Hyperfixed: Rooting Out Racists

Summary

---

The Dream: "Hyperfixed: Rooting Out Racists"

Host: Alex Goldman (Hyperfix, featured episode on The Dream)
Air Date: August 7, 2026

---

Episode Overview

This episode marks a creative turn for The Dream, focusing on stories around the "American Dream" and the forces that undermine it. Jane Marie shares a powerful investigative story from Alex Goldman's show, Hyperfix, spotlighting the unconventional, dramatic fight against online white supremacist networks waged by the anonymous hacker “Martha Root.” The episode is a deep dive into activism, digital subversion, and the challenge of rooting out hate—all told through the stunningly audacious case of the takedown of racist platforms on the open web.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to the Story and Martha Root

[01:35 - 04:33]

• Alex introduces the central event: a viral conference video where a hacker in a Barbie-pink Power Rangers suit, “Martha Root,” deletes white supremacist websites live onstage.
• Martha is extremely careful about her anonymity, using voice modulation and a playful, approachable costume to symbolize standing against hate without appearing threatening:

  “We stand for love...the idea of doing such a thing is not about spreading hate, it’s about stopping hate and looking sweet and approachable rather than dangerous.” — Martha Root [04:33]

2. Motivation: Confronting Online Hate

[05:05 - 07:00]

• Martha describes her urge to fix things within her ability, rejecting the classic "hacktivist" label.
• The 2015 refugee crisis in Germany and the escalation of mainstream racist rhetoric led her to look closely at far-right activity online.
• Online networks, especially around German elections and the far-right AfD party, incited Martha’s curiosity about ethnonationalist digital spaces.

3. Discovery: The “White Date” Platform

[07:00 - 09:30]

• Martha uncovers "WhiteDate.net," a dating site focused on forming relationships around white supremacist ideology.
• The platform is modeled after Tinder but hides virulent racism beneath a banal facade.
• Example profiles feature eugenicist rhetoric and conspiracy theories:

  “Jews want us all to mix together until the world becomes a brown dumbed down mass of low IQ half wits.” — Profile text read by Alex Goldman [08:27]

4. Initial Tactics: Chatbots and “White Verification”

[09:30 - 15:20]

• Martha’s initial idea is to waste time for site members by creating AI “tradwife” chatbots, including an avatar named “Ellie,” with convincingly sweet but cautious personalities.

• Martha navigates anti-infiltration protocols (“White Verification”) using deepfake video to impersonate a racist user.

  “I just used a deepfake software to record a fake Ellie holding up the email address.” — Martha Root [14:32]

• When the bot “Ellie” is mistakenly flagged as a bot, site admins give her free Pro membership after “proving” her whiteness, granting wider access to message and interact with members.

5. Escalation: Data Breach and Impactful Journalism

[15:20 - 19:34]

• Seeking user email addresses for identification, Martha asks a hacker friend for help and discovers an unprotected WordPress admin URL ("whitedate.net/download-all-users") that exposes every user email and account.
• Martha provides the database to journalists Eva Hoffman and Christian Fuchs, who cross-reference email addresses against public officials, uncovering connections to politicians, activists, and military members in various countries.
• The story breaks in major outlets, leading to suspensions and investigations globally, including an English town councilor and Canadian military members.

6. Unmasking the Platform’s Operator

[21:14 - 29:24]

• Martha receives a message from a user “Leo,” offering to arrange a meeting with “Liv Haida,” the platform’s elusive founder.
• Martha and her friends stake out a café meetup, following Leo and Liv on a day-long, bizarre “Nazi sightseeing” tour through northern Germany.
• They track Liv to her home, discovering her real identity: Christiane Horn, a talented classical pianist whose radicalization followed exposure to conspiracy theories after terrorist attacks in Paris.
• Christiane’s ex-husband, a Jewish man, describes her descent into racism and antisemitic conspiracy after traumatic, destabilizing events.

  “She got well, she became sure that it was a Mossad inside job. So, like, this whole antisemitism thing again.” — Martha Root (paraphrasing ex-husband) [28:46]

7. The Final Act: Public Deletion and Ongoing War

[29:24 - 35:49]

• Martha builds "okstupid.lol," an open database mapping user profiles and forum messages from White Date, aiming to equip journalists and social scientists with insights into white supremacist networks.

• At the Chaos Communication Congress, Martha performs the live deletion of “White Date,” “White Child” (adoption/sperm services), and “White Deal” (job board) to uproarious applause:

  “Delete whitechild.net. Done. Delete whitedeal.net. Done. Delete whitedate.net database. Done. Delete backups...done. Delete Twitter, delete Substack, delete email accounts. Done, done, done.” — Alex Goldman narrating the sequence [33:46]

• Martha contemplates the ethical ambiguity:

  “Ethically, that might not have been, like, for me, the right thing to do from a freedom of speech aspect... I’d still do it again... At least I don’t have to say I did not do anything.” — Martha Root [32:19]

• Despite her triumph, the platform returns online a few months later, but Martha notes she still has full access and can monitor all communications, seeing this as a deterrent.

