5 Bigots Who Utterly Ended Up Owning Themselves

5 A "Provocateur" Declares War On Twitter, Loses In The Saddest Way Possible

Laura Loomer is a far-right "journalist" who, outside of her work with Infowars and Project Veritas, is most widely known for being the subject of more dunks than a Midwest frosty. Also for getting herself banned from Uber and Lyft after she complained, in the wake of a terrorist attack, about how they employed too many brown people for her liking.

Loomer's career as a "professional provocateur" reached its sad nadir in 2018, after she was banned from Twitter for publishing racist conspiracy theories about incoming congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Rather than take this ban as a point of pride (do you know how hard it is to get banned from Twitter?), she responded by losing her goddamn mind.

We're coming around to the idea that owning a megaphone should require a license.

Soon after getting banned, Loomer handcuffed herself to the doors of Twitter's headquarters in New York City and demanded the return of her account. In order to argue her case, she brought along several props, including a sign accusing Twitter of supporting "Jew hatred" (which makes her friendship with Holocaust denier Chuck Johnson a little awkward) and a yellow Judenstern badge. You know, like the ones that the Jews wore while Hitler was "banning" them from Europe for "violating the terms of service" of life.

At this point, all they're missing is for "Yakety Sax" to start playing.

The police eventually turned up, and it looked like Loomer was going to get the attention that she craved. And then Twitter announced that they couldn't care less about pressing charges, and invited Loomer to spend as long as she liked on their doorstep.

It took two hours for her to crack, when she asked a police officer to cut her free. She didn't get her Twitter account back, sure, but the real win was the friends she made along the wa- oh wait, no, everybody spent the day dragging her for being a baby.

Related: The 5 Most Clever Ways People Made Hate Groups Look Stupid

4 "Defend Europe" Charters A Boat To Stop Refugees, Accidentally Smuggles Refugees

The vast majority of African and Middle Eastern refugees enter Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea. It's a dangerous voyage that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people fleeing poverty, persecution, war, rape, and slavery. In response, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) like Aquarius, Refugee Rescue, and Doctors Without Borders began chartering boats with the intention of rescuing refugees in trouble. And because we live in the second-worst possible timeline (the worst possible timeline is just like this one, but with 10,000 times more wasps), Defend Europe, an "identitarian" organisation with a hate-on for Muslims, decided to charter its own vessel. The C-Star's express intention was to blockade the NGOs and interrupt their rescue operations, in what they promised would be a "summer of disturbances."

When someone pointed out that this would probably lead to people dying, Defend Europe responded by saying that they were only going to monitor the NGOs and report any wrongdoing. Incidentally, one of the people aboard the Whitest Pearl was Lauren Southern, a right-wing vlogger and human/mayonnaise hybrid who months before had been arrested by the Italian coast guard for blockading an NGO vessel ... and firing flares at it.

Pictured: a bunch of normal, level-headed folks.

But not everything went according to plan. The initial launch of the C-Star was delayed for several days after the mayor of Catania, Sicily refused the ship permission to dock in the city's port, which meant they had to scurry over to Cyprus in order to catch their cruise -- at which point further protests forced them to abandon plans to refuel in Greece and Tunisia. The C-Star's engine then broke down, and while the crew eventually radioed the coast guard and asked for help, this arrived in the form of Sea Eye, an NGO whose ship was sailing nearby, looking for refugees to rescue. The racists turned them away, apparently preferring a slow, agonizing death on the high seas.

The C-Star was eventually repaired and sent on its way, but at one point in the journey, the captain was detained for failing to prepare a crew manifest, which seems a little odd. Isn't "write down the names of your crew" the easiest job a captain has? Why wouldn't he prepare one? Well, that might be because he was using the trip as a cover for human trafficking. When the C-Star stopped over in Cyprus, authorities boarded and found 21 refugees -- refugees who, according to reports, had paid the captain and crew 10,000 euros each for safe passage to Italy.

Despite somehow managing to increase the number of refugees in Europe, Defend Europe eventually declared the mission a success. Although, let's be real, the bar for "success" for these folks couldn't get any lower if they accidentally ate a buoy.

Related: 4 Hilariously Unexpected Feuds Between Fringe Groups

3 The Proud Boys Accidentally Doxx Themselves

In October 2018, the Proud Boys were involved in a small riot outside a fascist gathering in New York City. After several members of the group were arrested for assault, the de facto ringleader, Gavin McInnes, quit under the mistaken belief that this would save his boys from prosecution. This instead enabled an internal faction known as the "Elder Chapter" (the biggest dorks) to take over.

