christiefan915
Catalyst
It is definitely a "dog whistle" word. To be fair to those of us who are aging who have used it in its older sense of a criminal strong-arm guy, I think that they maybe haven't figured out that it's the new n-word. It's always good when you see "thug" used to look at both context and the generation of the person using it.
I won't forget how the bigots put the victim on trial. That's when they started calling him a thug.