June 18, 2020

Nazis Put This Symbol on Political Opponents’ Arms. Now Trump is Using It.

The upside down red triangle was used in Hitler’s concentration camps.

Facebook screenshot

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The first result for a Google search of “upside down red triangle” is a Wikipedia page detailing Nazi concentration camp badges. Google’s official “knowledge panel” reiterates this, linking the same Wikipedia page. The results on the rest of the first page almost unanimously show the same thing.

But the fact that the upside red triangle has been an explicit piece of deadly Nazi iconography for seven decades hasn’t deterred Trump’s 2020 campaign from using them in Facebook ads. This week, the campaign started running a series of ads, disparaging Antifa demonstrators and featuring a large, bright red, upside-down triangle. Antifa, is of course, short for anti-fascist. The red triangle was sewn on uniforms of people interned in concentration camps, including anti-fascist political prisoners. Millions of Soviet and Western anti-fascist soldiers died defeating Nazism, including hundreds of thousands of Americans.

“Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem. They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting—it’s absolute madness,” reads one 2020 Trump ad featuring the symbol.

While the ads appear to have been inactivated by mid-Thursday morning, many were running earlier in the day even as users on Twitter pointed out the Nazi history of the triangle.

Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said the company “removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”

Media Matters noticed the campaign had purchased a total of 88 ads featuring the concentration camp badge symbol, which Mother Jones confirmed. Each ad started with a 14 word sentence. The number 1488 is a common neo-nazi hate symbol that makes reference to Adolf Hitler and a widespread white supremacist slogan.

This isn’t the first time this week Trump has seemed to make fascist references on social media. Last Thursday, in a tweet he abbreviated the Secret Service to “S.S.,” more commonly known as an abbreviation for Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary organization of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. During the 2016 campaign, his campaign shared an image of Hillary Clinton surrounded by cash and adorned with a six-pointed star reminiscent of the shape Hitler’s Nazi regime forced Jews to wear. After the campaign was widely criticized for wielding anti-semitic tropes, it released a version with the star concealed.

This post has been updated with comment from Facebook and additional information on the ads.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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