Helen Zille and the alt-right-lite

Square Brackets

Hello! We’re back for 2020 after a break which was [not really] restorative, because people kept saying perplexing things on Twitter and elsewhere. This episode is about the Democratic Alliance’s [apparent] attempts to alienate most of South Africa’s voters, through the mechanism of Helen Zille’s Twitter account.

Musical interludes, and the intro and outro music, are edits of Soixante-8 by Obsibilo (under Creative Commons license 3.0).

Reading:

• A cultural war waged by a cartoonist (on the “satirical” Jerm cartoon)
• Finding sanity in a stampede of agitrolling, fauxrage and verbiflage (Zille defines and defends nonsense words)
• Zille: The race to the bottom (Chris Roper)
• Chris Roper’s vile “alt-right” smear (Ratcatcher “responds” to Roper)
• Helen Zille and “valuable aspects of colonial heritage” (JR on “that” tweet)