Retreating to his safe space after news broke that his former campaign chairman had been found guilty on multiple criminal counts, and his former fixer had potentially implicated him in a federal crime, Donald Trump found himself immersed Wednesday in the dulcet tones of his favorite Fox News host, the prime-time arbiter of white anxiety, Tucker Carlson. What he found there was a rant against South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, and Ramaphosa’s proposed plan to implement constitutional changes allowing the government to expropriate land without compensation—a move aimed at remedying the racial disparity that has persisted in South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994. Though he warned that the country would suffer the same fate as Zimbabwe, whose re-distribution of white-owned land plunged it into financial turmoil, Carlson’s argument was not solely economic: he accused Ramaphosa of “seizing land from his own citizens without compensation because they are the wrong skin color.” Hours later, Trump quoted Carlson in a tweet, announcing that he has directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures,” as well as the “killing of farmers.”

Trump, who reportedly pronounced Nepal as “nipple”, is not known for his grasp of geopolitical complexities. In fact, as the Toronto Star notes, his Wednesday tweet marked the first time he has used the word “Africa” on the platform since becoming president—all the more reason to view his sudden interest with skepticism. As it stands, government figures state that white South Africans own 72 percent of individually held farmland, despite constituting just 9 percent of the population. Though the government has made various attempts to rectify the situation, nothing has moved the needle. Now, with elections looming, the ruling African National Congress (A.N.C.) has proposed a constitutional amendment allowing it to repossess land from white farmers. According to an A.N.C. statement released in May, the move would be “a call to action, to decisively break with the historical injustice of colonial, apartheid, and patriarchal patterns of land ownership,” intended to “build a South Africa that belongs to all.”

These nuances, of course, are scrubbed from the Twitter feed of the president, who has instead chosen to rely on the expertise of a man whom the neo-Nazi Web site the Daily Stormer has called its “greatest ally.” Indeed, the issue of South African land-expropriation laws (which, incidentally, have not yet been enacted) has been enthusiastically taken up by the far right as evidence of an ongoing genocide against a white minority. Central to the push is South African lobbying group AfriForum, which in recent years has worked to persuade the international community of a rash of race-based killings that specifically target white farmers. Various media figures have taken up the cause, including British media personality Katie Hopkins, who declared she was heading to South Africa to document the “racial war waged by black extremists who are systematically murdering white farmers” (Hopkins was fired from British radio show LBC after calling for a “final solution” to Islamic terrorism), and in June 2017, Ann Coulter tweeted that the “only real refugees” are “white South African farmers facing genocide.”

There’s fairly little evidence for this—research conducted by one of South Africa’s largest farmers’ organizations suggests murders of white South African farmers are at a 20-year low. Responding to Trump on Twitter, the South African government said that its country “totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past,” while former U.S. ambassador to South Africa, Patrick Gaspard, eviscerated Trump in a tweet of his own, writing, “The President of the U.S. needs political distractions to turn our gaze away from his criminal cabal, and so he’s attacking South Africa with the disproven racial myth of ‘large scale killings of farmers.’ This man has never visited the continent and has no discernible Africa policy.” The Southern Poverty Law Center released its own statement, comparing Trump’s convictions to those of mass murderer and white supremacist Dylann Roof:

Whether Trump understands the implications of his tweet is open for debate. But Carlson, one of Fox’s premiere dog-whistlers, certainly does. He shored up the president’s anti-immigrant talking points on his show last month, telling his audience, “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country, at a rate that American voters consistently say they don’t want.” (It’s unclear whether he was citing a real statistic.) In a vacuum, Carlson’s views would likely be relegated to an obscure corner of the Internet. But in the age of Trump, they have a tangible impact on international policy—after Trump’s tweet quoting the Fox host, South Africa’s Mail & Guardian reported that AfriForum “claims it is ‘making progress’ following its visit to the United States earlier this year to garner support for its fight against land expropriation without compensation and so-called ‘white genocide.’”