South African Moronocracy
At best, Chris Roper's stupid attack on Alec Hogg is just another example of US prestige media / Democrat establishment crap. At worst, it is another failed attempt at being a 'good white'.
Today one of South Africa’s biggest morons, Chris Roper, and a failed politician, Phumzile Van Damme, created an echo chamber, then extended an invite to another moron, The Daily Moron’s self-appointed fact-checker Rebecca Davis - the same smear merchant who enabled the dog-pile on PANDA’s Nick Hudson earlier this year.
(I’m not going to explore the merits of Jeremy Nell’s remarks. I have yesterday responded to one Eduard Grebe, ostensibly a scientist from South Africa who now resides in California - on the CDC dime - my partial reply to this subsidized monkey will be published on Biznews.com in the next 24 hours. Rather, I’m going to address Roper’s smear of Alec Hogg, the continuum of his feeble, infamous claim, rooted in moral expediency, that Helen Zille is more dangerous than Julius Malema).
Just as Poplak at the Moron thinks he’s some sort of contemporary Gonzo traveler, Roper styles himself as a bietjie fokken kool spectator of Patti Smith’s New York, when junky poets shot themselves in the face and everyone else went to the loo in the street. Roper was a very bad thing to happen to the Mail & Guardian - much worse than the next editor Sipho Kings (now also gone), who was himself a disaster (with the circulation down the shitter, Kings busied himself with tweets about ‘ableism’). Davis’ partner is Haji Mohamed Dawjee, another angry little pretend feminist - but, fear not - like all the other performative radicals being outraged in Washington - this couple is only cosmetically woke.
These people just parrot Joe Biden’s chief nurse Jen Psaki. There is no difference between her defense of Anthony Fauci and Davis’ ‘fact-check’ in the Moron. Because reverence for public figures with the ‘right’ politics [see: Andrew Cuomo] has usurped religion, they see no fault. This they only encounter that when they reluctantly step outside, and people like Alec Hogg come into view.
Alec and I moved to London at around the same time in 2015. We became friends quickly: I consider him to be South Africa’s pre-eminent financial journalist, and I’m proud to have been distantly associated with his success story. There is however a rule that determines our professional relationship - the same rule I applied to Business Day for five years: I don’t accept pay.
Writing is a hobby: should my work generate any money, it should be shared amongst those whose livelihoods depend on it. Moreover, this arrangement guarantees my independence (my friend taught me this: he’s held a weekly column with the world’s oldest English-speaking magazine for nearly five decades now).
To lump Alec with a group known as the ‘alt-right’ (what he really means is ‘racists’) is a desperate slur and indicative of just how deeply junk groupthink, imported from US and latterly, UK universities has contaminated public discussion. As it happens, Joe Rogan, the world’s most successful podcaster, is demonstrably not ‘alt-right’.
Rogan’s choice for Presidential candidate was the formidable Democrat Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard’s campaign failed because she confronted Clinton inc. on its horror and corruption (which is something Davis has never done), and was mercilessly excoriated by the Clinton axis’ allies in prestige media. Furthermore, Gabbard, a military veteran with real-world experience of American wars in the Middle East, has successfully debunked prestige media/establishment Democrat lies about Russia and Syria. Rogan has also defended illegal immigrants - not a characteristic of the ‘alt-right’ last time I looked.
Alec Hogg’s crime was to platform a dissenting view of the Fauci / science / media triumvirate. But what Roper, Davis, Kings et al are fond of dismissing as ‘conspiracy theories’ are actually the perspectives of real people whose lives have been severely interrupted, some irreparably, as a result of disastrous policies established on the advice of people like Fauci and SAGE. Biznews’ attitude here is, in Alec Hogg’s own words, ‘old world reporting’ - the one where you give both sides of an argument the opportunity to express their positions. Remember that?
Roper, Davis, Adriaan Basson and co are consciously attempting to usher into South Africa’s small reporting ecosystem the same platitudes that the endlessly corrupted Joe Biden rode into the White House on. They condescendingly articulate, via retweets and shares, the same prestige media garbage - about ‘white supremacy’, about sympathy for domestic terrorists such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa, about the environment, about the ‘benefits’ of Covid-19 lockdowns. This confusing but menacing and schizophrenic strategy is then incorporated into customized forms of white-shaming, which look particularly influential when framed as Twitter posts - and even more so when Twitter’s own highly politicized editorialists boost them via rigged algorithm.
The result is chaos. In their efforts to appear ‘better whites’, these people leave a trail of division, ridicule, hypocrisy, presumed guilt, censorship and humiliation behind. And the real story here - about a lab leak that, if true, makes Watergate look like Disneyworld - lies somewhere in the smoke.
Thanks for this. The clowns at Daily Moron are BLM + BDS sympathisers. Insufferable navel gazers.
Refreshing Honesty about the woke mess.