Bonus Patreon Upcycle - KONY 2012
RedHanded
Wondery | RedHanded
4.5 • 18.2K Ratings
🗓️ 28 December 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As RedHanded takes a festive pause, we've picked two of our favourite Patreon Bonus episodes from 2025. To get a full-length, bonus episode of RedHanded every month (plus weekly video episodes of Under the Duvet and much more besides) head to Patreon.com/redhanded and sign up. Or, head to patreon.com/redhanded/gift to buy a membership for someone else!
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Remember that time a bunch of wristband-wielding Western teens went on a mission to save the world from a megalomaniac Ugandan warlord with an army of literal children in his ranks?
Well, back in 2012, American filmmaker Jason Russell was determined to make the whole world know Joseph Kony's name.
Featuring one of the first YouTube videos to ever go viral, cringey musical numbers, unhinged memes and a big old splash of charitable scammery, in this week's bonus episode we're unravelling the bizarre story of a social media campaign that virtue-signalled too close to the sun – and ended up crashing and burning.
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Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus Episodes
YouTube - Full-length Video Episodes
Sources and more available on redhandedpodcast.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wonderly Plus subscribers can listen to RedHounded early and ad free. |
| 0:04.6 | Join Wonderly Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. |
| 0:17.6 | Hello, hello. |
| 0:19.5 | We're going to take a walk down, certainly memory lane for us, but if you are a youth, you probably will not remember. Quite. So we're going to invite you to cast your minds back into the depths of the internet to 2012. YouTube was in its golden era. |
| 0:39.7 | Image sharing apps like Instagram were on the rise. |
| 0:44.0 | I was sleeping with the captain of the rugby team so no one could tell me nothing. |
| 0:49.5 | And it was a simpler time, online and in real life as well. |
| 0:53.6 | If you were still in nappies, you can fuck off. |
| 0:57.4 | But us, millennials, were at university, |
| 1:02.7 | and my concerns were not really to do with the internet back then. |
| 1:04.4 | No, not at all. |
| 1:05.9 | Not at all. |
| 1:06.6 | No. |
| 1:09.6 | I was just wrapping up uni in 2012. |
| 1:14.7 | And, uh, nope, couldn't have been further from my mind, the internet. |
| 1:15.6 | No. |
| 1:19.6 | But today's topic, I was aware. |
| 1:21.3 | I saw the stickers. |
| 1:28.7 | I had no idea and I didn't care to because I was busy with other things. |
| 1:38.1 | But suddenly in 2012 the West got a new mission which was to make a Ugandan warlord go viral. |
| 1:43.1 | Would we say one of the earliest viral infections? |
| 1:46.0 | Totally, totally, totally. To spread around the interwebs. |
... |
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