{"id":2573818,"date":"2026-02-26T07:52:02","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T12:52:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/cbs-sets-out-to-debunk-trump-ends-up-proving-him-right\/"},"modified":"2026-02-26T07:56:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T12:56:08","slug":"cbs-sets-out-to-debunk-trump-ends-up-proving-him-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/cbs-sets-out-to-debunk-trump-ends-up-proving-him-right\/","title":{"rendered":"CBS Sets Out to Debunk Trump, Ends Up Proving Him Right"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fcbs-sets-out-to-debunk-trump-ends-up-proving-him-right%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2573818&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>This article critiques the 60 Minutes segment about white farmer killings in South Africa and Anderson Cooper\u2019s effort to challenge Donald Trump\u2019s claim that crosses along a rural road signified burial sites of murdered farmers. It notes that Cooper returns to the road, finds the crosses are memorials rather than graves, and frames this as a correction to Trump\u2019s assertion. However, the piece argues that the segment\u2019s strongest moments come from interviews wiht the farmer who erected the crosses, including his testimony about his father\u2019s assault and three of his friends\u2019 murders, which underscores the human cost beyond a semantic debate.<\/p>\n<p>The article also highlights how Cooper presses a widow who witnessed her husband\u2019s murder and then shifts to the farmer\u2019s son running the farm, suggesting a discomfort with the trauma of the events. It emphasizes the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/doug-collins-to-serve-as-designated-survivor-for-trumps-state-of-the-union\/\" title=\"Doug Collins to serve as designated survivor for Trump&#039;s State of the Union\">broader past context<\/a> that the report largely omits: Mandela\u2019s 1998 warning about farm killings, the Afrikaner\/Boer identity tied to farming, and the charged politics around anti-Afrikaner rhetoric and chants like \u201cKill the Boer.\u201d The piece cites estimates of thousands of farm murders as 1994, noting organizations like AfriForum that track about one farm attack per day, and points out that there are roughly 30,000 commercial farmers\u2014mostly white\u2014making the murder rate vastly higher than the national average.<\/p>\n<p>Ultimately, the author contends that while the segment fixates on a semantic distinction between crosses and graves and debates whether the killings constitute genocide, it cannot escape the underlying reality and historical context of the violence against farmers. The piece closes by presenting the author, Hans Mahncke.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>In the latest <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/video\/afrikaner-south-africa-genocide-claims-60-minutes-video-2026-02-22\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">airing<\/a> of <em>60 Minutes<\/em>, Anderson Cooper delivered what may be one of the most spectacular media self-owns in recent years. The segment was constructed around a single objective: dismantling President Trump&rsquo;s claim that more than 1,000 white South African farmers were buried along a rural road marked by white crosses. Trump had shown footage of those crosses <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/ytJA8fwP728?si=8pNDgaFDttwgtW2U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">during<\/a> the May 2025 White House visit of Cyril Ramaphosa, arguing that the scale of killings targeting white farmers was so severe that it warranted international attention and, in his view, amounted to genocide.<\/p>\n<p>For the segment, Cooper traveled to South Africa intent on puncturing that image. He returned viewers to the same stretch of road where the crosses once stood and noted that they were no longer there. He tracked down the farmer who had erected them and established that the crosses were temporary memorials rather than <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/trump-misidentified-images-from-the-congo-during-ramaphosa-meeting\/\" title=\"Trump misidentified images from the Congo during Ramaphosa meeting\">literal burial sites<\/a>. The report leans heavily on this distinction, presenting it as a decisive correction that rendered Trump&rsquo;s claim false.<\/p>\n<p>Yet as the segment unfolds, that conclusion quickly collapses under the weight of Cooper&rsquo;s own reporting. The same farmer who explained that the crosses were memorials goes on to recount how his father was brutally attacked and how three of his closest friends were murdered on their farms. These were not distant acquaintances or abstract statistics &mdash; they were friends and fellow farmers whose loss he had experienced firsthand. How many viewers could name even a single friend who had been brutally murdered, let alone three, all in the same line of work? The testimony was immediate, tangible, and devastating, and it completely undermined Cooper&rsquo;s attempt to reduce the issue to a semantic debate over crosses versus graves or the precise meaning of the word genocide.<\/p>\n<p>The segment continued with an interview of the wife of one of the murdered farmers, who had witnessed her husband&rsquo;s killing. Cooper quickly shifted attention to the son who now runs the farm, as if that could somehow diminish the horror of what had occurred. To cap it all, he callously pressed the widow to say she did not consider the murders genocide, reducing her trauma to fodder for more &ldquo;Get Trump&rdquo; footage.<\/p>\n<p>The killings of white farmers are neither a new nor a fringe concern, though Cooper never mentions it. In 1998, Nelson Mandela gave a full <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mandela.gov.za\/mandela_speeches\/1998\/981010_safety.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">speech<\/a> condemning the &ldquo;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/pay-for-slay-seeking-an-effective-american-legal-response-to-palestinian-terror\/\" title=\"\u2018Pay For Slay\u2019: Seeking An Effective American Legal Response To Palestinian Terror\">cold-blooded killings<\/a> that have been taking place on the farms in the past few years,&rdquo; and noting that while farm crime had existed before, incidents of murder and assault had &ldquo;increased dramatically in recent years.