Thomas Johnson - The Blog

  This post continues with ten facts about the DA. Fact: 6.            DA participates in rightwing victim narrative and conspiracy theories   In 2019 after a white Stellenbosch farmer was murdered in a likely crime of opportunity, the WCG was so outraged that at a media conference the agriculture MEC announced the formation of a task team to coordinate a response to farm killings. The farmer’s murder was blazoned across the media.   That same week an NGO released a report about the very high numbers of women and children murdered each in the country each year. It received almost no attention. The DA too is silent about Cape Town’s – the country’s crime capital – high crime rate, especially in black and brown communities.   The rightwing call farm murders, which to them means white victims while ignoring other races, “[white] genocide”. However, independent research and police statistics are unable to prove thei...

Here are ten facts about the Democratic Alliance (DA) most people do not know. In this part I list facts 1 to 5. The next post shall have facts 6 to 10.  1.            The DA is a rightwing party   It’s unclear when or how it started but the DA’s shift to the right was under the influence of party leader Helen Zille and her appointee, parliamentary leader and part-time pastor Mmusi Maimane. In 2015 already, member of parliament and academic Prof. Wilmot James was concerned about the party’s creeping conservatism. Around then former leader Tony Leon, who’d handed a growing, centre-liberal opposition to Zille, reportedly said there were no liberals left in the DA. Zille’s remarks about race and colonialism cemented the perception, if not fact, she and the party were rightwing. DA, Zille and then parliamentary leader (now party leader) John Steenhuisen personally were associated with rightwing groups and individuals. The far-right...