Hey David, can you explain what dog whistles are in politics?
This is a good question.
We talk about dog whistles all the time.
Oh, with Trump, we've talked about America first and nationalism and all these different
things as being dog whistles.
What do we mean by that though?
So dog whistles are coded language that sounds completely innocuous to some, usually to the
larger public, but it has another meaning for people who know what they're listening
to.
So it's called the dog whistle because there is a such thing as a dog whistle when you
blow it.
I think if a house to a human ear, it sounds just like a very low tone, unremarkable sound,
if you can even hear it.
It's been awhile since I've been around a dog whistle.
You basically just hear the air coming through the whistle, but to a dog's hearing it lets
them hear a noise that is, I think, high pitched.
It riles them up.
They hear it immediately.
They think they're being called or whatever the case may be.
There are racist dog whistles.
There are antisemitic dog whistles, there are religious dog whistles.
So here's some examples, inner city and urban to refer to black people to those in the know
with seemingly innocuous language.
So we've heard, I've even interviewed some people, Ben Shapiro use this term when I interviewed
him about gun safety.
We will hear, talk about to really deal with gun violence, we need to focus on urban youth,
inner city, whatever they're talking about black people.
It's about, we don't want black people having guns, but white people having guns is fine.
That is a dog whistle that sounds innocuous from the language, but if you know what is
meant, you understand it.
Law and order, law and order, it sounds, I mean listen, we have laws and we need order.
We things that we need things to be in order.
It has been used to signal anti-immigrant ideas, racist ideas.
It's been used as a signal by politicians to say, don't worry, I'm for law and order
coded to mean I'm not going to let immigrants or black people get too much clout or status
in society.
Tough on crime is a similar one also that is often connected to, it's just straight
up racist policies like for example and frisk.
Here's another example, Barack Hussein Obama.
Now you might say that's the guys name.
How could that be a dog whistle, but the people using it use it to signal something less American.
Someone may be Muslim.
I think most of you probably understand that one.
Where's the birth certificate is a similar sort of idea.
Birth certificate.
It's a piece of paper.
How can that be racist?
How could that be a dog whistle?
Well, you have to look at its use.
You have to look at who is using it.
You have to look at what is being suggested or implied by its use within, there's so many
antisemitic dog whistles.
We could do an hour just on those, but one is, and this, this is like a prototypical
example because it sounds so innocuous.
The term coincidence.
Antisemites love to talk about the coincidence of look at the number of Jews in this industry.
What a coincidence and coincidence sounds like a completely benign use of the term,
but it's part of antisemitic conspiracies about conspiring to control industry or government
or whatever the case may be.
That is dog whistling and politics.
It's using coded language that sounds innocuous, but as a very specific and targeted meaning
to people who know what to listen to and listen, the white supremacists have come on my show
and said, David, we get, Trump can't just say anything, but we understand the language
that he's using and whether Trump is coming up with that language himself or it's being
fed to him, or a combination of the two, we don't know.
But the white supremacists themselves are saying, we hear the coded language from Donald
Trump that does it for today.
We've got a great
bonus show coming up.
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