Political Pranks - The Art of the Prank

August 10, 2019December 15, 2023

Right-Wing Website Dosed With Own Medicine

The op-ed site Quillette has risen to prominence in the Trump-era conservative firmament by condemning progressive orthodoxies around race and gender, providing a platform for accused sexual predators, defending “Google Memo” author James “Fired4Truth” Damore, and promoting the “Sokal Squared” hoax, an effort to discredit academic disciplines by categorizing them as “grievance studies.”

This week, the site took a blow to its own credibility when left-aligned mischief-maker “Archie Carter” submitted a critique of the Democratic Socialists of America littered with lies, cliches, and errata. The piece was promptly published and promptly retracted by Quillette, leaving leftist publications Alternet and Jacobin (along with broad swaths of Twitter) to gloat over the fallout.

Will Sommer, a journalist/provocateur focused on far-right movements, scored an interview with the hoaxer.

Quillette Duped by Left-Wing Hoaxer Posing as Communist Construction Worker
by Will Sommer
The Daily Beast
August 9, 2019

Construction worker and avowed Leninist Archie Carter has plenty of gripes with the Democratic Socialists of America, the left-wing group that’s enjoyed a new wave of popularity during the Trump era.

In an essay published Thursday on the conservative op-ed website Quillette, Carter declared that DSA had been overrun with overeducated, oversensitive college graduates, blinding itself to the true needs of the working class.

“DSA is doomed,” Carter wrote.

Carter’s piece seemed like exactly the kind of argument that’s turned Quillette, a self-described “platform for free thought,” into a hotbed for the right-wing online “Intellectual Dark Web” movement. Carter had impeccable blue-collar bona fides, with his Quillette bio describing him as a committed union member who’s always “watching the Mets blow a lead.”

But there’s one problem with Carter’s story: He doesn’t exist.

DSA members started picking holes in Carter’s story almost as soon it went live on Quillette. New York City’s DSA local couldn’t find any record of a member, current or former, named Archie Carter. And while Carter claimed to have participated in sit-in protests as part of his DSA work, the group hadn’t organized sit-ins in New York in years.

By Thursday evening, Quillette had retracted Carter’s essay, saying Carter had failed to “supply answers to our follow-up questions in timely fashion.” Read more.

January 21, 2019December 15, 2023

The Political Prank That Ensnared the Wall Street Journal

Laura Loomer is a far-right media provocateur known for shambolic publicity stunts. Her toxic racial rhetoric has resulted in her removal from a number of social media platforms, and she hasn’t taken it well. Anxious to stay in the public eye, she was recently tricked into a bizarre caper that oddly also sucked in the Wall Street Journal. This comedy of errors encapsulates much of what is so ridiculous about the current media landscape. See if you can keep up.

“Did the Wall Street Journal Fall for a Prank Directed at Laura Loomer?”
by Jared Holt
Right Wing Watch
January 15, 2019

EXCERPT FROM THE FULL ARTICLE: “She didn’t verify who I am once. Never did she make an attempt,” Gillen said. “Everything I gave her as ‘info,’ she took as gospel. She hasn’t batted an eye or questioned anything that I said, ever.”

In a recorded phone call Bernard shared with us, Loomer expressed her willingness to leverage all means possible to retaliate against Twitter.

“I’m down with anything, honestly. So if whistle-blowers like yourself just want to come to me—I mean, I’m looking to escalate this as much as I can. I don’t even care. The gloves are off right now. [Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey] is banning people simply because they’re conservative. … He is taking money from all these Muslims and implementing Sharia law,” Loomer told Gillen during a phone call.

Bernard told Right Wing Watch that the goal of their stunt was to see if Loomer would go on-air at Alex Jones’ Infowars and repeat what they had told her, after which they planned to reveal the details of their joke in order to make a point about what they said were Loomer’s and Infowars’ non-existent journalistic standards and confirmation bias.

But something else happened.

“Don’t worry it will be big,” Loomer wrote to the pranksters in a December text message. “I have a big network of journalists I know.”

Read the whole story here.

December 20, 2018December 15, 2023

Another Reason Art Is Bad for Fascism

Ever wondered why fascists hate free speech? Brains trumped brawn when this German art collective shined a light on dozens of violent neo-Nazis.

“Who Says Art Is Useless? A German Art Collective Outs 25 Neo-Nazis in an Online Sting Operation”
by Henri Neuendorf
Artnet News
December 8, 2018

A left-wing German art collective is using its creativity for a cause. The group’s members announced on Wednesday that they had identified dozens of neo-Nazis by luring them into an elaborate digital trap.

