Sunday, July 03, 2016

NO, THAT TRUMP "STAR OF DAVID" TWEET DIDN'T ORIGINATE AT A WHITE SUPREMACIST MESSAGE BOARD

Yesterday, as you probably know, Donald Trump tweeted this:



The image, in which the phrase "Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!" appears in a six-pointed star on top of a pile of money, was denounced as anti-Semitic, so Trump deleted it, then reposted it later with the phrase in a circle rather than a star.

Was the image intended to insult Jews? Trump World has denied this -- but Anthony Smith of Mic.com pointed out today that the image had previously appeared at a white supremacist message board:
Mic discovered Sunday that Donald Trump's Twitter wasn't the first place the meme appeared. The image was previously featured on /pol/ -- an Internet message board for the alt-right, a digital movement of neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white supremacists newly emboldened by the success of Donald Trump's rhetoric — as early as June 22, over a week before Trump's team tweeted it.



Though the thread where the meme was featured no longer exists, you can find it by searching the URL in Archive.is, a "time capsule of the internet" that saves unalterable text and graphic of webpages. Doing so allows you to see the thread on /pol/ as it originally existed.

Of note is the file name of the photo, HillHistory.jpg, potentially a nod to the Neo-Nazi code for "HH," or "Heil Hitler," which the alt-right is fond of hiding in plain sight.
If you read the original Mic post, you probably assumed that that was the last word on the subject. But it's been pointed out that the image appeared on Twitter a week before it appeared on /pol/, and now the Mic post has been updated to say that the image actually comes from "a Twitter account that regularly tweets violent, racist memes commenting on the state of geopolitical politics."



I've been through FishBoneHead1's Twitter account, and while it's awful -- basically it's a firehose spewing every terrible right-wing meme -- it's not in any way focused on Jews.

(UPDATE: I stupidly posted direct links to the following tweets, assuming FishBoneHead1 would be too proud of them to delete them. As it turns out, he's deleted his entire Twitter account. I'm trying to recover the images. Without them, the following makes no sense.)

FishBoneHead1 much prefers infantile Muslim-bashing...



... infanile bashing of African-Americans ...



... infantile sexism and liberal-bashing ...



... infantile Obama-bashing ...



... and, whenever possible, infantile Hillary-bashing:





Scroll through the feed -- FishBoneHead1 is a jerk, but he doesn't appear to be a Jew-hating jerk. He just likes making dumb images out of simpleminded right-wing memes, using the most obvious graphic techniques. He probably thought a six-pointed star would accommodate the words better -- if he'd wanted to dog-whistle, the star would have been yellow.

UPDATE: The Daily Beast's Gideon Resnick salvaged this from FishBoneHead1's feed:



Why would a Hillary-hater call Hillary a Nazi if he thinks Nazis are good?

Remember, the non-anti-Semitic wing of the right hates all Democrats for not being sufficiently pro-Jewish or pro-Israel (flip side: they think Democrats are too pro-Muslim). That's what FishBoneHead1 says about Obama, if not Clinton:



If Trump wanted to post an anti-Semitic dog-whistle, he wouldn't have taken down the tweet so quickly, and he wouldn't have edited it to remove the star. Besides, dog-whistling isn't exactly his style -- if he wants to offend someone, he usually just does it, with no nods or winks. In this case, he was just being your right-wing uncle, unthinkingly retweeting Democratic-bashing stuff on social media after barely looking at it.