Thank you for demonstrating how dog whistles work!
Agreed that it is both and meaning is determined by context.
Context of a schmuck who pretended to be Jewish to get votes? It looks like flashing as White Power, how it’s held, so on, but context seems inconsistent with that.
So this guy earlier claimed to be Jewish, and when caught in a lie, then claimed to be “Jew-ish”. And now he’s flashing white power signs? Is he just willing to do anything to appeal to everyone?
…the context here is that Santos is a lying liar who lies about everything, who is cozying up to the alt-right (who probably almost certainly helped fund him and win his seat) and would obviously do the most obvious bit of trolling out-in -the open.
These are cartoon villains. Santos is an over-the-top cartoon villain. He is one-step-away from twilling his moustache. This is entirely consistent with everything else he has done. It would have been surprising that he didn’t flash the white power symbol.
That’s because when he tried he realized he had never grown one, only claimed to.
…I mean, everything that Santos does is ridiculous. Everything. Nothing would surprise me. He could pull his pants down on the House Floor and dance the macarena and the only thing I would think would be “of course he did.”
Because the man is just ridiculous. Of course, he flashed the white power sign. People largely stopped doing it over a year ago, so of course Santos would do that now. I wouldn’t expect anything less.
As with Trump, I am often appalled but rarely surprised.
…what exactly is it do you consider an urban legend?
[Citation Needed]
If you mean they are mostly intended for people in the sticks, then I agree.
When a bunch of people say “Let’s say we’re using this gesture to mean this thing, so people think that’s what we mean by that gesture”, they are in fact using that gesture to mean that thing. That’s what “meaning” means.
And whatever that is, it’s definitely not an “OK” sign. The “OK” sign is never shown at waist level, like that, while the similar “white supremacy” sign often is.
Santos isn’t a Nazi.
He’s just saying he’s Nazi-ish.
FYI, here is a webpage from the Southern Poverty Law Center on the white power sign, suggesting that sometimes they’re making the sign to “troll the libs” and sometimes to signal to like-minded individuals.
Too many syllables – his brain stops at two. Nazish.
This isn’t villainous; it is literally (and in the old school meaning of the word) insane, seriously, not something a villain would do, more something someone with serious brain dysfunction would do.
Zish or Nazish; the eternal question.
“I didn’t say ‘Nazi’, I said ‘Not Z’.”
At this point, I agree that Santos seems to have some sort of mental illness. Pathological liar, perhaps (though I am obviously not a medical professional)?
Yes, and clearly here the intent is to troll the libs"… and it worked.