In August, far-right groups gathered in the east German city of Chemnitz for a multi-day rally that quickly turned violent. Fascist extremists chased and harassed immigrants, vandalized property, made Nazi salutes (which is illegal in Germany), and clashed with riot police. But most of the demonstrators who caused the unrest managed to evade arrest and prosecution.

In response, the leftist artist and activist group Center for Political Beauty (ZPS) made it their mission to bring as many neo-Nazi rioters to justice as possible. After the unrest, the activists began collecting footage and images of rioters and cross-referenced it with publicly available social media profiles.

The group built a website with information and pictures of more than 1,500 of the estimated 7,000 Chemnitz demonstrators and sent out a newsletter urging the public to come forward with further information. But the public appeal turned out to be a trick. Programmers working with ZPS deliberately designed the site so visitors could only see 20 profiles at a time, encouraging the fascists to use the search function to find out if they themselves had been named. Read more.

December 20, 2018December 15, 2023

Deep Fakes: Down the Horrifying Rabbit Hole

On the topic of our tenuous collective relationship with the concept formerly known as “truth,” this examination of “deep fakes,” high-tech simulated video recordings of people you recognize doing things they’ve never actually done, may be the most frightening and portentous emerging story of 2018. And that’s saying a mouthful.

“You thought fake news was bad? Deep fakes are where truth goes to die”
by Oscar Schwartz
November 12, 2018
The Guardian

Fake videos can now be created using a machine learning technique called a “generative adversarial network”, or a GAN. A graduate student, Ian Goodfellow, invented GANs in 2014 as a way to algorithmically generate new types of data out of existing data sets. For instance, a GAN can look at thousands of photos of Barack Obama, and then produce a new photo that approximates those photos without being an exact copy of any one of them, as if it has come up with an entirely new portrait of the former president not yet taken. GANs might also be used to generate new audio from existing audio, or new text from existing text – it is a multi-use technology.

The use of this machine learning technique was mostly limited to the AI research community until late 2017, when a Reddit user who went by the moniker “Deepfakes” – a portmanteau of “deep learning” and “fake” – started posting digitally altered pornographic videos. He was building GANs using TensorFlow, Google’s free open source machine learning software, to superimpose celebrities’ faces on the bodies of women in pornographic movies.

A number of media outlets reported on the porn videos, which became known as “deep fakes”. In response, Reddit banned them for violating the site’s content policy against involuntary pornography. By this stage, however, the creator of the videos had released FakeApp, an easy-to-use platform for making forged media. The free software effectively democratized the power of GANs. Suddenly, anyone with access to the internet and pictures of a person’s face could generate their own deep fake. Read more.

January 25, 2018December 15, 2023

Indecline’s “Grave New World”

The activist art collective Indecline, which previously goosed U.S. President Donald Trump with controversial naked statues and other photogenic stunts, has created a new piece of fake real estate for him to own.

“Artists Create a Cemetery for the Things Donald Trump Killed in 2017”
By Elena Goukassian
Hyperallergic
January 23, 2018

Late last Friday night at a golf course in rural New Jersey, a group of people wearing ski masks pulled up in a white van disguised as a Time Warner Cable vehicle and proceeded to plant six gravestones, complete with votive candles, miniature American flags, and roses. When the sun came up, they returned to the scene of the crime, documenting their deed.

Commemorating the anniversary of President Trump”™s inauguration, guerrilla street art collective Indecline “” who installed naked Trump statues in public parks throughout the country in 2016 and strung “Ku Klux Klowns” in Richmond”™s Bryan Park last fall “” decided to create a kind of “political report card, in essence, a year in review,” an anonymous representative of the group told Hyperallergic in a phone interview.

Titled “Grave New World,” the project”™s gravestones mark the end of concepts like “Decency,” which died with Trump”™s inauguration on January 20, 2017 (as the stone crudely says, “We “˜moved on her like a bitch'”) and “The Last Snowman,” which died the day Trump decided to pull the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement (“Rest assured he was giving a scientist the finger as he went”). The remaining four stones mark the death of the American Dream with the immigration ban; of “Our Future” with the end of DACA; of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau with the arrival of Mick Mulvaney; and of “Those Bootstraps They Keep Talking About” with the latest tax bill. The anonymous representative noted that they really had to narrow down the gravestones from “a diverse selection of things Trump fucked up” in the last year. “We would have needed a much larger budget to cover everything.” Read more.