>>1512 >>the scheming Merchant meme was LITERALLY a Satanist named Nick Bougas who went by the name of "A Wyatt Man" and was a member of Col. Michael Aquino's "Temple of Set"
>According to a 2015 BuzzFeed News report, Bougas used the pseudonym "A. Wyatt Mann" (phonetically: 'a white man') to produce overtly racist and antisemitic cartoons in the late 1980s and early 1990s.[3]
>The Mann cartoons have been widely reused as memes in original context by white supremacists, various internet trolls, and later, the alt-right. One cartoon in particular, a stereotypical caricature of a Jewish person referred to as the "Happy Merchant", became one of the most popular antisemitic images on the internet. It has been reused, modified and parodied multiple times, eventually becoming part of the visual language of websites such as 4chan.[2][3][20][21] Bougas' work as Mann has frequently been combined by Internet trolls with cartoons by political cartoonist Ben Garrison, which Garrison has said generates confusion between the two artists.[2][22]