One of South Africa’s delicious ironies is that the self-proclaimed descendants of an Afrikaner Master race have become the very thing they profess to despise, a subjugated Native race living in the shadow of a colonial master whose whims and diktats they strive to anticipate and accommodate.
The dregs of the Master race have many marketing arms, such as AfriForum, Solidariteit and the new grift vehicle on the block, Lex Libertas (formerly the Pioneer Initiative). A ChatGPT hallucination suggests the organisation is named after comic book villain Lex Luthor, the arch-enemy of Superman, who Wikipedia says is an ordinary human with an extraordinary aptitude for manipulation, “who is also proud, calculating, pragmatic, and vengeful — driven by an insatiable thirst for control and devoid of ethical principles”. I know what you’re thinking. Could Ernst Roets, acclaimed struggle hero and the founder of Lex Libertas, be Lex Luthor?
No, Roets is no supervillain, just a run-of-the-griftmill chancer who will latch on to any recycled outrage topic to get the funds flowing. His latest con is trying to find evidence of South Africans who were mean to Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA who was shot dead by one of those lunatics that the US produces on a regular basis.
Here’s Roets’s recent post on X, that graffiti-filled toilet door formerly known as a social media platform: “We have made significant progress in our investigation into social media profiles in South Africa (including government officials) encouraging death and murder in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. We have decided to make the study broader, in other words, not to focus exclusively on remarks relating to Charlie Kirk, but incitement of violence in general — particularly on an ethnic basis. Most of the research has been done. The findings are clear and several people have been identified. We’re now working on writing it in the form of a report and drafting a follow-up plan of action. We will publish more on this in the weeks to follow.”
Who is this report for, one has to wonder? Will it really add anything to South Africa’s social ecosystem, other than to provide some badly rendered data visualisations for the alt-white idiots to share into the void?
Thinking of it in that way would be a mistake, though. The report is really a version of the ritualised offerings that cargo cults offer to the absent gods, crude mimicries of what the colonial power does, laid out in a pathetic hope that the gods will notice you. And, by the way, when someone working on an investigation says they’ve decided to broaden the scope, we all know that means they couldn’t find anything, so now they’re basically making it up.
I’ve written about cargo cults before, in relation to the president of Zimbabwe gratefully receiving the gift of a helicopter from Russian President Vladimir Putin. But to refresh our memories, cargo cults are religious movements that appeared in 1945 at the end of the Pacific War, primarily in Melanesia.
These movements arose among Pacific Island communities who had been exposed to colonial powers and military logistics, who saw outsiders receive abundant supplies via ships and planes, and interpreted this cargo of valuable goods as spiritual gifts. When the US abandoned the bases they’d used during World War 2, prophets (or grifters as we now know them) started promising people that there would be a resumption of these gifts if they performed a ritualised mimicry of what the US military had done.
According to Wikipedia (and forgive me if I also quote from my 2023 column), “cult behaviours usually involved mimicking the day-to-day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles. The islanders carved headphones from wood and wore them while sitting in fabricated control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses.”
I picture Roets tremulously crocheting a MAGA cap out of yarn he’s rescued from an old cardigan. He puts it on and runs around in the yard, shouting at SpaceX satellites. Notice me! Notice me!
How sad and pathetic is this? Could there be a sadder consequence of being used by a colonising power and then abandoned? To spend your life producing badly constructed offerings made of inferior materials and lay those out on a joke of an airstrip in the vain hope that the big daddy in the sky will notice and lay his benevolent eye upon you one more time.
I imagine you know where I’m going with this. Lex Libertas’s Kirk report is a sad little offering by a sad little organisation pitifully begging for the departed colonial powers to come back and be nice to the natives again. Make Apartheid Great Again, if you will.
I picture Roets sitting beside his fireplace, tremulously crocheting a MAGA cap out of faded red yarn he’s rescued from an old cardigan. He puts it on and runs around in the yard, shouting at SpaceX satellites. Notice me! Notice me! The “investigation into social media profiles encouraging death and murder in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination” is going to mimic what actual digital investigative analysts do, but it’s going to be made out of coconut husks and spit.
You know, Ernst, maybe your begging will actually work. The US state department is planning to fund MAGA-aligned think tanks and charities across Europe. They’ll be doing this under the pretence of protecting free speech, of course, a similar ploy to that of our home-grown Make Afrikaners Great Again political grifters, who love to claim they are fighting racist laws.
The Financial Times reported this month that senior state department official Sarah Rogers “travelled to Europe in December to meet influential right-wing think tanks and has spoken to key figures in Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party about deploying a pot of money to spread American values”. The newspaper quoted a senior figure in Farage’s party as saying the US administration was “on a crusade to save Europe”.
“They have a real soft spot for the UK but feel it is under threat from dark forces that are spreading across Europe,” the Reform UK source said.
Dark forces, Ernst! That’s resonant terminology, right? This could be a chance for your Klueless Klux Klan to jump on the bandwagon! Sure, you’re just a lowly African, with a Trump crypto coin fashioned out of tinfoil and packing crate debris, but maybe if you squeal real loud, Daddy will notice.
And it’s not just the Big Daddy over in the US, of course. Our local magatwats are licking the boots of many conservative leaders, some of whom are polluting our shores this month at Lex Luthor’s Future of Nations Conference in Pretoria.
According to the bumf for this conference, “many modern political systems have become disconnected from social, cultural and economic realities, leading to instability, declining legitimacy and growing social tension, especially in deeply plural societies”.
The speakers will be some of the most odious public figures dredged up from the far-right corner of the cesspool. These include our very own nepocreepo Rob Hersov, a man whose intellectual heft is outweighed only by his gossamer personality, and an assortment of grifters from far-right marketing vehicles such as Vlaams Belang in Belgium, the New York Young Republican Club and the Südtiroler Freundeskreis der Afrikaaner (South Tyrolean Friends of the Afrikaners). You probably think I made up that last one, but no. It might be laughable, but it’s real.
Ernst, bro. Have you no pride, man? People are laughing at you and your fellow white grifters, and the cute way you mimic the political posturing and ideological disinformation tactics of your absent colonial deities. What’s next, fundraising for ICE deployment in South Africa?
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