The big social media news of the weekend was Donald Trump’s posting of a video that showed him tackling and beating up a man with a CNN logo for a head. This was criticized as (a) unpresidential (duh) and (b) a call for violence against the media. I’m not so sure about that, but in any case I managed to avoid wasting time on it.
But no more! The sleuths at CNN have tracked down the guy who originally created the video that Trump retweeted. See if you can spot the part that had me in stitches:
Now the user is apologizing, writing in a lengthy post on Reddit that he does not advocate violence against the press and expressing remorse there and in an interview with CNN for other posts he made that were racist and anti-Semitic.
…. “The meme was created purely as satire, it was not meant to be a call to violence against CNN or any other news affiliation,” he wrote. “I had no idea anyone would take it and put sound to it and then have it put up on the President’s Twitter feed. It was a prank, nothing more.”
….The apology has since been taken down by the moderators of /The_Donald subreddit.
Reddit is famously the Wild West of the internet, opposed to censorship of any kind, but apparently we’ve finally plumbed the edges of their tolerance. Racism, anti-semitism, and violent misogyny are all OK. But apologizing for them? That’s going too far.
Welcome to Reddit, ladies and gentlemen.
