In 2017, HuffPost South Africa published a blog post titled “Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise?” written by one “Shelley Garland”. The argument was outrageous. It suggested that white men should be denied the vote because of political outcomes such as Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the Democratic Alliance’s good results in the 2016 local government elections in South Africa.

But Shelley Garland did not exist.

The name was a pseudonym used by Marius Roodt, a Johannesburg-based researcher. His intervention was simple, sharp, and devastating. He submitted an extreme piece of anti-white-male prejudice, dressed it up in the language of progressive politics, and watched a major media platform publish it.

That was the point.

Roodt’s method echoed the brilliant exposés of the Grievance Studies affair, in which James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian submitted deliberately absurd papers to academic journals to test whether left-wing ideological dogma could pass as scholarship. Their hoax papers included arguments about “rape culture” in dog parks, fat bodybuilding, sex-toy use as a cure for male transphobia, and even a section of Mein Kampf rewritten in feminist academic language.

The lesson was devastating. If the conclusion pleased the ideological gatekeepers, almost any nonsense could be laundered through the right vocabulary, or in these cases, left-wing ideology.

Roodt, who went as far as dressing in drag to complete his Garland persona, applied the same logic to the media. He wanted to see whether a plainly discriminatory attack on white men would be published if it arrived dressed in the moral costume of progressive politics. HuffPost South Africa answered that question for him.

The article should have been rejected immediately on basic moral, editorial, and democratic grounds. It called for a racial and sex-based attack on voting rights. Yet because the target was white men, and because the language sounded fashionable to the progressive ear, it passed through the gate.

The fallout was severe. HuffPost South Africa’s editor-in-chief, Verashni Pillay, was forced to resign. Other senior editorial figures later left. An investigation found that HuffPost had failed basic editorial checks, including verifying the identity of the supposed author.

The deeper lesson was not about one fake byline. It was about media bias.

Roodt showed that some newsrooms could recognise prejudice only when it came from the right. When the same prejudice came from the left, aimed at the approved villains of progressive politics, it was accepted as analysis, activism, or brave social commentary, revealing a double standard at the heart of leftist media culture. It showed that hatred can be laundered through fashionable language. And it demonstrated, brilliantly, that sometimes the only way to expose a corrupted editorial instinct is to let it reveal itself.

Roodt is a senior staffer at The Common Sense.