If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely 'brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change.
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If you've been on the internet for a while you've probably seen this image:
It's been floating around on the internet as a meme about people who believe in conspiracy theories. But there has been a lot of contradictory statements made about the presentation of the "conspiracy theory" portion, with many asserting that the original image depicted the Star of David, as a reference to the prevailing antisemitism within people who believe in conspiracy theories. And that the edit to change the Star of David to a unicorn was allegedly done by a far right redditor to erase this jab at antisemitism.
I thought it would be interesting to actually search up the memetic spread of this image and see how it had evolved up to this point from its origin. Also I fell into this rabbit hole and I'm taking everyone down with me
Disclaimer: I am not Jewish, American, nor confident that my research is 100% accurate. Platforms die, posts are deleted, and Google Image Search can only go so far, so take all of this with a grain of salt.
The original image that this meme comes from is from the graphic design company gapingvoid, illustrated by Lead Artistic Director Hugh McLeod, on the 22nd January 2014. This introduced the foundational image, the dots and connecting lines.
This was then edited by illustrator Brian Somerville to expand on the graphic. My source is from 28th April 2014, and the original blogpost where this was published has seemly been taken down/is broken, so this image could have been created anywhere before that. This expands upon the original's idea to include Data, Insight, and Wisdom with minor edits to the original image, and is only missing the iconic "Conspiracy Theory" portion of the image.
After this point, the timeline gets messy. The image explodes into a meme, check out @informationversusknowledge-blog for some documentation of the various edits of this meme. None of the images on this blog have either the unicorn nor the Star of David.
Many people attribute this Imgur image as the original, depicting the Star of David, dated to 2020.
But the artifacting bothered me, as the quality of the Star's line art not matching the rest of the image is a dead giveaway that the image was another edit of some other post where the Star of David was added. (Also, if anyone knows who the signature Nagy belongs to that would be interesting to know!)
According to TinEye, the earliest recorded instance of the Star of David in the meme on the internet seems to have been 24th September 2015. And two days later on the 26th, the image was posted to Reddit on r/funny, with the OP taking a heavily antisemitic tone and seeming to confirm their belief that Jews were literally behind every conspiracy theory. The post had no reference to any original artist.
It makes sense to me that this would be the original image that was appended to Somerville's edit, as this image is smaller, and bashing the two together would create that uneven artifacting effect.
The well known unicorn version of the meme was identified by TinEye to have first been posted to Reddit r/funny on the 14th of August 2020, far after the Star of David version. This post does not have any explicit antisemitism that I could identify, aside from the copious illuminati and conspiracy theory memes in the comments.
In conclusion
It seems that people who thought that the meme with the Star of David came first were right, but the perception that the original image was suppose to be a criticism of antisemitism seems to have been false, as the image was created to be solely antisemitic.
Perhaps this could have been more obvious to actual Jewish people, but I had no idea about the harmful intent behind the original meme. Dogwhistles can mean different things to different people, to me all I could perceive was a funny meme, but the actual antisemites who created this meme felt validated in their beliefs. Seeing them shitpost about how "jews are behind everything" and posting photos of their "proof" was...chilling.
Maybe it's all up to interpretation. Some Jews actually did find it funny because they thought it was meant to criticise conspiracy theorists.
