Curt Schilling tweeted a racist meme comparing Muslims to Nazis

Curt Schilling, successful former Major League Baseball player and catastrophically unsuccessful former video game maker, made a whoopsie.

The retired 48-year-old tweeted an image just before noon on Tuesday with an alleged statistic comparing the number of Nazis in Germany in 1940 to the number of Muslims who “are extremists.” The photo’s background was Adolf Hitler, in full Nazi regalia. Within ten minutes Schilling deleted the tweet, but it was preserved as a screenshot by plenty of outraged Twitter users.

Schilling has started to express his regrets in response to certain comments on Twitter, saying you “Gotta own the times you go off the rails.” He also responded to a question on why he took the image down:

Schilling also posted the meme on his personal Facebook page 4 hours ago, before deleting it shortly before 1 p.m EDT. He seems to have found it via a calmly titled Facebook page called “BREAK UP the IRS.” The page traffics in a mix of conservative memes (“LET EVERYONE KNOW AMERICA WANTS [HILLARY CLINTON] IN PRISON!!!”), dubiously sourced news posts, and twerking videos (“Twerking is possibly the best thing to come out of recent pop culture, and probably the only thing that I can happily say I will never, ever get tired of”).

Schilling, who isn’t shy about his conservative views, pretty regularly posts other memes about Muslims (among others) to his Facebook page.

As Angel Rabasa, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation told the Christian Science Monitor earlier this year, the percentage of Muslims who are “extremists” is often very exaggerated.

Ethan Chiel is a reporter for Fusion, writing mostly about the internet and technology. You can (and should) email him at [email protected]