YouTuber Josh Pieters has revealed that he pranked far-right British commentator Katie Hopkins by flying her to Prague and presenting her with a fake award. Hopkins, who is frequently retweeted by President Trump and was recently suspended on Twitter, was awarded with the Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy, abbreviated as C.U.N.T. And if you think that’s mean, just wait until you hear her hate-filled acceptance speech for the award.
The 26-year-old Pieters explained the prank in a new video on his YouTube channel, which has over 1.2 million subscribers. And it was a surprisingly large undertaking to convince Hopkins that she was getting a real award. Pieters organized flights, hotels, a dinner at the Four Seasons, and even hired actors to play members of his fake advocacy group, the Cape Town Collective For the Freedom of Speech.
Pieters, who’s originally from South Africa but lives in the UK, set up a fake website to make his organization appear more authentic, though there are some clear hints it might be fake. The photo of the founder that appears on his website is the current leader of the Ku Klux Klan, as just one example.
Pieters flew from his home in London to Prague and set up hidden cameras to capture the prank from a number of angles before Hopkins got there. Hopkins, who has previously echoed Nazi language by tweeting about the need for a “final solution” to the problem of terrorism, never seems to understand that the YouTuber’s banquet is a joke.
“We made Katie Hopkins fly 1,600 miles and accept a fake award and put the word ‘cunt’ behind her without her noticing,” Pieters says in the video. “You might wonder if this is a bit mean. For a moment I did too. But then she made her speech and told us what she really thought.”
The video delivers a rapid fire assault of Hopkins saying hateful things during her acceptance speech like, “If you call Mohammad in a school playground, 2,000 fucking kids come running and you don’t want any of them,” and “Epileptics are all weirdos. They’re up there with the Asians.”
Hopkins can also be heard repeatedly saying that Muslims are “raping their own mother” and she also mocks Arabic names, calling them “retards.” Hopkins can also be heard referring to 17-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg as an “autistic fucking wench.”
Interestingly, if you look closely at the video, Pieters shows one of Hopkins’ emails from when they were setting up the trip, which includes her suggestion that the fake group meet with Dominik Tarczynski, a member of Poland’s Law and Justice Party.
“He is more South African than many South Africans and I think an excellent contact for your group!,” Hopkins writes.
Who’s Tarczynski and why is he “more South African than many South Africans” in Hopkins’ estimation? He’s a far-right politician who says he doesn’t want Poland to be “taken over by Muslims, Buddhists, or someone else,” as he told Al Jazeera. Apparently Hopkins believes that all white South Africans must be as racist as Tarczynski.
Pieters ends the video by explaining why he went to such lengths to make fun of Hopkins, a truly despicable person.
“The truth is, there’s an awful lot of hate in the world, and people like Katie Hopkins spread that hate and make money from it,” Pieters said.
“And she can do that, because she has freedom of speech. But, so do I. So I used it to combat her spreading of hatred by playing on her ego and making her look a little bit silly.”
Hopkins did not respond to an email from Gizmodo sent early Friday. We’ll update this post if she has anything to say for herself.
Correction: This post originally said that Dominik Tarczynski was a member of Poland’s Law and Order Party. The best translation is actually the Law and Justice Party. Gizmodo regrets the error.
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