistry, and mathematics faculty by the 1938 systematic Nazi acts of book burning.

…let’s be honest: this kind of hate doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s part of a disturbing wave we’re seeing across the country. A wave enabled – sometimes with a wink and a nod, sometimes with a bullhorn—by leaders who should know better than to fan the flames of division for political gain.

The politically driven Nazi brain drain devastated German science (leaving their Army powered mostly by horses and slaves in WWII) while strengthening American institutions where immigration and diversity of voices were welcomed.

The Nazi-like realignment of science in America today risks not just individual careers but entire research networks, as Harvard researcher Adam Sychla noted: “I easily could have met her last week to start a collaboration. Instead, Kseniia is being unfairly detained.”

The scientific community’s response matters greatly. In the 1930s, organizations like the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars helped hundreds escape persecution. Today, the Harvard students and faculty who traveled to support Petrova demonstrate recognition of what’s at stake: not just one scientist’s freedom, but the principle that science must remain beyond the reach of political persecution.

[President] Macron reiterated that the Choose France for Science initiative, launched a few weeks ago, “generated over 30,000 visits, one-third from the United States, with several hundred application files opened”. The goal is to “welcome talent at every level, from PhD students to Nobel laureates, including post-docs and junior professors, based solely on the quality of their work”.

How the world responds to such cases will determine not just individual fates but also the future of international scientific collaboration and America’s position for scientific talent fleeing persecution. On the face of it, deporting a Harvard scientist to Russia without cause is a cruel, undemocratic and self-defeating act of a petty autocrat bullying the scientific community. Europe, Australia and Canada stand to “brain gain” individually as well as align more together against such acts of the sewage-contaminated American regime.