Thanks to a hoax pulled on the Huffington Post.

For a distillation of the contemporary left’s worldview, one needn’t look any further than a blog post that was recently published at the Huffington Post: “Could it Be Time to Deny White Men the Franchise?”

At least one could have turned to this post—until HuffPo took it down. But we’ll get to that shortly.

The author, a person going by the name of “Shelley Garland,” a self-declared South African and graduate student in philosophy, argued that it is morally necessary to temporarily deny the franchise to white men.

Moreover, at least some of their resources should be repossessed and “redistributed” to others.

Garland explains her reasons. First, white men are bad for left-wing progressivism. “Some of the biggest blows to the progressive cause in the past year,” she writes, “have often been due to the votes of white men.” She gives examples. “If white men were not allowed to vote, it is unlikely that the United Kingdom would be leaving the European Union, it is unlikely that Donald Trump would now be the President of the United States, and it is unlikely that the Democratic Alliance would now be governing four of South Africa’s biggest cities.”

“If white men no longer had the vote,” Garland summarily states, “the progressive cause would be strengthened.” She’s quick to underscore that she is proposing nothing more than “the denial of the vote to white men for 20 years (just less than a generation),” for this is all that it would take to “go some way to seeing a decline in the influence of reactionary and neo-liberal ideology in the world.”

Garland explains that “liberalism—and its ideological offshoots of conservatism and libertarianism—are the most popular ideologies among white males” because, “with their focus on individuals and individual responsibility, rather than group affiliation,” they “allow white men to ignore the debt that they owe society, and from acknowledging that most of their assets, wealth, and privilege are the result of theft and violence.”

Denying white men the vote, even if temporarily, would “strike a blow against toxic white masculinity, one that is long needed.”

Another reason why white men need to be constrained is compensatory in nature. The disenfranchisement of white men, Garland eagerly wishes, “could see a redistribution of global assets to their rightful owners. After all, white men have used the imposition of Western legal systems around the world to reinforce modern capitalism. A period of twenty years without white men in the world’s parliaments and voting booths will allow legislation to be passed which could see the world’s wealth far more equitably shared. The violence of white male wealth and income inequality will be a thing of the past.”

While admitting that it may indeed be “unfair” to adopt the measures that she urges, Garland insists that “this violent status quo will not change without a struggle, and the only way to do so will be through the expropriation of these various assets and equitably distribute them to those who need them.” Going this route “will not only make the world a more equitable place, but will also go some way to paying the debt that white males owe the world.” For “500 years,” such evils as “colonialism, slavery, and various aggressive wars and genocides, have been due to the actions of white men.”

Thus: “Redistributing some of their assets will go some way to paying the historical debt that they owe society.”

The unfairness to white males “is a small price to pay for the pain inflicted by white males on others, particularly those with black and female-identifying bodies.”

Garland reiterates her call: “It is time to wrestle control of the world back from white males[.]”

The backlash on social media was immediate and relentless. Initially, the editor-in-chief of HuffPo SA, Verashni Pillay, stridently defended the post. Garland’s “underlying analysis about the uneven distribution of wealth and power in the world,” Pillay remarked, “is pretty standard for feminist theory.”

Moreover, it has “been espoused in many different ways by feminist writers and theorists for decades now. In that sense, there was nothing in the article that should have shocked or surprised anyone (or so we thought).”

Pillay accuses critics of refusing to engage Garland’s blog post and informs them that there is no way to avoid her conclusion given her premises, premises that she and her ilk at the Huffington Post share with Garland. “Dismantling the patriarchal systems that have brought us to where we are today, a world where power is wielded to dangerous and destructive ends by men, and in particular white men, necessarily means a loss of power to those who hold it.”

Pillay doesn’t mince words: “Those who have held undue power granted to them by the patriarchy must lose it for us to be truly equal. This seems blindingly obvious to us all.”

Then, however, something happened.

Huffington Post SA removed the post, supposedly because “the blog submission from an individual who called herself Shelley Garland, who claimed to be an MA student at UCT, cannot be traced and appears not to exist.” It then reaffirmed “the Constitutional values of South Africa,” especially “universal enfranchisement.”

The “Shelley Garland” post was a hoax.

A person, a female, claiming to be the author of the piece referred to it as “total garbage” that she packed with clichés—“black and female-identifying bodies,” “patriarchy,” etc.—that are common currency among the “less sensible left.”

“Shelley Garland” supplied to the nation an invaluable service. In one little article, she revealed for all with eyes to see the gist to which the agenda of today’s left ultimately boils down:

It is resolutely, vehemently anti-white, specifically anti-white men.

Leftists almost always hide behind abstractions and generalities. They know that if they are too overt in expressing their plans for the rest of us, the latter would stall. A real leftist wouldn’t want to state things as baldly as “Garland” did. But as Pillay made abundantly clear before she and her employer had to go into damage control, “Garland’s” is the position of the hard left, and has been “for decades now.”

Thank you, “Shelley Garland,” for unveiling the truth.