As a means of consolidating their power, the Elder Chapter drafted a new set of bylaws laying out how the PB would operate going forward, copies of which were sent to the press in order to trigger the libs and show everyone how totally cool and stable they were.

And true to form, they fucked it up.

As an official membership document, the leaders of the Elder Chapter were required to divulge their IRL identities. In order to stop antifa from spending the next six months sitting outside their homes, however, they redacted this information from the copies that they circulated to the public. Well, "redacted."

Not being smart enough to use MS Word isn't a great look for someone who thinks they have a plan to reshape society.

Instead of properly redacting the documents, the Elder Chapter tried to be clever and do that thing with the black bars from the movies. Only they did it using the highlighting tool of a word processor, which meant that all anyone had to do was highlight the relevant section and bing bang bosh: their real names were on display for the whole world.

Related: 7 Everyday Heroes Who Mercilessly Trolled Racist Morons

2 An Ambassador Denies Spouting Islamophobia, Dutch Journalists Have It On Video

While Pete Hoekstra isn't the worst person in the Trump administration, he certainly deserves a participation trophy. In 2017, Hoekstra was appointed U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands after a long career spent representing the district of blind hatred and bizarre racism. At one conference, he told an audience of right-wingers that the Netherlands had been taken over by a "Islamic movement" that was burning cars and politicians, as well as converting areas of the city into "no-go zones."

On the same day that he was sworn in as ambassador by Vice President Mike Pence, Hoekstra found some time to be interviewed by Wouter Zwart, a Dutch journalist. When Zwart called Hoekstra out on his comments, Hoekstra replied that actually, he never said those things at all, and this whole story was fake news designed to blah blah blah.

It was at this point that Zwart showed Hoekstra a video of him making the remarks in question.

Hoekstra then changed tack and denied ever having called the story "fake news," despite the fact that he had just been recorded saying exactly that. We suspect that someone tried to play this off as a five-dimensional chess move designed to trigger the libs, but at what point is this sort of thing more easily explained by these people being hapless buffoons?

Impressively, the situation got worse. After the interview went viral, the Dutch media went in for the kill at Hoekstra's first official press conference as ambassador. The assembled journalists pressed him for nearly two hours for details about the apocalypse outside, or failing that, to name a single politician -- hell, even a make of car -- that had been immolated by the apparently all-powerful caliphate running things in their country. Hoekstra couldn't answer, and some days later, he copped in a newspaper interview to having made the whole thing up to impress his right-wing buddies.

Related: 5 Stupid Ways The Alt-Right Is Destroying Itself From Within

1 A Transphobic TV Writer Tries To Destroy A Charity, Winds Up Making Them Even More Money

Graham Linehan is an Irish comedy "icon" who's more famous nowadays for spending every waking moment getting very angry about the existence of trans people.

Mermaids UK is a charity that provides resources to children living with gender dysphoria (whereby someone becomes distressed or anxious because there's a "mismatch between their biological sex and gender identity"). In December 2018, the organization was granted 500,000 pounds in funding by the British National Lottery, which would have enabled them to expand and open a network of support centers across the UK. Obviously, this made Linehan very angry, and in response, he organised a concern-trolling campaign that got the funding suspended and Mermaids' financial future placed into significant doubt.

Enter Harry Brewis, a Twitch streamer and YouTuber. Following a promise he'd made in a previous video about speedrunning culture, he announced that he'd be livestreaming a 101 percent (not a typo) completion run of Donkey Kong 64 for charity, with all donations going to Mermaids, to hopefully make up for Linehan's wrecking.

The stream began on January 18. Before he had even picked up a controller, he'd raised $1,000, which was some pretty on-the-nose foreshadowing for what was about to happen. Over the next 57 hours, Brewis was joined by a whole host of YouTube personalities, including Jim Sterling, Lindsay Ellis, Dan Olson, Natalie Wynn, and Casey Explosion, as well as some no-names like John Romero (of Doom fame), Chelsea Manning, two of the hosts of Chapo Trap House, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and voice actor Grant Kirkhope (who's played the big ape himself).

When the stream concluded, Brewis and his donors had raised over $340,000 (264,000 pounds) for Mermaids. The kicker? The National Lottery then announced that they'd looked into the accusations leveled by Linehan and found no wrongdoing, meaning that Mermaids was also getting the 500,000 pounds they'd originally been promised.

#ThanksGraham

Adam is on Twitter and has a newsletter about depressing history. Sign up here!

Support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more, check out How Trump's Pardon Of Joe Arpaio Is Normal And Also Super F***ed Up:

The first-ever Cracked Podcast LIVE TOUR is coming to a city near (some of) you this spring! Tickets on sale now for Chicago (April 11) and St. Paul (April 12).