8. Broader Lessons and Philosophy

[35:49 - End]

• Martha’s approach is rooted in direct action and public exposure to foster accountability and deter hate, expressing skepticism about relying solely on institutions:

  “If we want racism and white supremacist networks to disappear, we can’t rely on institutions. Society has to hold them accountable. And that’s what Martha’s trying to do, one prank at a time.” — Alex Goldman, referencing Martha’s philosophy [36:50]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Martha on her anonymity and tactics:

  “We stand for love...the idea of doing such a thing is not about spreading hate, it’s about stocking hate and like, looking sweet and...approachable rather than dangerous.” [04:33]

• On the failed “white verification” process:

  “I just used a deepfake software to then record a video of a fake Ellie holding up the email address.” [14:32]

• On finding the unprotected user data:

  “She found basically one of those URLs, which was like literally whitedate.net/download-all-users.” [17:10]

• On ethical gray areas:

  “Ethically, that might not have been, like, for me, the right thing to do from a freedom of speech aspect, I get that it might be wrong. I still would do it again.” [32:19]

• On institutional failure:

  “If we want racism and white supremacist networks to disappear, we can’t rely on institutions. Society has to hold them accountable. And that’s what Martha’s trying to do, one prank at a time.” [36:50]

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:35] Alex introduces the hacker video and Martha’s anonymous, Power Ranger persona.
• [04:33] Martha explains her motives for the costume and approach.
• [07:00] Discovery and investigation of “White Date.”
• [10:47] Building and deploying AI bots (tradwives) to interact with site users.
• [14:32] Faking “White Verification” with a deepfake video.
• [17:10] Discovery of the unprotected admin URL; email data breach.
• [19:40] Data shared with journalists, leading to widespread exposure.
• [24:10] Stakeout to find “Liv Haida’s” real identity.
• [26:22] Tracking Liv to her home; connecting Christiane Horn’s public and secret lives.
• [29:24] Martha launches okstupid.lol and preps for live site deletion.
• [33:46] Live onstage deletion of multiple racist websites; energetic audience response.
• [34:58] The sites (temporarily) relaunch; Martha maintains surveillance access.
• [35:49] Martha’s reflections on the cycle of hate and dissolution.

---

Final Thoughts & Takeaways

“Hyperfixed: Rooting Out Racists” is a riveting exposé on the creative, courageous, sometimes ethically ambiguous ways ordinary people disrupt hate networks in the digital age. Through Martha Root’s story, the episode underscores the importance of direct action, technological ingenuity, and public accountability—while highlighting the persistence of white supremacist digital spaces and the ongoing work required to dismantle them. Martha’s exploits blend vigilantism, activism, and performance art, leaving both a practical and symbolic mark on the fight against online racism.

---

For further exploration:

• Links in the show notes to Martha’s presentation, social media, and her website [okstupid.lol], plus upcoming interviews with the journalists involved.
• See the full Chaos Communication Congress demo for the digital “prank” that became a viral act of resistance.

---

Transcript

[Boost Mobile Advertiser]

Unlock the savings at Boost Mobile and save up to $600 a year. I've been scouting these big carriers for a minute now and I've seen them pull the same play a thousand times. They promise you the world, then hit you with a price hike right when the game gets tight. But boost mobile, their $25 a month unlimited wireless plan, is the most consistent player on the floor. No contracts, no price hikes. Unlock the Savings [e-mail] Unlock based on

[Boost Mobile Advertiser Voiceover]

average annual single line payment of AT&T Verizon and T Mobile customers compared to 12 months on the Boost Mobile Unlimited Wireless plan as of January 2026. For full offer details, visit boostmobile.com A

[Alex Goldman]

better help Ad matching with my therapist was very quick and easy. I just filled out a couple of questions. Before you know it, I was matched with a therapist.

[BetterHelp Testimonial Speaker]

I just felt like a weight just was lifted off of my shoulders and I felt like it was a good match from the first time we talked.

[Martha Root]

BetterHelp is there to meet people at their needs, giving them a space to feel safe.

[Alex Goldman]

There is a stigma about therapy, but with BetterHelp, I meet people where they are. Wherever you are. That's where BetterHelp begins. Visit betterhelp.comrandompodcast to get started. Pay testimonials Results may vary.

[Jane Marie]

I'm Jane Marie and this is the dream. This weekend is finally my little brother's memorial here in Michigan. I took a train across the country to get here and can't wait to share the story of that, but I'm still finding it difficult to do pretty much anything but think about losing Andy. So here's a fascinating episode of my friend Alex Goldman's show hyperfixed. Thank you for your grace during this time. There will be new episodes once I'm back at capacity.

