White supremacists all over the web saw another one of their dreams come true last night, as our so-called president retweeted racist “white genocide” propaganda he picked up on the Tucker Carlson Fox News hatefest. This long-standing racist conspiracy theory has been circulating in the darkest areas of the internet for years, and it’s now made its way from neo-Nazi websites to Fox News, and from there to the Twitter account of the president of the United States.

This isn’t “dog-whistling” any more.

I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018

Like so much of the stuff that emanates from Donald Trump, “large scale killing of farmers” is simply not happening; in fact, attacks on farmers in remote areas of South Africa are actually declining, not getting worse.

As for “land and farm seizures,” there’s a grain of truth behind this, but as usual it’s been exaggerated, distorted and stripped of context by the white supremacists. In the bad old apartheid days, white people had basically stolen close to 90% of the land in South Africa. That figure has now declined to about 70%, obviously still a very sore point.

To address this race-based disparity, the African National Congress has proposed a constitutional amendment that would let the government confiscate land without compensation. This amendment is very controversial (for obvious reasons), has not yet been enacted into law, and no land has yet been expropriated. But the propagandists are acting like it’s already going on, of course.

The South African government responded to Trump’s vile tweet:

South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past. #landexpropriation @realDonaldTrump @PresidencyZA

— South African Government (@GovernmentZA) August 23, 2018

And the Anti-Defamation League also issued a statement denouncing Trump for this tweet:

Deeply troubling. This is a white supremacist talking point. For years they’ve campaigned to stop “white genocide” in South Africa & made false claims about race-based killings of white South African farmers. Our full statement: https://t.co/8FzJSDGQWm https://t.co/QiwOKrg4u6

— ADL (@ADL_National) August 23, 2018

But the response from white supremacist Twitter (yes, that’s a real thing in 2018) was overwhelmingly celebratory. When I posted a tweet pointing out that Trump was pushing an outright white supremacist talking point, I was name-checked by none other than former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.

Ah, now I see the reason for the ugly pile-on in my mentions - the bull goose racist himself called them out to attack. pic.twitter.com/7gBCI4WXsQ

— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) August 23, 2018

Duke was calling out his racist followers to attack me, and did they ever. My Twitter timeline was almost instantly inundated with insults, death wishes and threats, and hate speech by racists and white supremacists, and it’s still going on as I write this. In all my time on Twitter, I don’t think I’ve ever seen these troglodytes so excited.

But I may have to print out David Duke’s tweet and frame it.