It's amazing to me that intelligent people like DQ still give the trump campaign/admin any benefit of doubt when it comes to to appealing to white power groups.
It really isn't, people agree with a lot of Trump's views but his appeals to racists make them feel guilty by association. So I think it's natural to want to deny their existence.
I'm not trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. You guys saw it as nazi imagery, I didn't. Maybe he (or his team) intended it to be a dogwhistle, maybe not -- it didn't strike me as odd, but reasonable minds can differ and all of that.
I think this by definition is giving him (or his campaign) the benefit of the doubt.
Also, I legitimately think Trump is too dumb or willfully ignorant to recognize possible Nazi symbolism here, but not whoever had this designed or designed it.
Also, I think dq's resistance to calling it Nazi symbolism is more interesting than the symbolism itself. I probably wouldn't have commented if DQ hadn't tried to deny its existence.
In the post you quoted, I literally said “maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.”
Again, it didn’t strike me as odd, and but for the tweets comparing it to some nazi symbol (is that the SS logo?), I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. There were people in the thread calling the shirt “nazi propaganda” - which seemed like an exaggeration to me, given the ubiquitous “eagles holding things” symbols we see throughout 18th-20th century politics, including the seal of the United States. Can I say for certain the intentions of the person who designed this stupid shirt? No. Is there something insidious about this stupid shirt? I don’t know. Is it “nazi propaganda”? I don’t know.
To the extent “I don’t know” is perceived as some sort of defense (or benefit of the doubt) given to the shirt or the Trump administration, I’ll concede that it’s definitely 100%, inarguably nazi imagery.
Damn the Pit is exhausting sometimes.
