Yes I absolutely get that. And to stand next to him, but not imitate him. When Democrats go down on at knee in the Capital then you know the gesture has been stolen.

The hashtags, kneeling and placard-waving protests are the bona fides. They are the means with which to signal ones conformity. Beyond that I do not think they serve any function. People were repeating the hashtag #defundthepolice, for instance, before they even understood what it entailed. When a protester asked the mayor of Minneapolis if he would “defund the police”, he tried to confirm if that meant abolishing the police. Upon finding out that #defundthepolice in fact meant abolish the police, he said he disagreed and was booed out of the area.

These expressions resemble the “duckspeak” of Orwell‘s 1984: “pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc”. “It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck”.