If the white English ambulance chaser Jolyon Maugham were in South Africa last week, I imagine he would have celebrated the Constitutional Court’s mental decision to prevent seismic surveys off the Wild Coast (“culturally significant waters”) by assembling a makeshift stage, blacking up and performing the role of a young, gender-queer Barack Obama in a very bad play about racial injustice (that obviously never happened). When the elite sniff a gap, these are the kinds of things they do.

Maugham once killed a fox and told the world about it on Twitter. He said he went outside wearing his wife’s negligee, saw the poor creature, then grabbed a baseball bat and beat it to death. English people aren’t mad about killing animals and soon Maugham was the subject of multiple threats. His response to this was to claim he felt suicidal, pointing to a television starlet who’d hung herself ostensibly on account of media hounding.

When news broke on Friday that Jason Arday, the black Cambridge professor accused of wholesale plagiarism and deception, had committed suicide, Maugham came out fighting. His activist movement, The Good Law Project, was the party responsible for the open letter supporting Arday before his death, from which a number of prominent personalities removed their signatures when it became clear that Arday was an unapologetic fantasist.

Maugham, very much of the left extreme that warned opponents not to use the murder of Conservative MP Ann Widdecomb as political leverage, began to use Arday’s death…as political leverage, calling shame upon the media (who’d done an admirable job of holding power to account here) and demanding an inquiry.

Vigil

The scene of the vigil for Arday on Monday night in Trafalgar Square was like a blend of Hollywood blockbusters. If the young, middle-class white English boys and girls resembled the zombies from 2007’s I Am Legend, then everyone else was there to bury an official from the state of Wakanda. That they were present was testament to people like Maugham and the ranks of elite white saviours who continue to marshal the majority of the public's attention.

In South Africa, the summit between the movement March and March and civil rights group AfriForum has been met with disgust and indignation from the kind of platitudinal zombie who attended Arday’s vigil in the belief that he was “murdered” for “being black”.

As long as this prevails – as long as elites keep elite-ing, i.e., speaking for black people, agitating judges into surrender and brazenly ignoring the era of cheap petrol, interest rates, and property that enabled their own astonishing upward mobility – we can expect more alliances perhaps categorised under “myenemy’senemyismyfriend”. It is the logical, expected response.

And more: it’s necessary. Take these elitist statements from a professor at the University of the Western Cape following the Constitutional Court’s ruling: “The judgement shows that climate change cannot be separated neatly from questions of race, class, history, culture, participation, development, future generations and ecological protection.”

These were Professor Angela van der Berg’s words in The Conversation – proof that that bastardised term “woke” is merely on gardening leave awaiting a more agreeable vehicle than the current occupant in the White House for renewed adoption. What Van der Berg means is that if something – anything – is not aligned to the current climate change orthodoxy and more, if it doesn’t accommodate the artificial intersectional grievance model, then grounds now exist for its exclusion or dismissal. This is the Durbanville satellite of the Good Law Project.

Influence

It captures the extraordinary influence of groups like Maugham’s in setting the media narrative across our fault lines. Inherently catastrophic, it no longer bothers to hide the work of people like Saul Alinsky and David Gilbert (Weather Underground) in its foundations and objectives, which are to keep people where they feel they belong, and construct artificial barriers – the creep of which just results in more limitation elsewhere.

To understand how important a fixture of cooperation between AfriForum and March and March is, try to predict some elitist courses following the Constitutional Court’s ruling and academia’s machinations following Arday’s suicide.

Obviously, other environmental groups buoyed by Friday’s judgement will chance their own hands – this remains a money game, despite all protest to the contrary, and there is more than enough of that (especially in Europe) to see other resource initiatives challenged. Similarly, Cambridge and others will dig in on academic DEI advocacy – to the point where the circumstances of Arday’s suicide (i.e., he was exposed for lying) will be forgotten. This is already happening at the University of Ghent, Belgium, where one of the people who exposed Arday, Nathan Cofnas, finds himself in the crosshairs of European academics sold on race communism.

Ultimately, the issue of AfriForum and March and March is above a good or bad judgement. It is an impulse determined by events at home and abroad that demand society adheres to a universal (but especially modern European) code of thought. In the weeks that lie ahead, the collaboration will be ruthlessly dismembered in the media and attacked by fringe parties – probably GOOD and Rise Mzansi. AfriForum will be accused of blackfacing its bigotry; March and March will be described as impressionable simpletons. The tone of each attack will reflect the increasingly desperate elitist language of the Good Law Project, and environmental organisations on the make.

But it will survive. Unlike its enemies, its foundations are practical and legitimate. The terror evident in the commentary betrays the elitist’s greatest fear: that in the most unlikely of liaisons, in a place absent of feet washing and naval gazing, a sense of cohesion may be located, which may go on to form something akin to national interest.