Alt-right White House correspondent defends sharing anti-CNN meme that depicts Trump as 9/11 plane

(Image credit: Screenshot/Twitter)

published 7 July 2017

The White House-accredited correspondent for alt-right website Gateway Pundit, Lucian B. Wintrich, shared a meme Tuesday that depicted one of the 9/11 planes superimposed with President Trump's head as it approached the World Trade Center, which had been overlaid with the CNN logo. "Perhaps unintentionally," Newsweek writes, "Wintrich approvingly conflated Trump with al Qaeda while casting CNN in the role of the 3,000 innocents who were killed that morning."

The meme, which was apparently intended to be a dig at CNN, is among dozens that have been created by alt-right social media users since Trump shared a video last weekend of himself beating down a man with a CNN logo in the place of his head. Subsequently, "[a] new subreddit was created, /r/CNNMemes, which quickly had posts popular enough to reach the front page of Reddit with their memes receiving tens of thousands of upvotes," Heat Street reports. "4chan declared all out 'Meme War' on CNN, vowing to bomb their advertisers with angry emails and of course manufacture a massive amount of CNN memes."

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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