WASHINGTON (JTA) — Donald Trump posted a flattering message from a Twitter account that features claims that Jews and others are carrying out a genocide against whites.
It was not immediately clear if the Twitter account, @WhiteGenocideTM, is a hoax site or a genuine white supremacy advocacy feed, or some combination of both.
The feed in recent weeks has alternated between tweets in support of Trump, the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, and those peddling anti-immigrant and racially charged propaganda.
On Friday, WhiteGenocideTM replied to a tweet by Trump mocking former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, another candidate in the race. The reply tweet had attached to it a photomontage of Bush as a vagrant outside Trump Tower, the real estate magnate’s New York property, bearing a cardboard sign “Vote Trump.”
Trump “manually” retweeted the reply tweet, meaning he added quotation marks so that it would appear under his own Twitter handle. Although the text of the tweet did not include any racially charged language, the effect was to have Trump’s official portrait appearing above the handle “WhiteGenocideTM.”
WhiteGenocideTM’s Twitter page lists its residence as “Jewmerica” and includes a link to a short film glorifying Adolf Hitler as a savior of Europe.
Trump’s manual retweet drew immediate scorn, including from Bush’s campaign. The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple media requests for comment in the day after he posted the flattering retweet, including from JTA.
WhiteGenocideTM, in response to a request on Twitter by JTA, identified as Sam Hyde, a stand-up comedian whose repertoire includes a routine that mocks Muslims and notions of racial equality. The claim could not be immediately verified, and JTA posted a query seeking confirmation on the Facebook page of Million Dollar Extreme, a shock comedy trio that includes Hyde.
Among Hyde’s exponents online are far-right websites.
Hyde in 2013 pranked a TEDx symposium at Drexel University claiming to have just returned from Africa, where he said he was training natives in Javascript.
A.V. Club, profiling Million Dollar Extreme in 2013, called the trio “comedy provocateurs.”
“MDE videos, YouTube comments, and tweets sometimes espouse some pretty heinous views in the service of a joke, and the group doesn’t tend to ‘wink’ when it’s ironically adopting the personas of scummy Internet denizens,” the entertainment news and criticism site said.
A Jan. 13 WhiteGenocideTM tweet with a cartoon depicting Trump gassing Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a Jewish candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, has been removed, but not before being captured by various media.
Since the scandal erupted, “WhiteGenocideTM” has reconfigured its Twitter page as a mocking tribute to Sanders, in one Tweet praising him for advancing a “Jewish America” and saying “Hitler & Marx would be proud of you.”
