So, did you hear about Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, getting his comic strip pulled from newspapers after going on a lengthy rant in which he called Black people a “hate group” and called for informal segregation of the races?

I want to talk a bit about how we got there.

Last week, hard-right

On the question of “It’s OK to be white,” 72% of all respondents agreed with the statement. Okay.

Rasmussen called disagreeing with these phrases "anti-white beliefs," but omitted important context from both the polling question and the report that went with it.

“It’s OK to be white” is a political slogan, not a statement about whether or not it is okay for white people to exist. On Twitter, Rasmussen admitted that this poll was “inspired by the [Anti-Defamation League] literally defining the wording of the question as ‘hate speech.’” But that, still, is not the full story.

This began, as so many racist troll campaigns do, on 4chan’s /pol board back in October 2017 by way of Newsweek.

[Heads up: several of the links I'm going to share in this section are to archived 4chan threads, so be aware that there will be some pretty over-the-top nastiness and bigotry. Definitely not safe for work.]

Newsweek

See, Trump had just taken office, and every news organization on the planet was rushing out to do their own The Nazi Next Door type story. While some journalists no doubt did better than others — whatever your opinion of the Mother Jones Richard Spencer profile, it was probably better than The Hollywood Reporter’s “White Nationalist Uniform of Polo Shirts Takes Center Stage in Charlottesville” piece — this trend was (and will certainly remain) controversial.

But I digress. The Newsweek article was mostly about Taylor's campaign to flood college campuses with white supremacist flyers and posters. That’s what’s important to this edition of the newsletter. From Newsweek:

"The election of Donald Trump is a sign of rising white consciousness," Taylor wrote on American Renaissance, his online magazine dedicated to white supremacy, adding later, "Now is the time to press our advantage in every way possible."

Along with a 13-step video tutorial on how to hang racist propaganda without getting caught ( advice included wearing a hoodie and posting between midnight and 4 a.m. ), Taylor linked to 15 downloadable posters that co-opt some of the most powerful images of the 20th century, including James Montgomery Flagg's "I Want You!" poster from World War I, only here Uncle Sam has a new message: "I want you to love who you are. Don't apologize for being white." And there's Thomas Jefferson in front of a tattered American flag, with the slogan "Men of the West, don't give in to hate…. Embrace white identity today!"

Taylor's posters drip with nostalgia for a whitewashed 1940s America and speak to those who believe they are losing control of "their country." One poster looks like a Collier's or Saturday Evening Post cover, with a butler in a tux offering an attractive, diamond-clad woman a cup of tea as she coyly glances at her audience. Tagline: "Women. They will try to shame you for being white. Don't let them." Another resembles a retro World War II poster, with two floating heads on a green background and a bubble that reads, "Free your mind from hate" and "Don't be manipulated by professors! White guilt only hurts you!"

Among the other taglines on the posters (which Newsweek, weirdly, linked to) were:

• “Love who you are. White people exist. White people have the right to exist. White People have the right to exist as white people. Be White.”

• “No apologies. No groveling. No guilt. Liberate yourself from ethnomasochism.”

• “Love who you are. Embrace your heritage. Be white.”

• “Men of the West, never apologize. Love who you are.”

• “Be yourself. Be white. Say no to anti-white propaganda.”

• “Tired of anti-white propaganda? Stand up for yourself.”

• “We founded this nation. Why should we apologize for being who we are?”

You get the idea, right? So, AmRen was carrying out this campaign with all of these professional-looking designs and homages to classic pieces of historical propaganda. This stuff had a clear, obvious white supremacist message.

This is where 4chan comes in.

Several months later, a 4chan user saw a local news story about one of AmRen’s flyers (the Uncle Sam design), and suggested making "signs like this pop up in college campuses around the world." The goal, this poster put forward, was to get "the left going apesh*t over something so trivial [that it would] show just how anti white the political climate is and it would wake up normies/lemmings."

“tldr [too long; didn’t read] go put up signs at your local college campus that say ‘its ok to be white’ in plain text with no pictures or symbols.”

Reading through the replies, you see how the operation took shape. Someone would suggest posters containing a Hitler quote, someone else would say that it’d be better to edit out the source of the quote, and then a third person (this one with a Nazi flag tied to their account handle) would respond with, “Coward.” “We have to be more subtle if we want this to work,” added yet another user. The goal was to spread Taylor’s white supremacist message but in a more meme-friendly way.

The goal wasn’t to create art. The goal was to get people worked up. The goal of this far-right message board was to wink and nod to Taylor’s more overt “pro-white” message in hopes that people would react.

One user suggested using art from the neo-Nazi American Vanguard organization, offering up a poster of a young white man standing next to a white woman with the text, “We have a right to exist.” Another user responded, “The 1930’s Nazi Germany propaganda poster aesthetic is too obvious.”

Once there seemed to be some consensus that the flyer should read “It’s okay to be white,” they started workshopping designs, suggesting different fonts, styles, and so on. Eventually, there seemed to be an agreement to go with a white background with all caps black text reading “It’s okay to be white.”

You can go read the entire thread (if you’ve got the stomach for it) here.

