What’s the absolute dumbest shit you’ve ever heard in a public place

[supermatt]

It's the weekend before the 2008 US presidential election and then-candidate Barack Obama makes a campaign stop in a town a two hour drive away. I decide it'll be cool to go. I get to the venue super early and basically stand in line the whole day. You assume that most people who bother to stand in line an entire day for a political rally have some knowledge of how the system works. You would be wrong.

These two girls in line behind me start talking about their plans for voting. The first girl says they should meet up and go to the polling place together on Tuesday. Her friend says no thanks, she's going to cast her vote online. The first girl says she didn't know that was an option. Her friend tells her oh yeah, it's a new thing but it's definitely possible. The first girl talks about how cool that is and says that she, too, will cast her vote online.

Obama lost Missouri by two votes that election.

j/k he lost by a lot more

 

[djplaeskool]

Black Hebrew Israelites near Centennial Park

Hoo boy 🤣 where do I even start
Between the questionable genealogy of the tribes of Israel to the "pale agents of Satan" ... Just... Wow

 

[Adder7806]

Was eating at a restaurant. Table over "If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?!"

 

[Brandino]

I had sex in my car on a public street late at night. Some dude out for a walk got a pretty good eyeful as he walked by the car. Thankfully, he didn't stop and stare.

 

[Commander Quackers]

bruh,, my Math professor in college said there is 52 states too! I dropped out of school the next day lmao

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So what are the 2 states were missing?

 

[Serpico99]

Looking for some GTA6 dialogue? I did say that the Cowboys were going to the Super Bowl.

 

[Crossing Eden]

I had sex in my car on a public street late at night. Some dude out for a walk got a pretty good eyeful as he walked by the car. Thankfully, he didn't stop and stare.

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.....ok???

 

[DrScruffleton]

during the recall election in California, walking into Walmart people had a table set up in support of larry elder by the entrance. They were shouting at people that Newsom is a commie that will break into your house and force vaccinations. And they said it dead serious.

 

[Deleted member 17210]

"I moved to Canada because Jimmy Carter raised taxes too much".

 

[beau_beaumont]

I was in Europe on a bus and overheard two women talking about the United States. One of them was adamant their official language was French. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: Actually, it was England, which is even more ridiculous. There was also a kid who thought all Americans were black since all his favorite rappers and nba players were black.

 

[Falchion]

Lots of COVID conspiracy theories from people out in public. Never knew how many crazy people there were until COVID happened......

 

[Unaha-Closp]

Not heard but rather seen so I hope it's okay. I live in a small Scottish City, they are all small as Scotland is small, as is the UK - anyway, just wrote that because I would never have expected that a 'group' like this would choose my city as a place to re-educate. Maybe its smallness is why - anyway anyway, I was in the City Centre. Slap bang in the middle. If you are in town you are probably going to be driving or walking through this part - and off to the side is a statue of some cunt from the past and I was meeting my mum there. I get there and there is a small crowd and I think, 'I don't hear any music?' so what gives. When I get there I see a few people standing beside the aforementioned statue of cunt from the past with placards and infographics proclaiming that 'Gravity Is Not Real'. Now I was kinda stunned a little, as I said - small Scottish city. Not a hotbed of radical physics. Anyway, one of their signs slid down the stairs, one of them went after it and picked it back up and I burst out laughing and walked away.

 

[Fireclad]

When I went to get my glasses the old guy talking to the sales rep was going on an absolute tirade about how, and I quote, "COMMUNISM IS THE REASON WHY THE ROMAN EMPIRE FELL!"

 

[Burly]

Couple weeks ago I heard someone nearly shouting into their phone about "a woman falling in love with an alien and that's why he decided to save earth."

Not sure what that was about, but thanks alien dude.

 

[Kasey]

Something to the effect of "if evolution is true, I'd be able to jump into the ocean and become a fish".

 

[AIan]

a 3 to 5-year-old child said "you're a cunty bitch"

at church in front of like 5 people.

Stop letting your kids watch movies/play games intended for adults. Please.

 

[amphteamints]

oh man, i have a good anti-mask/vax one too.

there is this pretty locally famous Japanese bakery and it gets a lot of visitors from out of town. they are very strict about enforcing mask ordinances in this whole shopping plaza (there's a sushi place, an upscale Japanese restaurant, Japanese bakery, Japanese fast casual restaurant, Japanese gift shop and a whole ass Japanese grocery store all in the same plaza) and this woman who very clearly was an out-of-towner walks in with her two teenage daughters without wearing masks. A staff member (half Japanese, half black woman-- this is an important detail to note) immediately asks them to mask up. The daughters pull up these skimpy bandana like textiles to their face and the mom just flat out refuses-- here is how the interaction goes.

