Are Fidget Spinners the Newest Symbol of White Supremacy?

Topic starter

[Some context, 4chan/pol is trying to turn all sorts of things into "hate symbols" from the "OK" hand gesture to the rainbow flag and the Washington Post logo, now this.]

Fidget spinners are this years hottest toy trend. It’s a little top that spins in a child’s hand to distract from the harsh realities of the cruel, uncaring world around them.

And already this Tickle-Me-Elmo tier toy trend is getting super political.

Rebecca Mead at The New Yorker called the fidget spinner the “embodiment” of Trump-era values.

“The fidget spinner, it could be argued, is the perfect toy for the age of Trump,” Mead wrote. “Unlike the Tamagotchi, it does not encourage its owner to take anyone else’s feelings or needs into account. Rather, it enables and even encourages the setting of one’s own interests above everyone else’s. It induces solipsism, selfishness, and outright rudeness. It does not, as the Rubik’s Cube does, reward higher-level intellection.”

Normally, a top is a toy requiring collaboration with the material world. It requires a substrate on which to spin, be it the hard earth of ancient Iraq or the molded-plastic IKEA table in a modern flat. As a toy, the top grounds physics, like a lightning rod grounds electricity. And in this collaboration, the material world always wins. Eventually, the top falls, succumbing to gravity, laying prone on the dirt.

Not so, the fidget spinner. It is a toy for the hand alone—for the individual. Ours is not an era characterized by collaboration between humans and earth—or Earth, for that matter. Whether through libertarian self-reliance or autarchic writ, human effort is first seen as individual effort—especially in the West.

But the fidget spinner could mean something even worse than Trump-era values and libertarian principles. The fidget may be a symbol of white supremacy.

Yep, the evidence is piling up and there are clues everywhere. For instance this spinner kind of looks like a swastika.