This is not unlike what happened to the white supremacist, Richard Barrett. A few years ago, as part of a documentary, John Safran obtained a DNA sample from Barrett and had a DNA test done without his consent (he got him to blow up a balloon and used the saliva inside). It showed recent African ancestry in the maternal line. Safran announced the finding at an awards ceremony organised by Barrett but never got to air the documentary because of threatened legal action.
A year later, Barrett was murdered by a young black man who it seems was being paid by the homophobic white supremacist for sexual favours.
If the hatred and ridicule arise from traits that are 1)freely chosen and 2)deserving of contempt (both of which are the case here), there’s nothing wrong with that. Not only is it not wrong, it is positively right: it discourages others from adopting racist jackassery and inhibits the spread of racism by making its adherents less willing to promulgate it in public.
Even if it didn’t change his attitudes, it most certainly did affect him – becoming a public laughingstock is going to degrade his ability to do really scary things in North Dakota or anywhere else, at least insofar as it makes it more difficult to recruit allies.
I am reminded of the Robot Chicken “Dicks With Time Machines” scenes, where somebody would mess with historical figures just to be a jerk… until the last sketch, in which an Adolf Hitler speech was interrupted by putting up a screen behind him and presenting a film of him straining on the toilet The audience to cracked up laughing and quit paying attention; at this point, the title changed to “Heroes With Time Machines”.
I’m not sure what punchline you would have come up with if you’d written those sketches, since you’d still consider the trickster to be a dick.
Yeah–I’m with others who think that public shaming is a good thing. There’s a pernicious human desire to be seen as a maverick hero, a figure from legend, blah blah blah. It leads to plenty of awfulness, like this dude.
If other awful people like this dude see him turned into a ridiculous buffoon even by their own standards, it might have some prophylactic effect. And that’s awesome.
That was my first thought too. But the guy in the New Yorker article became an ultra-orthodox Jew. No half measures for him. I concluded that he was inclined to fanaticism and didn’t much care fanatical what. Immoderation in everything. It would be as if the guy mentioned in the OP joined the NAACP, became a fanatical advocate of black power, etc.
As I already said, I agree, but I have to dispute your description of this desire as “pernicious”. The desire to be seen as a hero sometimes leads people to do actual heroic things, so on the whole it is at worst a double-edged sword,
Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. It will only strengthen their feeling of being oppressed and make them even more convinced that they are right and everyone against them are wrong.