Everyone with any web design or video production experience knew that the ‘Unified Reich’ nonsense was the result of someone taking existing assets and templates and turning them around without looking closely.
A Trump commercial used a generic ‘newspaper’ background which included a historical headline about a ‘Unified Reich’.
But not only the media, but the Democrats and the Biden campaign, decided to pretend that this was some sort of specific agenda by Trump.
‘That’s Hitler’s language’: Biden responds to Trump’s ‘unified Reich’ post – CNN
‘Hard to call it an accident’: Trump shares campaign video with a headline about a “Unified Reich” – MSNBC News
Trump social media account shares video mentioning “unified reich;” Biden blasts “Hitler’s language” – CBS News
Awful New Info About Trump and “Reich” Video Shows Deep MAGA Sickness – New Republic
CNN’s Jim Acosta Eviscerates Trump Over ‘Unified Reich’ Video – Daily Beast
Do You Want a Unified Reich Mind-Set in the White House – New York Times
After days of this, someone at CNN finally tracked down the designer behind the original assets.
Bizarrely, the fake article’s text appears to trace its origins to a graphic designer named Enes Şimşek who lives near Istanbul.
In an exclusive interview with CNN, Şimşek said that the Trump ad appears to have been created from video graphics he built in May of last year, designed to give customers the option of building something that looked like an old-fashioned newsreel. Şimşek said he actually searched Google for text about World War I – not World War II – and copied language he found and pasted it into in the newspaper article: “German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.”
As first reported by the AP, the phrase appeared to have been lifted from a Wikipedia entry on World War I. According to Wikipedia’s logs, that phrase was created on November 15, 2022, and it has since been removed. The phrase does not reference Nazi Germany.
It was supposed to be dummy text – placeholder language that the customer could ultimately replace, he said. Şimşek built the template to allow the customer who purchased it to swap in their own language. But Şimşek believes the Trump video kept the text from his original template. Şimşek says he has sold just 16 copies of the template at $21 a pop.
It has appeared in at least two other online videos: a French-language video posted to Facebook that contains the dummy text and a music video posted to YouTube. They appear to have no political context.
CNN discovered the video template on Video Hive, a motion graphics template store. After Şimşek was contacted through the contact form on the video template page, he responded via email that he was the creator of the template.
“I didn’t know it is my power to change politics … I don’t know what could be crazier than that,” said Şimşek in a video call. “Imagine if your work shakes a country.”
For those who aren’t aware, everything from web design to video production to game design and film effects often depend on buying existing assets. Then you’re supposed to modify and personalize them. Whoever was responsible for the ad should have changed the text. They were lazy and stupid for not doing it. But that doesn’t change the fact that anyone under 40 and involved in the media knew exactly how this happened. Because they’ve done it themselves. Much of the work these days doesn’t involve making things from scratch but using assets and templates. They chose to lie about it for political gain while calling Trump a ‘Nazi’.
And, despite this story, don’t expect anyone to recant or backtrack. Narrative is everything and truth is nothing.