Over the weekend News24 published an exposé about the finances of AfriForum, claiming that the lobby group is taking in immense sums of cash and spending most of it on salaries and marketing ― a revelation that will almost certainly enrage AfriForum’s supporters into giving it even more money. Readers of this column will know that I find AfriForum’s business model distasteful, mainly because of my lefty snowflake belief that palefaces like myself who benefited from colonialism and apartheid ― whose forebears rigged the system to make sure that they and we only had to compete economically with a small fraction of the population of this country ― have a responsibility to, at the very least, be clear about who bore the brunt of that history and who continues to bear it today. AfriForum, on the other hand, has shown an eagerness to subvert or even rewrite that economic history, whether for example by dismissing the immense theft that was apartheid as a “so-called historical injustice” or by failing to refute the claims made by Ernst Roets in 2018 when he was interviewed by Maga fire-starter Tucker Carlson and agreed with Carlson that white people were the victims of state persecution in South Africa, an interview that helped fuel Maga’s preoccupation with a fictitious version of this country. When News24 published its scoop over the weekend I’m sure there were many readers who were eager to see a group they believe to be hawkers of self-righteous victimhood exposed as grubby, cynical hustlers. And yet, as I read the claims that the lobby group has pocketed almost R2bn in private donations since 2019, with the overwhelming bulk of that money allegedly spent on hefty salaries and self-promotion, I found myself unable to feel the frisson one usually enjoys when a scandal breaks. Partly, I suppose, that’s because it’s not my money being spent keeping the broeders in the style to which they are accustomed. There’s also the fact that even AfriForum’s harshest critics would have to admit that the numbers quoted seemed to present fairly good value: even if you believe the lobby group does almost nothing except talk about itself, slag off the ANC and sporadically hump the leg of Donald Trump, the worst you can accuse it of is being just like certain opposition politicians, except without living on our taxes. Mainly, though, I think I speak for many of us when I say that after a generation of watching the ANC gorge on public money allegations about a private organisation possibly overindulging on a few hundred million donated eagerly over half a decade by private citizens isn’t really going to fire up the old adrenals and get the outrage pumping. Of course, this is not a failure of journalism. It is the job of journalists to follow their noses wherever they lead. And in an older, simpler time, when reports by respected journalists carried with them the implication that the subject of those reports might have some difficult questions to answer, News24’s claim that it had gone “inside AfriForum’s money machine” and seen its “splurges” might have alarmed some inside the lobby group, especially if, as News24 claims, the group’s growth and income have plateaued. This, however, is not that time. Now, thanks to Trumpism normalising imaginary victimhood as the animating energy of mainstream politics, all questions from outsiders act not as opportunities for transparency but rather as tripwires, triggering the perimeter flares and announcing that it’s time to circle the wagons and protect Daddy. Even apparently moderate conservatives at the centre of South Africa’s political spectrum are doing it. Should any journalist ask a difficult question of the DA, the comments below the line are invariably variations on two angry questions: who’s funding this hit piece and would you rather live under the ANC? It’s possible that some of AfriForum’s poorer supporters, struggling on dying farms or in knackered small towns around the country, might see the New24 investigation and wonder, for a moment, if they should ask their local representative to explain what exactly AfriForum’s leaders are doing to earn their alleged R2m or R3m salaries. For the most part though, I suspect the response will be a cascade of money as even lackadaisical supporters are jolted into action, lunging for their wallets to defend the last true patriots from a treacherous attack by the lowest form of human life; lower even than Marxists and feminists and Christopher Nolan: journalists. Yes, I find the business model distasteful, but at moments like this, lordy does it work …• Eaton is an Arena Holdings columnist.