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Coast Guard Backtracks on Swastika Policy Change After ‘Fake’ WaPo Report

“Information has impact,” the Washington Post has insisted. And on Thursday, the paper showed how quickly its reporting could lead to results. At the same time, it got labeled as a purveyor of fake news because of the change it led to.
“U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses as hate symbols,” the Post reported, citing publicly available updated guidelines set to take effect Dec. 15 that revised the description of the Nazi insignia and representation of lynchings to “potentially divisive.” […]
Tara Copp, one of the two reporters of the Post story, said on X that the Coast Guard initially did not respond to requests for comment, but after publication, a Coast Guard spokesperson said that the Armed Forces branch disagreed with the story and that it would look into the policy and “will be reviewing the language” that apparently downgrades the classification of these symbols. Lunday also reportedly sent an email to the force afterwards that emphasized the symbols remained “prohibited.”
“The claims that the U.S. Coast Guard will no longer classify swastikas, nooses or other extremist imagery as prohibited symbols are categorically false,” Lunday said in a statement posted on X. “These symbols have been and remain prohibited in the Coast Guard per policy.”

But they weren’t claiming that, though. They were claiming the Coast Guard wouldn’t call them hate symbols, not that they wouldn’t necessarily prohibit them…

…and they’re right about that, the Coast Guard’s booklet on harrassing behaviour distinctly calls them “potentially divisive”. I know, because I got a PDF of that booklet via TruthOut, whose article on the story links to it, and took that screenshot of it myself. Anyway, the Time article notes that the Coast Guard have rather hastily issued a new policy confirming they actually do consider those things hate symbols and tut-tutting the Washington Post for its dastardly lying… but was it, or were the CG scared into backflipping? Well, one Democratic senator is unconvinced:

And the guidelines I screenshotted above did refer to the swastika as merely “potentially divisive”, so whatever the new policy may say, that was the language used in the document that was still available as of 7:42pm AEST when I downloaded it from the Coast Guard website. In any case I don’t think TrumpCorp actually care about antisemitism per se and the hysteria about it in recent times has only really been to keep in with Israel; after all, they’re demonstrably unconcerned about any other sort of bigotry cos so many of their policies rely on it…