Dogwhistle Politics and Nazi Code Hunting

especially on X the Everything app. But this, this extends outside of of X the Everything after, this extends outside of Blue Sky the Internet in general. This is about how we understand the messaging of fascists and understand how rhetoric and anti fascist like education works, and ways that I think it's currently being misapplied.

proud of, comma a homeland worth defending. So on the surface, you know, maybe a slightly hashtag problematic sentiment here with a hashtag problematic painting or at the very least of painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and Indigenous people specifically with like a white supremacist outlook, with this enlarged white woman bathed in a white cloak, bringing forth that the tide of quote unquote progress as Indigenous people are are forced to flee from the edge of the painting.

are in this tweet? Mea fifteen no, so close, so close, fourteen fourteen words in this tweet, which might remind you of the fourteen words the Nazi signifier, which I probably just explain. Surely most people listening to this is familiar with the fourteen words, since it seems everybody thinks they are an armchair expert on fascist rhetoric. But the fourteen words we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. This became a popular hashtag

dog whistle, especially in the past. I would say ten fifteen years, usually by implanting fourteen's and usually fourteen eighty eights with eighty eight meaning Hyle Hitler because each is the eighth letter of the alphabet. This became a common Nazi tag. You could see this in graffiti, You see this embedded into into posts, see this in like Nazi artwork. And going back to this DHS post, we cannot only

count fourteen words in this tweet. This is actually a fourteen eighty eight because two of the h's in this in this post are capitalized unusually, and that means hal Hitler Wow because hc eighth letter uh huh oh but wait, actually looking at this post again, there's actually other words in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized.

administration and finally proves that they're fascist. You can just look at all of the fascist policies the Trump administration is enacting. Instead of doing numerology on tweets, people are thinking, ha ha ha, I have decoded the secret Nazi message with a HHD one eight eight fourteen. Nice trigroypers. Meanwhile, you can just look at the actual text of the post. You can look at the painting. Both of those things have an inherent fascist quality. It's literally defending the concept

of ethnic genocide, of manifest destiny. While the administration, the DHS is currently furthering as no nationalist policies.

already fascist. If they're just saying things openly and doing things, what purpose does a dog whistle? And this is something that we're going to discuss. Are not just saying this and closing the episode, We're going to get into these And I think part of what's happening here everybody is so cooked by the paranoid style of American politics. Everyone is it's so eager to decode the hidden messages that we're missing what's right in front of us. QAnon has

a total victory. Qwanon does not really exist in the way that it did in twenty eighteen. That the q Andon cult and conspiracy theory as like a singular cultish project is kind of no more. But q Andon has a cultural victory over the entire United States, and not

just on the right wing, not just on Mega. So much of American politics now is litigating who is and is not a pedophile, who is and is not trafficking children, who can notice which events are staged, who can notice hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on the Internet, And this is what like everything is, And like the real turning point I think for the right wing was probably the twenty twenty election, in like a massive fracture

from reality in which they think that election was legitimately stolen. And obviously there was many events leading up to that which which contributed to this. Yeah, And I think one of the biggest fracture points for liberals was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, with people creating whole new alternate

realities that that event was staged. And because that door is opened now I'm seeing such a massive flood of things that I would label as blueing on conspiracy theories, which is kind of a nonsense term, but it gets the point across and I'm gonna do a whole piece

on bluing on very soon. I've been collecting blueing on conspiracy theories for a while, but I want to do something specifically about this fourteen eighty eight and like secret codes thing, because it's so evocative of like, you know, Q drops, and it's evocative of, you know, searching for Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have been doing

for generations. And we're to talk about that more and read a little bit of an essay on that topic after this ad break, and I will let you know there's gonna be two messages in the ad break that if you decode, you win a special prize at the end of the episode, So make sure you listen to every single second of the ad in case you miss the code. Okay, we are back, speaking of the paranoid style in American politics. I want to quote a few sections to kind of frame what I'm talking about here.

This was an essay written in the sixties by Richard hoff Setter Hoffstetter Richard Hoffstetter one of the first like modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics. I'm gonna I have three paragraphs here that I that I selected as being relevant to the current the current topic at hand.

As a member of the avant garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to it. As of yet to unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration.

the structural violence of the state. This was reacted to by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade gaining power and then finally took power in the form of like a bunch of pistol petite bourgeois fucking car dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed by the richest tech company guy in the world, right,

and they came together to build fascism. This is the most straightforward, like if this is a conception of how a fascist takeover works, that he's so thuddingly literal that It defies narrativization because it's just there. There's no subtlety to it. They're just saying it. They just want to do it, and they're doing it. But everyone is convinced that there's like some kind of secret hitting conspiracy and it's like no, they're just doing the thing that they're saying.

the Patriot Front playbook. Here, the ICE director said that he wants an Amazon like mass deportation system, calling it quote unquote Amazon Prime, but with human beings. They're saying this, you can listen to the actual words. I'm going to read another quote here from the Paranoid Style of American Politics essay quote. A final characteristic of the paranoid style

is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed respectable. Paranoid literature not only starts from certain moratal commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully

and all but obsessively accumulates quote unquote evidence. The paranoid seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it unquote. And I think that gets into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this,

this naze code hunting. It's actually a form of self coping, looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking at the brazenness in which ICE is operating, and this is a self preservation mechanism. Someone on Blue Sky that I was talking to about this is like arguing, like Ice doesn't need to dog whistle, they have no reason to like dog whistling is for trying to like sneakily get racists or fascist into power while signaling to a nationalistic base that they are like one of them.

It's about defending a culture from its destruction through ethnic demographic shifts. It's they're not trying to obscure what they're doing in the slightest No.

government is doing. But also like if you look at any pulling at all, but anything the people are doing,

everyone hates it. There isn't like a secret thing that you can say to convince people that they're that all these people are Nazis, because it's like and that's not even a particularly useful project because everyone fucking hates them already, like trying to fight this in the realm of sort of the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of in the realm of like, Hi, i'm your neighbor, you

also fucking hate this. Let's go fucking like do this should people are doing in la and like follow these fucking ice fans around, right, That is stuff that people are doing, but it doesn't have the kind of like instant emotional gratification and register of trying to like accumulate hordes of secret knowledge, so people do it less even though it's less effective.

a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating to me because, I mean, one person who I was lightly arguing about this on line was was saying, like, this is not numerology, and we don't have to be just okay with a clear attempt to normal white nationalist rhetoric. And like, first of all, like codes aren't rhetoric. Codes are codes, and the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric.

What they're actually like saying which has like proto fascist or fascistic aspects, that is the rhetoric and they're doing it. Is there somebody out there in twenty twenty five who's gonna finally realize that DHS as an agency has fascistic underpinnings via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if you count words and turn certain captize letters into numbers, it makes a secret Nazi message.

that's scary. Report to marry Meia. