The scent of Armageddon filled every North London home last Sunday. Local transgender activist Max du Preez took his defence of the ANC international, with an article published by London’s The Guardian – and computers suddenly started smelling like dirty socks, wet towels, gorgonzola on an aeroplane, and pockets of fluid from dead cacti.
You had to play out of your socks to be the worst white liberal in the British weekend media. The day before, The Telegraph seized the case of one Stuart Love, the CEO of the Westminster city council, who claims that his obsession with “wokeness” is a result of “having grown up under apartheid”.
Love, at once another chinless centrist dad, struggles to perform his basic council obligations – such as rubbish collection. I know, because I pay him to do so, and he fails. He succeeds, however, in positioning enormous pride flags in the street outside and forcing his staff to undergo ‘privilege tests’, where you get five points for owning a car, and fifteen for being a white male (the highest).
Then there was Mikey van Erp, a Dutchman who grew up in Zimbabwe. Van Erp is a notorious liberal cyclist who films driver indiscretions then grasses them up to the authorities before adding to the existing totals on his social media bio. Since 2019, Van Erp – who resembles Stuart Love – claims he’s reported over 2,000 drivers who’ve been fined over £150,000.
It is no wonder that men who drive white vans on their way to fix things like broken pipes and double-glazing sometimes post memes of crowds erupting at football matches and captions them: “The nation when Cycling Mikey gets crunched under an HGV”.
Usurp
But Du Preez managed to usurp both the council guy and the cyclist grass. In a totally unexpected line, he wrote to complain about Donald Trump and Elon Musk – because it’s not as if 991,018 articles on the same subject haven’t already been published in the English-speaking world this year.
Du Preez looks smart in the photo accompanying the article. He’s wearing an electric green tie, something you would expect a Belgian techno clarinetist to sport, but at least it’s a tie, and not one of those Mao shirts he wore in the days when he didn’t bother to disguise his left-wing derangement. The opening chords of “me-myself-and-I” are next.
They don’t stop, and soon its clear that’s all the article is (this is an information source for the particularly affected, and this is a particularly affected man). Du Preez makes contentious claims about Afrikaners, culture, opportunities, land, and the economy (some of which the IRR has already debunked, but let’s not ruin a centrist dad spastic-fitting Sunday); – and then a sweeping one like “the majority of South Africans were outraged” ̶ referring to Trump’s remarks about the country. (This is a demonstrable lie: if any analysis of “the majority” is true, then it is that they are less inclined to vote now than at any time in democratic living memory – particularly the youth).
He admits that the ANC “hasn’t performed brilliantly”, cheerfully oblivious to the fact that it’s entirely possible for a governing party to perform “badly” – even “disastrously” – but still prosecute its own corrupt members, protect grannies and women and children. He then gets into the ANC’s case against Israel.
Performative theatrics
“Someone had to do it,” is roughly the claim. What exactly is “it”? A press release demanding that Israel practise restraint, dated for publishing on 7 October 2023 when there was no basis for restraint? Performative theatrics in the Netherlands at the cost of building an African language college? There’s something unnerving about a man in the evening of his time cursed with a conflict superiority complex. Europe witnessed the Holocaust, the Porajmos – or Devouring of Romani peoples, the Balkan wars: to suggest that the past emboldened the ANC with some kind of exclusive moral impetus is not the stupidest thing he’s ever said, but it may be the most embarrassing.
Du Preez scrambled to The Guardian because he panicked. For over 30 years, he and his kind (aloof white academia, white media, white LinkedIn profiles) have volunteered gatekeeping services to white opinion in the manner of the King’s Hand. Seizing then marshalling ownership of the narrative has made them feel better about themselves, afforded them handsome commercial opportunities and empowered them to insult skeptics or independent thinkers with insults and cries of “shame”. That grip is under threat.
Not because of racists, or Donald Trump, or “disinformation”. Trump and Musk’s comments are what happens when the culture of rent-seeking and its associates breaks known measurements, and not just by expanded and uncontrollable practice, but by the persistent eagerness of people like Du Preez to cushion them from scrutiny and consequences.
Donald Trump’s comments, however inaccurate, are what happens when we’re told that the only thing to do with failed ideas is to make them fail harder. It is this logic that has seen “anti-racists” become the biggest racists in the world. If it weren’t Trump or Musk, it would be others – now, or later.
The one comfort is that Du Preez is shouting into a chamber whose walls are narrowing (only 19 centrist dads or so expressed any pleasure at the article; perhaps du Preez isn’t aware of the links The Guardian’s parent has to slavery). Politicians in the UK trying to defend the depravity of rape gangs in the country’s north are rattled and lashing out.
One of the most interesting contemporary perspectives belongs to a Canadian Professor of War Studies called David Betz, who is in heightened demand for his view that civil war in the UK isn’t too far away, and will be fought on ethnic lines. His thesis concludes that social engineering destroys social contracts. This is true of South Africa, and it is proving true of the UK.
[Photo: Screenshot/The Freedom Collection]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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