The Huffington Post made a bold move this week in publishing one of the most click-baity op-eds in recent memory: “Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?”
Written by an alleged South African philosophy student Shelley Garland, the piece poorly argued for the need to take the vote away from white males all over the world. (RELATED: HuffPo Writer Proposes Stripping White Men Of Voting Rights)
On Saturday, HuffPo retracted the article after it was revealed that the purported author of the article likely doesn’t exist. It’s not too surprising that the article was probably just an elaborate troll — even though the liberal media giant defended its publication as a valid point of view before deleting it. (That defense has since been scrubbed as well.)
Even if it was all just a bit of satire, the article represents a point of view that is becoming more prevalent in South Africa and among some leftists in Europe and America as well.
Lamenting Brexit and Donald Trump’s surprise win, “Garland” placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of white men for most of the world’s problems. Focusing on her home country, the self-declared philosophy student said, “90 percent of the country’s land is in the hands of whites (it is safe to assume these are mainly men), along with 97 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange” and claimed that this is the norm throughout the entire world.
That’s a terrible thing, if you couldn’t tell.
So the author offered a modest solution: “a moratorium on the franchise for white males for a period of between 20 and 30 years is a small price to pay for the pain inflicted by white males on others, particularly those with black, female-identifying bodies.” Without this right, the essayist hopes the wealth and property of white men will be properly redistributed to make for “the past 500 years [of] colonialism, slavery, and various aggressive wars and genocides.”
These arguments, of course, appear even less serious when you take into account that this was likely a troll. However reassuring that may be, the idea of disenfranchising whites is a serious one in South Africa — the nation Garland claimed to hail from.
In Huffington Post’s retraction, its South African subsidiary insisted that it follows the nation’s stipulation to not publish hate speech — implying the article amounted to that.
Unfortunately, SA’s leaders aren’t as interested in avoiding hate speech towards whites. Just last month, the country’s president Jacob Zuma called the confiscation of all white-owned property — without restitution. (RELATED: South African President Calls For Confiscating White-Owned Land)
The move was likely in response to the growing popularity of Julius Malema and his far-left Economic Freedom Fighters party. Malema has spent a lot of time campaigning around the country urging for the redistribution of property from “white invaders” in order to “unite black people in South Africa.”
The neighboring state of Zimbabwe implemented the same idea of confiscating white-owned land — with disastrous consequences.
Both Zuma and Malema are fond of singing the song “Kill the Boer,” an anthem that has been deemed a call for murder of Afrikaners. And it’s not just inflammatory songs and punitive proposals white South Africans have to worry about.
As a recent Australian news report points out, gruesome farm murders against white landowners are starting to rise in the African state. These crimes usually involve horrific torture of the victims — including the use of blowtorches and power drills — that appear to be driven in part by anti-white sentiment.
This alarming problem is being met with silence and even derision by the country’s predominately black leadership. When one lawmaker spoke out on the matter in parliament in March, a colleague from the ruling African National Congress shouted “Bury them alive!” in response to the threat posed to white farmowners.
The group Genocide Watch has even stated that the “early warnings of genocide are still deep in South African society.”
So while the HuffPo article itself may not have been serious, it’s not a fringe proposal in the current climate of South Africa. And, by all appearances, if Shelley Garland had turned out to be a real person, HuffPo’s SA branch would’ve still stood by it. Which is a strong indication they thought it was a valid point of view.
Here in America, we have the luxury of seeing similar articles and knowing that they have no way in hell of being enacted in the foreseeable future. Even though there may be some on the Left who will entertain the idea of disenfranchising white voters, it will be greeted by the rest of our society as ridiculous.
In South Africa, it’s not such a crazy idea to call for the disenfranchisement of whites. And if Malema or another politician suggests it in public, there will be no recourse in pretending it’s a joke.
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