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Comment by heartbreak | Hacker News Reader

Trump's Twitter retweet, literally last night. He retweeted a racist dogwhistle from an Alt Right personality hours after Trump supposedly condemned them.

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For those of us who don't follow his every twitter move, which tweet are you referring to?

He retweeted this last night: https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/897107711434915842

That's racist? How is pointing out an ongoing bloodbath in Chicago, where most victims are not well-to-do fellow "white supremists", racist? To be fair you have to admit Trump has a lot more on his mind than just one white supremacist rally and he's been trying to get involved in Chicago's violence since before the election.

He hasn't been trying to get involved, he's done fuck all except tweet about it and use it as a dog whistle to talk about how insane those blacks in Chicago are at his bizarre post-election rallies.

But he has a black friend who will fix Chicago violence in a week!!

There is a big difference between ongoing gang violence and a terrorist attack. They are both problems, yes, but a terrorist attack by a Nazi during a public demonstration is by far bigger news.

Yeah it's called a dog whistle. A white supremacist killed a woman in Charlottesville last weekend, but look what black people did in Chicago.

The content of the tweet is noise, it's the source of the tweet that is the signal and the message re-tweeting a tweet from that source sends.

That's classic whataboutism and incorrect as well. There's been plenty of media coverage about the Chicago gang violence (and other inner city gang violence) over the years. Political protests, as well as terrorist acts, do tend to receive more intense coverage than ongoing systematic violence.

I don't know about this Twitter account, but I do personally consider it racist when reporting or discussions are angled to only report ethnic group targets (or other tribes) negatively. Whataboutism like this is also a signal to me.

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