Is He Joshing Us or Did the Swastika Draw Itself?

Sometimes the headlines almost write themselves.

Suspended NASCAR driver says he didn’t intentionally draw a swastika on his toaster strudel

The question here is: did the swastika draw itself?

Truck Series driver Josh Reaume was suspended indefinitely by NASCAR on Tuesday for violating its social media policy. And according to Reaume, that violation was unintentional.

Reaume, who owns a team in the Truck Series, says he posted a picture to Snapchat of a toaster strudel last week. That seems pretty innocuous, right?

Well, the icing on that strudel was drawn in the shape of a swastika. And Reaume said he somehow didn’t realize that he had drawn a strudel swastika when he posted the picture to Snapchat.

From TobyChristie.com:

“What happened was, I made a toaster strudel, I put icing on it. I put icing on it arbitrarily. I can — now, that this has become such a significant thing in my life, everything is crystal clear now in what I was thinking. I was mindlessly putting icing on a toaster strudel thinking about how I was going to arrange to get my daughter to day care in the morning because that’s my responsibility and I was flying out to Phoenix the next day.

“When I was done, I took a picture, I wrote, ‘Snack time,’ and posted it to my Snapchat, which I had no idea it was even more than my immediate friend group. [The account is] private, it’s not even under my name, to my knowledge. Now, shame on me for maybe not fully understanding SnapChat, and I don’t care to get on social media in the immediate future, but somebody obviously screen-shotted it or did something with it and pushed it to NASCAR. I don’t know what the image looks like.”

Reaume apologized for his actions in that interview and said that “there was not a bone in my body that had an intent of doing that.”

Ugh, don’t use the “not a bone in my body” defense, please! That usually points to guilt.

Although if you read the story, it is not so straight forward.

The image being circulated that Reaume referenced started being spread on Twitter and was being touted as the photo that Reaume shared to Snapchat, however this was false. Rather, the image being passed around seemed to be an old meme of some sort. Still, Jalopnik and others picked up on the fictitious photo and from there it was downhill for Reaume.

While Jalopnik did issue an update to their story explaining that the photo that was embedded in their story was not the actual photo, many will likely never see the update and will assume that is what the Toaster Strudel looked like. Regardless of what the photo appeared to be, Reaume maintains that it was not a goal of his to showcase one of the most iconic signs of evil on his snack.

My advice to Josh is to stay away from posting photos of your breakfast. Especially if this is how you make your coffee.