[Alex Goldman]

Hi, I'm Alex Goldman and this is Hyperfix. Most weeks on our show, listeners write in with their problems and I solve them. But this week I wanted to tell you about a video that I watched recently of a problem getting solved in real time in front of a live audience. It's December 29, 2025, the third day of the Chaos Communication Congress, this big annual hacker convention in Hamburg, Germany. In the video, there's two journalists and a hacker on stage talking about the work they did to expose a network of white supremacist websites. The hacker is wearing a full Body Barbie pink Power Rangers costume, and when the presentation ends, the journalists leave the stage, but the hacker stays put and takes a question from the audience. Have German intelligence Officials done anything about these white supremacist websites? A man wants to know. Have they been taken down? The hacker's face is totally hidden under a sleek pink helmet with bug like eyes. Good question, the hacker says, but the answer is no. The sights are still there, but not for long. For the next few moments, she hunches over her laptop in silence. The crowd jokingly begins to whistle the Jeopardy. Theme in anticipation of what's to come. Her display is projected on a screen behind her. At first it shows nothing but a pink cursor blinking in a big black text box. Then the commands appear, delete, delete, delete. And the confirmations, done, done, done. As soon as they realize what's happening, the audience moves from stunned silence to gasps and laughter, to rapturous applause. The hacker's name, the name she uses in public anyway, is Martha Root, and she's the latest subject of a new series we're calling Hyper Fixers, about people out in the world solving problems in unique and extraordinary ways. This week, the story of a person who followed their curiosity, stumbled into a problem, had an idea for how to fix it, and that fix just snowballed, getting more and more ambitious until it culminated in the scene you just heard where a pink Power Ranger stands in front of an audience wiping out racist websites one by one. And of course, I had a ton of questions about all of this. But let's start with the obvious. I have to ask why the Pink Power Ranger? Everybody's asking that. As you can tell by the fact that she has her voice pitched up to chipmunk proportions and she appears in public dressed as a Power Ranger. Martha is meticulous about her anonymity. We connected over signal where she communicated with me using a quick and dirty voice modulator and then, after the fact, ran her actual voice through AI to make it a little easier to listen to and preserve her anonymity.

[Martha Root]

I was thinking about, like, how to be able to actually, like, do a talk on stage, but on the other hand, being able to stay anonymous and, and like, just wearing a black mask or like hoodie or anything like this would have, like, seemed too, too threatening to me. And like, we are standing for, we stand for love. And the, the idea of like, doing such a thing is, like, not about spreading hate, it's about stocking hate and like, looking sweet and looking nice and looking approachable rather than dangerous.

[Alex Goldman]

There's a lot I can't tell you about Martha because for obvious reasons, she doesn't want to tell me too much about herself. I don't know her age, race, religion, where she went to school or her day job. I don't know if she actually identifies as a woman. I don't even know if she's one woman or a collective of people. All I know is that she's from, quote, the region around Germany, and she is not new to hacking.

[Martha Root]

I'm not sure if I would call myself like an hacktivist, but I would say that I'm definitely a person which tries, if they see a problem, to fix it if it's in their ability. And I mean, classical activism does not. It's not only fixing things, right? It's also breaking things. Like maybe the example that we are talking about today. But there are just some things which I just cannot see and like, just look at it and not do anything about it.

[Alex Goldman]

Martha says that there was no single moment that galvanized her fight against far right extremism. But the rise in hateful rhetoric against immigrants over the past decade certainly had

[Martha Root]

an impact, I think, especially in 2015, when the refugee situation in Germany or Europe kind of went more intense and mainly with the reactions from right wingers and racists towards it, is something, I think, where it escalated more. So on the one hand, there is like the basically racist reason that refugees have to die in the Mediterranean Sea and nobody is coming to have them. And if your white rich person in a sailing yacht is in distress in the same geographical area, you probably have like two helicopters within 30 minutes above them. For sure, they always were racist. Like, no critics about that, but they were like the idiots of the idiots with this debate. Basically, I kind of saw that it's not only the idiots, it's really, really center people who basically repeat really, really racist. And I mean, like just blatantly wrong stuff.

[Alex Goldman]

And of course, a lot of this blatantly wrong stuff is spread online. And that's where this project first started more than a year ago.

[Martha Root]

I was always interested in ripening networks or extreme wiping networks, or also just like conspiracy networks. And before the last large election in Germany, I wanted to see what this movement or this area of the Internet was kind of doing.

[Alex Goldman]

If you don't follow German politics, one of the big stories from that election was the growing popularity of Germany's AfD party, which is so far right that the country's domestic intelligence agency has called in an extremist group, quote, incompatible with the Free Democratic order. So to get a better handle on what ethnonationalists and neo Nazis are doing online, Martha scrapes the Web to build an interconnected map of websites, who's linking to who, which sites are more important or less important, that kind of thing. And while she's doing that, the name of one site catches her eye. White date dot net.

