In an open letter to US media personality, Tucker Carlson, Gillian Schutte implored him to challenge the outright falsehoods that Ernst Roets has been promoting about South Africa—falsehoods that distort history, manipulate crime statistics, and fuel a carefully curated victimhood narrative designed to protect white economic power while deflecting from the real crisis facing this country: the enduring dispossession, landlessness, and economic exclusion of the Black majority.
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Dear Tucker Carlson,
I am writing to you to challenge the outright falsehoods that Ernst Roets has been promoting about South Africa—falsehoods that distort history, manipulate crime statistics, and fuel a carefully curated victimhood narrative designed to protect white economic power while deflecting from the real crisis facing this country: the enduring dispossession, landlessness, and economic exclusion of the Black majority.
Roets is not a historian.
He is a propagandist who peddles racial grievance politics that deliberately invert reality.
He has lost nothing, yet he portrays himself and his kind as victims, all while standing on stolen land, reaping the privileges of an economy built on the enforced subjugation of the very people he fears.
His narrative is not only factually bankrupt but also an insult to the millions of South Africans who continue to suffer under the weight of historical injustice, neoliberal economic entrapment, and corporate exploitation—conditions set in motion by the very system Roets now seeks to rebrand as civilising.
I recently watched your interview with former state department official, Mike Benz, where he meticulously exposed how USAID and other US-backed institutions manipulate foreign nations under the guise of development assistance.
He laid bare how these interventions are not about genuine upliftment but about economic control, narrative-shaping, and maintaining Western dominance. You clearly understood the depth of this deception—how the same playbook has been used in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and beyond, creating dependency rather than sovereignty.
It would be a mistake to believe South Africa is exempt from this strategy.
The very forces that have been deployed to secure US and European interests elsewhere are at work here, ensuring that economic power remains concentrated in the hands of white elites and multinational corporations.
The racial and economic disparities that Roets decries as a failure of governance are, in reality, the intended outcome of centuries of land dispossession, followed by the neoliberal stranglehold imposed after 1994.
USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and other Western-backed entities have been instrumental in controlling South Africa’s economic trajectory, obstructing genuine transformation while maintaining the illusion of post-apartheid progress.
In this context, Roets' sudden departure from Solidariteit is suspicious.
Who is funding him now?
Given the documented history of USAID and NED bankrolling opposition figures, manufacturing crises, and amplifying narratives that justify external intervention, it is entirely plausible that Roets is benefiting from the same machinery.
His role is clear: to manufacture global sympathy for white South Africans, to delegitimise Black governance, and to construct the necessary discourse that ensures continued Western economic interference.
This is the classic formula—create a victim, construct a crisis, and use that crisis as leverage for external intervention.
Let me introduce you to the ways in which Roets and his ilk have constructed victimhood.
Roets' most dangerous deception lies in his deliberate revision of history. He claims that Nguni-speaking people—the Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele, and Swazi—are settlers just like the Europeans. This is a lie, one designed to erase indigenous claims to land and rewrite history to absolve white South Africans of their role as colonial invaders.
When Jan van Riebeeck and the Dutch arrived in 1652, they did not land in an uninhabited wilderness. The Cape coastal region was home to the Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua, part of the larger Khoekhoe-speaking communities, as well as the San and various mixed pastoral and hunter-gatherer societies that had long-established trading networks across the subcontinent. These communities were among the first to face brutal land dispossession, forced removals, and violent extermination.
Their grazing lands were seized by the Dutch, their cattle stolen, and their way of life systematically dismantled.
As Dutch expansion continued, it encroached on the lands of the Xhosa to the east, igniting the century-long Frontier Wars that saw entire African communities displaced and forced into a state of landlessness.
The Glen Grey Act of 1894, introduced by British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, laid the groundwork for institutionalised land dispossession by restricting land ownership and forcing Black men into wage labour under white-controlled industries.
This was solidified by the 1913 Natives Land Act, which legally barred Black South Africans from owning land in over 90% of the country, entrenching generational poverty and economic exclusion that still defines South Africa’s structural inequality today.
Despite these historical facts, Roets and his ilk attempt to cast Afrikaners as indigenous to Africa.
This is intellectual fraud.
Being born on stolen land does not confer indigeneity.
By this logic, European settlers in North America would be indigenous, and so too would the descendants of British colonial rulers in India.
The word Afrikaner itself is a term that referred to people indigenous to Afrika before it was appropriated by white settlers to construct an identity of racial exclusion.