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>More striking still is that the segment completely ignores the historical context that makes these attacks politically and culturally charged. Not that viewers would know it from <em>60 Minutes<\/em>, but the farming group in South Africa is anything but an incidental demographic. The Boers, which means &ldquo;farmers&rdquo; in Afrikaans and Dutch, were the original European settlers who arrived at the Cape in the seventeenth century, not as colonizers but as farmers working for the Dutch East India Company, which needed a reliable food supply for its ships passing by on voyages between Europe and the Dutch East Indies.<\/p>\n<p>These settlers later moved inland, establishing much of the agricultural foundation of what would become modern South Africa. Over time, the term &ldquo;Boer&rdquo; came to refer more broadly to Afrikaners, the Afrikaans-speaking descendants of those settlers who developed a distinct language, culture, and political identity rooted in farming. Farming, Afrikaner identity, and the country&rsquo;s origins are deeply intertwined, and understanding that history is essential to making sense of the attacks on this group. <\/p>\n<p>Even the notorious &ldquo;Kill the Boer&rdquo; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Xr-MKtxI4Mc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">chant<\/a>, pushed by some South African politicians and noted by Trump, takes on real significance only when understood against this historical backdrop. By ignoring all of this, Cooper reduces the issue to random crime so he can focus on a semantic quibble over whether the white crosses were actually graves.<\/p>\n<p>Groups that track crime against farmers continue to report staggering figures. By conservative <a href=\"https:\/\/www.citizen.co.za\/ridge-times\/286455\/eloff-se-lita-knap-witkruismonument-op\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">estimates<\/a>, the total number of white farmers murdered since the official end of apartheid in 1994 runs into the several thousands. A 2010 <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20100603141223\/http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/news\/world\/africa\/article7078730.ece\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">report<\/a> in the London Times already noted more than 3,000 murders. AfriForum, a group that emerged from a trade union and represents Afrikaner interests, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.plaasmoorde.co.za\/en\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">records<\/a> roughly one farm attack per day. The precise figures can be debated, but the sheer scale and persistence of this brutal violence is undeniable, particularly given that there are only a little <a href=\"https:\/\/foodsecurity.ac.za\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/Food-Systems-Profile-South-Africa-Catalysing-the-sustainable-and-inclusive-transformation-of-food-systems.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">over<\/a> 30,000 commercial farmers, most of them white, which puts the murder rate at roughly <a href=\"https:\/\/issafrica.org\/iss-today\/farm-attacks-and-farm-murders-remain-a-concern\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">three<\/a> times the national average, a fact Cooper never mentions.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, the <em>60 Minutes<\/em> report fixates on a semantic issue while conceding the underlying reality. Trump said burial sites, whereas the crosses are memorials. Yet the memorials exist because farmers have been attacked and killed in massive numbers, a reality that Cooper&rsquo;s own interviews make impossible to ignore. He also quibbles over whether the attacks constitute genocide, though he never defines the term and never addresses the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/scenes-from-the-supply-chain\/\" title=\"Scenes from the Supply Chain\">broader historical context<\/a> of the Boers. Ironically, the more <em>60 Minutes<\/em> pushed to show the crosses were not graves, the more it ended up documenting exactly what Trump had claimed.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<div>\n<p>      Hans Mahncke is in-house counsel at a <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3YuVZYV\" >global business advisory firm<\/a>. He holds LL.B., LL.M. and Ph.D. degrees in law. He is the author of  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Swiftboating-America-Russiagate-Crossfire-Investigation\/dp\/B0FNXCQ8KM\/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.DjUY7RzzAZSNTHfV6s3mDQ.po8ROEXuuEtP_ZSfZOTJoE1AzqwYsCuRG4SGgBJl_7U&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=%22Swiftboating+America%3A+Exposing+the+Russiagate+Fraud%2C+from+the+Steele+Dossier+to+the+FBI%27s+Crossfire+Hurricane+Investigation.%22&amp;qid=1759949638&amp;sr=8-1\">&#8220;Swiftboating America: Exposing the Russiagate Fraud, from the Steele Dossier to the FBI&#8217;s Crossfire Hurricane Investigation.&#8221;<\/a>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cooper&#8217;s 60 Minutes segment undercuts Trump&#8217;s claim<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1441,"featured_media":2573819,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screen-Shot-2026-02-24-at-8.44.32-PM-1024x582.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[74624,5201,13420,73071,3634],"class_list":["post-2573818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-cbs-news-2","tag-debunking","tag-fact-check","tag-media-analysis-2","tag-trump"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Screen-Shot-2026-02-24-at-8.44.32-PM-1024x582.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2573818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1441"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2573818"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2573818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2573822,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2573818\/revisions\/2573822"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2573819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2573818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2573818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2573818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}