Media platforms of South Africa's right-wing

Media site BizNews (BN), edited and published by Alex Hogg, banned me on Tuesday from commenting. I don’t know the reason but it follows an exchange on Monday and Tuesday with two commentators about civility, criticism, freedom of speech and right of reply.

 One of them, Geoff Coles from Somerset West, a retired accountant and expatriate Brit originally from Durham, is a troll and irritant on BN and Politicsweb (PW). Almost each time he comments, it is to insult and criticise no matter what is discussed, even if he agreed with one.

Last year he alleged, without evidence, Politicsweb columnist William Saunderson-Meyer accepted bribes to write positive pieces about government. In an unusual riposte, Saunderson-Meyer called him an “offensive man”.

This is the way of the right-wing, though, 90% of commentators. They attack and defame, more for sycophantic approval than making a contribution to debate.

They hate independent minds that don’t follow the herd. On PW and BN and the few other sites where they're still allowed to comment (likewise, left-leaning sites censor and ban those who don't adhere to the left narrative) anyone who doesn’t follow the right’s narrative are abused and threatened. To me, MJ on BN: “I want to smash your face”; Jared repeatedly on PW: “Give me your address so I can throw toilet [shit] at you”. I complained but neither were banned. I blocked them.

Coles liked to say I was a lunatic or resident of Valkenberg, Cape Town’s psychiatric hospital.

This week on 2oceansvibe David Bullard, notorious shit-stirrer and racist and former columnist for Daily Friend who was fired for his tweet about the K-word, called me a “sanctimonious prick” (later changed to "male appendage") and “moron” for criticising him. 

He claimed his neighbours in Somerset West (there must be something in the water) think he’s a “super hero” for the tweet. In a follow-up tweet he referred to “leftard bedwetters”, leftard being the far-right’s disparaging term for liberals. He received support on the forum.

In his replies to me he overlooked my criticism of the offense per se. Instead, as they do, he shifted blame to blacks, that he and his friends don’t have "tolerance" for “kleptocrats”, i.e. to them all blacks are thieves.

He's also a columnist for PW. That PW did not fire him proves speaks volumes about it. Bullard's weekly column appeared as usual on June 2. Gareth van Onselen wrote of him in Business Day, "If the purpose is merely notoriety, what you say counts for very little, so long as it generates infamy", which summarises Bullard and the right.

The right-wing present themselves as champions of good governance, morality and ethics. They constantly complain about the ANC's lack of it, as Bullard's post-tweet article on PW is about.

But when it suits them, they excuse their own and their idols' misconduct, e.g. DA, Helen Zille, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

Similarly, convicted racists Penny Sparrow, Vicki Momberg, the "Coffin Case" pair, etc are innocent, or at least what they did can be excused for reasons that are unclear (they don't use the same reasoning to excuse black-on-white crime, e.g. farm murders, then it's "genocide").

Instead, they are martyrs for the far-right cause. Their "persecution" shows the ANC government, criminal justice system and courts are "corrupt" and "incompetent" and that blacks, "MSM" (mainstream media) and "woke" "leftards" hate whites in general and Afrikaners in particular.

Everyone who isn’t like them and they don’t like are “paid ANC trolls”, “commie”, leftist/leftard, “liberal” and white/Afrikaner-hating "racists".

The government, left and black society are a particular object of their hatred and vitriol, often couched in barely hidden racist language which PW and BN don’t censor. (Usually comments on PW are more blatant than BN. A PW commentator, one of the few civil ones, wrote “Politicsweb, where rational debate goes to die among the vitriol”. He stopped commenting soon after.)

BizNews, Politicweb, Institute of Race Relations’ (IRR) Daily Friend and related libertarian lobby groups like Free Market Foundation, AfriForum and Sakeliga are fertile platforms for conservative and far-right activism, conspiracies and denialism – climate change, coronavirus pandemic and lockdown, alleged white and farmer genocide, black theft of white land and economic wealth and right, loss of white rights, you name it. (This essay is not an examination of right-wing organisations like IRR, etc, but these are associated with right-wing media.)

These editors, columnists, op-ed contributors and commentators invent allegations against and conspiracies about government, blacks and liberalism while force-feeding their libertarian “classical liberal” and right-wing agendas. Now, the pandemic and South Africa's lockdown is the subject of reactionary conspiracies and alternative facts. This was the final straw that resulted in me stop reading PW. My criticism of BN is likely one of the factors that led to my banning.

