By David Kamioner | December 22, 2019
After an extensive investigation, officials at both the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point have cleared midshipmen and cadets of any intention of using the decades-old “OK” hand gesture as a white power symbol, as had been charged by many on the far-Left.
The academies stated on Friday that their students, at last weekend’s annual Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia and broadcast on ESPN, were merely indulging in the “sophomoric” “circle game,” an activity that invites a punch in the shoulder to anyone who looks at the gesture when it’s made below the waist.
Yes, immature — but not racist.
But the back story goes even further back than that.
The entire controversy of the symbol in general is the result of an elaborate hoax by the online pranksters 4chan that was designed to troll the Left and see just how deep their gullibility ran.
As 4chan and the rest of America have discovered, it runs into a never-ending abyss.
Related: Left-Wing Types Allege That Military Academy Students Were Using a ‘White Power’ Sign
No less a widely accepted fighter against bigotry that the Anti-Defamation League posted this on its website over a year ago: “The ‘OK’ hand gesture originated as one of these hoaxes in February 2017 when an anonymous 4channer announced ‘Operation O-KKK,’ telling other members that ‘we must flood Twitter and other social media websites … claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy.’ The user even provided a helpful graphic showing how the letters WP (for ‘white power’) could be traced within an ‘OK’ gesture. The originator and others also suggested useful hashtags to help spread the hoax, such as #PowerHandPrivilege and #NotOkay. ‘Leftists have dug so deep down into their lunacy,’ wrote the poster, ‘we must force [them] to dig more, until the rest of society ain’t going anywhere near that [stuff].’ ”
The ADL is not considered some enabler of alt-Right bigotry.
If anything, it stands on the progressive side of the aisle.
Cadets at the Army-Navy game were accused of using a "white nationalist" symbol.
Investigators say they were only playing a "circle game" where you form an "OK" sign and try to get someone to look at it – If they look you get to punch them.https://t.co/V2bqchMy9q pic.twitter.com/HUAQaH048U
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 21, 2019
JUST IN: Cadets accused of using white supremacy hand gesture at Army-Navy game have been cleared of wrong doing. West Point says the cadets were playing the "circle game”
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 20, 2019
So for them to know this bespeaks common sense on their part — and a tremendous lack of even the slightest due diligence on the part of those who maligned the men and women of the service academies.
But, as 4chan knows and the rest of us not consigned to a mental health facility have accepted, the penchant for the Left to believe anything, to promote any nostrum no matter how absurd, is matched only by their hatred for traditional American institutions.
They thought this set-up was the perfect storm of denigrating the U.S. military and at the same time striking a blow against the alt-Right.
However, as in so many of the Left’s modern arguments, this premise was laughable and the evidence non-existent.
Will they ever learn?
Unlikely.
To do so, they’d have to give up their pernicious ideology and that’s not something their worldview would permit.
This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.
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