Fact Check Me: How I Became a MAGA Troll
Or: The day the metric system picked a fight
I gained two followers and a subscriber yesterday.
All it took was… using litres.
I was scrolling my Substack feed when someone asked:
“What are gas prices in your area?”
Simple. Harmless. Community-building.
The kind of question that should end in mild agreement and maybe a complaint or two.
So I posted mine.
Casually. Calmly. Respectfully.
Like a normal human being reporting on the price of fuel.
But there was a problem.
Everyone else was American.
They were talking:
USD
gallons
freedom units
And I showed up with:
CAD
litres
quiet Canadian confidence
Now I’ll admit it — I knew what I was doing.
I wasn’t trying to start a war…
but I also wasn’t not trying to confuse people.
A little metric mischief.
A gentle nudge into international awareness.
A polite Canadian prank.
Apparently, that’s how culture wars start.
The reaction?
Immediate.
Hostile.
Unhinged in a way that made me feel like I had accidentally insulted someone’s grandmother.
I got called names.
Someone suggested I probably had an old toilet sitting on my front lawn (which feels very specific).
And at some point — and I still don’t fully understand the path we took to get here —
I was labeled…
A MAGA troll.
MAGA.
Because I used litres.
Think about the chain of logic required to get there.
“Hmm… I don’t understand this number…
must be political extremism.”
At no point did anyone go:
“Hey… are those litres?”
No one clicked my profile.
No one did the mental math.
No one paused long enough to think:
“Wait… could this guy just be… Canadian?”
Because if they had, they would’ve found:
References to the Avro Arrow
Mentions of the NDP
A guy who is very clearly not auditioning for American politics
But that would’ve required five seconds.
And five seconds is a lifetime on the internet.
Instead, we skipped straight to:
“This man is a problem.”
At one point, someone even sent me an AI-generated image of Trump facing a firing squad
with a comment about dancing at his funeral.
Which felt like a bit of an escalation for a conversation about gas prices.
Eventually — mercifully — someone stepped in.
Explained the metric system.
Translated my numbers.
Brought peace back to the land.
They even joked I was probably near a Tim Hortons.
Which, to be fair…
statistically, yes.
And just like that, everything cooled off.
No more insults.
No more assumptions.
No more political labels.
All it took was:
“Oh… litres.”
Five seconds.
But that’s not the world we’re in.
We don’t investigate anymore.
We react.
We don’t get curious.
We get loud.
Something doesn’t make sense immediately, and instead of asking why,
we assign intent.
And once you assign intent,
you don’t need facts anymore.
Look — I get it.
Things are tense.
People are primed.
The internet rewards speed, not understanding.
You don’t get points for being thoughtful.
You get points for being first.
So when something feels off —
wrong units, wrong currency, wrong vibe —
you don’t check it.
You attack it.
And the funniest part?
I was trolling.
Just not in the way they thought.
I wasn’t pushing politics.
I wasn’t stirring outrage.
I was just a Canadian…
dropping litres into a gallon-based society
and watching the system try to process it.
And somehow, that was enough
to turn me into a MAGA troll.
But here’s the part I like best.
In the middle of all that chaos…
I gained two followers and a subscriber.
Because some people did take the five seconds.
Some people did look.
Some people realized:
“This guy isn’t a problem…
he’s just using the metric system.”
So yeah.
Shoutout to litres.
Shoutout to confusion.
And shoutout to the algorithm for rewarding international incidents.
Turns out…
the quickest way to grow your audience
is to accidentally start a geopolitical misunderstanding.