#146 Politics, Discourse, and Dog Whistles

April 3, 2019

What’s a dog whistle? Non-metaphorically, it’s just a whistle used for communicating with dogs. It’s only special feature is that it emits sounds above the human audible spectrum. In other words, it’s a whistle that dogs can hear, but humans can’t. However, the notion of a dog whistle has become a metaphor for words and phrases alleged to have special meanings for specific groups; such “dog whistles”, it’s alleged, make it possible to communicate “hateful” ideas with those groups (the “dogs”) without the rest of us, the “woke” and “near woke”, being aware of it. Leftist activists have made the “dog whistle” accusation an attack against any speech not consistent with their agenda. The “dog whistle” accusation is an attempt to cripple discourse, to make discussion or debate or even mere conversation impossible.

The “dog whistle” meme has a long genealogy. Words and phrases have often been used for special social or political purposes. Possibly the earliest example of such a usage that of the password, as in the well-known “shibboleth” of biblical fame. But there have also been groups who if not at war, have been clandestine. Such groups invented such membership identifiers as secret handshakes, signs, symbols, and even names. Peoples have always faced the challenge of identifying each other in public spaces. Probably best known of such are the Freemasons, but the use of such identifiers ranges across many more groups. Any group looked at with suspicion or worse has been accused of having such, so Jews were thought to have them, Knights Templar, homosexuals, witches, communists, and members of the Cosa Nostra among many, many others. People have always been hostile to “others” in their midst and those “others” have almost always found ways of keeping their “otherness” secret. Secret identifiers were a necessary way of allowing themselves to function without attracting the attention of their their hostile hosts.

But while the use of secret identifiers served the “others” group in question, it was quickly understood to have another deadly use as well. The others, on the one hand, used the identifiers to recognize their fellows, but the members of the host group, on the other, could use the mere idea of the existence of such identifiers as a weapon against anyone at all. The assumption of the existence of secret identifiers was actually a gift to paranoiacs and malevolent actors capitalizing on (sometimes justified) popular fears. The fact that the identifiers were necessarily secret made this use of secret identifiers a perfect weapon. In fact, it was soon clear that any group could be accused of using secret identifiers, whether or not they were; after all, the identifiers were secret, that is, invisible. Any sign, symbol, hand-motion, facial expression, etc. could be singled out by a malevolent actor and attributed to any group as evidence of their secret, malevolent conspiracies.

But up till now, I have been talking about the weaponizing of putative secret identifiers by a host against a clandestine group within it. It should be clear that the clandestine group was not characteristically using the identifiers as a weapon against the host, even when it was an enemy of the host; rather, the existence of possible identifiers was used by the host or elements within it against some sub-group in the population (real or not).

But this is not the end of the story. Once a weapon is used, it becomes accessible to everyone, even to the targets it had previously been directed against.

This has happened in a BIG way with Socialists in the United States. They were once accused of using secret words and phrases to identify one another (and probably were). They were the “other” group within a larger host. But no more.

The “love that dare not speak its name” has now become mainstream. No, I’m not talking about homosexuality, that’s been mainstream for the past twenty years. Hell, it’s not even mainstream now, it’s privileged mainstream. No, I’m talking about … Socialism!

Socialism has come out of the closet, and it’s come dressed for war. And one of its main weapons is the secret identifier accusation. But now the secret handshake has been turned around to become the “secret coded message.” Since the 1920s the West has been seriously nervous about embedded Socialist cohorts and has attacked whomever it suspected (often correctly) of being a Soviet agent. These agents were thought of as using secret methods of communication which included secret identifiers. Socialists, therefore, were the targets of the secret identifier weapon.

When a host turned on one of its groups this way using the identifier accusation, the purpose was to turn one or more people into enemies of the host. You used the secret sign X, this means you’re a Socialist; Socialists want to take our savings and give them to their supporters. In this usage of the weapon, the host remains intact, the unwanted others are “justifiably” killed, jailed, or exiled.

But with Socialism, the others worm has turned. The Socialist uses the secret identifier accusation against the host and much more, he extends the concept of the secret identifier to that of the secret coded message.The Socialist claims that people of the host are sending secret coded evil messages to their supporters, messages that the good and decent people cannot hear or see.

This is a strategy aimed at a central Socialist objective.

That objective is to wreck the nation-state in which he resides. He goes about this by breaking down any and all unifying systems of value, narrative, and myth. He attacks the dominant and formative religion of the nation-state (in this case Christianity); he attacks the values of patriotism and family; he attacks all of the state’s existing identity structures; he attacks by dividing wherever he finds unity. Men and women have unity in sex and family: turn women against men, destroy the white male identity as far as possible. Turn the poor against the rich. Turn the black against the white. Whatever common ground you find within the society, wreck it.

The objective is to reduce a society to it’s constituent particles: it’s solitary individuals.

Socialists have been at this for a long time. This is the real purpose of “identity politics.”

Using a metaphor from chemistry, Socialism can be thought of as a decomposition reaction catalyst. A catalyst is a chemical which generates a chemical reaction in other chemicals without being itself changed. A decomposition reaction is the breakdown of a chemical substance into its constituent parts.

Take any successful, prosperous, cohesive society with shared values and a shared understanding of its own history and mythologies, place it in a beaker, add Socialism, and watch the bubbling and steaming begin. The society begins as an organic whole, a form of life, and it ends as a lifeless aggregate of inorganic elements decomposed on the beaker’s floor.

Now, how does the Socialism catalyst work?

The Socialist has clearly understood that the power of the coded message accusation comes from the fact that it is secret. The accused says in vain that he was “just shaking hands! No message! Nothing!”. Since coded messages are necessarily secret, the accuser can easily respond: “Of course, you’d say that, we couldn’t see the secrets in the handshake.” It is the secrecy that is the secret essential ingredient in the coded message accusation.

Understanding this fact about coded messages, the Socialist has deployed an entirely new and far more devastating version of the weapon: the (drum roll) … Dog whistle.

An actual dog whistle emits a sound whose frequency lies above human hearing, but within canine hearing. Thus, when a dog owner blows on his whistle, the dogs in the area can hear it, but not other humans.

The Socialist now accuses anyone with whom he disagrees of using metaphoric “dog whistles” of racist, homophobic, white nationalist, anti-gay(etc), all bad stuff rhetoric aimed at his evil followers. Needless to say, we can’t hear these secret messages because he’s using secret “coded” English expressions.

But here’s the punch line.

The objective of the dog whistle weapon goes far beyond merely tagging some individual with evil communications; it goes to making people afraid to communicate at all.

This is the ultimate social decomposition reaction catalyst.

The dog whistle weapon attacks language and discourse itself. It creates a world in which words do not mean what they mean; they mean anything and everything anyone wants them to. In a world in which what one says means only what someone else insists it means, speaking itself becomes an act of courage.

The Socialist wants to make speech itself, any speech, a frightening event for a speaker. In this world, no matter what you say, it may not mean what you think it means, it may only mean what some mob on twitter insists it means, a mob led by a Political Commissar.

This has the Socialist’s desired effect of reducing the society to a non-society, a mere aggregation of solitary, frightened individual societal particles huddling in the dark avoiding all association and verbal interaction.