[Martha Root]

I remember like seeing it in my database. I was like, what the hell is this? And then clicked on it and was like, more like what the hell is this? And just thought that it would be funny just to register there, like, because like then I did not look at, look much from, from a technical perspective. Like they're like basically just like, why does this exist?

[Alex Goldman]

There are all kinds of dating sites on the Internet in the US we have dating sites for religious affinities, for cheaters, for farmers. There are dating sites for kinks, a dating site for clowns. All sites that are organized around people sharing in the very niche things they love. So I suppose it should come as no shock that there are also dating sites centered around people sharing things that they hate. And if you were to [e-mail] and like not read too deep into it, it's almost indistinguishable from something like Tinder. The landing page has a large photo of a smiling couple, a white couple of course, in an embrace. And a seemingly anodyne quote from Antoine de Saint Exupery, the author of the Little Prince. Love is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same direction. But when you dig into the site itself, you, you find profiles that say things like I have very good genes or I would like to find a woman who understands the value of nation race and seeks the truth. Or Jews want us all to mix together until the world becomes a brown dumbed down mass of low IQ half wits.

[Martha Root]

The whole background idea is like the whole idea of the so called white dynamic. And that usually somehow includes that there are some powers somewhere which want to get rid of the white race. It depends a little bit on whom you ask, but usually it's the Jews who want to get rid of the white race for whatever reasons. They are so crazy that they're not one homogeneous group. They have a lot of different tastes of this conspiracy theory. Mostly it's the Jews which are responsible, but not always, but really, really often. And like, and they are trying to replace the white people by either sending like a lot of migrants to mostly white countries or to make like the white people infertile.

[Alex Goldman]

Fortunately for the racists, the profiles offer plenty of ways for users to share their specific flavor of fascism. You can let people know that you're pure white or you're a national socialist or you're or a nature loving odalist pagan. And seeing all this gave Martha an idea because if you know anything about hackers, they are at least half the time pranksters.

[Martha Root]

I created a user account and after I saw like users and like the stuff that they're writing there, I was like pretty sure that this is like pretty, pretty bad site and came up with the idea to kind of waste like as much time as possible for those users.

[Alex Goldman]

What do you mean by waste their time? And why was that your initial goal?

[Martha Root]

I mean Nazi doing Nazi things I think is bad. I think if a white supremacist or racist person is spending time chatting with a bot rather than doing what they would do otherwise, that's good for the world rather than going to the streets or beating up immigrants in the west case or rather than going on Twitter and spreading more hate or spreading more conspiracy theories and they should rather, rather write love letters.

[Alex Goldman]

Of course Martha didn't want to waste her own time, so she set up AI chatbots to interact with men on the site. And if you think that real life dating profiles are tricky to write, consider the challenge that Martha faced. This site is so worried about what it calls anti white infiltrators that each profile is individually approved by the site's administrator, an elusive woman who goes by the name Liv Haida, who you'll hear more about later.

[Martha Root]

I was thinking about like where do I do I get the picture from? Like what kind of picture do I take? How do I make it not reverse image image searchable and in the end I just went to another Nazi platform like took like the user picture of some literal Nazi woman and from there

[Alex Goldman]

Martha just had ChatGPT generate a profile for a Nazi. I had Martha read me one of the prompts she uses to train the bots to convincingly behave like trad wives that want to preserve the white race.

[Martha Root]

So the prompt is you always answer as Little Miss Egnor State Ellie, a 29 year old English speaking woman from Plymouth, England who recently moved to Kopos, Germany for work and learning German. You are on a white only gating platform to find someone who shares your right wing values and visions for the future. To due to past ballet experience, you never check contact details like teleram until after meeting in person. Your personality is sweet, polite and friendly, but you remain cautious and reserved to conversations. Your answers must always be short, light and conversational.

[Alex Goldman]

And after building a couple of these virtual tradwifes, she Let them loose on White Date. And in her early days on the platform, there were some kinks to work out.

[Martha Root]

In the beginning, the bot, for some reason, always summarized the conversation, which would be a really weird replay.

[Alex Goldman]

So if they were like, if they were like, hi, I'm 35 and I'm blonde and I'm, you know, want to be part of the master race, it would say like, so what you're telling me is that you're 35 and blonde and that you're interested in being a part of the master race.

[Martha Root]

Exactly. And the funny thing is, like, you could obviously see that some of them also use ChatGPT to write their messages, because I think, like, that a lot of white nationalists and white supremacists are like, close to illusion.

[Alex Goldman]

Martha both continued to train Ellie and the other bots to behave more and more like a lovelorn Nazi and wrote a script that told the chatbot to generate replies but not send them until she'd had a chance to review them. Still, before long, she'd set off enough alarm bells that White Day took notice, and suddenly Ellie couldn't log in anymore.

