Alex Jones posted an old video of a historic crisis with the suggestion it was a typical day in South Africa – and “the future of ALL Western countries if changes are not made fast”.

Mary Alexander • 7 August 2025

“This is Durban, South Africa,” begins the caption of a video posted on the X account of US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on 20 July 2025.

“This is what removing ‘White Oppression’ and replacing it with Soros NGO systems looks like,” it continues. “A glimpse into the future of ALL Western countries if changes are not made fast as already seen in the SH!T HOLE blue city’s across America.”

The post has been viewed more than 1.6 million times so far, and has spread widely on X (here and here), Facebook (here, here and here) and elsewhere (here, here and here).

The footage shows mounds of trash strewn over an otherwise almost empty street lined with closed-up shopfronts. Taken from TikTok, it’s overlaid with the text: “This is the situation in Durban town right now.” It’s also been reposted with captions such as “This is Durban, South Africa, in neighborhoods where there are no white people.”

Durban is a port city in South Africa’s eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, on the Indian Ocean coast.

Alex Jones, Donald Trump and ‘white oppression’

The founder of the InfoWars disinformation platform, Alex Jones has built his fortune on fake news and false conspiracies. For his relentless claim that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting – where 20 children aged six and seven were killed – was a hoax staged by “crisis actors”, US courts have ordered him to pay US$1.5 billion to the victims’ parents.

In the X post, what Jones means by “White Oppression” is presumably South Africa’s universally condemned racist system of apartheid, which ended with the country’s first democratic elections in 1994.

By “Soros” he refers to the billionaire US philanthropist George Soros, founder of the pro-democracy Open Society Foundations and a favourite target of conspiracy theorists.

Jones is a strident supporter of US president Donald Trump, a Republican.

Since retaking office in November 2024, Trump has made false claims about land restitution and white genocide in South Africa. He has also criticised its genocide case against Israel, cut US aid to the country and slapped a 30% tariff – the highest in sub-Saharan Africa – on South African imports.

Trump has in the past referred to African nations as “shithole countries”. Jones’s “SH!T HOLE blue city’s [sic] across America” is his description of cities governed by the US Democratic Party.

Nine days of violence in 2021

The video does show Durban, but during a historic upheaval more than four years ago.

We took a screengrab of its first frame and ran it through a Google image search. This led us to a Reddit thread on the clip, where one user had this to say:

The video was originally uploaded July 13, 2021 by TikTok user Afu Afu (@af__ptl) and shows Durban, South Africa during the July 2021 riots. The TikTok account is private now but it can be seen in tweets from the time.

The user links to two X posts with the same video, one from 15 July 2021 and the other posted three days later.

From 8 to 17 July 2021 violence exploded across South Africa after former president Jacob Zuma was sentenced to 15 months in prison for defying a court order to testify at a commission probing corruption during his presidency. The “Zuma riots” were largely confined to KwaZulu-Natal – Zuma’s home province – and the urban province of Gauteng.

The looting that followed was largely opportunistic, as people took advantage of the chaos to raid shops. More than 300 people were killed over the nine days. It remains the worst violence South Africa has seen since the end of apartheid.

At the time, the world was still gripped by Covid. Analysts ascribed the violence not only to longstanding poverty and inequality, intractable problems with roots deep in the apartheid past, but also the social and economic turmoil of the pandemic.

The video does not show a typical day in Durban. It was shot from 440 West Street in Durban Central, heading east. A Google Street View of the same route snapped in November 2024 shows a very different scene.

Taken in its entirety, Jones’s claim is false. The footage is from a moment four years ago, when the country faced the unprecedented crisis of the arrest of a former president. And it could be said that the July 2021 riots were ultimately caused by the “White Oppression” of apartheid, not by its removal.