You know, when a kid walks into the house holding a dog turd the details of where they found it or what sort of dog left it there are not very compelling.
For example, SPLC seems to entertain the claim that the association of the “ok” gesture with white nationalism originated as a 4chan hoax to “trigger the libs” (eg not as a genuine white nationalist hand gesture but merely as tomfoolery intended to provoke a moral panic), but may have later been appropriated by some white nationalists. (https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/09/18/ok-sign-white...)
I hope you’re not implying
You’re also missing the larger point
You’re certainly not engaging in anything
It's just the OK hand gesture [made with the left hand?].
Or, perhaps all scuba divers are racist.
The 'It's OK to be white' thing works because they're taking one side of an issue and devolving it into something so basic that it's impossible to refute. By associating something irrefutable like "It's OK to be white" (which only the most blatant racist would argue against) with all their other more controversial positions, they're basically setting a trap that you have to carefully maneuver around instead of being able to just bluntly refute their point with logic or facts.
The misandry thing seems like something else. Like other extreme positions, it's existence benefits the opposition more than the more mild supporters on their side. It's just a low hanging fruit that the opposition can use to snipe more mild supporters by association. Similar to how the left can take potshots at actual Nazis to discredit conservative positions.
I think “it’s OK to be white” is literally just a slogan used to troll people. Developed and reasoned arguments are not the point. The point is the layered irony. Layer 1 is the literal meaning. Layer 2 is this particular slogan being proposed by a white nationalist as a white nationalist slogan. Layer 3 is the notion that the white nationalist himself is merely a prankster inventing the Layer 2 narrative from whole cloth. Hence, you have a perfect troll because people will argue about this slogan and talk past each other because they are on different layers of irony.
Misandry Tumblr has different layers:
1. The author of this Tumblr unironically hates men.
2. Anti-feminists unfairly and hyperbolically accuse feminists of misandry. The author of this feminist Tumblr reclaims the term ironically. (Parallel: “deplorables”.)
So you get some people saying “hey, look, all of those feminists really do hate men!” because they missed the ironic aspect of misandry, while the ironic misandrists reply “none of us actually hate men”, denying and covering for the unironic misandrists. But maybe some of the unironic misandrists are still being ironic, but just excessively committed to never acknowledging the irony in a weird kayfabe sense. That way, they can basically gatekeep the conversation to keep it between people who are hip to the irony. But then the truly unironic misandrists can still slither into the community under assumption of good faith, and end up talking past their own purported allies.
In a sense, I think the “white nationalist dog whistle” troll is another gatekeeping mechanism. If you’re on the level of irony where you’re not a white nationalist but you like tweaking moral panics over white nationalism, you get to have a chuckle at the panicking progressives who take it unironically. If you are a white nationalist, you are almost as much a butt of the joke as the panicking progressive, but you have a similar smokescreen as the unironic Tumblr misandrist. Unless the original joker really was a white nationalist at which point he gets to chuckle at the naive useful idiots who are giving him this free smokescreen.
This is called a "motte and bailey" argument. It's a favorite of bad-faith debaters.
For example, there’s occasional moral panics about white supremacist dog-whistles, like Pepe the frog or the hand gesture. Of course, it’s also the hand gesture for a three point shot in basketball, so you have all kinds of sarcastic “Steph Curry is a white supremacist” memes about it. (Dog whistles in general are, 80% of the time, a moral panic anyway.)
I don’t know if this is how that particular gesture got that association, but trolls (who are possibly white supremacists) will sometimes deliberately invent absurdly innocuous dog whistles, like the phrase “it’s OK to be white”, just to provoke the moral panic from the other side and to force them into absurd rhetorical positions. The metagame being that, maybe they actually are white supremacist dog whistles, depending on how ironically the coiners of them adhere to white supremacism.
There’s a similar reaction in some left-wing circles, eg the “misandrist” sphere of Tumblr, which seems partly comprised of feminists who ironically claim the term “misandry” because they are accused of it by their opponents and also partly composed of feminists who unironically hate men.
It’s not just political either. I kind of suspect a lot of the conspiracy or flat earth stuff is just disingenuous trolling or LARPing. I mean, some people are kooks, but other people just pretend to be for fun.