This may surprise you, but South Africa’s most troubled editor, Adriaan Basson, doesn’t actually like Donald Trump – kind of startling because you’d never know, right? He does however appear to have located a small affinity for Elon Musk or rather, one of Musk’s ideas currently ripping the extravagant and grotesque largesse out of American “foreign policy”: DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency).
Of course, Basson wouldn’t want to deprive someone of their puberty blockers from the Hillbrow clinic, and ideally, DOGE – in its South African application to exposing the sheer waste and corruption in its municipalities – should be diverse, vibrant, and reflective. Which means that there shall have to be representation from both Al-Shabaab and Sudan’s RSF.
In the event that such intervention is considered, he would also insist that all the white female DEI consultants he unleashes whenever there’s another race hoax should be made DOGE emerita or something. Whatever. It’s a start.
But Basson risks the ire of his in-house ombudsman George Claassen, who was presumably working from home the day Basson published the South African case for a DOGE – making him an outhouse ombudsman. Here’s what Claassen had to say about Donald Trump and Elon Musk on the 11th of February:
“In the midst of social media and tech barons like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and others kneeling at the feet of an immoral, vindictive occupant of the Oval Office, raising the white flag of their independence, the challenges facing journalists to adhere to ethical, reliable, trustworthy, accurate and fair journalism have never been more daunting.”
Nerve
You have to admire his nerve. In the unlikely event Trump felt that his character had been impugned and sought a meeting in Heerengracht Street to straighten things out, this outhouse/in-house arrangement would bewilder even Washington’s most experienced white shoe SLAPP lawyer guys.
Claassen is also a Big Climate guy, and likes to use his occasional columns to scold okes and okettes who – despite admirable attempts – still can’t quite fathom how higher taxes and the destruction of a generation’s prospects will reduce the world’s temperature. All that’s happened in the years that Claassen has been scolding is that the Washington DC metro area has become home to three of America’s top five wealthiest counties.
It’s literally the manor of the oldest and most elaborate state capture racket in the West – where fraudsters like the climate fraudster Michael E Mann drag their opponents to court for calling their fraudulent hockey sticks “fraudulent”, – and from where the USAID swindle that Musk is tearing to pieces casts its progressive doctrine to the world. You could feel for Claassen at this point: volunteer reputation managers get no thanks from the big shots there.
Rotten luck
With the exception of highlighting the rotten luck of people who were living off USAID’s largesse, why did it take so long for prestige media in South Africa to acknowledge that a monumental effort at restoring government trust and transparency was underway in the US? For days nothing was said about the scam – in contrast to the UK, where everyone went berserk, partly because they’re protective of scams, given half the City owes its existence to them, and partly because it enraged the centrist dads.
The father of the centrist dads in the UK is a former “Conservative” MP called Rory Stewart – and he was incensed that his wife had a million for her foundation canned. What did Mrs. Stewart’s foundation do? It showed pictures of men’s urinals to ladies in Afghanistan (Marcel Duchamp). So the delay in South Africa is resolved: the country’s white editors may be damaged and hate themselves for accidentally using gendered or ableist language in staff meetings, but they appear to possess just enough self-awareness to know not to self-report.
Narrative tremble
A clear sign of narrative tremble occurs when an editor starts flirting with the ideas belonging to people that he or she purports to hate. It becomes even clearer when officials like JD Vance take the stage in Munich and strip layers off said narrative, or to no less a meaningful point – when the excellent Afrikaans journalist Izak du Plessis (author of the outstanding Ralph Haynes: Godfather van die West Rand) unceremoniously ejects the sneering professor Piet Croucamp from his show.
Few can dispute that the modern liberal simulation – sometimes hilariously referred to as the “rules-based international order” – has been weakened beyond repair. This was the programme that safeguarded the procession of the “expert” class, forever wars, and permanent emergencies, the secret passages between governments and obedient media, the academic or scientific “consensus”, the insatiable identity grift, the uniparty, today’s over-educated and over-celebrated and ultimately incompetent Western managerial elites.
It was once the case that double-downing was both the habit and the last refuge of the scoundrel, but that is no longer possible. Neither is containment. DOGE, the restoration of free speech, the inheritors of British Marxist academia surrendering their country’s influence, the decline of Europe where not a single one of those modish, sophisticated, multi-lingual commissars has been able to locate humanity’s most instinctively desired state of peace for three years now, the demonstrable failure of the effete “soft” power and the return of its opposite – these things are all great, essential, and happily now, inevitable.
Any redemption arc has a few awkward points. Along the way Basson and the outhouse guy will learn that the “president” before Trump lied much more, probably stole too and, who, despite being mentally inadequate was buttressed by the same logic their media organisation advocates. All that’s left to do when everything you’ve believed in collapses is join local transgender activist Max du Preez on his balcony near Cape Point and feed the baboon that descends from the mountain every day to extort lettuce.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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