Trump Cites Bad Source to Claim South African Genocide
PLUS: Pope Leo Did Not Chastise Trump; Kash Patel’s Canadian Fentanyl Myth; Introducing NewsGuard’s False Claim of the Week
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Introducing: NewsGuard’s False Claim of the Week
Also in today’s edition: During an Oval Office meeting with South Africa’s president, Trump cites American Thinker, a website rated as unreliable by NewsGuard. Also, liberals embrace an AI deepfake of Pope Leo XIV and Trump administration officials blame Canada for the U.S. fentanyl crisis.
Today’s newsletter was edited by Sofia Rubinson and Eric Effron.
1. False Claim of the Week: A ‘White Genocide’ Is Unfolding in South Africa
Today, NewsGuard is introducing a new feature, “False Claim of the Week,” which highlights a false claim from NewsGuard’s Misinformation Fingerprints proprietary database of provably false claims and their debunks. The claim of white genocide in South Africa was deemed the “False Claim of the Week” due to its widespread appearance across social media platforms and websites, its high engagement levels, and the high-profile nature of the sources promoting it. Given those three factors in addition to its significant subject matter — its potential for harm makes it our False Claim of the Week. (Note: The 23 false claims covered this week were published between May 15 and May 22.)
Debunk: Crime statistics and findings from institutions that track genocide worldwide contradict the claim that there is a genocide against white farmers in South Africa.
Although South African Police Service crime statistics show that murder is rampant in the country, they do not indicate that white farmers are being systematically targeted. According to the Police Service, there were 26,232 murders in South Africa last year; 44 of the murder victims were from the farming community.
No international human-rights watchdog groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, have identified a “white genocide” in South Africa. No international courts have ruled that any group in South Africa is committing genocide against white South Africans. No political party in South Africa has claimed that genocide is occurring.
“The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false,” Gareth Newham, the director of the governance, crime and justice program at South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, told PBS News in May 2025. “As an independent institute tracking violence and violent crime in South Africa, if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity, we would be amongst the first to raise [the] alarm and provide the evidence to the world.”
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2. Trump Boosts the Genocide Claim with a Shaky Source
President Donald Trump himself gave a boost to the “white genocide” claim during an Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on May 21. At one point, Trump held up a printout of an article from AmericanThinker.com (NewsGuard Trust Score: 22.5/100). As Trump displayed the publication, he referred to a photo accompanying the article and stated, “Look, here are burial sites all over the place. These are all white farmers that are being buried.”
Actually, the image, which occupies half the American Thinker page, was not taken in South Africa. Rather, the photo taken from a Reuters video shows Red Cross aid workers at a burial site in the Democratic Republic of Congo in February 2025 in the aftermath of a mass rape and murder incident, The Independent (Trust Score: 85/100) first reported.
The American Thinker article was headlined “Let’s talk about Africa, which is where tribalism takes you.” It stated that the South African government “isn’t even pretending anymore that its goal is anything other than destroying whites.” The article referred to several African countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, the accompanying photo taken from the Reuters video was not captioned. The only indication that the photo related to Congo was a source link below the image that linked to a YouTube video about the atrocities in Congo.
Context: American Thinker, a 22-year-old conservative website, has been found by NewsGuard to have repeatedly published false or egregiously misleading claims. This has been NewsGuard’s finding in seven reviews of the site since 2021, most recently in April 2025. (Reality Check members can read NewsGuard’s Nutrition Label for the site here.)
In the past year, NewsGuard found, American Thinker has published articles falsely stating that mail-in ballots led to widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, that then-Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz “groomed” and inappropriately touched a foreign exchange student when he was a teacher in Minnesota, and that the COVID-19 virus is manmade.
Click here to find out more about NewsGuard Trust Scores and our process for rating websites. You can download NewsGuard’s browser extension, which displays NewsGuard Trust Score icons next to links on search engines, social media feeds, and other platforms by clicking here.
3. AI Version of Pope Leo Condemns Trump’s Immigration Policies, Drawing Praise from the Left
By Macrina Wang
What happened: Left-leaning social media users are praising Pope Leo XIV for his tough stance against the Trump administration, citing a video that supposedly shows the pope saying that Trump’s immigration policies are “a blatant trampling on both the teachings of the Church and the promises of the American dream.”
Context: Before becoming pope, Leo had reposted articles on his personal X account that criticized the Trump administration’s actions and rhetoric on immigration.
For example, in April 2025, he shared an X post that called Trump’s handling of the March 2025 deportation of Salvadoran national and U.S. resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia “illicit” and asked: “Do you not see the suffering? Is your conscience not disturbed?” And in February 2025, he reposted an article titled, “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
A closer look: In the video cited by some liberal accounts, the pope appears to address Trump from a podium, saying that he “firmly oppose[s] everything that you stand for” and describes Trump’s actions as “a hideous manifestation of white supremacist ideology.”
You can watch the video here:
Liberal X user @SuzieRizzo1 shared the video and stated: “Damn! Pope Leo XIV tells Trump that the immigration policies he’s implemented are a blatant trampling on both the teachings of the Church and the promises of the American Dream! Amen!” The post garnered 283,400 views and 12,000 likes in two days.
Left-leaning Threads user @ItIsOver2812 posted the video and said, “Beautiful 🙏🙏👏👏.” The post received 6,800 likes and 790 reposts in two days.
Actually: The video is a deepfake using AI-generated audio and video manipulation, NewsGuard found. There is no record of the pope making these or similar comments.
The apparent original poster of the video, pop culture-focused TikTok user @grv12095oio, labeled it as AI-generated. However, most of the subsequent shares of the video did not acknowledge that it was created with AI.
Through a reverse image search of the video’s frames, NewsGuard traced the footage to Leo’s May 12, 2025, address to the international press. In that speech, the pope made no mention of Trump, according to NewsGuard’s review of the transcript and video of the event.
Tricks of our trade: AI deepfakes can be convincing, especially when they align with preconceived notions of what the speaker would say. Here’s some tips for determining that this video is AI:
The voice does not sound like Leo’s. Born in Chicago, the new pope has an American accent while the voice in the clip has an Italian accent.
The voiceover is out of sync with Pope Leo’s mouth movements.
Without pauses or breaths, Leo’s speech sounds mechanical, a tell-tale sign of AI audios.
If you see something, say something
If you see or hear something that you think may be provably false, please alert NewsGuard via realitycheck@newsguardtech.com and we'll do our best to get to the bottom of it. Note: Tips should not include content that you simply disagree with, however strongly.
4. Trump Officials Now Blame Canada for U.S. Fentanyl Crisis
By Sarah Komar
What happened: Conservatives, including members of the Trump administration, are blaming Canada for America’s fentanyl crisis, falsely claiming that ever since Trump “sealed” the U.S.-Mexico border, the drug is primarily entering the U.S. from the north.