The president of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) is a featured speaker at a conference this week in Pretoria, hosted by an Afrikaner nationalist group whose founder was instrumental in persuading the American right that white South African farmers face systematic attacks.
Stefano Forte, also the executive director of the billionaire-funded 1776 Project Pac, will speak at the Lex Libertas Future of Nations conference on 25 February alongside leading figures from the Afrikaner Solidarity Movement, members of Belgium’s far-right Vlaams Belang – whose predecessor was outlawed for racism – and a political analyst from a thinktank wholly funded by the regime of the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
Forte’s appearance cements growing institutional bonds between the NYYRC, Afrikaner groups and the European far right, after Afrikaner nationalists attended recent NYYRC galas in New York and NYYRC figures attended rightwing conferences in Budapest and Brussels.
Rita Abrahamsen, professor of African studies at Oxford University, said at conferences like the one in Pretoria, “they are all trying to form networks, share ideas and learn from each other.”
The connection may already have influenced the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Jaco Kleynhans, the Solidarity Movement’s head of international liaison, told the New York Times in December that “the extent of our access and engagement has increased tremendously in the past 10 months”, and that he speaks weekly with US government officials.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which has examined connections between radical right groups worldwide, said: “No one should be surprised at the relationship between Forte and far-right extremists like the Vlaams Belang party, Orbán’s Hungary and white South African separatist groups.”
She added: “All of these movements have expressed support for white nationalist ideas, which is also driving the Trump administration’s new policy of restricting refugee admissions to white South Africans.”
‘A viable political dispensation’
Hosting organisation Lex Libertas was founded last year by Ernst Roets, an Afrikaner activist whose parents are from Orania, a whites-only Afrikaner settlement that critics have long described as a whites-only utopia, and whose defenders frame it as a project of cultural self-determination.
Before founding Lex Libertas in February 2025, Roets spent more than 20 years inside the Solidarity Movement – the network of Afrikaner institutions that includes the trade union Solidarity, the lobby group AfriForum and dozens of affiliated organisations.
Lex Libertas describes itself as working towards “a viable political dispensation for the peoples of South Africa” through decentralisation and self-governance. Roets has denied that he is racist, and has instead characterised South Africa’s democratically elected government in those terms.
During both Trump terms, Roets has at key moments promoted the movement internationally, with apparent influence on US foreign policy.
In May 2018, during Trump’s first administration, Roets was part of an AfriForum delegation to Washington DC that made the case to administration officials and staff of Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, that Afrikaner farmers were being racially targeted for violence.
On that trip, Roets appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, claiming the South African government was “complicit” in farm attacks. After a follow-up segment by Carlson that August, Trump tweeted about “large-scale killing of white farmers” in South Africa.
Abrahamsen, the African studies professor, said of the Afrikaner radical right’s overseas advocacy: “They had a very strong sense that they had no platform at home. And in that sense, there’s no doubt that they were smart, because they knew if they could get a platform internationally, they would force themselves on to the agenda at home in South Africa.”
In February 2025, weeks after his second inauguration, Trump issued an executive order suspending South African aid and prioritising Afrikaners for refugee resettlement, leading to blowback against Afrikaner nationalist groups in South Africa.
Nevertheless, Roets has continued travelling to the US to promote Afrikaner nationalism.
In a July interview with the Daily Caller, Roets called for the US to implement targeted sanctions on South African officials and recognise Afrikaners as an “indigenous African nation”.
Roets has cultivated a relationship with the NYYRC over several years. He headlined an NYYRC event alongside Maga influencer and “pizzagate” propagandist Jack Posobiec and former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam in July 2024.
He and Joost Strydom, executive director of the Orania Movement, served as toastmasters at the 113th Annual NYYRC Gala last December, at which the NYYRC described them as “determined Afrikaner freedom fighters and close friends of the club”.
Reportedly, Roets toasted those “preserving our outpost of western civilization” in southern Africa.
‘You want us to denounce our allies?’
Forte assumed the NYYRC presidency in April 2025. His first gala as president, in December 2025, was reportedly attended by white nationalist Jared Taylor, along with approximately 20 lawmakers from Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which the country has designated a “confirmed extremist group” and “incompatible with the free democratic basic order” of its constitution.
Also reportedly present at the gala was former NYYRC vice-president Vish Burra, who weeks earlier had been fired from a job producing former congressman Matt Gaetz’s One America News show after posting a video depicting Jews as cockroaches.
From the podium at the December gala, Forte refused to denounce the AfD. “You want us to denounce the AfD? You want us to denounce our allies? You want us to denounce those that stand with us?” he said.
He also declared that the club was “prepared to endorse” Trump for a third term in 2028.
Forte also serves as executive director of the 1776 Project Pac, founded by Ryan Girdusky in 2021, which initially recruited for and funded campaigns for school board elections.
The network
The Pretoria conference brings together other parts of an increasingly visible international far-right network.
Kleynhans, of the Solidarity Movement, was previously CEO of the Orania Movement, according to his LinkedIn page and previous reporting.
In February 2025, he was part of a delegation that met with senior Trump administration officials at the White House, presenting a “Washington memorandum” requesting targeted sanctions against ANC leaders and recognition of Afrikaners as a cultural community.
The advertised Vlaams Belang contingent includes the party’s leader, Tom Van Grieken, Flemish parliamentarian Kristof Slagmulder and Johan Deckmyn, a member of both the Flemish parliament and the Nato parliamentary assembly.
Vlaams Belang is a rebrand of Vlaams Blok, which was convicted of racism under Belgian electoral law by the Ghent court of appeal in 2004 for “manifestly and systematically” inciting discrimination. The party dissolved five days later and immediately reconstituted with substantially the same personnel.
Slagmulder is Vlaams Belang’s principal parliamentary advocate for the Afrikaner cause. He has raised farm murders in the Flemish parliament, shown the Julius Malema “Kill the Boer” video in committee – the same clip Trump showed South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, at the White House – and gave a previous Flemish minister-president a 65-page list of purportedly murdered farmers.
Earlier this month, Deckmyn attended the inaugural “Make Europe Great Again” conference in Brussels, organised by Vlaams Belang’s Filip Dewinter alongside British far-right activist Tommy Robinson and former US congressman Steve King, whose political career foundered over his apparent support for white nationalism. Deckmyn reportedly warned that “blind policies” would lead Europe to a situation similar to modern South Africa, where he claimed the white population faces brutal discrimination and genocidal attacks.
The conference also features Zoltán Koskovics, a geopolitical analyst at the Center for Fundamental Rights in Budapest. The center, entirely funded by the Hungarian state through the prime minister’s cabinet office, organises CPAC Hungary – the annual conference where all these networks converge.
The Pretoria event is the latest in a years-long string of conferences with overlapping attendance from many of the same individuals.
The Guardian contacted Ernst Roets and Stefano Forte for comment.
On this growing relationship, Abrahamsen said: “Increasingly, Orania is seen as a model of self-government at the local level.”
She asked: “Why are the Hungarians interested in the Orania? Why is Stefano Forte interested?” She added: “It’s the sense that you have a nation a people that has determined that they will govern themselves against global liberalism so they become an exemplar of a successful ethnostate.”
Beirich wrote: “This is just another example of how white nationalism is driving this administration’s policies and how this racist ideology is shared by many of its allies and staffers.
“The mainstreaming of this heinous ideology, which Trump is greatly responsible for, has given sanction to this extremism and bought alliances of those who share these ideas into the open.”
