Burnham even upheld South African apartheid as a model for America. In 1971, he noted with approval that “the Bantustans are beginning to take on reality within the boundaries of South Africa” and suggested that they—along with other examples of nations “composed of noncontiguous territories”—might provide a “more promising” model for American blacks than the supposedly failed policy of integration.

For Burnham, supporting regimes like apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia wasn’t a matter of realpolitik, but based on abiding moral commitments. Although he styled himself as a cold-blooded Machiavellian, Burnham became hotly emotional when it came to defending these regimes. In the late 1970s, the Carter administration withdrew recognition for Rhodesia. Talking to his fellow editor Joseph Sobran, Burnham bitterly complained, “Sometimes you have to throw your friends to the wolves. But you don’t have to talk a lot of shit about democracy while you do it.”

The word “friends” is key here. The minority whites who govern those countries were seen not just as allies of necessity but people who deserved empathy because they shared the same problems as white Americans: how to maintain white rule in a world where people of color were struggling for political autonomy. Burnham claimed that the people of Africa and Asia had been “historically inert” but had now “moved historically on stage.” Burnham’s fear was that in order to placate the newly independent nations and “to save its own neck,” the American policy elite was willing to abandon white settlers in Rhodesia and South Africa.

National Review stopped explicitly supporting Jim Crow by the late 1960s but it continued to apply the same racial analysis to Africa, maintaining the necessity of apartheid until the twilight of Afrikaner rule in South Africa. As the website Africa Is a Country noted, American conservatives' defense of the racist regime became increasingly shrill and fused with domestic politics during the bitter last days of apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s. Buckley did scandalize some of his fellow conservatives in 1986 by suggesting that if he were a black South African he might join the African National Congress to fight apartheid, but this hypothetical opposition had no bearing on his real politics, which consisted of vociferously opposing the movement to challenge South Africa with sanctions. Burnham’s own mode of analysis was taken over by his intellectual disciple Samuel T. Francis, an occasional National Review contributor who also worked for a time as editor of the Washington Times. Francis wrote two books celebrating Burnham as a seminal conservative intellectual.

In one of the last articles he wrote before his death in 2005, Francis warned that “white genocide” might loom in South Africa. The “white genocide” trope has become increasingly popular with white nationalists in the United States since it cast whites as victims who need to arm themselves in self-defense, and possibly launch pre-emptive attacks against non-whites. There's even a Twitter hashtag: #whitegenocide.

Early in his career, Francis worked as an editor for Citizens Informer, the house organ of the Council of Conservative Citizens—a hate group that peddles the "white genocide" trope, and which Dylann Roof explicitly cited in his manifesto. Roof explains that he typed "black on White crime" into Google, adding, "The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?"

Roof's massacre has prompted renewed scrutiny of the group, to which a number of current and former Republican politicians have ties. The CCC has hosted former Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has flirted with the group. Three other GOP candidates—Senator Ted Cruz, former Senator Rick Santorum, and Senator Rand Paul—recently announced they would return or give away campaign donations from Earl Holt III, president of the CC.

Holt, meanwhile, issued a statement that read, “In his manifesto, Roof outlines other grievances felt by many whites. Again, we utterly condemn Roof’s despicable killings, but they do not detract in the slightest from the legitimacy of some of the positions he has expressed.”

In the beginning of the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois realized that racism wasn’t just an American problem and that the color line divided the world. Starting from the opposite point of view, the early National Review conservatives realized that a defense of racial hierarchy in America went hand in hand with supporting white rule of Africa. Dylann Roof is far from being an intellectual, but the genealogy of his thinking about Africa runs in line with those formative issues of National Review.