Member-only story
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
Dog whistles allow politicians and talking heads on mainstream news to send messages to their evangelical and white supremacist supporters without attracting anyone else’s attention.
It sounds almost like a conspiracy theory, except it’s a well-known practice going back decades. Speech writers and staffers have referred to it plenty of times, talking about how they use obscure terms or phrases when they want to make racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise hateful remarks to score political points with their base. Meanwhile, they maintain a level of plausible deniability if anyone ever tries to call them out.
It’s almost genius.
Dog whistles encourage violence.
These politicians and pundits don’t just use obscure terminology, they also use vague metaphorical language that invites certain listeners to apply the most violent interpretations possible. They don’t tell anyone what to do. They describe hypothetical situations where someone…
