Coast Guard removes Florence's service employee on alleged action of "white power"

The US Coast Guard said they removed one of its members from Florence's service after he made an alleged white power gesture in the background of a television interview.

"We are aware of the offensive video on twitter – the Coast Guard has identified the member and removed it from the response," the agency said. written on Twitter after a clip of the gesture caused the tumult of social media. "His actions do not reflect those of the US Coast Guard."

The employee, who was not identified, did the poster during an interview with MSNBC on Friday with another Coast Guard member. You can see the man in the background of a help center looking directly at the camera before shaping his hands to make an "OK" sign – a gesture recently adopted by white supremacists. He seemed to try to hide the gesture by pretending that he was scratching his face or his hair.

The coastguards did not deny that the officer had intentionally made the sign of white supremacy. The agency did not immediately return messages from CBS News.

The hand signal gained popularity in 2017 as a joke among white supremacists online, who wrote about cheating the Liberals and the media by thinking that the "OK" movement had been co-opted by groups of 39, far right. But the joke eventually became serious as white supremacist groups and personalities, such as Richard Spencer, continued to pose with the gesture on the photos and spread their use on social media.

Coast Guard controversy comes days after social media users accused Zina Bash, a lawyer and a Republican agent, to have made the gesture in front of the camera while sitting behind Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings. Bash's husband, John Bash, an American lawyer in Texas, said she was just resting her hand and called the charge "repulsive".

"Everyone tweeting this vicious conspiracy theory should be ashamed of themselves," wrote Bash in a tweet now deleted. "We were not even familiar with the hateful symbol attributed to her for the random way she had laid her hand during a lengthy hearing."