In their own way these sites set the agenda for the mindless herd who follow, approve and repeat what they read. Seldom do they publish or read views that present alternative philosophies, PW's "fair but fearless" motto.

The right are obsessed about the black ANC government. Before the coronavirus pandemic pushed these concerns aside, they incessantly complained – and still do – about ANC, EFF, black economic empowerment and society in general and land redistribution.

In fact, white lives and their standard of living remain unchanged after apartheid ended. They have nothing to complain about, but they do all the same. Contrary to their morbid opinion, for all its problems, and it has many, South Africa is in an overall better political situation now than during apartheid. It has one of the most liberal constitutions in the world and freedoms it didn’t have before, the result of black people's largesse, and if not forgiveness, then to forget and move on. 

Its citizens are no longer international pariahs and welcomed around the world. Whites still control the economy and live the way they did before while for the majority of blacks and browns not much has changed. 

So why do they constantly complain? Including among the moderate, they yearn for the apartheid bubble where whites felt secure and blacks knew their place. They cannot stand the idea of a society governed by blacks who are their equals. By comparison, most blacks, except a minority of extremists and populists who use race as an expedient political tool, have moved on. 

While the majority of whites probably harbour residual racial attitudes, the far-right – about 5% of the country's population based on the IRR's Race Relations Survey – haven't and are locked into the inherent racial class structures of colonialism and apartheid.

Now with the coronavirus pandemic, they’re whinging about the economic impact of the lockdown. They believe the lockdown is unnecessary and exaggerated despite all evidence to the contrary (they haven't heard of the prevention paradox). They present conspiracy theories and alternative facts about the pandemic. Some even say it's a “hoax”. People like PANDA's Nick Hudson and Peter Castleden and Allan Gray's CEO Andrew Lapping – the white elite who before were not concerned about the country's systemic poverty and unemployment – fuel their beliefs with reckless and poorly formulated theories.

But the middle class and especially middle class whites have little to fear from poverty. All they fear is their portfolios and how their credit and consumption-driven lifestyles are being affected. News24 columnist Melanie Verwoed called it "hysteria lane".

They constantly reveal their ignorance, petulance and immaturity. With the Internet they have a world of knowledge at their command but read only that which confirms their prejudices. They appeal to authority provided the authority is white and of their class and political ideology. Similarly, they prefer YouTube and self-taught experts rather than the genuine article. 

 They perceive the world in a fundamentally different way to the rest of us. Facts are discarded and changed for whatever suits their conclusion. And when presented with their contradictions, they either go silent or attack their critics.

Often they don't know what belief system they're subscribing to. For example, a moderate PW commentator by its standards, who rejected he was right-wing, despite my cautions, insisted quoting a self-taught British writer of a (one) self-published political booklet as an authority. He went silent when I referred him to an Internet entry that the writer's political ideology was conspiracy theories and Antisemitism.

Their political heroes are Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Helen Zille about whom they post adoring and loving comments. They say life is wonderful in “first world” US and UK which can teach “third world” Africa and South Africa a lot about governance.

However, when challenged about whether they’d like to live there given Brexit or their high rates of Covid-19 infections (Sweden is another place they recommend), they go silent. There’s silence now that the US is descending into anarchy and a police state and authoritarianism after the murder of George Floyd, which Trump is stoking.

Many times I wondered what would happen when right-wing denialists (climate change, pandemic, systemic racism, etc) are faced with the awful truth. They’d hide in their bunkers, of course, as their idol Trump – a self-described militaristic person – did last week when protesters stood outside the White House.

They don’t have the courage of their convictions. And have thin skins, including the self-described satirists Bullard, Gordin, Donaldson, Reader, etc. They can give it, but can’t take it. They're misathropes who constantly fear the worst, a psychological condition known as "catastrophising". But only of any black-run country. This doesn't apply to white enclaves like DA-run Western Cape, a "well-run bubble" (IRR's CEO Frans Cronje), or any white country.

Economically they're in the middle to upper classes and have access to the best education in the country, historical privilege and opportunities, media and internet. But strangely, they revel in their ignorance and poor reading. I describe it as the “right-wing bubble”, and failures of apartheid’s Model C schools and Christian National Education. When I noted this and their failure to do basic research and use facts, I was accused of getting insulting and personal.

One hopes for civil, reasonable people who are prepared to debate with facts and logical argument. But the far-right relies on racism, hatred, conspiracy theories and denialism. They insult and abuse those they disagree with. Most of their comments and arguments are rubbish: unintelligible, illogical, with few facts that they make up on the fly. They arrogantly try to convert one to their way of thinking, not that one wants or needs it. When they fail, one is deemed incorrigible and “given rope and hung on your petard (sic)” (self-described literati Ingrid on PW).

