A friend sent me a snapshot of Daily Maverick writer, Marianne Thamm's latest Facebook rant, and though the contrived hysteria caught my eye, I can’t pretend to be shocked.
Thamm has long made a spectacle of dismissing any narrative that openly defies the West’s self-appointed moral perch.
This time, she fixates on Vladimir Putin’s supposed grievance that Russia’s historical role has been “undervalued,” reducing his motives to little more than an ego-driven vendetta.
In the process, she trundles out the clichéd notion that “Putin hates Europe,” as though this were a serious historical claim rather than a calculated soundbite meant to incite fear in her middle-class, pearl-clutching readership.
The effect Thamm is seeking is clear: she wants to keep people on edge, feeding them a simplistic myth in which Russia’s every move stems from deep, unbridled loathing.
Yet if we remember how relentlessly US interests have elbowed Europe to view Russia with suspicion, it becomes obvious that hostility was deliberately cultivated on the other side of the fence.
Of course Thamm will not acknowledge how Washington-based think tanks orchestrated Europe’s frosty posture—that would amount to giving away trade secrets. Instead, she pretends that Putin is single-handedly masterminding a grand campaign of antipathy.
She even throws in Donald Trump, labelling him “Putin’s meat puppet,” as though international politics boiled down to the same cheap ventriloquist act she rolls out in her Daily Maverick sideshow.
The irony is lost on her: here is a woman who claims to rail against propaganda, yet she herself is one of South Africa’s top “weaponised sleepers,” along with Karyn Maughan, Pauli van Wyk, and Rebecca Davis—journalists activated whenever more Afro-, Russo-, or Sino-phobia is needed to maintain the illusions cherished by liberal media.
Her assignment this time appears to be to neutralise certain recent pro-Russian commentary without mentioning its source, so as not to give it algorithmic momentum.
None of this is surprising when we understand that Thamm forms part of a donor-funded media ecosystem that includes Daily Maverick, GroundUP, Amabhugane, Code for Africa, and Media Monitoring Africa, among others—all sustained by labyrinthine finances linked to Washington-based agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Originally a covert CIA instrument, NED has become a soft-power vehicle for US geopolitical goals.
Within this framework, Thamm’s job is obviously to demonise any state or ideology challenging Western supremacy, to keep the public fixated on foreign menaces rather than the systemic injustices—inequality, poverty, neoliberal exploitation—that actually shape our global condition.
She alludes to ominous “Russian troll factories” while conveniently omitting equivalent Western influence ops, framing only Russia as villainous. That approach handily deflects scrutiny from decades of meddling by powers closer to home.
She then crams the term “Sadocapitalism” into her rant, branding both Russia and Trump’s US as caught up in sadistic impulses—yet she never acknowledges the deeper, structural critiques that economists like Jeffrey Sachs have offered for years.
Sachs has long insisted that geopolitical strife rarely stems from any one leader’s personal vendetta, but is rather “the cumulative result of decades of Western arrogance and NATO expansion, which Russia has perceived as an existential threat.”
As he correctly states, you can’t simply write the conflict off as Putin’s solitary hatred of the West. Instead, it must be located in the broader context of neoliberal policies and Western power blocs that hollow out local economies and provoke rising tensions.
Thamm’s use of “Sadocapitalism,” if she understood it in anything more than a superficial sense, would connect to precisely this kind of rampant, predatory capitalism that supports endless war-making led by the United States and its close allies.
The term has typically been used by those critical of how the US historically exercises global hegemony—especially its habit of exporting endless conflict under the guise of democracy and profit. By conflating Russia and Trump’s US under one glib label,
Thamm misses the entire point: “Sadocapitalism” is a structural indictment of Washington’s perpetual war economy, where monstrous profiteering is dressed up in moral righteousness. In other words, she takes a concept meant to expose the historical cruelties of Western-driven global warfare and flips it into a cheap, all-purpose slur, conveniently diverting attention from the real architects of those policies.
That she would toss around such a term without parsing its roots or significance only exposes her tendency to flatten every geopolitical complexity into a shallow morality play. The takeaway for her audience is that both the Kremlin and Donald Trump’s White House alone are equally sadistic, thereby erasing the role of Western neoliberal agendas that Sachs and others have long criticised.
It’s a manoeuvre that fits her broader strategy: focus on individuals or countries cast as “evil” rather than investigate how globalised capital, especially under the stewardship of US power, sustains the very conflicts she claims to deplore.
Her performance stands out not only for its hyperbole but for her reliance on omission. She refuses to name or quote the pro-Russian voices she’s supposedly refuting, a tactic that keeps her readers ignorant of opposing arguments.
In never acknowledging these voices, she avoids giving them any boost in visibility—an especially telling move given the liberal media’s obvious de-platforming of me since around 2018. This brand of “weaponised journalism” neutralises alternative analyses by erasing them from public view while still stirring up alarm about their purported existence.
Equally galling is how Thamm’s fixation on supposed foreign threats diverts attention from urgent local realities. As she prattles on about trolls and “sadists,” one hears nothing about domestic grassroots activism, Black liberation struggles, or the legacy of colonial violence—issues that a truly independent journalist might otherwise spotlight.
Her entire focus is to recast the world as an endless clash between Western virtue and Russian malevolence, leaving no room to question why so many in the Global South might resist US hegemony in the first place.
That is her designated job: to create liberal backlash, Russophobia, Sinophobia and Afrophobia against diverging narratives that are organically emerging in social and independent media as US-backed platforms lose credibility day by day—Thamm’s shallow commentary notwithstanding. And of course they co-opted GroundUP to ‘safely’ cover the struggles of the masses while not upsetting the elite, a well-funded platform shielding Daily Maverick from criticism and freeing them up to get on with their not-so-clever propaganda.
The real trick here is that Thamm, in style and method, embodies the very propaganda she claims to expose.
She insinuates that Russia is the source of all disinformation, yet she churns out a donor-friendly narrative echoing the worldview favoured by Washington.
She condemns alleged manipulations but offers her readers a storyline that conveniently absolves Western powers and the neoliberal architecture they uphold.
Instead of engaging with the structural analyses of people like Sachs, or acknowledging how Europe’s hostility was groomed by foreign policy elites, she indulges in blustery declarations about Putin’s hatred, Trump’s meat puppetry, and “Sadocapitalist” ghouls.
The upshot is a closed media circuit whose primary function is to ward off any genuine debate. Any critique that might disrupt Western-dominated discourses is swatted away, never named, never engaged.
Meanwhile, Thamm’s audience is left imagining that they alone hold the moral high ground, reassured by her insinuations that only someone deeply compromised would question the liberal consensus.
It is a perfect feedback loop, and it thrives on deflection: blaming all ills on external bad actors instead of reckoning with the raw inequities and exploitative policies that structure our world.
In the end, Thamm’s rant is hardly about Putin or Trump at all—it’s about the lengths to which certain media forces will go to maintain their hegemonic narratives.
By spinning out histrionic warnings of Russian menace, she avoids discussing how power really functions, or how decades of intervention, privatisation, and austerity have chiselled away the prospects for equitable development both at home and abroad.
It’s a rhetorical high-wire act designed to keep her donors happy, her readership suitably terrified, and her critics nameless.
If she ever mustered the intellectual honesty to confront alternative viewpoints head-on, she might find that the myth of Western innocence crumbles far more quickly than her reputation as a journalist.
But that kind of reckoning would blow her donor-funded cover wide open—and they’re not paying her to tell the truth.
* Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. Follow Gillian on X - @GillianSchutte1 and on Facebook - Gillian Schutte.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
IOL Opinion