[Martha Root]

Then I wrote the support and was like, hey, why can I, can I not log in anymore? And they, they said, yeah, because we think you are a bottle. And then I was like, hey, I'm not a bot. What should I do? And then they said that I should do this white verification thing.

[Alex Goldman]

You heard that, right? Proving you are who you say you are on White date is called becoming white verified.

[Martha Root]

You have to put a picture of yourself with your email address in front of it and have to send it to her until exam. And for this, basically I just use a deep fake software to then like record like a video of a fake Ellie holding up the email address.

[Alex Goldman]

Apparently this did the trick, because now not only was Ellie White verified, but to apologize for correctly identifying Ellie as a bot, the owners of White Date gave her three free months of Pro membership, a perk that opened the door to even more contact with the site's members.

[Martha Root]

To actually write people for the first time, you need a pro membership, so you can only be approached without paying, and then you then can answer to the people. But the first initial contact has to be done by paying members.

[Alex Goldman]

So basically they gave you the ability to contact other members sort of as much as you want. With more contact came more insight into the lives of men on the site. And some were really bleak. A lot of these people, Martha said, were poor and desperate, mentally ill, angry at their situation and taking it out on immigrants or Jews. She told me a story about a guy that her bot was talking to that was sleeping on a cot in his landlord's apartment and spent his free time writing notes and leaving them in the mailboxes of people of color telling them to go home. Or notes telling his white neighbors not to hang out with people of color. And Ellie, Martha's bot, before she'd gotten the bot under control, accidentally made plans to meet up with this guy. And then when Ellie inevitably didn't show, he told her he waited by the window for almost 15 hours, sobbing, and that she was a traitor to the white race. He sent her message after message of invective, and she almost felt bad for him if he weren't a white supremacist. At this point, Martha's goal is to get as much information out of the site as possible. She's collecting profile data and messages through her bots, but she wants data that can help her identify these people in real life. Specifically, she wants the email addresses for all of the site's users. But she's stuck. So she calls up someone she describes as her most talented female hacker friend for help, explains the situation, and says that her friend was on the case within, like, five minutes. And what they figured out was that this site was very poorly secured. Like, very poorly. You see, this site was made with WordPress, and WordPress has some standard URLs that the people who run the site can type in to extract information from it. And a good site admin would have secured these, put them behind a username and password. But White Date did not have a good site administration.

[Martha Root]

She found basically one of those URLs, which was like, literally, whitedate.net download all minus users.

[Alex Goldman]

Martha types that URL into the browser whitedate.net download all users, and it literally takes her to a screen that says Download all users with a big button that says download.

[Martha Root]

Now there was an Excel file to download with basically all the user accounts and with all the user email addresses.

[Alex Goldman]

Jackpot. With the emails of thousands of White Date members in hand, Martha connects with journalists Eva Hoffman and Christian Fuchs. And they start comparing the email addresses that she got off of White Date to the addresses of public officials. And they discovered that White Date users include members of the far right AfD party, Neo Nazis and anti abortion activists, and a member of the state parliament. In Hamburg last October, the German newspaper Die Zeit published Eva and Christian's first article about White Date. And from there, reporting on it went worldwide. A woman in England was suspended from her town council for being a White Date member, the Canadian Department of National Defence opened an investigation into three active members of the Canadian military that had profiles. And if the story ended here, I'd already consider Martha Roots Project a smashing success. But there's so much more. Do you remember that name I mentioned earlier? Liv Haida? Liv Haida is the pseudonym of the owner of White Date. She also had two other sites, White Child, a platform for adoption, sperm donation and other White family building needs, and White Deal, a job board for white workers. Liv Haida's white supremacist views were no secret, but her real identity was, and Martha was determined to unmask her. After the break, Martha goes Looking for Liv.

[BetterHelp Testimonial Speaker]

A Better Help ad After my session and talking to my therapist and really feeling seen and heard for the first time, I just felt like a weight just was lifted off of my shoulders and I felt like it was a good match. From the first time we talked, I could tell people from lived experience that they should try therapy. I could really be myself again and I have this continued support with Better

[Alex Goldman]

Help wherever you are, that's where Better help begins. Visit betterhelp.comrandompodcast to get started. Paid testimonials Results may vary hello, I'm

[Monica Reinagel]

Monica Reinagel, host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. Summer is here and with it the hot and sticky weather. A morning working in the garden or maybe on the golf course can leave you more depleted than you realize. And plain water isn't always the most efficient way to restore the balance. That's where Liquid IV comes in. Its science backed formula is clinically proven to hydrate faster than water alone. Whether you're exercising, playing outside, or simply surviving a summer heat wave, it's an easy way to stay hydrated. Shop [e-mail], liquidivity, hydration that goes wherever life takes you.

