7 Everyday Heroes Who Mercilessly Trolled Racist Morons
The extreme right aren't the only ones who can play the trolling game
Human society comes with a great number of diverse opinions, but there are at least some basic ideas we should all be able to agree on: Racism is bad, hate speech is unacceptable, and people who leave shopping carts in the middle of the parking lot are literally the devil. But despite these truths being self-evident, there are still plenty of trolley-abandoning racist numbskulls everywhere who think they can dribble their poison without repercussions. So in the wake of a resurgence in open white supremacy, we celebrate the creative ways that people have made Nazis look like idiots right under their fascist noses.
7. People Are Turning Racist Demonstrations Into Anti-Hate Fundraisers
Donating to a charity can be tricky. There are so many causes that need help, and you're never sure where your small contribution will wind up. Maybe your $50 isn't going to save rhinos, but will ensure that the WHO offices can have a new batch of green pens. But a few geniuses have found the best way to get people excited about donating to charity: They guarantee that even the smallest contribution will royally piss off a bunch of racists.
In 2014, a group of neo-Nazis organized their annual march through the town of Wunsiedel, Germany, because if you're dumb enough to be a German Nazi, you're also too dumb to know what irony means. Sick and tired of these jackbooted morons scuffing up their streets, the many non-Nazi citizens of Wunsiedel came up with an inventive counter-protest: For every meter that the rally marched, the town would donate 10 Euros ($12) to Exit Deutschland, a charity dedicated to fighting Nazi recruitment.
As a result, hundreds of Germans turned up to cheer on the Nazi march like it was a charity fun walk, even putting up stalls with free food and refreshments in order to make sure these sheep would keep marching.
They even painted markers at certain intervals in the street, thanking the Nazis and reminding them of how much money they had raised for their own opposition.
In the end, the Nazis did what they do best: stubbornly walk towards their own downfall, raising nearly $12,000 for Exit while making absolute fools of themselves.
And this is far from the only time that people tired of Nazis marching through their town have come up with a similar plan. In August 2017, the Jewish Bar Association of San Francisco began a GoFundMe campaign called "Adopt a Nazi," where backers could donate money based on the number of people who attended the white supremacist "Freedom Rally" in the city. They wound up raising more than $134,000 for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But it doesn't take an entire rally full of thick-necked polo-shirted bigots to make a difference -- it sometimes only takes one Nazi to make the world a better place. In January, Kal Penn (of Harold And Kumar and White House fame) received a tweet from some racist nerd telling him to go back to his own country -- where he already was. To cleanse this troll's soul, Penn responded by setting up a fundraising page in support of Syrian refugees under his name, and in under 24 hours, Penn's donation drive earned over $250,000 for the nonprofit International Rescue Committee.
It's getting closer to a million dollars every day, all thanks to some coward who told a celebrated American actor and writer he didn't belong because he didn't have a proper-sounding American name, like Jebediah or Aloysius.
In fact, we should thank trolls everywhere for raising awareness of their existence. Nothing better reminds people that the world needs all the help it can get.
Just interrupting to let you know the vast majority of what I publish is free, but if you wanna upgrade to a paid subscription for just $5 a month ($50 for a year—cheaper!!), not only do you help me continue doing what I love, but you get every article a whole week earlier than everyone else.
Don’t want to subscribe via Substack? A Ghost version is also available for paid subscriptions only.
6. Racist Internet Groups Are Being Hijacked And Turned Into Parodies
Social media sites such as Reddit and Facebook often advertise absolute "freedom of speech" as a major selling point. The downside, unfortunately, is that well-intentioned mission statements like that are catnip for Nazis. Reddit in particular is lousy with Nazi communities -- so many that the site has become home to the largest community of white supremacists on the web. And while the site has finally started cracking down on the problem, others have found a better way to stick it to unsavory subreddits: by taking them over and turning them into something nice and wholesome.
It all stems from a Reddit rule that subreddits which haven't been moderated in 60 days are up for grabs for anyone who wants them, so a racist moderator who takes their eye off the ball for too long might find themselves replaced by someone whose mission isn't quite so nefarious.
The trend might have begun in 2016, when rogue moderators took control of the subreddit /r/punchablefaces -- ostensibly a place to post pictures of people whose faces look ripe for punching, but which ultimately became a place for users to post photos of random black people and talk about how badly they want to break their face. When the new mods took over, they established an explicitly new target for the community's hatred: Minions.
