The whole "Chinese virus" thing reminds me that so much of right-wing messaging can be boiled down to the OK sign: Do something that is obviously flaunting racism but that also has plausible deniability. When people react, play innocent. Right out of Richard Spencer's playbook.

It's honestly a genius maneuver that we simply don't know how to counter. These people can taunt you, but if you call them on it, they just show you a picture of Michelle Obama doing an OK sign.

After tiki torches and blood & soil hurt his image, Richard Spencer advocated this strategy. If your goal is to act in incredibly racist ways, the first step is to act in ways that could be construed as racist but are ambiguous and have innocent explanations.

It's not even crypto-racism because it's right there in your face. But the rules of liberal discourse have long required us to pretend that certain bad faith positions taken in the name of politics are actually real.

For way too long, we pretended to give the benefit of the doubt to obvious bullshit. This goes back way before Trump. It really took shape during the Bush years.

I think back to the adolescence of cable news, shows like Crossfire, where the hosts were expected to take bad faith positions in service of their argument. Because the point was to keep the fight going. It was a new kind of kayfabe.

And so it's fitting that Trump, who before he was president became a TV guy at his core, was the one to usher in an age of pure political kayfabe.

It's how Steve King was able to play coy for years while reciting chapter and verse from east European nazis. It's how Stephen Miller built a system of racialized cruelty but played the victim on Sunday morning media shows.

And every time I hear something like "Chinese virus," I remember I live in an age where I'm forced to swallow bullshit every day.