We South Africans, it must be said, have got used to a fairly low grade of hypocrisy.
When it comes from what remains of the left, it’s usually as knackered and pointless as a Joburg traffic light, as the ANC sermonises about freedom and human rights while sharing LOLs with repressive regimes in China and Iran, or the EFF trumpets Marxism-Leninism as its leader piles up an impressive portfolio of very privately owned property.
On the right it’s also tinged with failure, whether it’s AfriForum pretending to be an oppressed minority or the DA going on a “fact-finding” trip to Israel and finding Potemkin villages are very lovely.
No wonder, then, that we’ve had to look north for the really high-class, sparkling sort of hypocrisy, where the increasingly emboldened political right kept demanding rational thought and meritocracy and then voted for Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, or howled about cancel culture and free speech as it celebrated Elon Musk buying Twitter and promptly granting more censorship requests from governments than the platform’s previous owners ever had.
Since last week’s murder of mainstream edgelord Charlie Kirk, however, the global right has taken the gospel of “Do what I say, not what I do” to levels the ANC and EFF could only dream of. It’s really been something to see Trump, whose pardons of the January 6 insurrectionists formally confirmed that political violence works, leading his party in pious condemnation of it.
Hypocritical free-for-all
To be fair, many US liberals have also joined the hypocritical free-for-all, staging their own events to declare that it is abhorrent when people use violence for political ends in the US, which is apparently a different thing to people using violence for political ends in Gaza, which is, er, complicated.
The most absurd responses, though, have come from the far right, illustrated by South Carolina politician Nancy Mace, who reacted to the killing by tweeting that it was “time to bring back the death penalty” and that “the left owns what happened”.
Of course, once a suspect was found, and didn’t seem to be a black, trans, Muslim immigrant but rather a white man from a conservative, gun-loving family, the death penalty instantly gave way to thoughts and prayers as Mace tweeted: “We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will try to do the same.”
What if that’s the point?
It’s hypnotic. But what if that’s the point? Over the weekend, as the liberal media discovered a clip from Wednesday in which Fox News sock puppet Brian Kilmeade suggested on air that homeless people suspected of crimes should be given an “involuntary lethal injection”, much of the outrage focused not on a senior media figure openly endorsing mass murder but rather on the hypocrisy of Kilmeade keeping his job while an MSNBC pundit was fired after a gentle rebuke of Kirk.
It was such a peculiar response, and left such a moral void, that when Kilmeade finally offered a short apology on Sunday, four days later, I couldn’t help wondering if I’d just watched a psychological experiment play out; one in which the oligarchs who own Kilmeade and the politicians he boosts had offered the US right some overt Nazism and then waited four days to see if there was any interest, and the liberals had been too busy getting upset over injustice to notice.
Of course, I might be wrong. But next time we’re compelled to stare, aghast, at some fresh hypocrisy, it might be worth wondering why, and who it benefits.
• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.
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