Written by: Roman Cabanac
The story of Ntokozo Qwabe has gone viral. As the leader of the RhodesMustFall campaign at Oxford, in a post-prandial act of malice, Mr. Qwabe and his companion wrote that they would give a tip when ‘the land is given back’. Mr. Qwabe, then, proceeded to post a gloating and mean-spirited post on his Facebook page, praising the act as ‘wonderful’.
On the 29th of April, Sihle Ngobese went to Obz Café and voluntarily gave a R50 tip to the waitress out of his own volition. Sihle, Jonathan Witt and I then decided to crowd fund a ‘tip’ for the waitress in question. We sent out a few tweets with some banking details and the donations started pouring in.
To give some context, Jonathan and I host a podcast called The Renegade Report on CliffCentral.com. Sihle was a popular guest on the show last week; a classical liberal filled with a ravenous streak for justice. We kept in contact with Sihle after the show as we found his passion for liberty and justice compelling. Subsequent to his tweet, Jonathan and I decided to start a fundraising campaign to assist the abused waitress. I posted a tweet with my banking details and instructions to send proof of payments to my email address.
Within the first two minutes, R150 was paid into the account. Within five hours, we received over R6 000 in donations. The tweet went viral.
What also went viral was the smug, bourgeoisie left. The snivelling sycophants of a failed ideology spread their bigotry throughout Twitter. Accusations of ‘privilege’ and ‘whiteness’ permeated the weekend. No arguments were made; only insults. We were called ‘right wing assholes who want to teach blacks a lesson’. We were called ‘ultraconservative rape apologists’. ‘Racists’ was the preferred term for most. The toxic culture of victimhood bubbled to the surface, devouring with it the positive intentions and outcomes of the campaign.
The reaction to the campaign from the left was one of utmost envy. The voluntary donations, sent by donors from all over the world proves a very pertinent point – the market will always achieve what it feels it wants to. The left beg and plead with the state to fund them; the market required a few tweets to fulfill a need. The left burn art, buildings and books; the market quietly donates to a humiliated, working-class woman. Feminists called the campaign ‘sheer violence against black pain’. But the donations steadily trickled in – hundreds of emails and tweets of support accumulated.
What we are witnessing is the implosion of leftism. All the major issues have been corrected. There is no Great War, there are no concentration camps, there is no nuclear fallout. We live in relative peace and prosperity so the big issues are gender pronouns, statues, bathrooms for trans people, fat shaming and ‘decolonization’. Your tone of voice is a ‘microaggression’, fictional books have ‘trigger warnings’, Beyoncé is the new Martin Luther King. The left don’t care what you do. They care about what you think. Criticism is now bigotry; funding for a working class woman is ‘white privilege’. There are no arguments to be made – it’s all 50 shades of bigotry.
Yet, throughout the debacle, the outcome remained. R44 777.70 was donated to a homeless waitress. A separate fund generated R60 000.00. Throughout the abuse, the silent majority gave their money to a cause they believed in. The market won and the left hated it. Let them.
Author: Roman Cabanac is a co-host on The Renegade Report, which is a “hard-hitting, factual podcast that seeks to undermine modern narratives with the use of evidence, facts and statistics.”