Not too long ago the local press would have us believe that Afriforum’s lobbying in the US was less a masterclass in the art of woeing MAGAites than an ill-planned gimmick. From posing in front of buildings they never entered, to dropping names of people they could barely get hold of on the telephone, it was laughed off as kindergarten cosplay.
Ironically, the one person whose visit was clearly not an act was none other than Ernst Roets who’d recently left that group to head the newly-founded Pioneers Initiative. According to the faithful, Roets’s showing deserved flying colours. In his interview with Tucker Carlson as well as Dr Jordan B. Peterson, the Pioneers found mention on platforms that nowadays attract numerous eyeballs and turn otherwise boorish journalists and dour academics into cultural icons.
If you ever needed further evidence that the alternative media has, here and everywhere else, done a number on its traditional forebear, these names should put paid to any doubts. To list but a few; Penuel Mlotshwa, Rob Hersov, Ernst Roets, Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Douglas Murray, Joe Rogan, Dave Smith, Nhlamulo ‘Nota’ Baloyi. Who would’ve thought?
Such a motley – straddling disparately between the alt-right and pro-underclass left – and often encumbered with those ‘isms’ that make diversity consultants cringe, and whom talk shows think twice about inviting – especially together – would find themselves dissecting SA’s troubles to audiences who still ask ‘South Africa, yea? Where’s that?’ An audience so sufficiently versed of Mzansi’s illnesses as to regurgitate that blacks are doing very bad things to whites and if they’re not careful they’ll probably wind up like Zimbabwe and Rhodesia.
But here we are; 2025 the clear genesis of the end of big media gatekeeping and a surging wokeness to detach oneself from the matrix and wander into the counsel of the Andrew Tates of this world, who’ll supposedly be straight-up and call it like they see it. And they’ll also afford their interlocutors uncapped airtime to state their case – perverted, distorted and self-evident as it may be – often with minimal probing counters or point by point fact-checking. Just free reign to wipe the floor with the tropes. Or, it seems, give a voice to all truths, no matter the teller or his motives. Who would’ve thought?
Sometime last year one half of the Western world recoiled in disgust whilst the other was scrambling to ensure the interview would not see the light of day when Carlson sat down with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Considered an unabashed dictator with a warrant out for his arrest, naturally, millions tuned in to watch. What had all the hallmarks of a Barbara Walters throwback soon turned into a fawning spectacle as Carlson looked like the intern of a fanzine than an unflinching journalist seated across the one guy that the whole world expected serious questions to.
Such is the new normal, whether in the land of MAGA or of Kwaito. Because the big studios with the watchful producers are seemingly no longer necessary, the old rules don’t really apply as long as nobody sues. Caveats like ‘allegedly’ are often forgone, likewise sacrosanct axioms such as ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ Reputations are sacrificed at the altar of clickbait and shock therapy often stands in the place of credibility. The system has been flipped on its head and the doors blown wide open to anyone and everyone who has – not necessarily the mettle but the balls or madness – to pick up a mic and give it a go.
With the Ivy League news anchor now an afterthought arises a watershed between the generation of podcasters versus a ‘credentialism’ that is seen as a fast waning relic from a fast dying era, the old questions, however, continue to einvent themselves. Who will guard the podcasters? Should everybody be allowed a seat at the table? Old hands like Piers Morgan, a seasoned journalist in the traditional space and now a household name in the booming new era has been amongst the first to ask the existential questions.
Of one his guests, a Professor John Spencer, Morgan recently wanted to know whether individuals like Darryl Cooper, a supposed historian who once referred to Winston Churchill, not Hitler, as the ‘chief villain’ of the Second World War and has also desperately tried to justify the Holocaust should be ‘platformed on gigantic podcasts like [The] Joe Rogan [Experience] if they’re not going to be vigorously challenged?’ Prof Spencer’s response: No. ‘We should not platform a historical revisionist.’
Yet all across the podcasting platforms, these guys creep up with one controversy after another. Here at home, we recently awoke to news of the SA Human Rights Commission initiating Equality Court proceedings against Nota Baloyi. On Dj Sbu’s Hustlers Corner Podcast, Baloyi had some colourful comments. ‘White people,’ said Baloyi, ‘are [an] inferior species to us. We’re Homo sapiens; they have got Neanderthal blood in them. This is the science. This science was not done by black people, it was done by them.’
Then came Roets’s moment, barely a month since Donald Trump had signed an executive order granting Afrikaners ‘escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination’ refuge status. With SA firmly in MAGA’s crosshairs, the moment couldn’t have been more opportune for Roets. It signified something of a reunion given that the two had met owing to similar reasons some seven years ago. As with his Jordan Peterson interview, the guy was given carte blanche to break a leg.
And so we listened as he painted the story that some of us know too well. One of an anti-white, anti-minority, incompetent socialist black government that thirsts after white land and where in the face of ineffective policing and failing infrastructure the only avenue open to the God-fearing Afrikaner is the road to self-governance. No serious interjecting on the part of the host, only highbrow intellectualism that made sure the attacks landed with the sort of indisputable ferocity only big academic theoriesing can drive home. Take, for example, Carlson’s advice to Roets’s desire for Afrikaner sovereignty. There are two options, he says, ‘force… or you will need the assistance of a powerful outside force that makes it happen.’
A knowledgeable mind in SA’s subtle race game, Roets did try to be economical with throwing racial terminology around but he also somewhat unwittingly validated Baloyi’s ‘code’ claims. That SA’s race wars are so deeply advanced as to be coded. As in ‘incompetence,’ or ‘corrupt’ are often no more than a substitute for ‘black.’ By the time Carlson chuckled: ‘It does seem not only like one of the worst governments in the world but one of the dumbest also,’ I’d had my fill. I suddenly longed for the measured voices of a Tim Modise or Freek Robinson.
For the old days when some things were simply censored. But now we are way too far gone, the battle of ideologies is out of the controlled studio newsroom and in a cage where all things go. Sure, there are courts we can turn to when people have overstepped the line but with so many transgressors one wonders whether granting access to everyone won’t soon have us listening to psychopaths. I’d thought that this would be the popular view but it turns out that the Holocaust denialist Cooper’s following has tripled since his remarks.