The Latest Whataboutism Trap

I have an unpopular message to my liberal, progressive and leftist friends: We need to stop getting mad every time a Trumpy dumpster fire of a person makes an OK sign.
We should instead mock them for thinking they’re clever. They aren’t. They’re gross and stupid. A trap has been laid and we are walking right into it constantly. The OK sign is not an historic white power symbol. That is made up.
It started as a pro-Trump symbol, has been embraced by the alt-right, and is used by them to mean Trump support. There’s an excellent piece here on the complexity of this ontological problem: is it a white power symbol because American white supremacists (read: Trump supporters) use it? Or do white supremacists (read: Trump supporters) use it because it’s a white power symbol?
In brief, my take is: Trump supporters use it to show they support Trump. Trump is a racist. Therefore it’s a racist symbol. But it’s not an historic white power symbol and should not be described as such. It should be described as a symbol indicating loyalty to Trump and affiliation with the alt-right, who are white nationalists.

Folks on the alt-right enjoy making the symbol to “own the libs.” (More on that in a moment.) When Zina Bash made it recently at the Kavanaugh hearings, and everyone freaked out as she intended, she did it again! Why? Precisely because she knew it would draw howls from the left.
And it doesn’t stop there:
It is right to ask, “What kind of fucking pond scum lunatic thinks it’s funny to make a symbol that other people think is a white power salute as a joke?” (Or in the case above, “What kind of monster trains their kid to make symbols other people will interpret as white power symbols knowing the impact it might have on their child’s life?”)
But it is more interesting, in my view, to ask, “Who benefits from us thinking it’s a white power salute?”
The game has been revealed with this tweet:
There have been dozens of articles recently about “whataboutism.” It’s a very successful propaganda trick — and a Soviet favorite — meant to discount the views of those not in power. You say, “Trump has put kids in cages,” and they say, “What about what Obama did?” This places the burden on you to find out exactly how different the Obama era policy was from the Trump policy (very). It puts the burden on you to defend the immigration policies of the Obama administration that you might not have any interest in defending. For anyone observing, it places you and the person you’re arguing with on a level playing field of “two sides of an argument,” rather than one person citing massive and sweeping violations of human rights and international law and another person defending those violations.
For years, we have looked at the collective descent into batshit cuckoo land by those on the right wing. Saddam attacked us on 9/11! Obama was a secret Muslim! Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster! Hillary personally sold Uranium to the Russians!
We are astonished when we see how huge a percentage of the Republican Party believes something absolutely, provably false. And we are right to be astonished. The conservative appetite for conspiracy, for wild-ass bullshit is bottomless. Thus Alex Jones. And anyone on the alt-right (like Steve Bannon) who is thinking deeply about the ongoing media war for the hearts and minds of Americans still not paying attention is well aware of this problem. If the alt-right looks like a bunch of lunatics spouting lies, and the mainstream left and right look like well-meaning people arguing over what to do about the “shared facts,” as Ben Sasse calls them, surely the alt-right will remain in the fringe.
The Breitbart experiment has been to weaponize the left against itself. To convince the left to start embracing and espousing wild conspiracy theories. To make the left seem like “the other side of the argument” to the alt-right. The current resident of the White House demonstrated this in his response to Charlottesville. Worse, really, than his “very fine people” comment — which is what gets all the attention these days — was his effort to equate Nazis with Antifa. His effort to say the Left and Right are equally bad.
“You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.”

Milo’s self-proclaimed martyrdom on the cross of free speech; Bannon getting kicked from the New Yorker; everyone freaking out about Zina Bash making an OK symbol: they are all part of a concerted plan. Demonstrate for those who are only sort of paying attention that both sides are crazy and believe crazy things. We say the far right believes Sharia law is coming to the United States and erroneously believes Muslims make up a massive percentage of the American population. That is utterly crazy. They say we hate free speech so much that we believe something as innocuous as the okay symbol is a white power sign. Everybody is crazy. What about that? Would you rather have Free Speech or Muslims? Take your pick. Those are the sides. Clock is ticking.
Make no mistake: for 30 years the Republican party has embraced an increasingly alarming descent into fact-free lunacy. Those in power like Ben Sasse and Marco Rubio know it. And now, their way of climbing out of the hole will be to argue that both the left and the right believe crazy things. Whataboutism. The OK sign is part of that. They are trolling us, getting us all to condemn something somebody made up on 4chan.

The MAGA-sphere absolutely loves it when the libs freak out over their uses of Pepe and of the OK symbol. They do it precisely to elicit that reaction. The Anti-Defamation League has been pretty clear, it isn’t a white power symbol and they never said it was.
But some day soon, when you or I or any sane person rightly cites this fact:
55% of Republicans support ripping babies from their parents.
Or better yet this one:
42% of Republicans still believe Obama was born in Kenya.
The response will be swift and clear. “Yeah, but whatabout the 60% of Democrats who believe the fucking okay symbol is a white power salute?”
We’re being trolled. And it is working. And it will be used against us.
