| Happy Merchant | |
|---|---|
 Edited caricature illustration of a stereotypical Jewish man by "A. Wyatt Mann" (Nick Bougas). | |
| First appearance | 1992 |
| Created by | Nick Bougas |
TheHappy Merchant is anantisemiticcaricature of aJewish man. The image appears commonly on websites such as4chan,Reddit,Twitter andInstagram, where it is frequently used in antisemitic contexts.
The image was first created by the American cartoonist "A. Wyatt Mann" (aword play on "A white man"), a pseudonym ofNick Bougas.[1][2][3] The image was part of a cartoon that also included a racist caricature of a black man and used these images to say: "Let's face it! A world without Jews and Blacks would be like a world without rats and cockroaches." The cartoon was first released in print in 1992 (under theWhite Aryan Resistance newsletter),[4] but appeared online in February 2001.[1]
The stereotypical image of a Jew from the cartoon began to spread on various internet communities, where users began to make variations of it.[1]
The Happy Merchant meme endorses the idea that Jewssecretly conspire to conquer the world.[5]
The image is intended as a derogatory depiction, and employs manystereotypes of Jews. These include:
This image is a form of antisemitic propaganda, common onalt-right internet communities such as 4chan, other "chan" websites, and on othermessage boards.[7]
In 2017,Al Jazeera appeared to have tweeted an image of the Happy Merchant on its official English-language Twitter account while referring toclimate change deniers.[8] Al Jazeera explained in an apology that they did not post the image in question, but replied to a user who did and then linked to the thread by accident.[9]
A 2018 study published by Savvas Zannettou et al. focused on online antisemitism recorded that the Happy Merchant and its variations were "among the most popular memes on both 4chan's/pol/ board andGab, two major outlets for alt-right expression.[10] The study found that usage of the Happy Merchant on /pol/ remained largely consistent (with a peak during theUnited States missile strike on Syria in April 2017), while use of the meme onGab increased after theUnite the Right rally in the US in August 2017.[11] It was also determined that /pol/ influenced the spread of the Happy Merchant to other web platforms such asTwitter andReddit.[12]
The same study also found that the Happy Merchant has been incorporated into other common memes on the site, includingPepe the Frog, an originallyapolitical caricature of a frog, which is often used by the alt-right for racist purposes.[13][14]
Under the pen name of 'A. Wyatt Mann,' artist Nick Bougas has drawn many explicitly racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic cartoons where there isn't even a pretense of humor.
But internet anti-Semites (or at least people fishing for a reaction) started splicing Garrison's work together with the work of Nick Bougas, aka A. Wyatt Man, a director and illustrator responsible for one of the web's most enduring anti-Semitic images.
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