White Supremacists Everywhere
The greatest internet hoax of all time meets the most unlikely group of people
I’ve seen many great internet troll jobs in my time, but the award for the greatest of all time has to go to the message board 4chan for convincing liberals that the “OK” hand sign is a secret white supremacist signal. The plan for the hoax was brilliant in its simplicity; take an issue liberals already have themselves in a panic over, make up some ridiculous claim that feeds into that panic, and then flood social media with posts pushing the hoax. Fast forward to 2021, where the hoax is accepted as truth despite having been debunked dozens of times.
Belief in that hoax has popped up in the most unlikely place you could think — the beloved game show Jeopardy!. For the New York Times, Ben Smith tells the story of how contestant Kelly Donohue was falsely labeled a white supremacist because he had the misfortune of holding up three fingers in the wrong fashion. Donohue was merely trying to signify his third straight winning evening on the show but instead of holding up three fingers with his pinky and thumb touching he did so with his index and thumb fingers touching. The private Facebook group for former contestants lit up after the show aired, assuming that Donohue was making a white supremacist hand gesture on national television.
From there things went off the rails — Donohue’s social media posts were picked over, a picture of him in a MAGA hat was found, which ultimately led to 595 former contestants signing a petition letter asking why the show had not cut the offensive footage out. One former contestant went so far as to file a complaint with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which when the League replied that it did not see any evidence of white supremacy in Donohue’s actions, led to a meltdown with accusations that the ADL was gaslighting the former contestants.
Donohue gamely tried to explain that he was not a white supremacist nor was he making a white supremacist hand gesture, but I’m sure you’ve seen this movie often enough to know the next plot twist
“Mr. Donohue had tried to explain himself after the episode aired and accusations of covert white supremacy began turning up on his personal Facebook page. ‘That’s a 3. No more. No less,’ he wrote. ‘There wasn’t a hidden agenda or any malice behind it.’
His fellow former contestants responded harshly in their letter to his attempt to explain himself. ‘Most problematic to us as a contestant community is the fact that Kelly has not publicly apologized for the ramifications of the gesture he made,’ they wrote. That prompted him to ‘reject and condemn white supremacy’ in a second statement.”
The question I had when I first heard of this controversy; how do smart and, as Smith assures us several times, very nice people go completely bonkers over an internet hoax? All it took was a wrongly interpreted hand gesture, a picture of Donohue in a MAGA hat, and it was off to the races with no other evidence that any of the people involved knew for a fact that Donohue was a white supremacist. Even worse, when confronted with the facts of the story the former contestants that participated in this witch hunt did not apologize but instead doubled down, insisting that the show should have preemptively removed the content in order to avoid any controversy.
(rich coming from people complaining about being gaslit, no?)
What happened here is a toxic mix of misinformation, assumption, and panic over a wildly overinflated threat. It’s the last part of that mix that fascinates me — for some reason, liberals have taken it as truth that white supremacy is a major threat to...well I’m not sure what exactly. That is why 4chan targeted this hoax at liberals, the posters knew they would be the ones to fall for it because of their prior assumptions about society and the prevalence of white supremacy in it.
I don’t understand this belief — yes of course there are actual white supremacists but we’re not talking millions or even hundreds of thousands of people who hold those beliefs, yet the belief that white supremacists are everywhere has become prevalent in certain circles. Donohue’s case isn’t one of labeling someone a white supremacist because that is the insult du jour, these people genuinely believed that he was a white supremacist because he made a certain hand gesture. Once that assumption was made, any sort of good faith toward Donohue went out the window.
That is the root problem, both in this situation and so many others; the lack of good faith and the refusal to accept any explanation that doesn’t confirm one’s snap assumptions. Those who signed the protest letter saw what they wanted to see and aren’t interested in any other explanation. Fortunately, patience for such behavior seems to be wearing thin — when even the New York Times thinks these folks have gone off the deep end, that’s a sign.