Mom: "I'm sorry, I have a medical exemption-- you can't ask me to mask"
Staff: "Ma'am, the local ordinance requires everyone in indoor spaces to be masked"
Mom: *some stupid shit about ADA that is not true that these idiots keep on spouting on social media*
Staff: "If you do not want to wear a mask, you can step outside and I'll gladly take your order out there"
Mom: "So you're asking me to go to the back of the bus?"

The staff member was just... flummoxed... I'd say one, because it is a dumb thing to say and two, it's pretty fucking racist and directed at a POC.

Staff: "Ma'am, we will be happy to help you outside"

The mom then starts loudly ranting about how she's being treated like a second class citizen and I hold my phone up like I'm recording her and go "Lady, do you want to embarrass your daughters on social media?" and she shut up and walked out-- daughters taking the order.

That poor staff member started crying and went into the back. Felt so bad for her. She's almost always there when I go and she's so friendly.

Click to shrink...

was this mitsuwa

 

[EntelechyFuff]

Mine's very recent: I'm in a conservative area so at first it wasn't any thing unusual:

GUY 1: Man omicron isn't shit, just more made up lib garbage
GUY 2: You're wrong, Omicron is real and it can fuck you up <this is where I started paying attention>
GUY 1: Really? I just thought was basically like a cold
GUY 2: It's not, it's bad, and it's even more contagious than the other strains, you watch this thing is gonna hit us hard.
GUY 1: Still I just don't trust the goverment
GUY 2: You shouldn't. Biden isn't gonna do a damn thing about it. I hate that he got elected, he doesn't give a fuck about us.

Basically Guy 2 successfully convinced Guy 1 that Omicron was a threat, but still believes Trump would've handled it more seriously than Biden. This was really early days of Omicron too.

 

[aett]

My wife just got back from the pharmacy and she told me about what a couple of people said around her. One was a man who was complaining that his job made him get vaccinated and since then, his health "has never been worse" and that he thinks he has pneumonia. He was talking to a married couple, one of which was a pregnant woman. When she said she was having a girl, the first man said "Girls are a pain."

Then the pregnant woman went on to say how she didn't get vaccinated because "it makes you infertile".

 

[GDGF]

"I voted for Stephen Harper."

Click to shrink...

I hear he had a toenail problem.

 

[I Don't Like]

Easy. I was at a wedding after-party at a hotel and there was another group who were hanging out and we kind of merged and I ended up talking to a guy in the military who said that the US had never sold weapons abroad. It came up because I was talking about America's biggest exports and this army guy - and from what I recall I have no reason to believe he was lying about having served - straight up told me I'm stupid for claiming America sells weapons to other countries, lol. It was so dumb I thought he was trolling but it eventually became obvious that he was not. Yikes.

 

[Rassilon]

One of my co workers said Covid was an invention from the government. I don't bother talking to him about the subject.

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One of my housemates had a conversation with a corner shop owner who believed the entire purpose of the Covid 'hoax' was to push contactless payments, despite the fact they'Ve been more or less ubiquitous in England for some time

 

[butzopower]

My brother was telling me about The Wolf of Wall Street and his girlfriend asked us if we had realized Wall Street was a real place.

 

[Brandino]

.....ok???

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I read done instead of heard. Guess that post almost qualifies now

 

[GuessMyUserName]

Blatant racist on the phone on the GO Bus complaining loudly about immigration and saying some really heinous shit I'd rather not repeat. Needless to say Canadians can be just as openly, abhorrently racist as anyone else.

 

[R2RD]

One of my English professors in a class was telling us how pigs are a human invention made of a cats ,dogs and rats and their purpose is to eat our garbage.
Also that Black people created white people and therefore there are only two races: black and white. So yes, according to him people from Asia are black. There was a lot more but i don't remember the details very well.

 

[Ketch]

I had sex in my car on a public street late at night. Some dude out for a walk got a pretty good eyeful as he walked by the car. Thankfully, he didn't stop and stare.

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helllll yea! What he say?

 

[GamerJM]

My grandparents talked about how there were aliens underneath the white house causing covid in public.

 

[Brandino]

Never heard this guy speak, but in downtown Chicago, there's a guy with a sign near Union Station that says something like, "Biden daily rape me. Ban the FBI." During the Trump years, it was Obama.

