Why the Indiana GOP Fired This Worker
A former Indiana Republican Party employee said he was fired for making the “OK” symbol with his fingers while posing for a team picture.
So a guy makes a circle with his thumb and pointer finger in a team picture. Now he's out of a job. The Indiana Republican Party fired him over the "OK" symbol, and honestly, the whole thing should make every conservative pause.
Commentary is separate from the original publisher's reporting.
A former Indiana Republican Party employee said he was fired for making the “OK” symbol with his fingers while posing for a team picture.
Paul Joseph Tinkle detailed his experience in a thread on X. “This Tuesday, September 29th, I was fired by the Indiana Republican Party for making an OK symbol with my fingers,” he wrote.
I am shocked and upset that a universal human symbol was treated as anything but a friendly gesture. I decided to search online about OK. The Anti-Defamation League stated “Since 2017, many people have been falsely accused of being racist or white supremacist for using the ‘okay’ gesture in its traditional and innocuous sense.”
On Saturday, September 26th, I was at a door-knocking event in Hamilton County. We took several group photos. I was at the front of the group, and asked to hold a sign, which I was quickly told to put away and hide as it said “Trump endorsed candidate”.
Having nothing to do with my hands, I made an OK sign to convey positive vibes. Sunday morning, I was told the Hamilton county chair believed I was sabotaging his photo with the 👌. The Hamilton county chair reached out to various people, and despite my explanation, I was fired on Tuesday morning.
Tinkle noted that he “was not even allowed to attend the meeting on my future with the INGOP” and that he “never even got to defend myself to the person who made the firing decision, nor to the Hamilton county chair.”
Tinkle explained that he’d worked as an English teacher in Japan for three years and that “every kid in Japan knew the term and symbol” and that he “would regularly use it along with the hand sign to help me communicate with my students.”
1/ I wanted to give a career update for my friends and any potential conservative groups looking for an employee. This Tuesday, September 29th, I was fired by the Indiana Republican Party for making an OK symbol with my fingers. Yes, seriously. (1/8)
The notion that flashing the “OK” symbol is a white supremacist dog whistle dates back almost a decade, when leftists were concocting new ways to label their political opponents as racists.
It began when some social media users pulled off an internet prank in which they ironically claimed the symbol was racist as a joke. The left picked up on it, believing it to be real, and ran with it even after it was revealed to be satirical.
We are apparently still doing the "the OK symbol is a white supremacist symbol" thing.
The Anti-Defamation League claimed the gesture “acquired a new and different significance” in 2017 “thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol.”
Since then, folks on the left have gleefully called anyone who flashed the symbol a white supremacist (unless it was someone on their political team, of course). It appears the Indiana GOP has bought into the false narrative, which resulted in Tinkle losing his job.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
So a guy makes a circle with his thumb and pointer finger in a team picture. Now he's out of a job. The Indiana Republican Party fired him over the "OK" symbol, and honestly, the whole thing should make every conservative pause.
We know the gesture has been co-opted by trolls on the fringe. We know because the media tells us so, constantly. But context matters, and there is no context here except a smiling employee in a group photo. For every bad actor who uses that hand sign as a wink, there are a million normal Americans who use it to mean "all good." Firing a staffer over that doesn't make the party look careful. It makes the party look terrified. If the left can cancel a Republican employee over a gesture half the country makes at the grocery store, they'll do it to all of us.
What did the party actually think he meant? They didn't say. They just cut him loose and hoped the story would go away. Cancel culture took a Republican scalp, and the GOP handed over the knife. That's the part that stings. We don't expect any favors from the left. We do expect our own side to act like it believes in innocence until proven guilty.
Conservatives say we judge people by the content of their character, not by a single frame of a photo. This looks like the opposite. We wring our hands about mob rule, then let a mob over a harmless hand sign run a party chairman's office. A party that throws its own people away over a gesture isn't standing for anything except its own survival. If Indiana Republicans want to be somebody's moral enforcer, they're going to run out of staffers real quick.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.