Slogans cannot ever truly and completely be detached from their product. In the case of “It’s okay to be white,” the product was white supremacy.

If someone says, “I’m lovin’ it,” your first thought is probably, “Hey, that’s the McDonald’s slogan.” If you hear, “Just do it,” you’ll likely think, “Oh yeah, Nike;” “taste the rainbow” will always be associated with Skittles; “the quicker picker upper” brings to mind Bounty.

Marketing is essentially a game of word association — as is propaganda.

If you were to poll people on whether they want the United States to improve, to become greater than it currently is (whatever one’s assessment of what “currently” means or “greater” would be), I imagine you’d end up with a pretty high level of agreement among the population, across political ideologies.

But if you polled people to see whether or not they agreed with “Make America Great Again,” it’s safe to say there would be a much more conflicted set of results, as people would recognize that as Donald Trump’s slogan. The same goes for “America First.” Disapproval of those statements aren’t necessarily a comment on one’s feelings about “making America great” or putting the country first, but may be more about the campaign pushing the slogan.

Context matters. The goal of these right-wing operations is to pick something super vague that on its own and in any other context is something completely innocuous, use it as a bit of a wink and a nod to the people who are “in on the joke” (and agree with them) while mocking those who understand the “joke,” but call BS.

A perfect example of this was the whole ordeal with the “OK” sign. Around 2016, right-wing figures like Milo Yiannopoulous and Richard Spencer made a habit of flashing an “OK” sign on camera, mimicking how Trump often held his hands. The gesture became a way for far-right Trump supporters to signal, “Hey, I’m one of you,” to each other.

In 2017, 4chan users launched a troll campaign to try to convince people that “the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy.” The goal was to flood social media with hashtags like “#PowerHandPrivilege” and “#NotOkay.” This is similar to another stunt pulled in 2014 to get “#EndFathersDay” trending. They made social media accounts, pretended to be outraged lefties, and tried to bait a few real liberals to jump in and join the campaign.

People on the right do flash each other the “OK” sign, and they were doing that before the 4chan operation. The goal was to get people on the left worked up and ready to accuse everyone who had ever made an “OK” sign with their hands of being a white supremacist. While some have overstepped and called this a “hoax” (no, it really is something that people on the far-right do to signal to each other; it’s just not some sort of elaborate code for “white power”), others have highlighted the importance of context.

From a piece about the “OK” sign from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Emily Pothast observes at Medium: “Its ambiguity is precisely why it’s such an effective trolling tactic. … When successful, this kind of trolling makes otherwise credible journalists and public intellectuals look like buffoons, either by overreacting to an ambiguous stimulus or by missing the whole context of the gesture.”

Salon writer Amanda Marcotte delved this point further on Twitter: “Part of the problem is that if, hypothetically, someone flashed white supremacist symbols at the camera, the point of the stunt would be to get liberals wound up, so they can then claim that liberals are just imagining things,” she wrote. “That was what the OK symbol was literally invented to do: Both serve as a white supremacist symbol and also one that is just ordinary-enough looking that when liberals expressed outrage, the white supremacist could play the victim of liberal hysteria.”

“It’s okay to be white” is the very same thing. It’s something that, if you take it out of context, sounds harmless. If you’re familiar with the context, however, it quickly becomes something one would quite easily object to.

Imagine if the KKK adopted an unofficial slogan of “Sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns for everyone.” If you were familiar with it, and “sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns for everyone” had been associated with the Klan over a span of years, how would you answer the polling question, “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns for everyone?” Good pollsters don’t try to trick people into saying they agree with slogans (if they wanted to ask about whether it’s okay for white people to exist, they could have done that, but they, instead, decided to take something that the Anti-Defamation League added to its Hate Symbols Database)

This is just to say that the racist, segregationist rant Scott Adams went on, was based on a BS poll winking to the white supremacists on 4chan.

The poll did not, as Adams insists, demonstrate that some large segment of Black people in the U.S. don’t think it’s okay for white people to exist. Adams is, himself, a troll who thinks he’s a lot smarter than he actually is. He likes to babble on about “persuasion” and tongue-in-cheek nonsense where he pretended to endorse Hillary Clinton for president, arguing that if Clinton won, there would be a “race war in the United States,” in which he “would be a top-ten assassination target in that scenario because once you define Trump as Hitler, you also give citizens moral permission to kill him.”

So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.

As I have often said, I have no psychic powers and I don’t know which candidate would be the best president. But I do know which outcome is most likely to get me killed by my fellow citizens. So for safety reason, I’m on team Clinton.

You see what he tried to do there, right? He spent a whole blog post about fearing violence for being a Trump supporter and argued that a Clinton win would result in a war breaking out. He thinks he’s so clever with this reverse psychology BS, but he’s just an idiot with a comic strip. And the thing is, he couldn’t even stick to the bit. Clearly a Trump supporter from the start, he “switched” his endorsement to Trump in September 2016.

Adams is the same guy who led the charge to convince the Republican Party that Trump actually handled his remarks perfectly after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally (Trump absolutely did not, and no matter how much Adams tries to call it “the Charlottesville hoax,” he’s lying; I’ve written about this in great detail before here and here.)