The subreddit /r/whitepolitics, which we hoped was simply a forum where people could discuss the politics of famed grammarian E.B. White, used to be for discussing all the things white people are better at than nonwhite people, such as shuffleboard and racism. But it was usurped in 2017, and is now dedicated to the actual color white. The forum is still about how being white is great, but the moderators announced that "racism is now banned," so now it's about Swiss coffee and the proper way of separating colors when doing laundry.
But the greatest acquisition of all has to be /r/stormfront. Once the Reddit home to the recently demolished white supremacist website of the same name, it's now the newest place on Reddit for discussing the weather.
Cleansing the internet of the racist "Well, ACTUALLY..." brigade isn't confined to Reddit, either. Over on Facebook, a guy who found himself invited to moderate a Confederate Pride page decided to pull a hilarious long con. He started out by changing the group's banner image numerous times (the other mods couldn't figure out who was doing it):
However, when he grew tired of that, he kicked it up a gear and changed the whole group's name to "LGBT Southerners For Michelle Obama And Judaism."
He then complained to the group about how people kept posting weird Southern racist stuff on a page specifically created for "celebrating queer support for Michelle Obama, Judaism, and mixed-race marriages." Normally we don't support gaslighting, but we have a feeling that people who believe the Confederacy was a good idea enjoy being lied to about the past anyway.
5. A Sousaphonist Follows A KKK March While Playing Dopey Music
In 2015, a few days after a white supremacist murdered nine people in a black church in South Carolina, the Ku Klux Klan decided it was a great time to hold a rally through the center of town. Because if ISIS can celebrate every time America suffers, why shouldn't they?
But as the sad procession of the worst white people have to offer plodded their way toward the South Carolina State House waving their Confederate flags, local resident Matt Buck decided to show up with his sousaphone and give them the theme music they deserved. Included in Buck's playlist was an appropriately rotund rendition of Wagner's "Ride Of The Valkyries," as well as the tune from the Family Guy gag in which Stewie follows a fat guy around with a tuba -- because let's be honest here, statistically speaking, Buck was doing the same.
Buck's stunt showed that when it comes to white supremacists, the line between threatening and hilariously pathetic is only as wide as a sousaphone riff.
It's amazing how a giant instrument that sounds like an autotuned fart can change the mood.
4. A Journalist Tricks Internet Racists With A Photo Of Empty Bus Seats That Look Vaguely Like Women In Burqas
The supposed encroaching threat of a Muslim takeover of Europe is something that gets internet racists all a-quiver. The mere sight of a mosque or a burqa in a country they think their whiteness helped build is enough for them to kick up quite a storm...on social media, while they're safe and cozy at home in their stained jim-jams.
In 2017, Norwegian journalist Johan Slattavik found the most poetic way to highlight, exploit, and, most importantly, mock this anti-Muslim hysteria. When on a bus, he noticed that if you only took a brief glance, the empty seats kind of looked like women wearing full-body veils. Deciding to see how many cherries he could get with a pull on the racist rage slot machine, he took a photo and posted it to a local anti-immigrant Facebook group with the caption: "What do people think about this?" And oh boy, the fish were biting.
Unsurprisingly, most of the commenters proved how little scrutiny they performed before blowing their hateful lids. "You can never know who is under there," one person commented, "Could be terrorists with weapons." Others insisted "Get them out of our country." Even though Slattavik knew exactly what he was doing when he posted the photo, he was still surprised by how many people fell for it. Though it could be that xenophobes also really, really hate empty bus seats. It makes about as much sense.
3. Trump's "Illegal Alien" Hotline Gets Swamped By People Reporting Space Aliens
In April, the government, as part of its mission to drum up hysterical fear of immigrants, launched the "Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office" (VOICE), through which upstanding citizens can rat out their neighbors for being too brown. Never mind that immigrants don't commit much crime -- if it's in the fascist playbook, the Trump administration is going to give it a whirl.
But as a surprise to even the government itself, VOICE was a resounding success, being flooded by messages of patriots reporting all kinds of aliens.
In a matter of days, the VOICE hotline was mobbed with callers reporting UFO abductions, Martian encounters, and even Bigfoot sightings.