 

[HylianSeven]

Years ago (well before COVID) we were waiting for a table in a restaurant and there was this group of teachers near us and this was basically their conversation:

"Yeah, it's crazy the things these kids are saying. Do you know what a thot is? *Whispers* "that ho over there""

"Yeah... Like I heard a kid say 'that thot over there'"

This conversation brought to you by the redundancy department of redundancy.

 

[CrazyIvan1978]

Edit: misunderstood OP topic

 

[steejee]

At the Dr Mudd house (of Booth fame):

Staff 1: "I heard that New York City is the least free place in America"
Staff 2: "Those poor souls"
Staff 3: *shaking head sadly*

Gift shop had little army figurines you could buy and the Confederate ones had just as many black soldiers as the Union ones.

Bit of a surreal place.

"Zip codes don't start with zero." Someone said this to me when I was giving them my Connecticut zip code…

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I live in MA and my Dad thought I'd screwed up my zip the first time I gave it to him, guess it's just one of those things you don''t know exists til you see it.

 

[Rodney McKay]

First job out of college at a tech consulting place.

Boss took us out for a work lunch and one of my coworkers started talking about how the ice age never happened. Another coworker was so incredulous that he kept asking him questions, like how massive boulders could have ended up in the middle of nowhere unless there were huge glaciers covering the area.

The ice age denier's only real response was that it wasn't mentioned in the Bible and the stuff about the ice age "was just stuff written by people".

I wanted to scream at the guy that the Bible was a book written by people too, but I kept my mouth shut because I knew it would only fall on deaf ears.

 

[CorpseLight]

I was on the subway and there were these two Finance bros intentionally talking loudly and the one was trying act like a curious mind / deep thinker. I remember specifically the one dude kept saying "Fermi estimate" for nearly every question his friend asked him.

Bro A: "How many people do you think could fit onto a single train car?"
Bro B: "FERMI ESTIMATE ... maybe 500 if they all packed in."
Bro A: "Somewhere around there, I agree. By the way, what time are you thinking going out tonight?"
Bro B: "FERMI ESTIMATE ... 7:00pm or so."

He said Fermi estimate at least a dozen times while I was stuck on the subway with them.

Click to shrink...

Maybe his name was Fermi

 

[Cation]

Usually I one up their stupidity to question things they prob even believe.

Some guy told me how "the libs" purposely made Covid to get Biden elected. I told him "I don't disagree" and then told him Trump isn't real. Dude is CGI with voiceover and that's why his hands are small on TV. Dude was baffled. He couldn't even complete his thoughts after that. Total thought block

 

[orochi91]

"I voted for Stephen Harper."

Click to shrink...

Not gonna lie, that was me in 2011

I didn't know any better lol

😭😭😭

 

[Hydra_BE]

A co-worker at a former job was convinced that the Miami Heat losing to the Dallas Mavericks in 2011 was rigged. At first I thought he was joking, but he was serious. Like, both groups of trained professionals colluded to have Lebron lose in the biggest championship for some unknown reason.

 

[Dremorak]

"Even other vaccines will sometimes have harmful side effects"
"Nah but this one is like way worse"
Massive eye roll lol

 

[Version 3.0]

Just yesterday evening, my wife's sister said "Mother Earth is communicating with me, telling me the future. If you don't believe me, ask <her husband>." She didn't specify what her husband would confirm...we assumed she meant he'd tell us a prediction that came true.

I once had a co-worker tell me the moon isn't real.

My mother and sister once got mad at me for not believing in The Secret.

The truly bonkers thing is, none of these people are stupid, on the whole. They are intelligent and functional...unless one of their braindead wacko beliefs come up.

 

[ajoshi]

i'm not sure if this counts because it was in my party but it wasn't directed towards me

gf's friend pulls over waitress at Japanese restaurant after going thru menu: "um Mahi Mahi is dolphinfish, you guys know it's illegal to hunt and eat dolphin here?"

never saw her after that dinner.

 

[andymcc]

was this mitsuwa

Click to shrink...

no, tensuke market

 

[Deleted member 24021]

"Racism doesn't exist, it's black people being racist with their BLM movement"

My brain melted that day

 

[spootime]

Some of the most memorable have been from Gary the Preacher. If you went to a public university in North Carolina in the past 15 years you are probably familiar with Gary. He's a legendary, beloved, and utterly insane fundamentalist christian preacher who has been spreading the good word in the quads of UNC system schools forever. And by good word I mean some of the most racist, sexist, homophobic, -ist (take your pick) beliefs imaginable.

