Look who’s being liberal with the truth

It remains unclear whether the “thousands” of expats reportedly returning to South Africa are worried about economic and political fallout or the more radioactive sort, but the weekend’s chorus of jeers and whoops has certainly confirmed that our collective ability to read for meaning is already a smouldering crater. In case you didn’t read the Reuters piece last week, and are therefore in the same boat as most of the people who commented on it, the gist was simple: many thousands of expats are either in the process of coming back to South Africa, or are getting ready to do so. This information was backed up with interviews with a whole three expats, one of whom had “moved to California in 2003”, another who had lived in North Carolina for “two decades” and a third who had “returned from the Netherlands in December”.

Now, I know that reading can be hard — the Reuters piece ran to almost 900 words, which means the AI summary would have easily pushed out past 200 words — but, with respect, you don’t need to be a mage of the literary dark arts to glean from these dates and locations that none of these three people moved to the US as part of Donald Trump’s farcical “refugee” programme. It’s a pity, because if the Reuters report reflects reality, and thousands of expats are, in fact, starting to come back, it would have been useful to channel some of the energy otherwise spent whooping at Trump to use the piece and others like it as a counterpoint to the narrative, currently being peddled for money by right-wing race grifters, that South Africa is a failing or failed state. The source of this exposé?

The Reuters piece, with quotes from both the person who’d gone to California in 2003 and the decades-long denizen of North Carolina. In other words, not Trump’s fake refugees. Soon, though, liberal content producers in the US were hyperventilating over the same fiction, and by the weekend, when local sports personality Robert Marawa tweeted one of them to his million-plus followers, and talk radio station Power 98.7 unquestioningly cited Marawa’s tweet as the starting point for a debate on an entirely imaginary story, the fiction was set in stone: wêla kapêla, Trump’s refugees were turning tail and running home en masse.

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(I should also mention that, thanks to the Remedial English version of the story going viral, it has now been enshrined forever as truth by Google’s AI, which on Monday obediently cited the Reuters original even as it told me that “as of March 2026, some Afrikaner families who emigrated to the US as refugees are returning to South Africa”. I do not, however, want to dwell on what this means for our collective mental health in the future: I reckon we’re all depressed enough.) Of course, it is possible that a few of the so-called refugees have come back. But the extent to which the liberal opinion machine lunged at the Reuters piece while deliberately ignoring or misrepresenting the facts carefully laid out in it, is a reminder that when it comes to large groups trying to prove loyalty to their communities, liberals can be just as fact-resistant as the far right they love to pillory. At the very least, looking dispassionately at the implications of the Reuters piece might inject a little more nuance into our understanding of the migratory habits of the lesser spotted bourgeoisie, making ourselves and our media a little less vulnerable to the blackmail of the capitalist classes (“If you pass X or Y legislation, all the taxpayers will leave and never come back!”) while we get a clearer picture of where, and under which conditions, the relatively well-off choose to live.

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