Anthony Scaramucci's media company wants to know how many Jews you think died in the Holocaust
From the moment Anthony Scaramucci finished his invigorating burn through the White House corridors, he immediately began his slow drip down the back of the national throat by announcing Scaramucci Post—a new, agitated voice in the American press that would be delivered with the same sober deliberation The Mooch was briefly known for. Unlike old-fashioned, biased news sources, the itinerant White House Communications Director said, Scaramucci Post would be a “millennial-first media company,” committed to delivering “true centrist, informative content” directly to social media, where today’s millennials and facts congregate. So, what kind of 21st-century, [thinking face emoji], centristwave stuff is The Mooch rapping to the kids about?
The @ScaramucciPost account/bureau offered its followers four options to its poll question, “How many Jews were killed in the Holocaust?”, ranging from “Less than 1 million” to “More than 5 million.” The estimated number of Jewsh people who were killed, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is approximately 6 million—but hey, no fair Googling! As @ScaramucciPost account manager Lance Laifer said in a follow-up post, “The intent of the poll was to highlight ignorance of the basic facts of the Holocaust,” and you’re not going to win by cheating.
Of course, not everyone saw Laifer’s question as the edifying, fun little pub trivia quiz about genocide he intended. As The Washington Post points out, perhaps the sole defining characteristic of the Scaramucci Post’s approach to pure, unbiased, informative content is its reliance on opinion polls, soliciting its readers “#SPthoughts” on everything from their “morning wake-up routine in 3 emojis” to nuclear war with North Korea. And the Holocaust poll immediately followed three separate tweets asking for their opinions on the offensiveness of an Anne Frank Halloween costume, suggesting that it, too, was up for debate.
Following the backlash, Laifer spent the morning filling the feed with mea culpas, apologizing “if anyone was offended” by his thought-provoking poll on whether the Holocaust was as bad as people say. He also distanced the poll from Scaramucci, who Laifer says is “traveling in London,” and therefore unable to vet whether he wants to be involved with something that promotes anti-Semitism if he’s not getting paid for it.
At the same time, Laifer has also been retweeting people who defend the poll as necessary, in light of the 21 percent who responded with “Less than 1 million”—a number that proves that, gosh, there sure are a lot of goofballs following the account of this former Donald Trump advisor who have some pretty mixed-up ideas about Hitler and the Jews! Hopefully they stay tuned to Scaramucci Post so it can sort them out.