 

[RedStep]

"Greedo shot first"

 

[rjinaz]

Well I guess technically not "pubic" but as I lyft driver probably the top three weirdest conversations I heard was:

The Q woman taking on the phone about pedophile demon Democrats stealing the election from Trump.

The grown ass man in his 30s yelling as his parents on the phone like they were children. Just yelling vile shit at them calling them stupid and what not. It was surreal.

The man that decided he wanted to describe how when he was a truck driver he ran over an "Indian" on the freeway and described the gory details of what that was like. He said it was suicide. Then he asked me if I ever visit other countries to hook up with the younger cute girls and I turned on my radio and thanked the lord at that point there was just 5 minutes left of the drive.

 

[Tavernade]

A customer came into my store today and asked what the name of our website was.

 

[KomandaHeck]

A few years ago I was reading a book by the lake near my home. A guy joins me on the bench and we actually have an alright conversation for a decent chunk of time. Eventually, the conversation somehow steers towards politics and he name drops Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. This was before I really knew who they were but still had enough details to at least recognise this guy spends too much time online.

I don't even know how but it isn't much longer before he's gone rogue and drops some shit about how abortion is being pushed by the elite so they can eat the fetuses, before ending with a charming "What does a human taste like anyway?"

 

[Icepick_1878]

Before going to university I took a year off to travel the world. The year was 2017(year one of Trump).

When I got to California I booked a tour to Acatraz. On the ship to the island I started talking to an old, generally nice Texan couple. It was obvious they were MAGA lunatics with the guy constantly talking ill of California and it's people and other remarks(aren't you all socialists in Europe?).
At this point I was near the end of my travels so I had been to lots of countries. I told them where I already went before coming to America.
The man was shocked and asked me if I was a spy. I wrote it off as a joke, but he was definitely avoiding me after he knew that.

This story comes to my mind every few months or so and I ask myself can someone really be this brainwashed?


Edit: Another story from the same trip. I was waiting in line for the elevator to go up the WTC in New York. A group of Germans were in front of me and another group of orthodox Jews further in front. One of the Germans said to the others "At least there won't be a terrorist attack today".

 

[naib]

I was in line at Walmart once and heard this guy explaining to his buddy that he and his wife only buy store brand foods because "the billion dollar companies put stuff into their food to make you addicted to it."


His buddy immediately responded with "Yeah "preservatives" my ass".



I had to walk away in order to laugh.

Click to shrink...

May already be implied, but I would love to explain to these guys where a lot of these store brand products come from. Not a bad call in some cases tbh, but not because of brain control juice. They already got that

My brother was telling me about The Wolf of Wall Street and his girlfriend asked us if we had realized Wall Street was a real place.

Click to shrink...

OT, but I just rewatched that the other night when i saw it was on hulu. kinda sidesrcreen at 1st and then got glued in
I saw that shit in the theater with my folks and gf at the time. Reliving some of the cringe moments was super fun.

Spoiler

seeing coke butt-chugging on the big screen is impactful even w/out your parents in tow.
in my mind's eye we all cry laughed through a lot of that movie, but I hope it wasn't just me

This is more of an instance of public freakout than someone saying some dumb shit in public but while working at an international coffee chain, a disgruntled transient started screaming at a supervisor for not letting them into the bathroom. This is pre-COVID so bathrooms were open to the public. The guy, not hearing the supervisor say "yeah you can go in there, but there's someone currently using it" misconstrued that as some personal attack on his character because he gets livid and starts screaming and howling at the supervisor that he must be let into the bathroom now. This continues for an awkward ten minutes as the management gets involved, non-emergency number is dialed and everyone is now staring at the dude. All the while he's screaming at this point that he doesn't even WANT to go into the bathroom now, that he would much prefer to shit himself in a public lobby to spite our staff. For not letting him into the bathroom. That someone was already using, finished, awkwardly stepped around the ensuing fight and left the store.

Click to shrink...

This is awesome

I was in line at a sleepy kolache shop I used to frequent and dude in front of me was all suited out. He gets on deck and pretty curtly says 2 dozen kolaches. She kinda just looks at him waiting for the next part and he just stares at her. He finally starts to look around and you can see his eyes moving from the sweet to the savory and everything else. You can tell he's getting frustrated. She explains to him that they're all kolaches and he gets more mad. like, not aggressive really? but you could tell he was pissed and/or just embarrassed

He ended up just getting a bunch of the sweet ones. and none cream cheese even
Dude totally fucked up that morning meeting

Fun thread

 

[Wilsongt]

"They're going to nominate Kamala to the SCOTUS and make Hillary VP."