Media24 announced on Sunday that it will be investigating how its web property, the Huffington Post South Africa, came to publish an article “Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?” on Thursday. The article went viral internationally after members of the conservative media in the United States started linking to it on Twitter, and in online articles on websites such as Breitbart.com.
The posting of the piece was initially defended by HuffPost SA’s editor Verashni Pillay, however the article was pulled on Friday after it was established that the author, one “Shelley Garland”, probably did not exist. It was subsequently established that the HuffPost had fallen for a race hoax after the author – a self-described white male from Johannesburg who requested continued anonymity – contacted the Renegade Report on CliffCentral.com to explain how he had pulled it off.
In the article “Garland” claimed that white men had been responsible for various setbacks to the progressive cause over the past few years – including Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the victory of the Democratic Alliance in a number of metros in last year’s local government elections in South Africa. “She” suggested one solution to the problem of continued white male influence was to deny white men the vote over a generation:
“If white men no longer had the vote, the progressive cause would be strengthened. It would not be necessary to deny white men indefinitely – the denial of the vote to white men for 20 years (just less than a generation) would go some way to seeing a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology in the world.”
Having deprived white men of the franchise, Garland stated, it would then be possible to deprive them of their illegitimately acquired property and possessions, and punish them for the crimes they had committed over the past five hundred years.
“A period of twenty years without white men in the world's parliaments and voting booths will allow legislation to be passed which could see the world's wealth far more equitably shared. The violence of white male wealth and income inequality will be a thing of the past. This redistribution of the world's wealth is long overdue, and it is not just South Africa where white males own a disproportionate amount of wealth.”