Fired by Hamilton County GOP for the OK sign. OK’d by Turning Point for the job.

Turning Point hired Paul Joseph Tinkle who was recently fired by woke Hamilton County Chairman Mario Massillamany who clubs at gay bars

Fishers, Indiana; The Indiana Republican Party did not lose Paul Joseph Tinkle to a better offer or a difference over policy. It lost him because Hamilton County GOP Chair Mario Massillamany decided an ordinary hand gesture was a firing offense, then denied he had anything to do with the result.

Tinkle has worked Republican campaigns in this state since he was sixteen. He is a Hillsdale graduate, a former state House candidate, and until September 29 a field operative for the party. On September 26 he was door-knocking in Hamilton County. In the group photo that followed he was told to hide a sign noting a Trump endorsement. With nothing else to do with his hands he made the circle-and-fingers sign that has meant “all good” on American sidelines, in American classrooms, and in the Japanese schools where he spent three years teaching English under a U.S. embassy program. By Tuesday he was fired. A text from a state supervisor, reviewed by Blaze News, recorded the reason in plain language: “Mario thinks you dropped a white power symbol and no one will be able to convince him otherwise.”

Massillamany’s public account is that he merely forwarded anonymous concerns, pulled the photo out of an abundance of caution, and was “not instrumental” in the termination. He has also said he did not know what the sign was. Those statements do not survive contact with the supervisor’s text or with Tinkle’s account that Massillamany was angry and had already reached the top of the party. A chairman whose view is described as immovable does not get to treat the firing as an act of nature.

Mario Massillamany who has a law license in the State of Indiana. H.E. confirmed Mario to be proactively at gay clubs while pretending to be a conservative Republican as Hamilton County GOP Chairman.

The same chairman has been explicit about what he wants the Hamilton County party to become. In interviews he has called for more diversity, more women candidates, and deliberate recruitment from Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Hispanic, and Indian communities. He has described criticism of Secretary of State Diego Morales as racist on the grounds that Morales is a short Hispanic man from Guatemala with an accent. When asked by Blaze News about those diversity priorities, he hung up. Demographic sensitivity is the governing standard when it serves the coalition he prefers. Demographic suspicion is the governing standard when a local volunteer who has knocked doors for a decade uses his hands the way Americans have used them for generations.

The gesture itself was never the point. In 2017 an online troll campaign labeled the ordinary “OK” sign a white-power emblem for the specific purpose of producing exactly this overreaction. The Anti-Defamation League has since noted that large numbers of people have been falsely accused for employing it in its traditional sense. A party that still believes its own voters are the majority does not enforce the troll’s dictionary. It ignores the panic and keeps the volunteer. Massillamany and the state apparatus that acted on his view chose the other course, then argued over who placed the call.

Tinkle has said he remains a loyal conservative and will still support the Republican ticket. Turning Point Action has already offered him work in Indiana. That is the difference between an organization that still wants people who will carry the signs and a county chair who scans the photographs for forbidden shapes. Reagan’s Republicans did not expand their majority by adopting their opponents’ purity tests and applying them more harshly to their own side. They refused the premise. Indiana voters are not demanding a party more fluent in nine-year-old internet hoaxes. They are demanding one that stops discarding its own people to satisfy them. The texts, the timeline, and the denial show who made that choice.

This article was written by Hoosier, for Hoosiers.