UPDATE: Sept. 20,??? ?? ?? ??? 2016, 2:39 p.m. AEST "Skittles are candy. Refugees are people," a Mars spokesperson told Mashablein response to Donald Trump Jr.'s tweet.
While he declined to comment further, the spokesperson said the company does not feel it's an appropriate analogy.
UPDATE: Sept. 20, 2016, 11:08 a.m. PT Added report from The Interceptshowing connection of meme to anti-Semitic German children's story.
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Donald Trump Jr. set Twitter on fire (metaphorically) on Monday night when he tweeted out the below meme, purporting to put the ongoing refugee crisis in perspective.
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The image even has a the branding of the Trump/Pence campaign, making it appear like some sort of official release.
But there are a few problems with the meme.
First of all, it's not original to the Trump/Pence campaign. The idea was tweeted out in August by former Congressman and alt-right raconteur Joe Walsh. Walsh even passive aggressively called Trump Jr. out on it.
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WhileMashablecan't confirm whether or not Walsh was the originator of this particular meme, it's very similar to another meme that's been making the rounds going back to at least 2014 that uses another candy -- M&Ms -- to put a spin on the refugee crisis.
CARD ID: 90124, CARD TYPE: Imgur
And even that meme seems to have roots in a feminist meme that uses M&Ms in a similar way.
The Interceptpoints to a far more nefarious origin of the numeric logic used in these memes: an anti-Semitic German children's story from the 1930s that likened Jews to a poisonous mushroom:
[Franz's mother] “However they disguise themselves, or however friendly they try to be, affirming a thousand times their good intentions to us, one must not believe them. Jews they are and Jews they remain. For our Volk they are poison.”
“Like the poisonous mushroom!” says Franz.
“Yes, my child! Just as a single poisonous mushrooms can kill a whole family, so a solitary Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire Volk [nation].”
The other problem is that it's mathematically inaccurate. Trump Jr. smartly keeps his meme vague so you can't pin him down on an exact number to refute him.
But even in generalities, Trump Jr. is wrong.
According to Reference.com, there are 54 Skittles in every 2-ounce bag (the regular size bag you can get at the counter at any gas station or corner store). Let's assume we can fit three 2-ounce bags of Skittles into a bowl like the one in the ad. That's 162 Skittles, including three Skittles that would kill us, or, around a 1.9 percent chance you will be killed by a Skittle (or, rather, a terrorist posing as a Syrian refugee).
Just for comparison's sake, the average American, according to PBS, has a 0.000009 percent chance of dying in a plane crash (1-in-11 million) or a 0.02 percent chance of dying in a car crash (1-in-5,000), meaning Trump Jr. thinks you're around 100 times more likely to be killed by a Syrian refugee than by a car crash.
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But other research has underscored just how unlikely it is that a terrorist will kill you. One study showed that Americans are just as likely to be killed by falling furniture (like a television) than in a terrorist attack. In 2015, Americans were more likely to be shot by a toddler than be killed by a terrorist.
Even a study published last week by libertarian think tank the CATO Institute claims the odds are low: "the chance of an American being murdered in a terrorist attack caused by a refugee is 1 in 3.64 billionper year" (emphasis theirs).
That works out to a 0.000000027 percent chance of being killed by terrorism or one infinitely small sliver of a single Skittle.
This isn't meant to downplay the serious threat of terrorism in our world. But any of these examples put Trump Jr.'s (inaccurate) meme itself in perspective, poking Skittle-size holes in his argument.
And many on Twitter were happy to let him know what they thought of his argument.
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