Last night during his train wreck of a “town hall” on CNN, President Joe Biden flashed the “okay ” sign at one point while giving a weird whispered response to a question from an audience member in the invitation-only crowd about what percentage he felt the wealthy should be paying in taxes in order to be paying their “fair share.”
“Now, here’s the deal, though. You have 55 corporations, for example, in the United States of America, making over $40 billion, don’t pay a cent — not a single little red cent,” Biden claimed as part of his answer.
You can watch a short video clip of it here, but it’s also been preserved as a screengrab considering what we’ve been told over the last decade or so about how the “okay” sign was supposedly a white power symbol (but only when white Republicans use it):
The popular Twitter account “Libs of Tik Tok” took the viral moment and immortalized it in a tweet (and in a now-deleted Instagram post), stating that Biden “flashed the white power sign” to a black man who had asked the question, while noting they were “literally shaking” over the moment in what was clearly meant to be a mockery of all the nuttiness in the past we’ve heard from our supposed intellectual betters about the “okay” sign:
You will not believe this (or perhaps you will, considering the source), but the Democrat apologists at Politifact actually took it upon themselves to “fact check” the “Libs of Tik Tok” claim. We’ll get into the meat of the “fact check” in a minute, but I also wanted to share the tweet because it shows the clear panic they felt over the extremely remote possibility that many people would take the tweet seriously:
LOL – A “Pants on Fire” ruling for a tweet that was clearly satire. Far from first time fact-checkers have gone after satirical claims, and won’t be the last, unfortunately, for the humorless scolds.
After giving a brief overview/recap of the LoTT posts, Politifact first pointed out that the post was “flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed” before practically Zaprudering a video of the exchange. They then proceeded to make the use of the “okay” sign great again by issuing a “word of caution” to people who would see it (aka liberals, not that they noted that, of course) and automatically think “racism”:
First, a word of caution about interpreting that gesture as a white power gesture. According to the Anti-Defamation League, in 2017, members of the website 4chan falsely claimed that it represented the letters “WP” for “white power.”
“The hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist,” the Anti-Defamation League says in this article explaining the gesture. While overwhelmingly people use the gesture to signify assent or approval, “as well as other usages unrelated to white supremacy,” the league says, it has also been used as a sincere expression of white supremacy.
In this case, however, the context makes clear that Biden is using the gesture to illustrate the number zero, as in how many cents he said some corporations pay in taxes.
Wow. So NOW “context matters.” Isn’t that great? And it just so happens that context suddenly “matters” when a Democrat does it. It didn’t, however, matter for the last 10 years or so when politicians and sometimes random dudes on the street or on TV flashed it and got attacked, smeared, and in some cases canceled by online outrage mobs.
These so-called “fact-checkers” couldn’t be more transparent about their bias if they tried. Oh wait, they’ve actually been transparent about that, too – quite by accident.
You literally cannot make this stuff up. You simply can’t. I am just so done with these people. So done.