They Know Exactly What They’re Doing When They Do It
It’s a signal.
Their faces are smiling.
Are their eyes?
Smiling has never come easily for me, and I have trouble reading people’s facial expressions sometimes. I’ve learned to focus on people’s eyes. They never lie. So when I look at this holiday photo from Rep. Thomas Massie, tweeted days after yet another school shooting, a resounding no echoes through my head. Their eyes aren’t smiling. Their eyes strike me as cold and dead. Their smiles look a little too big. Their teeth are showing a little too much. They send an entirely different message.
This isn’t innocuous. It’s propaganda.
It’s a dog whistle.
Republicans speak in dog whistles.
There’s a reason why the far right gets away with so much, and it’s because they know the art of the dog whistle.
It’s political shorthand for a phrase that may sound innocuous to some people, but which also communicates something more insidious either to a subset of the audience or outside of the audience’s conscious awareness — a covert appeal to some noxious set of views.
Ian Olasov, Vox
