Marine Todd
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About
Marine Todd is a copypasta story about a United States marine who violently assaults a college professor for challenging the existence of God. While numerous variations of this story have been circulating for over a decade, the meme resurged in April 2014 after Twitter users began parodying the original story in satire of various American conservative and right-wing ideologies.
Origin
According to the tech news blog Technology Tell,[1] an email copypasta telling a story about a marine who hits a college professor in the head after offending him for challenging the existence of God began circulating as early as 2004. On March 20th, 2014, an image macro variation of the copypasta was posted by Facebook user Earl Dibbles Jr, which gained more than 283,100 shares and 241,000 likes in the first three weeks.
A Marine was taking college classes between his deployments to Afghanistan.
One of his courses had a professor that was an atheist and a member of the ACLU. One day the professor shocked everyone by walking into class, looking up and stating "God, if you are real, I want you to come down and knock me off this platform, I will give you 15 minutes.
Several minutes tick by in silence, when the 15 min. time almost expired the Marine gets up from his seat, approaches the professor and punched him in the face knocking him off the platform and out cold. The Marine simply went back to his seat.
The professor came to, visibly shaken and asked the Marine, "What the heck did you do that for?!"
The Marine said, "God was busy protecting America's military who are out protecting your right to say stupid shit like that, so he sent me to fill in."
Spread
On March 21st, 2014, Redditor NibblyWibbly submitted the image macro to the /r/cringepics[2] subreddit, where it garnered upwards of 7,900 up votes and 600 comments in two weeks. On March 22nd, Twitter user @dankmtl[3] posted the image macro, to which writer Luke O'Neil replied with a parody version of the copypasta written in the Comic Sans font.
swarthyvillain</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/dankmtl">
dankmtl MurderBryan</a> <a href="http://t.co/GLI0cjJQOL">pic.twitter.com/GLI0cjJQOL</a></p>— Luke O'Neil (
lukeoneil47) March 22, 2014
On March 27th, Twitter user @jdcrowley posted another parody written in Comic Sans about a marine who successfully seduces a woman at a bar.
nickmullen</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/lukeoneil47">
lukeoneil47 polksalad</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/dankmtl">
dankmtl rigamarock</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/MurderBryan">
MurderBryan swarthyvillain</a> <a href="http://t.co/4Sy2VehglU">pic.twitter.com/4Sy2VehglU</a></p>— J Crowley (
jdcrowley) March 27, 2014
On March 29th, Salon politics editor Elias Isquith tweeted a parody version of the copypasta, in which Marine Todd kicks a professor for saying "America deserved 9/11." In the coming days, several news sites published articles about the copypasta parodies, including Gawker,[5] Mediaite,[6] Technology Tell[1] and Thought Catalog.[7]
Follow-up to an earlier report on Marine Todd. Please share if you know a warrior pic.twitter.com/B2vDxDAznJ
— Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) March 29, 2014
Search Interest
External References
[1] Technology Tell – Twitter and the glory of Marine Todd
[2] Reddit – This totally happened guys
[4] Twitter – @swarthyvillain
[5] Gawker – Marine Todd is an Awesomely Stupid Right Wing Meme
[6] Mediate – Brave Marine Steals Upside Down American Flag
[7] Thought Catalog – The Story of Marine Todd
Top Comments
Jesus of New York (JONY)
Apr 03, 2014 at 07:13PM EDT
Anger Point
Apr 04, 2014 at 09:35AM EDT