Ties with U.S. and South Africa's Far Right
SCIUTTO: A murder trial is set to begin on Monday for the man accused of plowing his car into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, and killing a protester there. James Alex Fields is charged with killing Heather Heyer as she marched against a white nationalist rally last year. The hate that sparked that rally has spread and grown around the world, sadly. Now a group of white South African farmers say that they've been energized by the alt-right in the U.S. and by President Trump's rhetoric. They believe they are in danger, and the country is heading towards a brutal race war. But murders of white farmers in South Africa account for less than 1 percent of all murders in the country. Here's CNN's David McKenzie.</s>DAVID MCKENZIE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice over): The Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Even in its bloody aftermath, a young woman killed by a neo-Nazi, President Trump refused to pick sides.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: What about the alt-left? They came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right. Do they have any semblance of guilt?</s>MCKENZIE: Facing mounting criticism, the president would eventually condemn hate groups, but not before his initial comments were echoed by white supremacists globally.</s>SIMON ROCHE, SUIDLANDERS: How all these people, these right-wingers in the USA, restrain themselves in the face of such antagonism I really don't know.</s>MCKENZIE: That's an audio message from a South African sent from Charlottesville back home to his followers. His photo places Simon Roche at the scene. Surrounded by Nazi flags, he's in the corner wearing a hard hat.</s>ROCHE: The time is now for you to, white men, to arise.</s>MCKENZIE: And he took to the alt-right media for support.</s>ROCHE: Help us to continue to fight the good fight.</s>MCKENZIE: A constant theme.</s>ROCHE: We represent the white people of South Africa who are presently being told that they can expect to see a genocide.</s>MCKENZIE: For Roche and his group, the Suidlanders, the warning is more than just rhetoric. On a remote farm in South Africa, they are preparing for an all-out race war.</s>MCKENZIE (on camera): What does it feel like for you to have your family here hiding in the bushes if this was a real world situation?</s>ROCHE: Well, it would be really disturbing, but if you're prepared for it, it's not that bad.</s>MCKENZIE (voice over): It's a drill, of course. Here catsup replaces real blood.</s>MCKENZIE: But make no mistake, Roche is deadly serious about his founder's doomsday prophesy.</s>ROCHE: There is a pervasive sense amongst certain sectors of historically white societies, that those societies are being diluted on other people's terms.</s>MCKENZIE (on camera): But when you a term like diluted, I think Nazism, I think eugenics, I think all of these horrible things from the past.</s>MCKENZIE: Why is being diluted a problem?</s>ROCHE: That's neurotic. The societies are in demographic terms being diluted. We are preparing for a storm. Like the canary in the coal mine of the same anxieties and distresses that are being experienced in western Europe and in the</s>USA. MCKENZIE: So a lot of oxygen comes from support in the</s>U.S. ROCHE: Yes. Terrific oxygen.</s>MCKENZIE (voice over): Oxygen in the form of an inaccurate tweet from the U.S. president. There it was, a tweet from left field. I've asked Secretary of State Pompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large-scale killing of farmers.</s>HEIDI BEIRICH, INTELLIGENCE PROJECT DIRECTOR, SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTRE: It's not really, you know, at the end of the day about any kinds of facts or data. Once Trump put out that tweet, attention was drawn to this theory of white South African farmers under attack and being genocided in a way that had never happened before.</s>MCKENZIE: A South African myth connecting white supremacists worldwide, in videos and chat rooms and far right websites and increasingly in the mainstream. David McKenzie, CNN, near Welkom (ph), South Africa.</s>SCIUTTO: Well, we often ask if presidential tweets matter. There's an example of where they do. Coming up, could President Trump's next chief of staff be as close as the vice president's office?