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

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."

Wintrich eventually deleted the tweet "due to requests," but stood by "it being funny." When asked by Newsweek to explain what he meant by the tweet, Wintrich said: "Memes, as a new media art form, are open to interpretation. How would you explain it?"

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