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Zina Bash, sitting right behind Brett Kavanaugh, at the judge's confirmation hearing on Tuesday. (The Washington Post)
Republican actress Zina Bash put her hand on her arm, her fingers closed in a circle, as she sat behind Brett Kavanaugh during her confirmation hearing on Tuesday. And #Resistance Twitter, watching live audiences and seeing his hand, saw a secret code, harmful.
Bash was making the sign "agree" with his hand, he appeared. Eugene Gu, a doctor with more than 200,000 followers on Twitter who became a well-known Twitter character, tweeted that Bash was "There was a white electrical panel behind him at the Senate confirmation hearing. They literally want to bring white supremacy to the Supreme Court. What a national scandal and what a shame for the rule of law. "
His tweet has more than 13,000 retweets. The video of another user embedded in Gu's tweet, focusing on Bash's hand, is approaching 4 million views.
Activist and Liberal author Amy Siskind, in a now-deleted tweet, wrote that the symbol of Bash's hand should "disqualify" Kavanaugh from the Supreme Court.
In the evening, the name of Bash was in fashion. Siskind continued to sow doubt about Bash's intention in the evening on Twitter.
"Try it yourself," Siskind wrote about the gesture of the hand. "If you watch the video, you will see that it has been in place for a long time. This is not a natural rest position.
As the theory became viral, with no evidence of its veracity, Bash's husband, John Bash, the US attorney for Western Texas, called the charges against his wife, a lawyer who worked for years in Republican politics . "In the heated tweets.
"Everyone tweeting this vicious conspiracy theory should be ashamed of themselves" John Bash wrote. "We were not even familiar with the symbol of hate attributed to her for the random way in which she rested her hand during a lengthy hearing."
Zina Bash, who worked at the Trump White House as a special assistant on regulatory reform and immigration and legal policy, currently works as senior counsel for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. (R).
"Zina is Mexican on her mother's side and Jewish on her father's side. She was born in Mexico, "wrote Bash. "Her grandparents were survivors of the Holocaust. Of course, we do not have anything to do with hate groups, which aim to terrorize and belittle other people – never and never will. "
This was the second event to distract from the serious and substantial work of Kavanaugh's audition after the trends on social media. Earlier, videos and footage of Kavanaugh refusing to shake hands with Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed during the shooting at Parkland School in Florida.
Soon, conservative personalities jumped on the adoption of #Resistance Twitter's Hand Sign Theory, calling the controversy the left-wing Pizzagate. The joyful answer on the right suggests that the complicated origins of the correct hand sign are a symbol of viral hatred.
The idea that the hand sign is a secret symbol for white power must be prevalent in a campaign of viral trolls aimed at making Liberals and the media more credible. In February 2017, 4chan's / pol / board discussed tactics going on to try to make the idea viral. "For those who have not seen the original thread, our goal is to convince people on twitter that the hand sign" ok "was co-opted by neo-Nazis," wrote the original poster of the thread.
As BuzzFeed has already pointed out, / pol / was very happy when the sign of the hand began to make its way. As the campaign spread, the symbol was simultaneously adopted by the term alt-right – a generic term for those of the far right who adopt white nationalist views – and the pro-Trump Internet , which seem to trigger "liberals who believed that the sign of the hand was a decoder ring to detect secret Nazis.
[Pepe the Frog became a hate symbol. Now he’s just a dead hate symbol.]
The gesture is not considered a true symbol of hatred by organizations such as the anti-defamation league. But, like Pepe the Frog, his repeated association and use by white nationalists like Richard Spencer gave him a new meaning in addition to all his other harmless forms, making the symbol a joke, a gesture of Harmless approval and -Joke among a wide range of right-wing personalities to anger the liberals for their own amusement.
[Kavanaugh ‘turned his back,’ says father of Parkland victim who tried to shake his hand]
There is no credible evidence that Bash was aware of the hand sign associations with the alt-right campaign or the troll campaign that made it popular.
One of the reasons why the mem has been able to expand so far without any concrete proof is that access to white nationalism in 2018 is not a totally invented concern. White House officials continue to connect with white nationalist people and organizations. A speechwriter of President Trump left the White House in August after CNN announced that the staff member had attended a popular conference with white nationalists. And Trump's advisor, Larry Kudlow, hosted a major publisher of white nationalists at his home, as my colleague Robert Costa recently pointed out.
Mark Pitcavage, a researcher who studies extremism, shared the feelings of many when he rejected the controversy in a statement on Twitter.
"Of all the things you should be legitimately concerned about the Senate confirmation hearings in Washington, DC, today for Judge Kavanaugh," he wrote"Handshakes and symbols should not be among them. Serious constitutional problems are at stake. "
This publication has been updated
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Porn, the Nazis and sarcasm: how these 3 old rules explain the whole Internet
Pepe the frog has become a symbol of hatred. Now it is only a symbol of dead hate.
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