Naturally, VOICE's employees were not amused, their souls having withered and died as part of their on-the-job training. A spokesman even proclaimed that this "cheap publicity stunt is beyond the pale of legitimate public discourse" and called it "objectively despicable." They then turned away from the mirror and said some things about people on Twitter being mean too.
2. Swedish Antifascists Sent Thousands Of Nazis Fake Tickets To A Nazi Play, Causing Chaos
Humiliating Nazis isn't something that was invented recently. It's as old as, well, Nazism. Back in the early '40s, Nazis were running amok over Europe like ants at a picnic, and even though Sweden was officially "neutral," the country was lousy with right-wing extremists who wanted to get cozy with the Third Reich.
In 1944, Swedish antifascist operatives Ewan Butler and Janet Gow learned of a play being staged in Stockholm starring renowned German actor Georg Alexander. All the Nazis in Sweden were eager to attend, but tickets were strictly limited and available only by invitation through the German consulate. Knowing how much Nazis liked their hate to be all neat and orderly, Butler and Gow saw the opportunity to sow a little chaos.
Using what limited techniques they had at their disposal in an era before Photoshop, Butler and Gow managed to counterfeit upwards of 3,000 fake tickets for the play. Referring to a mailing list of Swedish Nazis provided to them by the British Special Operations Executive, they then posted the fake tickets to 1,500 local fascists, cordially inviting them to the gala opening. They even got each Nazi two tickets, so they could bring their Nazi friends.
The results, according to Butler, were "gratifyingly chaotic." When the play opened, the theater found itself swamped by several hundred Nazi sympathizers decked out in their best eveningwear, having already pre-gamed with their bro's and carrying tickets that they would soon learn to be fake. Ushers were faced with the daunting task of breaking the news to 3,000 drunk Nazis that they'd been pranked, and it shouldn't need to be said that Nazis don't take bad news very well. The real invitees had to force their way past rows and rows of lesser fascists, who did not enjoy being on the short end of the ubermensch-untermensch stick. Scuffles ensued, curtain calls got delayed, and the supposedly well-oiled Nazi machine got a delightfully theatrical wrench thrown into it.
The next day, after the chaos had settled down, the German consulate was forced to eat crow and release a statement apologizing for the mix-up and admitting they'd been had. Kidding, they 100 percent blamed it on the Jews.
1. A T-Shirt Company Handed Out Shirts With Fascist Slogans That Turn Into Antifascist Slogans After They're Washed
In 2011, the city of Gera, Germany hosted a music festival called "Rock For Deutschland." It soon became clear from all the shaved heads and suspicious tattoos that the festival attendees had a much more medieval approach to rocking people. But if you think these atonal fascists got away with it, you've clearly already forgotten about the delightful scamps of the Exit Deutschland charity.
Before the concert got underway, Exit came up with a creative way to slip an antifascist message right into the heart of the Nazi collective. Assuming a false name, they donated hundreds of free shirts to the festival organizers, who distributed them among the concert-goers. Each shirt carried a logo with a nationalist message: "Hardcore Rebellion!" With a skull on it and everything. Nazis love skulls.
However, when these sad skinheads came home and asked their parents to do their laundry, the messages on their souvenirs changed. You see, the shirts had been printed in a kind of ink that vanished once it was washed. Underneath was quite a different message: "If a T-shirt can do it, so can you -- we'll help you break with right-wing extremism."
Now, you might be thinking that most of the people who attend an evening of Nazi music won't be swayed by a simple T-shirt slogan. If Nazis could be persuaded by someone asking them "Hey, have you tried not being a Nazi?" the world would be a much better place. But that wasn't Exit Deutschland's goal at all. Their real plan? To trick a bunch of angry racists into giving them tons of free publicity.
After the skinheads discovered they'd been pranked, every Nazi forum and collective throughout Germany began posting angry messages that name-dropped Exit as the perpetrators. The story of the "Trojan T-Shirt Scam" was a hit with both prime-time news and social media. As a result, every German Nazi who actually was considering getting out of the scene suddenly knew exactly who to contact. In the aftermath, the number of people consulting Exit to pull the parachute cord and jump out of the ever spiraling plane of Nazism rose by 300 percent. All because the Nazis couldn't help doing what they do best: being angry, loud, and stupid.
