Why does all America discuss Skitles?

Donald Trump's son, arguing about refugees, took advantage of the worst analogy

Leading American publications - from The New York Times to Vox - on September 20 wrote about the candies of Skitles. Multi -colored dragees with fruit juice fell into the focus of the media attention after the son and adviser Donald Trump compared refugees coming to the United States with Skitles. Medusa briefly retells the next story associated with Trump's anti -immigrant rhetoric.

It all started with the tweet of Donald Trump Jr. The eldest son of a US presidential candidate from the Republican Party stuck a picture with a drame “Skitles” and the signature: “Imagine that you have a skeleton of Skitles, and I told you that having eaten only three, you will die. Would you scoop up [after that] a handful and eat? So it is with Syrian refugees. " Trump accompanied the picture with his own comment: “This is a picture that explains everything. It is time to put an end to political correctness, from which the interests of America suffer. "

Not all followers of Trump Jr. agreed with him. The record collected almost 17 thousand retweets and almost 27 thousand likes, but many Twitter users sent negative comments in response. Many convicted Trump in lies and manipulations; Even the former US Secretary of State Madlen Olbright (emigrated to the United States from Czechoslovakia) answered Trump. One of the popular reactions was the same picture, but with the other, the inscription: “Imagine that you have a skeleton, and orange tells you that all other colors are dangerous. Would you vote for him? So it is with Trump's election campaign. ”

The American media joined the analysis of Twit. The publication of Mashable calculated that from the point of view of statistics, the recording of Trump Jr. is a complete nonsense: the chance that a resident of the United States will die from the refugee’s hands are one by 3.64 billion, while the Skitles packaging contains 162 drams. VOX devoted a large material in which he first noted that it was not the best move to compare people with dragees (the representative of the Mars, the manufacturer of Skitles), and then brought down the entire power of mathematics on Trump. According to VOX estimates, if you continue the Trump analogy and compare the probability, then in the Skitles pier, there should be almost 11 billion ordinary Drazhs. Such a bowl will significantly exceed the size of Trump itself.

It soon became clear that Trump was invented by the analogy with the dragee. In 2014, a similar meme was discussed in feminist circles in relation to what share of men is capable of violence towards women. Instead of “Skitles” in Meme, they appeared M&M: “Do you say that not all men are monsters? Imagine a bowl with m & mʼs. 10% of them are poisoned. Forward! Scoop a handful and eat. After all, not all M&M is poisoned. ”

The Intercept believes that the origins of the meme should be sought in 1938. According to the publication, the idea with the three poisoned Skitles goes back to the children's book published in the Third Reich - in it the mother explained to her child that only one Jew could destroy the whole nation. Jews were compared in a book with toxic mushrooms. The author of the book is Julius Streicher , Gaulyiter of the NSDAP and editor of the newspaper Sturmovik (from its pages, he, in particular, called for the extermination of Jews). In 1946, Streicher was executed by the sentence of the Nuremberg Tribunal for calls to the genocide.