Comment by rat87

Oh sorry I might have misinterpreted your previous comment.

I don't think its totally unknown in the past although I suppose you might say it was often done with implausible deniability. As people pointed out there's a difference between being out and being openly out.

One funny example was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky (Putin's fascist clown who played the extremist to make Putin seem more reasonable, although it was probably close to his real views). Surprisingly the antisemitic Russian ultra nationalist had a Jewish father(who divorced his mother and moved to Israel when he was an infant) which he used to sort of deny it in a ridiculous manner saying his mother was Russian and his father was a lawyer