White Men Can’t Vote: Gullible Huffington Post Falls for Hoax Article

Last week we shared a Breitbart story about a leftwing opinion piece published by the uber-lib Huffington Post which argued that voting rights for white men should be ended.

Given the state of liberal thinking in the world, it was entirely believable.

But then it was revealed this week that the whole thing was a ruse to see how gullible the HuffPo is.

Turns out the answer is ‘very’.

The author was completely fabricated and the argumentation in the piece itself was so thinly veiled as to barely pass an initial editor’s smell test.

But apparently the no-white-men-vote idea was so delectable, HuffPo editors couldn’t turn it down.

Here’s more from Heat Street…

The Huffington Post’s recent publication of a blog post proposing stripping white men of their right to vote sparked widespread anger across social media. The editors initially defended the piece, titled “Could It be Time to Deny White Men the Franchise?” They even crowed about how much traffic it was getting and mocked readers for complaining, before suddenly reversing their decision and deleting the post over the weekend.

In the controversial piece, a South African woman named Shelley Garland, a self-described “activist and feminist working on ways to smash the patriarchy” had suggested it was “time to wrestle control of the world back from white males, and the first step will be a temporary restriction of the franchise to them.”

Garland argued: “If white men no longer had the vote, the progressive cause would be strengthened. It would not be necessary to deny white men indefinitely–the denial of the vote to white men for 20 years (just less than a generation) would go some way to seeing a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology in the world.”

She blamed white men for the Brexit outcome in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump.

Huffington Post’s South African editors were initially pleased with the reception of Garland’s article. On Saturday night, HuffPostSA editor Sipho Hlongwane bragged that the article had received plenty of traffic while making a tongue-in-cheek complaint about his corrections inbox.

After the piece went viral on social media due to coverage from right-leaning Twitter and Facebook personalities like Milo Yiannopoulos, HuffPostSA editor Verashni Pillay wrote an article (archived post) defending its publication. She highlighted examples of complaints sent to the website, and blamed readers for having a poor understanding of the “pretty standard feminist theory” Shelley used. Pillay has since deleted the defense.

Then, following the extensive backlash, Huffington Post deleted the article, replacing it with a meek apology and a claim that they were unable to confirm that Shelley Garland was a real person. They even had to hilariously clarify that they are in favor of universal voting enfranchisement.