by Abdul-Hakim Shabazz, Esq.
Sometimes we find out things that are interesting but not necessarily major breaking political news. We usually save those for our social media feeds, or if it’s fun, that’s what the Cheat Sheet is for. But this one is a little different.
Are you sitting down for this one? You should be. Because of all the items I had on my 2026 Bingo card, even I didn’t have “the OK sign returns” on it.
Allow me to explain.
Paul Joseph Tinkle, a Hillsdale grad and a former State House candidate (ran in 2020 against Ed DeLaney), says the Indiana Republican Party fired him from his fieldwork job on Tuesday, Sept. 29, for making the “OK” sign in a group photo. By his account, Hamilton County GOP Chair Mario Massillamany believed Tinkle was “sabotaging his photo,” reached out to “various people,” and Tinkle was gone before he got to explain himself.
His thread has been viewed roughly 455,000 times. National commentators held it up as proof the GOP is still “firing young men” over nothing.
Massillamany tells a different story. He told me he never asked for anyone to be fired, and that the decision belonged to the state party, which hires and fires its own staff. Tinkle’s supporters say there are texts. If so, somebody should release them. Until then, it’s one man’s account against another’s.
Here’s what isn’t in dispute. The OK sign has a complicated résumé. Trolls on 4chan launched a hoax in 2017 to convince people it was a white power symbol, specifically to bait the media into overreacting. Then some actual white supremacists adopted it, including the Christchurch mosque shooter, who flashed it in court. The Anti-Defamation League added it to its hate symbol database in 2019, with a big caveat: most people who use it mean exactly what your grandmother meant. Context is everything.
If Tinkle was fired over a gesture without anyone asking him what he meant, that’s a bad process, no matter who made the call. A five-minute conversation would have settled it.
But that’s not where the story ended.
Within a day, a verified X account calling itself the “Department of Deportations,” which has 104,000 followers and has existed only since July, told Massillamany to resign and added, “No more Indians in GOP positions.” In another post it declared, “He’s the Hamilton County GOP chair. I think it’s time we change that.” Others demanded he “resign from the GOP, forever” and called for his deportation.
A few facts for the mob. Massillamany isn’t Indian. He was born in Sri Lanka and came here at age 7. He’s been an American citizen for more than 40 years. He’s also been a Republican longer than some of his critics have been alive: he was a Statehouse page for Brian Bosma in 1986. You can argue with his politics, his phone etiquette, or his judgment. His citizenship isn’t up for a vote on X.
Understood?
So let me get this straight. Thursday’s argument was that it’s outrageous to call a young man a racist over a hand gesture. Friday’s argument was that the county chairman should go because of where he was born, and they didn’t even get the country right. If you’re going to complain about being falsely accused of racism, it helps not to immediately commit some in public.
Matt McNally asked the right question on Facebook: where are the Hamilton County Republicans Massillamany helped elect? Tinkle, who has kept urging people to vote Republican, could also tell the people rallying to his side with “no more Indians” that he doesn’t need their help. And the state party, which made the firing decision, can do two things at once: explain it, and say plainly that a county chairman’s ancestry is not a disqualification.
The irony is that a gesture that means “everything’s fine” has exposed a party where things clearly aren’t.
You can’t make this stuff up folks.
Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of IndyPolitics.org and an attorney licensed in Indiana and Illinois. Although on days like this, he wonders why.