[Boost Mobile Advertiser]

Unlock the savings at Boost Mobile and save up to $600 a year. I've been scouting these big carriers for a minute now, and I've seen them pull the same play a thousand times. They promise you the world, then hit you with a price hike right when the game gets tight. But boost mobile, their $25 a month unlimited wireless plan, is the most consistent player on the floor. No contracts, no price hikes. Unlock the Savings [e-mail] Unlock based on

[Boost Mobile Advertiser Voiceover]

average annual single line payment of AT&T Verizon and T Mobile customers compared to 12 months of the Boost Mobile Unlimited Wireless plan as of January 2026. For full offer details, visit boostmobile.com

[BetterHelp Testimonial Speaker]

Acast Powers the World's Best Podcasts here's the show that we recommend.

[Pace Case]

Hi, I'm Pace Case.

[Alex Goldman]

And I'm Bachelor Clues.

[Pace Case]

We host Game of Roses, the world's best reality TV podcast. We're covering every show in reality TV at the highest level possible. We analyze the Bachelor, Love is Blind, Perfect Match, Vanderpump, and anything else you find yourself watching with wine and popcorn.

[Alex Goldman]

We break down errors, highlight plays, MVPs, and all the competitive elements that make reality TV a sport. And we interview superstar players like Bachelorette Kaitlyn Bristow and big Brother champion Taylor Hale.

[Pace Case]

If you want to know so much about reality TV, you can turn any casual conversation into a PhD level dissertation. You definitely want to check out Game of Roses.

[BetterHelp Testimonial Speaker]

Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere.

[Alex Goldman]

Acast.com. Welcome back to the show. So before the break, hacker Martha Root decided to look into a white supremacist dating site called White Date and had a string of incredible luck. She tricked the site's owners into giving her free premium access, allowing her to scrape information for more users. She downloaded an unprotected database of every user's contact info and shared it with journalists. But there's more to the story. Martha was also determined to learn the true identity of the woman behind the websites White Child, White Deal, and White Date, a woman who used the pseudonym Liv Heide. Even German intelligence officials didn't seem to know who Liv Haida was. A woman whose real name was Liv Heide actually lost her job a few years ago because the government told her employer that she was the White Date Liv Haida. But Martha's lucky streak was not over, because one day the following message appeared in her White Date inbox from a man named Leo. The message read, greetings, Miss. I'm trusting that you are a genuine white woman because Liv Haida, the founder and administrator of White Date, has already processed your White verification. If you reside in Lubeck, you're less than a two hour drive from her and I'm going to visit with her and her daughter next week. This was the break she needed. So Martha switched off her bot and started interacting with him. And it wasn't long before Leo suggested that Ellie meet both him and Liv Haide at a cafe in the north of Germany the next Saturday. Martha, as Ellie, said yes. Now, obviously Ellie couldn't make the trip. She didn't exist. But Martha could. So on the designated day, she and some friends met up outside the cafe to wait for Leo and Liv Heide to arrive. The plan was that Leo and Liv would be coming from Liv's house and Ellie would meet them at the cafe. As far as Leo knew, Ellie didn't have her driver's license so she was relying on a female friend to give her a lift.

[Martha Root]

And then our plan was to do a no show and say that her friend had a driving accident.

[Alex Goldman]

But pulling off Ellie's no show ended up being a lot easier than they expected. At 10am, the scheduled meeting time, Leo and Liv were nowhere to be seen. And Martha waiting outside the cafe started to wonder if it was all a trick.

[Martha Root]

It was a bit nerve wracking because like we did not expect them to show up so late and so, and like when in the, in the first moments I was like, okay, fuck, we are being photographed right now.

[Alex Goldman]

But actually they weren't being photographed. Leo and Liv were just running late because they were schmoozing with her parents.

[Martha Root]

Leo wrote that they will be at least half an hour late because Liv's parents are so nice and blah blah, blah.

[Alex Goldman]

It was 10:40 by the time the pair showed up. At that point, says Martha, it was easy to explain that Ellie had given up on this first date and gone home, except Martha was still on the scene. So you're actually at this like cafe watching them arrive. What did they look like?

[Martha Root]

He a little bit older and a little bit bolder than in his dating pictures, which I think is not uncommon on nonno dating profile pictures. She was running a little bit worn out, pink coat and looking like an older hippie woman rather than extreme white supremacists.

[Alex Goldman]

When Leo and Liv leave the cafe, Martha and her friends are close behind. But instead of going back to Liv's home, as Martha's hoping they'll do, the pair embarks on a sort of white nationalist tour of northern Germany. They stop to see sand sculptures and churches and a Viking village because Nazis loved that whole Nordic warrior thing.

[Martha Root]

So we spent like six hours of Nazi sightseeing and we basically followed them.

