HuffPo Punked, Reduced to Total Laughing Stock

18 Apr, 2017 by Dave Blount

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Poe’s law has been confirmed. There is no discernable difference between true believer leftism and parody of true believer leftism. The recent piece on Huffington Post calling for white males to be denied the right to vote, which had to be pulled after it came to light that the supposed author does not exist, turns out to be a parody article written as a hoax:

On Thursday, the 13th of April 2017, the Huffington Post South Africa published a piece by Shelley Garland, a Master’s student in philosophy. Ms Garland argued that the suffrage needs to be removed, claiming that votes of white men have created the “biggest blows to the progressive cause”. White men have apparently been responsible for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the ANC losing four key metros in the municipal elections of 2016. Various other obviously spurious claims about land ownership, capitalism, and the fallacious Oxfam wealth report were made without references or the requisite evidence. They were treated as truth without interrogation. Ms Garland concluded her piece with the solution to the problem: remove the franchise from white men to wrestle away their supposed control of the world from them. …

Once the piece went viral HuffPostSA editor, Ms Verashni Pillay, penned a response vigorously defending the publishing thereof. She lamented the “patriarchal systems” which have allowed white men to wield power and further blamed readers for not understanding the “pretty standard feminist theory” that Shelley was peddling. The defence was subsequently deleted.

The hoaxer himself comments on this farce:

The piece was accepted without question by the Huffington Post even though — as others have pointed out on social media and elsewhere — the piece is riddled with factual errors, logical fallacies, and is not something that an MA student could possibly write…

Huffington Post did not fact check any of my ludicrous claims in the article, nor, as far as I can tell, was the piece edited. …

A further indictment on the Huffington Post is the fact that its editor, Verashni Pillay, then took it upon herself to defend the total garbage that I had written. …

Let this be a lesson to publications like the Huffington Post (and others) to fact check articles, thoroughly investigate contributors (especially those sending through unsolicited work), and not publish absolute poppycock, just because it fits into a certain ideological narrative.

Click here to see what HuffPo would look like if it didn’t publish any absolute poppycock that fits its ideological narrative.