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.

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MARY ALEXANDER • 14 JULY 2024

“Bill Gates has decided that the slave class needs to drink maggot milk,” reads one version of a claim going viral in South Africa, Kenya and across the world since late June 2024.*

“He’s launched ‘EntoMilk’ a food-like product. It’s described as a ‘dairy alternative’ that’s supposedly similar to real milk, but is made from ‘black soldier fly larvae’ or maggots. His goal is to introduce this product into the food supply…”

The claim links to a blog post with a stock photo of a mass of maggots crawling through a human skull. It’s headlined: “Bill Gates Has Launched ‘Maggot Milk’.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been a common target of conspiracy theories for years.

Another version of the claim reads:

You will drink the bugs and be happy! Wait, what? That’s right! Bill Gates’ latest evil venture is called EntoMilk. He wants to replace milk from animals (cow milk, goat milk) with maggot milk.

The claim has been posted with comments such as:

• This is an actual thing and he’s evil. look up Entomilk…
• What has the evil world of darkness been up to lately? Here is just one other hair raising demonic ploy of the elites.
• Zillionaire Bill Gates is at it again. He has already got the ball rolling on eliminating and replacing all meat products and now he is going after milk and dairy.
• Part of the new “Transhumanist” diet. I feel so bad for our Grandchildren and leaving this sick world behind to them.

Several instances include an AI-generated cartoon of a crazed-looking Gates holding a jar containing a malformed fly in one hand and a cup of what is presumably EntoMilk in the other.

It’s been posted on the known disinformation site Natural News, on the equally dodgy sites YourNews and SlayNews, and on YouTube.

But has Gates recently launched a “maggot milk” known as EntoMilk?

‘That’s your headline’

The claim began in a 20 June broadcast of the Alex Jones Show on InfoWars, titled “DISGUSTING: Bill Gates Wants You To Eat Maggot Milk.”

Alex Jones is a notorious conspiracist who founded InfoWars in 1999. US courts have ordered him to pay $1.5 billion to the parents of 20 six- and seven-year-old children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting for repeatedly saying the massacre was a hoax. The cases were the subject of a recent documentary, The Truth vs Alex Jones.

Jones’s broadcast uses a promotional video for EntoMilk, titled “Bug Milk”, which shows how it is made from black soldier fly larvae. Two people are seen drinking the milk while the voiceover describes its “creamy mouth-feel”.

The video ends with people being offered EntoMilk ice-cream to taste. Some look dubious.

The video stresses that insects may be “vital to the future of food” because they need little land for cultivation and aren’t as damaging to the environment as livestock such as cattle.

But Jones says: “Oh, it’s rich and creamy? And they are feeding the black people the maggots.” It’s clear he’s watching the video for the first time.

“Bill Gates is involved in these companies,” he suddenly adds, without evidence. “Bill Gates wants you to drink maggot milk.” Jones then gestures to someone off-screen, and says: “That’s your headline.”

Six-year-old advert for defunct product

The original video is almost six years old, first posted on YouTube in September 2018.

EntoMilk was a dairy-free milk alternative developed by South African food scientists and launched by their Cape Town-based startup Gourmet Grubb in 2017.

It was made from the larvae of farmed flies, so the “maggot milk” description, if dramatic, is almost true. The product was only sold as an ice cream and never in its liquid form, according to a July 2023 article.

But Entomilk has been off the market for years, and Gourmet Grubb is listed as out of business.

The Gourmet Grubb website no longer exists. The company’s Instagram page hasn’t been updated since 2020, and its description (note the past tense) reads: “Yes! we made insect ice cream from EntoMilk which is Dairy Free and insanely SUSTAINABLE! 2020 – we are going to level up – watch this space.”

Gates wasn’t “involved in” Gourmet Grubb. He’s not mentioned in any of the company’s online profiles. And if the billionaire had invested in a South African startup, it would have made many local headlines. But there’s no credible news of Gates’s involvement.

Bill Gates has not launched a “maggot milk” called EntoMilk. The claim is false, made up on the spot during the Alex Jones Show.

* Some Facebook and Instagram users may have deleted their posts after Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program rated their claims as untrue.

Published by Africa Check on 22 July 2024

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