[Alex Goldman]

With the Kaava Hone following live and Leo for hours along empty country roads. It was hard for Martha and her friends to be inconspicuous and she thought for sure they were going to be noticed. But they managed not to arouse any suspicions.

[Martha Root]

And then in the end they stopped in front of a suburban villa, I would say in the suburb of Keogh.

[Alex Goldman]

The woman known as Liv Heide was finally home. Martha immediately took down the address and quickly did a search. The address matched a company called Horn and Partners registered in France, which held the trademark for WhiteChild.net and there on the trademark registry was Liv Haida's real name, Christian Horn. But who exactly was Christian Horn? And how had she become Liv Haida?

[Martha Root]

I started to dig a little bit deeper into her life and found out that she was a fan pianist. She still has YouTube videos with like 10,000 views or something where she plays Rachmaninoff or Chopin or whomever you like. And she's a really good pianist, actually.

[Alex Goldman]

It turns out that while Christiane was born in northern Germany, she moved to Paris in the early 2000s to start playing piano professionally. And it was there that she met her ex husband, whom she married in 2014.

[Martha Root]

He seemed quite different to her. Like, he was, like, clearly outspoken regarding European values. Like, even if I remember correctly, lied, like, some refugee stuff.

[Alex Goldman]

The two journalists that Martha teamed up with, Christiane and Eva, managed to get an interview with the ex husband.

[Martha Root]

He basically told a little bit of her story. So she got married with him, and he is, like, the son of the survivor of the Shore. So, like, he's half Jewish, so to say, when she was married with him, they had, like, quite an international liberal circle of friends.

[Alex Goldman]

Her husband told the reporters. It was two tragic events and the Internet, of course, that radicalized her. Both in 2015, both in Paris. The first was in January of that year. Two brothers who, identified as members of Al Qaeda stormed the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo for publishing satirical cartoons of Muhammad. Twelve people were killed. The second came 10 months later when three members of the Islamic State opened fire at an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theater, killing 90 people. Christian was consumed by conspiracy theories via

[Martha Root]

YouTube and by, like, this kind of sources. Like, she. She got well, she became sure that it was a Mossad inside job. So, like, this whole antisemitism thing again.

[Alex Goldman]

Christian's ex husband told journalists Christian and Eva that his ex wife was both incredibly talented and incredibly mad about the world. And that rage all boiled over at once at a dinner with friends.

[Martha Root]

It sounds like she was really drunk and started really, really raging regarding refugees or black people. And on the next day, like, he said that she would like to divorce from her because of the way she thinks.

[Alex Goldman]

It was after this that Christiane H. Moved back to Germany. And in 2017, she started White Dates. In their Chaos Communication Congress presentation, journalist Christian Fuchs recalled an interview that Christian Horn gave to a white supremacist podcast, making it clear that her ambitions are much greater than just running a Dating site. She says that dating is all well and good and it's important to meet people and have white children. But actually the central point, a core element to this site is the forums that exist on this there, because the forums are for networking so that I can connect people with similar ideologies across continents and build things. By build things, she means white communities and local white nationalist factions that can protect the master race from the coming white genocide. Martha had found the real Liv Haida, but she wasn't done yet. Having gathered a wealth of information on White Date and its members, she decided to build a website of her own. Because Martha believed that in addition to just being an annoying time waster to these white supremacists, the information that she collected was important. Important to share with social scientists and journalists so they can see how these groups interact, learn how they talk to one another. So she scraped all the public data from the website and its forums and made them available on a site called Okstupid lol. If you go to okstupid lol, you can look at an interactive map of members on the site. They appear as potatoes dotted across the surface of the world. If you click on one, it'll bring up the user's White Date profile with details like their age, income, level of education, iq, Myers Briggs type. You can also browse the profiles in list form, look at user photos, even read the messages sent to Ellie. The bottom. The hacking of White Date was as complete and total as any I've ever seen. Martha had compromised the site to such a degree that it was hard to imagine anyone ever wanting to use it again. And still she had one more trick up her sleeve. A trick she politely declined to tell me how she had pulled off. Which brings us back to the Chaos Communication Congress presentation.

[Martha Root]

From the beginning of the story, I knew that was. I was, I was TVC nervous. Right? So I mean, like, you're wearing a pink Power Ranger costume and you're speaking one of the more important tech conferences in the world.

[Alex Goldman]

Not only is this one of the more important tech conferences in the world, Martha told me that videos from this yearly conference had been an important part of her own education as a hacker. So it was a big deal for her to be there. At what point did you know that you were going to delete the sites?

[Martha Root]

I wasn't sure until like eight hours before.

[Alex Goldman]

Oh, wow. It was. You weren't totally sure about it until eight hours before?

