Adriaan Basson, man with his finger on the pulse − News25 and all – writes from London: “Hullo,” he says, “Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.”
I’m convinced News25 is some kind of parasitic flatworm; every time I think I’ve unsubscribed, they manage to squeeze in a letter, or an offer – in some cases, to pay virtually nothing for a catalogue of shitlib race-hoaxing.
Like in 2020, I knew it would come – because he can’t help himself. Basson seems to think his views on an election in a sovereign country are uniquely positioned, and he caveats the self-righteousness with his “concern for the truth”. That would be fine – if he was concerned with the truth.
If he had addressed the shrieking two-headed monster called Jacinda Trudeau and its claims about ‘vaccines’, or its threats about the prospect of two-tiered societies; if he’d acknowledged that an unelected buffoon sitting at the WHO grace-and-favour mansion in Geneva popping off on X against countries reluctant to volunteer their democratic obligations was a bit tasteless; if he’d taken Joe Biden to task about ‘covid’, or Afghanistan, or being in twelve places at once…maybe he could get away with it.
Basson was in London for one of the biggest circle jerks you’ve never heard of. The annual Thomson Reuters Trust Conference sees hundreds of feeble, noodle-armed men jostling for control of the world’s English-speaking information flow, but not really jostling, because if you listen closely enough you can hear the hum of surrendered males and angry women all agreeing with each other.
They agree on everything, but especially Donald Trump – who irks Basson enough to include him in his letter. I can’t emphasise the cringe of this enough: not even establishment journalists in the UK behave like this. This UK is swamped by some of the most damaged, deranged reporters ever to have lived. Take Carole Cadwalladr of The Guardian, whose obsession with Russia landed her in court and cost her a council flat. Even she errs cautiously today.
Redundancies
It’s clear from Basson’s letter that media mass redundancies lie ahead in 2025 as these broken monopolies front up to yet another threat in AI. Here’s a sentence from his letter: “’AI is having a profound impact on society and democracy. AI is clearly the new battleground for trust,’ said the foundation’s impressive CEO, Antonio Zappulla”. Ignore the brown-nosing. The shark has been jumped: way before AI came the business of division, a commercial model incorporating the strategies of humiliation, cancelation and current thing-ism. Still, nice that Basson found a friend, no? Maybe ask him if he knows the Italian Club in Norwood?
Basson and his advisors, one being possibly the transgender activist Max du Preez, just don’t get it, do they? We’re post-porky – we’ve lived through almost a decade of Democrat hurricane porkies. We’re out. Unlike Basson and his colleagues at News25, in particular Phillip de Wet, some of us have skin in the game in these elections – and we could not care less if Trump emerged at his final hustings on Monday to declare that, actually, he – and not Lizzo (as Democrats would have you believe) – invented the microscope. Fine – Trump caught the Unabomber single-handedly, thrashed Deep Blue before it beat Kasparov, and knows some of the Sentinelese tribe personally (“smart guys”). Makes no difference.
Our arc of disillusionment extends much further back than Basson’s present, confected hysteria. We remember things like weapons of mass destruction and prestige media investment into it, two weeks to flatten the curve and just before that, the “very fine people” shake-down that even the extreme-left Snopes was forced to classify as rubbish. Basson and his colleagues like to think of themselves as reasonable “progressives” – but that would imply progress, and participating in a media landscape littered with government-approved narratives distributed by degenerate grievance reporters doesn’t qualify.
But these sorts of admissions prompt even further – what is this ‘progress’? We in the West haven’t ‘progressed’ in over half a century – certainly not insofar as regards architecture, music, or even medicine. You can literally hear the sniggering of the guys who sorted diabetes above you: “useless experimental therapeutics don’t count, losers, all you’ve done is solve erectile dysfunction and call buildings racist”.
Not anticipating miracles
We are not anticipating miracles from Tuesday; most of us are conscious that our lives won’t change – Trump winning won’t improve your self-esteem or help you break a bad habit. It would great if he terminated those Tammany lines growing fat on all the bombs being dropped on the heads of people in different countries, or the Ukrainian meat grinder, but even here our expectation is more deferential. Let me explain.
If you’re in the UK and you laugh at the hopeless Prime Minister, or his decision to appoint a former complaints desk clerk (who went around telling everyone she was an economist) as his Chancellor – you will go to jail. Same if you object to Germany’s climate policies. In Russia if you laugh at Vladimir Putin, a Chechen rocks up with a kilij. Right up until now in the US, if you make too big a thing about Bill Clinton’s or Reid Hoffman’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, the former’s wife eliminates you.
So, with managed expectations, the only thing we’re actually hoping for is the return of a world profile who is genuinely funny – an increasingly rare feature in a Western dude, let alone a leader. Underestimate humour, coupled to a sense of the unknown, at your peril. From our smoking ruin of a PC, air-bagged, endlessly formulaic civilisation, these are small but important windows of the spontaneous.
As tempting as it is to align to the Basson world view of finding pleasure in the sight of a man beating the crap out of a woman in the octagon (“progress”) or instructing your bank to debit your account monthly so that you can support scams that result only in mansions being acquired in California – nah.
Many of us just want to feel that the leader of the free world enjoys laughing – as we do – at things like a very important CNN legal analyst caught accidentally masturbating on Zoom, or an MP bust with his catamite in the drawing room, or that he prefers to troll Greta Thunberg than meet an overqualified British scientist who has hurriedly flown over to shriek about a respiratory condition that’s just been located in an area of Indonesia not far from – funnily enough – a US chemical laboratory nobody knew existed. Really, that’s all.
[Image: Tibor Janosi Mozes from Pixabay
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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