The journalist and Georgia Southern University professor who uncovered antisemitic and racist memes posted by the individual who created the GIF of Donald Trump wrestling with CNN, has said he is receiving death threats.
Jared Yates Sexton, journalist, author and assistant professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern, shared in a series of tweets some of the threatening messages that came his way after he revealed the social media history of the unnamed man who created the initial meme.
The Reddit user posted a GIF that quickly went viral and was retweeted in a revised form by Trump:
On Sunday, Sexton researched and tweeted images of other memes created by the user, "HanA**holeSolo," (asterisks inserted).
On Tuesday, the user issued a lengthy apology on Reddit (since removed by moderators of /The_Donald subreddit) , for both the initial meme and his other posts on social media with racist and antisemitic content. He also deleted all of his posts.
Sexton, however, has been on the receiving end of exactly this sort of threat since first uncovering the man's antisemitic posts like the following:
Sexton notes in a later Tweet that either he did more research than Trump's team on who was behind the Trump/CNN wrestling meme or Trump's team simply didn't care who was the source. It didn't take long for threats directed at Sexton to start flowing in :
Sexton continued getting threatening memes and messages well into Tuesday evening and it isn't the first time he has been on the receiving end of threats from internet trolls.
"There's something ugly growing in the body of America. This intimidation is meant to stall efforts to expose that," Sexton tweeted before urging everyone to "Be on the right side of history."
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