👌 is still 'OK', says Mr Stephen Fry

Have you, dear reader, heard that making the universal ‘OK’ hand sign is no longer kosher? If not, you are behind the eight ball and better smarten up, post-haste, capisce? Because the ‘OK’ sign is now the property of the Neo-Nazi and symbolises ‘white power’!

At least, this is the world according to regressive left wing PC-brigadiers and self-appointed moral constabularies of the internet, traversing cyberspace ready to flick on the outrage engine. And, unfortunately, also a large swathe of the journalism trade and political set.

The ADL explains the hoax on their website

The New York Times, what used to be a newspaper, saw fit to publish an article darkly hinting that two conservative (‘far right’ as the NYT likes to say, though never defining what they mean by it – as far as I can tell, anyone the NYT editorial board does not like) Estonian ministers, who flashed the ‘OK’ sign at their swearing-in ceremony, might be white supremacists. 

The Chicago Cubs took the brave step to ban one of their fans for life who dared to flash the sign on camera. Kathy Griffin, on the Covington scandal, posted a photo of some Covington school basketball players throwing up 'the sign', proving they are Nazis. Like the other famous white supremacists in the NBA such as James Harden, Stephen Curry, Kyrie Irving, Lebron James and Dwyane Wade.

Linking the ‘OK’ sign to ‘white power’ came about as a (rather obvious) hoax on 4chan in 2017, by trolls meaning to bait precisely such people who are temperamentally forever on the precipice of rage and sanity. And they swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Like Mrs Lovejoy, many have started insisting on censoring the sign (for the good of the children, of course). But, even the fact that it might be used by some fringe extreme right wing nuts does not mean that 99.9% of society should simply give up something universally acknowledged as meaning ‘OK’.

Eager to surrender any and every cultural property to the most minor of a speckle of a fetus of a group who might claim it for ill use, these people are at best useful idiots for the extreme right wing. What’s next? Ban ‘fairy’ because some people use it to insult gays? Ban painting because Hitler was a painter? Ban Shakespeare because at the end of Sonnet XII he wrote:

And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence

   Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence. 

Which might offend people who don’t want or can’t have children?

The vast majority of people who are sensibly getting on with their lives don’t really care about this facetiousness. But the media, who should have mocked this to death, or simply ignored it as the non-issue it is, decide to, like the examples above, take it seriously. They are unself-consciously acting like megaphones for the fringe right wing and making an Everest out of a mole hill.

Stephen Fry, the famous British comic, actor and writer, who has bi-polar disorder, in promoting Mental Health Week, tweeted a picture of himself doing the ‘OK’ sign, with the line ‘Are you A.O.K?’. Fry is a gay, Jewish liberal who is about as innocuous as you can get. The internet-scouring thought police came after even him, accusing him of white supremacy, leading him to reply:

‘PS: I really will not allow the simple 👌 gesture to belong to the moronic dogwhistling catfishing foghorning frogmarching pigsticking d***waving few who attempt to appropriate it for their own fatuous fantasies.’

Bravo Mr Fry! Rem acu tetigisti as he himself might have said. 

The thing about dog-whistles is that you have to be a dog to hear the whistle. These people, especially the media, who poise their ears eagerly for offence and who are so willing to perform mental gymnastics to ‘find’ offence like bloodhounds to a carrion, are a boil on the face of society and should be lanced, drained and properly dressed. They have shown how mean spirited they can be in the face of their own perceived power. If they can come after Stephen Fry for using the OK sign, they can come after you for the most inoffensive thing tomorrow. 

The people who have been making these kinds of flippant accusations, including the media, have been allowed to get away with it with no repercussions. But decent people, like Burke’s scores of great cattle, usually are silent, whereas the half-dozen crickets make all the noise. The massively left leaning media, social platforms and search engines, and education system, which have been consistently shifting further to the left, are all trying to shamelessly shape public opinion with emotional blackmail guised as tolerance and inclusivity, whereas what they sow is a ruthless brand of ‘with us or against us’ tribalism that negates conversations on any worthwhile topic and actively creates divisions, where none existed before, such as the OK sign. They either fail to realise their own extremist elements or do anything to condemn them, allowing the tail to wag the dog. 

But when push comes to shove, decent people, like Fry, will and should use the sharp edge of humour and irony to reveal the utter ridiculousness of those who think they can bully others, while riding their imaginary moral high horse, into thinking like a herd.

The recent spate of similar smear cases, like Covington, Liam Neeson, and Sir Roger Scruton, as well as the case of Jussie Smollett, all exploding in the face of a hyper-reactionary media and mob ravenous for blood, have rightly revealed their complete lack of principle and ethics.

Unsurprisingly, the quiet, decent people have begun to react. Trust in the media is shrinking. You may not hear it in the media but CNN’s viewership dropped 26% after their incessant pushing of Trump’s Russian collusion came to nothing after a 2 year, multi-million dollar investigation. The report, driven by Muller, who clearly dislikes Trump, is available for all to see and even the unredacted form available to congress members who wishes to see it, yet the media is still demanding transparency. Likewise, far leftist media outlets like Buzzfeed, Vice, Huffington Post and others, have been laying off thousands of staff.

 Good riddance to bad rubbish 👌.