While I would not phrase the question in such a dismissive fashion, the answer is “yes, I’ve known that for years, hasn’t everyone?”
Trump’s own use of the hand gesture has been discussed on the SDMB, I’m pretty sure, although I can’t find a link, as searching “Trump dog whistle hand white supremacist” yields far more threads than I’m willing to search through to see if any of them directly deal with the subject.
Not just Hindu. In Japan the swastika has for generations been used on maps as a symbol for a Buddhist temple. There’s a move lately to replace it with a pagoda, at least on tourist maps.
Being a Dharmic offshoot of Hinduism, I’m assuming the Buddhists picked it up from them.
The problem is, to get all the non-racists to work with you on this, you have to make sure they know about the racists’ intent to steal it. And as can be seen right here in this thread, trying to explain that “okay sign=racism” is a bit of an uphill battle. Plus, that just gives the racists that much more exposure. It’s pretty close to a no-win scenario.
It’s like the old rule of wrestling with a pig. You both get muddy, but the pig enjoys it.
It would be silly to use an OK sign with no context in it’s original meaning. However, I think swastika should never be displayed without a clear context that they are not supportive of Nazis. I would suggest you don’t do that.
And this does worry me.
Again, dumb idea to go it alone. Someone with social influence could turn this around quickly. The numbers are on our side for now. If we do nothing that could change in their favor quickly.
Steve Dallas. One of my top 5 Bloom County strips.
We clearly worry about different things. This is such a no big deal to me.
I’m fine with no longer using it in mixed company. If I’m with friends and/or people who know me well enough, I might still use it.
The game sort of outgrew the version where you punch each other and turned into a (lame, but funny because it’s so lame) prank where people just sneak the circle gesture in somewhere that it’s unexpected. When I worked in a big IT department, guys from other teams were always catching each other with it - in person, in photos that they submitted in support tickets or sent to each other in emails - the game was just sort of ‘made you look at the circle’ - there was no punching (I didn’t even know about that part until I looked it up for this thread actually) - pretty much the same level of thing as making ‘bunny ears’ behind someone whose photo is being taken.
Not that I can be sure that’s what was happening in the photo upthread, but as I say, absent of this narrative, I would have interpreted it that way.