By PHAKAMISA MAYABA
Not too long ago, the local media would have us believe that Afriforum’s lobbying in the US was less of a master class in the art of woeing MAGA-ites than a badly 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 passed with flying colours. In his interviews with Tucker Carlson and Dr Jordan B. Peterson, the Pioneers got mentioned on platforms that attract growing numbers of viewers and turn otherwise boorish journalists and dour academics into cultural icons.
If you ever needed more evidence that the alternative media have, here and elsewhere, done a number on their traditional forebears, 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 have thought that such a motley – strewn messily between the alt-right and pro-underclass left, encumbered with ‘isms’ that make diversity consultants cringe, and whom talk shows think twice about inviting — would find themselves dissecting South Africa’s troubles in front of audiences that still ask: ‘South Africa, yea? Where’s that?’ An audience so versed in Mzansi’s illnesses as to regurgitate the idea that blacks are doing very bad things to whites, and if they’re not careful they will wind up like Zimbabwe and Rhodesia?
But here we are – in 2025, the clear beginning of the end of big media gatekeeping and a surging desire 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 rein 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?
Some time last year, one half of the Western world recoiled in disgust while the other was scrambling to ensure the interview would not see the light of day when Carlson sat down with Russian president Vladimir Putin. With the latter regarded as an unabashed dictator, and with a warrant out for his arrest, millions tuned in to watch. What had all the hallmarks of a Barbara Walters throwback soon turned into a fawning spectacle as Carlson looked more like the intern at a fanzine than an unflinching journalist seated across the one guy the whole world expected to be asked some serious questions.
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, and 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 the madness – to pick up a mic and give it a go.
With the Ivy League news anchor now an afterthought, a watershed has developed between the generation of podcasters and a ‘credentialism’ that is seen as a fast-waning relic from a fast dying era. But the old questions continue to reinsert 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 among the first to ask the existential questions.
Morgan recently asked of one his guests, a Professor John Spencer, 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 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 woke 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 after Donald Trump had signed an executive order granting Afrikaners ‘escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination’ refugee status. With South Africa firmly in MAGA’s crosshairs, the moment couldn’t have been more opportune for Roets. It signified something of a reunion between him and Carlson, given that they had met for 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 picture that some of us know all too well — of an anti-white, anti-minority, incompetent, and 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 theorising can drive home.
Take, for example, Carlson’s advice to Roets in respect of Afrikaner sovereignty. There are two options, he said: ‘force … or you will need the assistance of a powerful outside force that makes it happen.’
A shrewd player of South Africa’s nuanced race games, Roets did try to be economical with racial terminology, but also somewhat unwittingly validated Baloyi’s ‘code’ claims. That South Africa’s race wars are so deeply advanced as to be coded. As in ‘incompetence’ or ‘corruption’ are often no more than substitutes 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 we are way too far gone, and 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, since his appearance on the Joe Rogan show, the Holocaust denialist Cooper’s following has tripled.