UNC Students Rewrap Campus Newspaper to Shine a Light on Youth for Western Civilization

Daily Tar Heel Prank Rewrapped Newspaper

Last week students at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill covered thousands of issues of the official student newspaper with a lookalike front and back page (check the PDF here). The Daily Tar Heel's issue that day became a "special anti-racist issue," with articles focusing on supremacist group Youth for Western Civilization. The top story? An article about YWC's co-founder Marcus Epstein pleading guilty to a hate crime (we blogged about that little escapade here). Another article details how YWC's local faculty advisor stepped down over the summer, and the back page was filled with articles critiquing white supremacy and liberals' customary milquetoast reactions.

As the activists' communiqué puts it:

Of course, being the lapdog of the administration and the bastion of liberal “tolerance” towards white supremacy, the Daily Tar Heel would never have printed such things on its own. And so, in the long tradition of expropriating the channels of media production, radicals took it upon themselves to assist the Daily Tar Heel in printing the news they refuse to print.

Much earlier in the morning, a large crew of friends and comrades had broken up into small teams and wrapped approximately 3,000 copies of the DTH with their own paper. This action was particularly designed to force YWC’s connections with white supremacist movements out into the open. It also serves as payback to a newspaper that refused to print one single supportive comment about the widely participatory direct actions that occurred against YWC earlier this year, while at the same time running friendly human interest pieces on two of the group’s officers.

The action garnered headlines off-campus, and the editor-in-chief admitted "we got pranked." I have to say, this is a fantastic example of how to do a newspaper rewrap. They have both fact and opinion pieces, resources for people to link up with other radical/anti-racist groups, and took the time and effort to rewrap newspapers on a massive scale. Folks may remember when anarchists rewrapped tens of thousands of issues of USA TODAY across most major U.S. cities the day after last November's election. The Yes Men also got into the act, with a rewrapped New York Times. In all three of these cases great care was taken to make the spoof look as much like the original as possible. Newspaper is cheap to print, and there are lots of radical graphic designers out there. Here's how the folks in Recipes for Disaster recommend doing it:

The most efficient method is three people to a car: one driver, one clean-cut person to go to each machine and exchange the pile of unwrapped papers within for a pile of wrapped ones, and one maniac in the back frantically wrapping away. At the very end of the trip, you can go back to the first box, where you got your first pile of unwrapped papers, and put in the last wrapped ones. [...] Bicyclists are best suited to going driveway to driveway, adding the wraps to individually delivered papers. Playing this role, they can round out the work of the drivers; in some areas, few people use newspaper dispensers, but if the wraps also appear in the front yards of the suburbs it will seem they are everywhere.