SHAPIRO: And Donald Trump has actually interacted with this group in an official capacity, right?īJORK-JAMES: Yes. It's been a place where misogynist, anti-Islam and other white nationalist kinds of language and terms have become very much acceptable.
It's called The-Donald, and it quickly ballooned into a really active site of some of his core supporters. Tell us about this subreddit.īJORK-JAMES: The subreddit started during Donald Trump's campaign. SHAPIRO: You said that in this subreddit, this thread, that people often refer to Trump as the God Emperor. SHAPIRO: Just to clarify, you're using the pronoun they because we don't know whether the user is a man or woman. They posted a meme with photos of people who work at CNN with Star of Davids imposed behind them with the leading title, something strange about CNN - can't quite put my finger on it. They made a post recently saying 500,000 dead Muslims is a good start kill the rest, and I'll be impressed. This particular user has a long history of really anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish posts. They were thrilled to have the president retweet their post, saying, I never expected my meme to be tweeted by the God Emperor himself, which is a common way to refer to Trump in this particular subreddit. SOPHIE BJORK-JAMES: We know that they have been posting in Reddit for over a year and are a very active user. Sophie Bjork-James teaches anthropology at Vanderbilt University, and earlier today, I asked her about that user. The Reddit user claiming to be behind it goes by the name Han Solo with an expletive in the middle. The White House press secretary told NPR that the president's video did not come from Reddit but offered no further details about the video's origin. Reddit is a site where people post on message boards called subreddits. Days before the president tweeted his CNN body slam video, a Reddit user posted one that was nearly identical.