Newark, N.J. Gets Punked in Fake Sister City Scheme

The levels that some people will stoop to in an attempt to score social justice bullsh*t points is reaching a ridiculous level…

If I wasn’t so blinded by how hilarious I find this gross oversight, I’d probably have enough sense to be outraged that we have such idiots in places of power. However, given the circumstances of our times, and the fact that it’s not something that we can easily fix at the moment, I’ll laugh about it instead…

From the New York Post:

Officials in Newark, New Jersey, were initially thrilled to partner with the Hindu nation of the United States of Kailasa.

The only problem? The country doesn’t exist.

After hosting “delegates” from the made-up country at a formal ceremony in January, City Hall has admitted that the whole thing was a scam led by notorious Indian fugitive Swami Nithyananda.

Newark officials said the agreement only lasted for six days and was rendered “baseless and void,” adding that no money was exchanged in the ceremony.

“Although this was a regrettable incident, the city of Newark remains committed to partnering with people from diverse cultures in order to enrich each other with connectivity, support, and mutual respect,” a city spokesperson said.

During the signing ceremony on Jan. 12, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka told the fake delegates: “I pray that our relationship helps us to understand cultural, social, and political development and improves the lives of everybody in both places.”

“No one in City Hall, not one person did a Google search, so maybe we need a transformation of City Hall because not one person said, ‘Let me go and Google and figure out this was a fake city,’” resident Shakee Merritt told CBS.

A Google Maps search of Kailasa only reveals a slew of temples in the southern half of India, and even a meditation center in Connecticut — but no city or nation.

The first thing that pops up on Google, however, is a link to a website promoting the fake nation as an “ancient enlightened civilization, the great cosmic borderless Hindu nation.”

It also touts Nithyananda as “The Reviver,” claiming he is worshiped by more than 20 million people in 196 countries around the world.

In reality, Nithyananda is an infamous scam artist who claims to have supernatural powers and has been on the run from rape and child abduction charges since 2019, according to reports from the New Indian Express.

I don’t understand how it wouldn’t occur to someone that you should probably look into that… All I seem to do all day is look stuff up. It’s mostly words that I’m unsure whether I’m using correctly, but that’s neither here nor there…

Therein lies the problem with popular social trends, though. Newark literally tripped and faceplanted into a scam. For what??? They were eager to prove to everybody that they were progressively cool enough to need a Hindu sister city? That seems like something that really uncool people would be excited about…

Cool people stop wasting taxpayer dollars on dumb sh*t. I haven’t seen many cool people around federal or local governments lately, but whattaya do?

If nothing else, I guess this just proves that having limited access to information in every prior generation wasn’t the reason why idiots existed. Noted.