Ernst Roets’ Washington cross spectacle struggles for US attention

Lex Libertas’ 3,000 white crosses in Washington event failed to attract much US media coverage, but the political connections behind it say something revealing about the growing network between global right-wing movements.

Before Ernst Roets’ Lex Libertas movement erected 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on Saturday, 26 September 2026 to represent the victims of farm attacks in South Africa, the campaign’s stated aim was to “create a powerful visual representation of the human cost of the crisis and to ensure that the issue receives international attention”.

Efforts will be made, the campaign stated, to “to engage journalists, commentators and media platforms in other countries, particularly in the United States and Europe” to build “growing global awareness”.

On that measure, the event appears to have fallen well short.

The international media blitz that wasn’t

In recent years, the false claim of “white genocide” and the alleged mistreatment of white South Africans have found fertile soil among conservative US broadcasters such as Fox News.

But with the US midterm elections little more than a month away, American media appeared to have considerably less appetite for platforming Roets and his allies this time around.

Afrikaners dressed in traditional clothing carry flags during a memorial for murdered South African farmers at the Witkruis (White Cross) Monument on a private farm on 4 October 2025 in Ysterberg near Polokwane. Official statistics do not indicate that white farmers are more likely to be the victims of violent crime than other populations. (Photo: Per-Anders Pettersson / Getty Images)

There was no evidence that even Fox News covered the 3,000 white crosses event. The sole US national TV channel apparently giving it airtime was One America News (OAN), whose audience has been decimated after it was dropped by most major US television providers amid controversy over its broadcasting of disinformation.

The most extensive coverage from other US media came from right-wing news website The Daily Caller, so notorious for its coverage of debunked conspiracy theories that polling at one stage found it to be America’s least trusted news organisation. The website has also repeatedly platformed far-right and virulently anti-Semitic views.

Outside the US, the most prominent outlet giving the Lex Libertas event sympathetic coverage was the UK’s right-wing GB News.

y far the greatest volume of media coverage came from South African outlets, with much of it generated by domestic pushback against the campaign.

Afrikaners for South Africa, for instance, accused Lex Libertas of exploiting “the suffering of farm victims to advance a narrow political agenda” and presenting Americans with a misleading picture of the country.

The hoped-for blitz of international media attention was therefore a damp squib.

Also conspicuously absent were major Maga influencers such as Jack Posobeic, with whom Roets has shared a stage on multiple occasions in the past.

Instead, Lex Libertas had to make do with a handful of substantially lower-profile names from the international online right, such as Italian influencer Lorenzo Caccialupi – identified by La Repubblica in September 2026 as “one of the faces of the Maga right in Italy”.

Far-right Italian influencer Lorenzo Caccialupi. (Photo: Lorenzo Caccialupi / X)

The growing global network behind the crosses

Caccialupi is barely known outside Italy. But his presence at Roets’ vigil is revealing, because the Italian influencer belongs to a transnational right-wing network supportive of European parties like Germany’s far-right AfD and similar movements in Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has identified Caccialupi as a participant in the international “remigration” movement, which campaigns for large-scale removal from Western countries of immigrants and people deemed insufficiently assimilated.

Earlier this year, Caccialupi was one of the speakers at the second annual Remigration Summit in Portugal.

Also taking the stage was the man who seems to have become one of Roets’s foremost allies in the US: New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) president Stefano Forte.

The President of the New York Young Republican Club Stefano Forte attends an Alternative for Germany (AfD) event in Berlin, Germany, on 25 March 2026. (Photo: EPA / Flip Singer)

At the Remigration Summit, Forte referred to New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani as an “anti-American radical Islamic migrant”.

Such rhetoric is not unusual for Forte, under whose leadership the NYYRC has hosted events like October 2025’s “Drinks With AfD”, the blurb for which applauds the AfD for working “tirelessly” to “save German demographics” and “return tradition to the German Volk”.

At the NYYRC’s annual gala dinner in December 2025, guests were reported as joking with each other about being “neo-Nazis”. Among the guests was a One America News producer who had recently been dismissed for posting a video depicting Jews as cockroaches.

Special guests

Two special guests delivered a toast early in the evening: Orania CEO Joost Strydom and Roets.

Roets’ toast reportedly honoured “the many people down in the southern tip of the African continent who are preserving our outpost of Western civilisation” – language quite different from that generally used by the media-savvy Roets back home.

Roets’ relationship with Forte and the NYYRC has only strengthened since then, with Forte travelling to Pretoria in February 2026 to speak at a Lex Libertas conference alongside a number of far-right European politicians.

At the 3,000 white crosses event, the NYYRC was the official partner of Lex Libertas.

The day before the vigil, the two groups had organised a conference at Washington’s National Press Club. Of the six advertised speakers, all were South African except Forte.

Two speakers – AfriForum lawyer Mark Oppenheimer and Free Market Foundation CEO David Ansara – are also current members of the University of Cape Town Council.

Ansara’s speech thanked the Americans for bringing “welcome pressure” on the “corrupt and venal” South African government, which he described as pursuing “utterly insane levels of punitive racial engineering”.

A State Department official enters the picture

But the most significant speaker at the gathering was someone not rostered in advance: 27-year old Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Samuel Samson.

Samson, according to Daily Caller reporting, told the conference: “What’s happening to you [presumably, white persecution in South Africa] is a definitive fact”, and reportedly said that South Africa was a cautionary tale for the US.

Samuel Samson. (Photo: US Department of State)

Samson was identified by ProPublica in July as driving a new project to award international US Department of State grants to right-wing movements.

ProPublica reported that one of the entities State Department staff were instructed to award funds to was Lex Libertas, to “research crime and atrocities against minority populations in South Africa”.

An invitation to other groups to apply for the $1-million grant alongside Lex Libertas was eventually extended, with the ultimate grant recipient unclear.

At the time of the Pro Publica report, Lex Libertas had been dealing with Samson’s State Department bureau for more than a year. Samson led a July 2025 South African fact-finding mission on farm attacks and minority rights; later that month Roets met Samson’s staff in Washington; Lex Libertas and the NYYRC briefed the State Department again in March 2026; and by mid-2026 Samson’s officials were considering US government funding for Lex Libertas research.

The spectacle may matter less than the connections

Judged purely as a publicity exercise, the 3,000 white crosses event appears to have delivered considerably less than its organisers promised, failing to generate an obvious cascade of international commentary.

Media coverage, however, may not be the most important measure of what Lex Libertas is achieving abroad.

Behind the white crosses is a political network that now stretches from South African activists to the New York Young Republican Club, European “remigration” campaigners and, increasingly, figures inside the US government itself.

Right-wing movements are establishing alliances beyond borders, and Roets is positioning his own Lex Libertas as a cog on the African continent.

Whether that international network could become a force capable of shaping how South Africa is framed, pressured and treated far more widely than from Washington, remains to be seen. DM

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