Donald Trump retweeted a racist graphic with fake stats from a neo-Nazi Twitter account
Retweets, we are often reminded, are not endorsements. That’s good news for Donald Trump, whose Twitter account recently retweeted a hate-filled image created by a Hitler-worshipping neo-Nazi.
The Republican presidential candidate came under fire Sunday for tweeting a graphic claiming to show statistics on racial murder rates, highlighting “black-on-black” crime. The numbers in the graphic appear to be completely fictional, and the source seems to have come from an actual Nazi.
As of Monday morning, it has not been taken down.
The numbers should have immediately seemed suspicious for a number of reasons. The top of the graphic says “USA Crime Statistics ~ 2015,” which is impossible as 2015 is not over yet. The chart also cites the “Crime Statistics Bureau – San Francisco” as its source. That organization does not exist.
The Twitter account “SexyPatriots™,” however, does exist. That is where Trump appears to have retweeted the graphic from.
If you need more convincing about the fakeness of the graphic, the FBI does actually keep track of homicide rates by race. Not for 2015 yet, but here are the numbers for 2014.
But this goes much deeper than SexyPatriots™. Political blog LittleGreenFootballs claims the earliest known appearance of the graphic is the following tweet.
https://twitter.com/CheesedBrit/status/668282032389230592
It’s hard to know where to start with this tweet: the screen name “Non-Dildo’d Goyim?” The swastika-esque avatar (symbol of the German Faith Movement)? The bio that says “We should have listened to the Austrian man with the little mustache”?
Sharing a neo-Nazi meme was really just the cherry on top of Donald Trump’s weekend, which several commenters pointed to as a low point in Trump’s race relations. Other highlights include:
- Holding a Birmingham, Ala., rally where a Black Lives Matter protester was assaulted by Trump supporters while chanting “All Lives Matter.”
- Saying the protester “should have been roughed up” when questioned about the incident.
- Recalling the “thousands” of New Jersey Muslims who publicly celebrated in the streets immediately after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center (yet another fake conservative meme).
At this rate, we shudder to think what Trump has planned for Black Friday.