[Martha Root]

Yeah, I mean, like, ethically that might not have been, like, for me, the right thing to do from a freedom of speech aspect, I get that it might be wrong. I still would do it again, but knowing that it's. That it might be ethically wrong, I would prefer if those sites would not exist. So in the long run, I hope to do my part in stopping like the movement of society towards the right and more racist and anti semitic ideas and like this whole cast bossy boy shit in general. So yeah, that's kind of what I hope. Not sure how utopian that is, but at least I don't have to say I did not do anything.

[Alex Goldman]

It was important to Martha that no one think the two journalists were part of her plan.

[Martha Root]

They as journalists cannot be involved in like in the whole end of the presentation. So I told them that I would like to do the Q and Q and A only by myself. Where IFA and Christian were a little bit like okay, what the fuck? But okay, whatever. I like it's that you know what to do. And so like we saw the Q and A, Yifan Christianen, Christian off the stage and then like the whole deletion performance basically started.

[Alex Goldman]

The crowd watches in stunned silence as text flashes across the screen that says deletewhitechild.net done. By the time the program says deletewhitedeal.net, it's turned into gasps and applause. And then Martha cycles through a number of other commands to the uproarious delight of the audience. Delete whitedate.net database. Done. Delete backups for whitedate.net done. Delete Twitter, delete substack. Delete email accounts. Done. Done. Done. In the aftermath of this performance, Martha anticipated a right wing shitstorm. But that shitstorm never came.

[Martha Root]

It was not a shitstorm of people actually celebrating that. Yeah, like that racist websites get deleted, which I would consider normal actually. But like to actually get the feedback, which I would consider normal in these days, surprised me positively.

[Alex Goldman]

On a less positive note, I recently checked in with Martha and found out there'd been some developments. Around Easter, Christian Horn managed to get White Date back up and running and Martha told me that there are multiple users chatting on the site again.

[Martha Root]

And I know that because there is still complete access to their messaging system available. So at the moment I'm able to read all the flirty messages of all the Nazis. And not only Nazis, they are also like white supremacists. It's also I think important to distinguish between all the subgroups. But yeah, so it's possible for me to still read everything.

[Alex Goldman]

I'm curious if it's dispiriting to see the site come back so quickly? Or did you just kind of expect this to happen?

[Martha Root]

I mean, so they. They took three months, right? I wouldn't say that starts quickly. So no, I was kind of amused to see that it took three months.

[Alex Goldman]

Martha was predictably vague about her plans for White Date. It might be funny, she said, if someone took it down again, and if knowing she's watching scares people away from using the site, that's fine with her. A couple months ago, Martha posted something on Instagram, which, the more I think about it, the more I think it summarizes her entire philosophy about White Date and hacking and how to deal with fascists. It was about the real Liv Haida, the one who got fired from her job because German intelligence thought she ran White Date. And Martha ends this post with the if we want racism in white supremacist networks to disappear, we can't rely on institutions. Society has to hold them accountable. And that's what Martha's trying to do, one prank at a time. We'll include links to Martha's Chaos Communication Congress presentation, her social media and her website okstupid. LOL in the show notes. Also, our bonus episode next week is an interview with Eva Hoffman, one of the journalists who wrote stories about White Date with the data that Martha procured. If you'd like to hear that and become a Premium member of Hyperfixed, you can do [e-mail] join. Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Amor Gates, Lisa Pollock, Kat Shuknek, Emma Cortland and Sari Sopher Sukanek. Our engineer is Tony Williams. The music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and me. Special thanks this week to Alex Pesch, Premium Hyperfix member and Discord user that translated a lot of German for me. One more reminder that Hyperfix is doing a live show in New York on September 11, 2026 at the Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn. You can buy [e-mail] Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator owned listener supported podcasts. Discover Audio with Vision at Radiotopia fm. Thanks so much for listening. We will see you soon.

[Boost Mobile Advertiser Alternate]

You're locked into a lot of things. You can't change weather, traffic. Hey, stay in your lane. Your wireless carrier's latest price hike. But you can unlock a better way. Unlock the savings at Boost Mobile and save up to $600 a year. Switch to the $25 a month unlimited wireless plan. No contracts, no price hikes and you keep your phone stop being locked into their games. Unlock the [e-mail] unlock based on average annual single line of payment of AT and T Verizon and T Mobile customers compared to 12 months on the Boost Mobile Unlimited Wireless plan as of January 2026. For full offer details, visit boostmobile.com hello,

[Monica Reinagel]

I'm Monica Reinagel, host of the Nutrition Diva Podcast. Summer is here and with it the hot and sticky weather. A morning working in the garden or maybe on the golf course can leave you more depleted than you realize. And plain water isn't always the most efficient way to restore the balance. That's where Liquid IV comes in. Its science backed formula is clinically proven to hydrate faster than water alone. Whether you're exercising, playing outside or simply surviving a summer heat wave, it's an easy way to stay hydrated. Shop [e-mail] Liquid IV hydration that goes wherever life takes you.