Rhoda Kadalie died on the 16th of April, leaving a hole in the world. The value of this exceptional woman may be lost to many impaired by social media; beyond her expression, she was the activist’s activist, the one way before demented environmental demonstrations sponsored by the Kremlin, the LGBT ally before Tik Tok and enforced pronouns - the freedom fighter before freedom became an obscenity.
One particular tribute has emerged that warrants exploration - not because it reveals something we didn’t already know, but because it articulates, possibly unwittingly, the great divide of us.
Marianne Thamm is herself a very good writer and, being a lesbian, a notable advocate of equality. I defended Marianne when she was attacked by creepy local incel Nickolaus Bauer for going through trash belonging to the EFF’s chancellory after one of their legendary benders in Camps Bay. Like Rhoda, there is much to admire about Marianne - with one exception: she cannot, or refuses to, calibrate the fact that an individual can be simultaneously good and object to the narrative of the contemporary US Democrat establishment, including but not limited to its affair with Silicon Valley, its grasp upon legacy media and its grooming of the HR departments in almost every single major US corporation.
Rhoda Khadalie, founder of the Gender Equity Unit at - of all places - the University of the Western Cape - died a supporter of Donald Trump, and a fierce critic of the Clinton dynasty, at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Joel Pollak, in Santa Monica. In today’s retarded parametrical scope, composed in part by unhinged professors and members of the corrupt fact-checking cult, a white man (Jewish) who marries a non-white woman (the great-granddaughter of a Malawian Trade Unionist) can still be racist, and actually probably is. A passage in Marianne’s tribute hints at this hysterical, inverted imposter: “I shall leave the Rhoda I had not engaged with for a while in peace in LA. Should we have remained in contact, I know we would have fought. And that is not how I want to hold her in mind.”
They would have fought because Marianne subscribes to the preferred narrative squeezed into Twitter every minute by unhinged professors and members of the corrupt fact-checking cult, because - according to the logic amplified through facilities belonging to the Biden administration - its unconscionable not to hate Donald Trump, or Florida’s Governor Ron de Santis, or Libs of Tik Tok. There is no compromise.
Instinct and fierce intellect, sharpened by decades of disillusionment at the chaos unfolding within the ANC and its allergy to managerial competence, forced something of a compromise in Rhoda. It was better, indeed more logical, to accept that Trump was a consequence (not the Russian asset legacy media spent the better part of a decade pathologically lying about), of a deeply fractured society. If the Clinton body count or the Biden crime family didn’t do the fracturing, then they exploited it to their advantage - making them fair game.
Marianne’s work is sometimes dazzling, often moving, and warrants unconditional respect. She is also emblematic of a kind of weaponized despair consciously agitated by forces within the Democrat narrative. Despair at people who don’t want sexual education forced down the throats of their infants or who refuse to submit before the BLM fraud, despair at people who see the moon-ish adoration for Ukrainian’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as an uncomfortable oversimplification - despair at people whose skepticism of Anthony Fauci was conceived in the days of HIV in San Francisco, way before the dwarf started fibbing about masks or other pharmaceutical interventions. In the absence of this despair, there would almost certainly be a class war.
Marianne claims that Rhoda isolated herself. The sentence alone betrays the crisis at the heart of those who despair: they feel like we’ve made mistakes, we’ve lost our way. This is, of course, unadulterated bullshit - people like Rhoda, and many of us whose course originated on the “left” (something now vanished in form) before a great departure, are content individuals, who do not feign embarrassment at their past and, most importantly, do not begrudge others to the point where their uncontrollable reflexes shoehorn division into the space of a tribute. That should be left to friendship and friendship alone; in the end, it’s all that matters.
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