This piece is about the media giving South Africa's right-wing a platform to promote their views and agendas. On its relaunch in 2018 with a new funding model, PW's editor said it was "fair but fearless" to counter the ANC/left narrative (the only one?). Well and good, but it has unfortunately ventured into far-right extremism. (See this post for a good analyses of PW's and similar position in the media spectrum and the readers they attract.)

It says a lot about BN and PW that Geoff et al are not the worst of their readers. Most are racist, bigoted and homophobic with an animus toward the ANC government, left and blacks expressed in awful language. Most of them should be moderated or banned. Occasionally I flagged hateful, racist and abusive comments. Sometimes flagged comments were removed. (I blocked egregious commentators and trolls only since November.) Invariably, when I objected about the quality of debate and manners of commentators, I was abused or reprimanded for whinging. 

PW and BN don't apply their comments policy but revealing the editors' Calvinistic streak, censor words with a sexual connotation even if used innocently. As far as I know, they don't routinely remove offensive comments and ban people because the same regularly say the same things again and again.

I often asked myself, as did my detractors, why I continued reading these sites. It wasn't that I was being informed – for that international media are miles ahead in professional standards and ethics. With few exceptions, the quality of articles in local media are not good. BN is more tabloid than serious media let alone business media it calls itself. It's really a club hosted by Hogg, with his frequent twee homilies (they're not op-eds or editorials per se). (See here for my assessment of BN's and PW's content.)

The truth is commenting is entertaining, and often became an end in itself. It was a plus if the article was informative.

So to my firing, on Monday I posted a comment to BN’s brief about SpaceX's launch of two US astronauts over the weekend. My point was it and local media ran that, in BN's case fulsomely congratulating "South Africa's" (sic) Elon Musk, but the main event in the US over the past week – the George Floyd protests – was hardly mentioned and not at all on BN. I called local media “mediocre”.

To this Geoff posted I was "negative", presumably that I dared mentioned race riots, anathema to the right, although he said I was right (like his peers, he’s blind to self-contradiction and irony). That was the extent of his comment. This was typical – he never contributed anything original or profound relying on the low common denominator of these fora. He commented mainly for the upvotes, a thing with them.

I had already decided to disregard him as a nonentity; he was not even worth blocking. Of the three kinds of people in a group – those who add value, those who remain silent and inane babblers – he was the last because he never contributes anything. But I got irritated because like BN he minimised another significant social event especially concerning race. I said he probably has the short man syndrome (I don’t know how tall he is – he could be over six feet). It was mean but well within what BN,and PW and sites consider acceptable, e.g. Bullard's reference to me being a prick, and similar to the criticism in The Guardian and local media, e.g. Daily Maverick (some of its writers say "fuck"). 

Geoff responded I was a lunatic and a patient of a psychiatric hospital and full of bile, unoriginal insults.

Another commentator said I was over the top and should be censured. Before, he was also rude to me purely because he lost debates. Commentators on these fora lack self-irony and introspection, resorting to the crass and superficial in character, attitude and thinking.

Around this time after I posted a comment to an article about PANDA (another criticism of government's pandemic data) a notice appeared saying it was awaiting moderation. "Oh", I thought. I noted someone must’ve complained or BN got tired of my comments that the site's mediocre. They have their wish, I said, it’s a short step to being banned. “So much for freedom of speech.” BN later removed that comment.

BN didn't remove my comments. People still replied to me but I couldn't respond. Perhaps they don't want to reveal they're abrogating freedom of speech and refusing right of reply. They lack the courage of their convictions

BN is not alone, though, SA's media – Independent, The Conversation, Daily Maverick, Groundup, EWN, Tiso, etc – all regularly do so. It’s their right to remove whomever they choose. But their comments policies are either unknown, inconsistent or not enforced. And they’re doing it in such a way to promote an agenda.

Offensive, bigoted and hateful commentary are allowed to remain, like Bullard's, Goeff's and all the others who get to spew bigotry and hate. But others are banned. The only criteria is who is saying what – if for the sites' agendas, they remain; if against, it goes.

This is the how America’s policing was described this week: blacks and peaceful protesters are beaten, killed and arrested. But aggressive and armed whites are not touched and allowed to spread insurrection and hate supported by Trump and right-wing media.