This is amazingly still up on HillaryClinton.com despite the fact it’s a blatant hoax:
The “prominent white supremacist” quoted by the Daily Beast is actually a parody Twitter account written by a Jewish man:
Backstory via Heat Street:
You might’ve heard of Pepe the Frog: the green, depressed-looking amphibian who has unexpectedly popped up in the mainstream media this election season. To Hillary Clinton’s social media staff, the Pepe meme is racist. I’m here to tell you it isn’t.
Pepe the Frog made a big splash last year when celebrities posted their own Pepe memes and sites like BuzzFeed compiled thousands of his various forms, something we noted yesterday. Pepe is an apolitical meme that’s been used by everyone from gamers and YouTubers to celebrities and progressive bloggers. Like any other exploitable meme, Pepe has also been cast as a Nazi. But no single group or ideology has ownership of the meme.
This past weekend, Donald Trump Jr. posted a version of Pepe on Facebook, prompting a Hillary Clinton campaign staffer to write a ridiculous post based solely on an even worse article on the Daily Beast calling Pepe the Frog a symbol of white supremacy.
Elizabeth Chan, who wrote the post on the official Hillary Clinton website, claims that Trump’s presidential campaign is posting memes associated with white supremacy. How horrifying.
The Daily Beast article that the campaign post hinges upon quotes a “prominent white supremacist” who goes by Jared Taylor Swift on Twitter, who claims that white supremacists had “mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda” and that there was an active campaign to build an association between the once-innocent meme and the far-right. But how true is that?
The article may have gotten the meme’s popularity with celebrities right in its opening, but that’s pretty much where facts end and fiction begins. The author, Olivia Nuzzi, paints a grim picture of Pepe’s evolution: one where a meaningless meme was intentionally selected by a clandestine group of white supremacists on a 4chan imageboard to be transformed into a symbol of Nazism. After building that association, they tied it with Trump. And now everyone who posts the Pepe meme is secretly signaling their support for white supremacy to other white supremacists.
Sinister as it all sounds, it’s fantasy. Jared Taylor Swift, or @jaredtswift on Twitter, is a right-wing parody account run by someone who describes himself as a “snarky Marxist who’s good at staying in character” long before these posts went up.