A YouTube prankster tricked a racist English media personality into accepting a cunningly titled fake award.
Internet prankster Josh Pieters established the Campaign to Unify the Nation Trophy award, also known as the CUNT award, solely for far-right British conservative Katie Hopkins.
Pieters, alongside fellow British YouTube trickster Archie Manners, managed to convince Hopkins to travel from London to Prague to receive the award meant to embarrass her. The internet personality, who once tricked influencers into promoting gravel, has more than a million subscribers on his YouTube channel. He documented his reasoning for the joke in a 10-minute video.
The video features a supercut of Hopkins' Twitter feed, displaying a series of her most prejudiced tweets. Recently, Hopkins was suspended from Twitter for harmful comments based on race, religion, nationality and gender identity. Twitter is going to do a “full review” of her account, Yahoo reported.
"Despite her charming views, one million Twitter followers and friendship with Donald Trump, Katie hasn't won many awards. So we thought it would be nice to give her one," Pieters said. "Being Britain's biggest ****."
Regarded as a champion of free speech to the far right, Hopkins is a professional troll who uses her platform to travel around the world and spread her bigoted views. She once compared migrants to cockroaches and has been retweeted by Trump multiple times, including one which categorized Baltimore as a s**thole, according to Business Insider.
“There’s an awful lot of hate in this world and people like Katie Hopkins spread that hate make money from it,” Pieters said via Mediaite. “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.”
As Hopkins accepted her CUNT award, she said, "This is by far the most fun I’ve had in a very long time."
"[I'm] not used to receiving awards, it is strange, and it’s strange to hear nice things being said about yourself. It is normally an incoming deluge of fireballs coming this way," Hopkins said.
Pieters and Manners created a fake organization called Cape Town Collective for the Freedom of Speech, accompanied by a website and board members to "honor" Hopkins' "past achievements."
In an interview with Metro UK, Manners told the outlet that Hopkins, who was well-aware of cameras, signed a release and has not commented on the prank.