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The South Bend Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge #36, recently posted this image to their Facebook page:

You will note the Santa in the lower-right corner is making That Gesture. This was posted to bring attention to the police union’s Elficers program, which is a toy and food Thanksgiving donation thing.

You can probably write the rest of this post on your own.

I believe the following things:

That’s a stock image, and was found by someone Googling “Cool Santa.”
That there is no real reason to believe that the image itself was meant as a stealth white power thing. Now, blah blah blah deniability and all that, I understand the point of why these assholes adopted this gesture, but still. I feel like that’s probably innocuous.
I’m a little less willing to cut whoever chose the image the same amount of slack, but I’m still willing in principle to cut them said slack, depending on how they react to being told about the image.

Go ahead, take a guess. What do you think happened when the local police union was told that the Santa they picked to help promote their Thanksgiving charity drive was making a racist gesture?

I’ll give you a minute.

Did you choose “double down” of fucking course they doubled down:

So, uh, here’s the thing, guys: It would’ve taken y’all less than ten minutes, max, to redo that image with any other Santa on that Google search list. There is no reason– no reason at all— to get defensive about that one. It’s a fucking stock photo. There are hundreds of other available images to choose from. You could have replaced the image, issued a literal two-sentence apology (“It was brought to our attention that a portion of this image featured a gesture many find offensive, which was not our intention. We apologize and have replaced the picture.”) and been done. Everybody would have forgotten about it in no time flat and, well, there wouldn’t be an article in the Goddamned paper about it today. I wouldn’t even know about it, and I wouldn’t be posting this today.

But nah, y’all couldn’t do that, could you?

And that is what makes it clear that y’all are racist as fuck. Because now there’s no deniability. Because you were told that Santa was making a racist gesture and you could have fixed it in seconds and instead your response is “Nah, it’s fine, fuck y’all.”

ACAB, even when they don’t have to be.

DmR4hllU8AIQdfa.jpg-large.jpeg Let’s talk about this asshole for a second, and the shape her hand’s making. Would I rather be talking about something else? Yeah, probably. Should this be a series of Twitter posts and not a blog post? Well, maybe. Am I still sick, and is this what I’ve come up with for tonight? Yeah. It’s my blog, so if I wanna waste time on nonsense I can.

The following things can all be true at the same time, and the majority of them are undeniable fact:

The woman making the gesture in the picture is of Mexican and Jewish heritage, which would make one think she, generally speaking, is rather unlikely to be a white supremacist;
but she still works for Brett Kavanaugh, so in this particular case “she can’t possibly think that because of her racial background” is, shall we say, somewhat less sound reasoning than it might otherwise be;
One can be Latinx and white at the same time! The identities can overlap! You can absolutely be Mexican, white, and a white supremacist at the same time.
You can also be Jewish and a white supremacist! Ever heard of Jared Kushner, son in law to the person in the White House? Hitler his fucking self was a quarter Jewish, for God’s sake.
I know how photographs work, and I know that sitting in one seat for hours with cameras trained in your general vicinity can lead to all sorts of ridiculousness. It is entirely possible that she’s popping a zit in this picture.
4chan originated the idea that this gesture meant “white power” as a troll move a couple of years ago;
but since then it has started to be used by actual, non-ironic white supremacists;
and part of the point is that it, as a fairly common gesture, will always be deniable. That you will always be able to find pictures of, oh, Barack Obama making the same hand gesture and point at it and go “See!” and you can always make anyone making an issue of the white supremacist flashing white supremacist hand signs look foolish, by laying out the precise chain of reasoning I’ve set out above. That’s. The. Fucking. Point.

So: Do I think that Brett Kavanaugh has white supremacists working for him, and do I believe that Kavanaugh himself may be one? Absolutely. 100%.

Do I believe that this woman is, herself, a white supremacist? Except insofar as it would not surprise me for any member of Kavanaugh’s staff to be one, I had never heard of this lady yesterday and will have forgotten about her tomorrow. So maybe! Maybe not! I dunno.

Did this woman deliberately decide to take the time out of the however-long-she-had-to-sit-there to randomly and quietly flash a white supremacist hand sign at the cameras? Ehh. Try as hard as I might, I can’t figure out what the point might have been of doing something like that, and, importantly: it doesn’t really fucking matter, because they’re about to steal another fucking Supreme Court seat.

The end. I’m going to bed.