Roets' most incendiary lie is his claim that white South Africans, particularly farmers, are being systematically victimised, if not exterminated. This is a fabrication, designed to stoke racial paranoia and mobilise global sympathy for a privileged minority that has yet to relinquish its economic stronghold. Here are the facts. (Farm Murders, Fact vs Fiction)
Roets exploits a handful of cases, presenting them as evidence of a fictitious genocide while ignoring the real crisis: the mass suffering of Black South Africans, who remain the primary victims of poverty, crime, and economic deprivation.
Where is his outrage for the 63% of South Africans living below the upper-middle-income poverty line of $6.85 per day in 2024? (World Bank).
Where is his concern for the 27% of children under five suffering from chronic malnutrition due to hunger? (Oxfam). Where is his sympathy for the millions of Black South Africans who work under exploitative conditions on white-owned farms, earning wages that keep them trapped in generational poverty?
Roets will not acknowledge that the real victims in South Africa are the people still bearing the consequences of land dispossession and racial capitalism. Here are the stats.
White South Africans, who make up less than 10% of the population, still own 72% of private farmland (Wilson Center).
The Gini coefficient, which measures economic inequality, stands at 63, making South Africa one of the most unequal countries in the world (World Bank).
In 2024, the combined wealth of six South African Billionaires, five of them white, increased by $4.1 billion, while the number of people living in poverty remains as high as it was in 1990 (Oxfam).
This economic stranglehold is not accidental.
It is the result of centuries of systemic theft, followed by post-apartheid neoliberal entrenchment that favours white capital and multinational corporations. The IMF and World Bank ensured that South Africa remained in a state of financial dependency, discouraging radical land reform and forcing the government into debt-driven policies that protect private capital while doing little to reverse structural inequality.
Apartheid may have ended politically, but the economic exploitation of South Africa never ceased. Today, multinational corporations, mostly based in the US, UK, and Australia, continue to extract South Africa’s wealth while reinvesting almost nothing into its development.
South Africa is the world’s leading producer of platinum, manganese, and gold, yet the profits from these industries flow to foreign shareholders while mining communities suffer.
Mining corporations exploit tax loopholes and lax environmental regulations, ensuring that the country’s wealth benefits international financiers rather than its people. There is little reinvestment in infrastructure, with millions of South Africans living in informal settlements without access to proper roads, sanitation, or electricity.
South Africa is rich in resources, but its people remain poor because its wealth is extracted by global capital. Roets has no interest in discussing this theft because his agenda is to protect white privilege, not expose the true sources of economic injustice.
A particularly insidious part of Roets' rhetoric is his attempt to paint Black South Africans as inherently violent and amoral, incapable of governance, and opposed to Christianity. This is a racist fantasy.
The reality is that the vast majority of Black South Africans are devout Christians, deeply rooted in faith and community. Despite centuries of colonial brutality, forced removals, and economic exclusion, there has been no large-scale racial retribution. South Africans want justice, not revenge. But justice requires land, jobs, and economic dignity—things that Roets and his allies actively oppose.
To this end Roets has also been aggressively pushing for a decentralised government in South Africa, a concept that at first glance may seem aligned with libertarian ideals but in reality serves an even more insidious purpose.
His vision of decentralisation is not about empowering local communities; rather, it is a calculated strategy to create white-dominated enclaves that would maintain economic control while politically insulating themselves from the democratic majority. It is an extension of apartheid-era "self-governing homelands," where Black labour could be exploited while white governance remained intact.
This is not decentralisation in the name of freedom—it is an attempt to carve out racialised economic fiefdoms under the guise of governance reform.
Tucker, you are no stranger to media manipulation, to narratives constructed to serve the elite while distracting the public from the real structures of power.
Ernst Roets is playing this exact game. He is not only mistaken; he is actively engaged in the deliberate deception of audiences like yours, hoping to legitimise his supremacist ideology under the banner of human rights activism.
I implore you not to lend your platform to his lies.
Do not give him the credibility that comes with appearing on your show. To air his interview would not be an act of free speech—it would be an act of complicity in spreading disinformation that seeks to legitimise white supremacy under the guise of victimhood.
Roets is not offering a different perspective; he is selling a lie, one that ignores the structural violence faced by the indigenous people of South Africa while distorting history to suit his racist agenda.
And let us be clear—what Roets is doing is synonymous with treason. Many South Africans from across the races are currently calling for him to be charged thus.
He is actively undermining the integrity of the South African state, fabricating crises to justify foreign interference, and seeking to fracture national unity in order to maintain white control over land and wealth.
Do you, Tucker, want to be remembered as someone who aided and abetted this treachery?
Sincerely,Gillian Schutte Writer, Filmmaker, Political Analyst, and Social Justice Advocate.
**The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of IOL or Independent Media
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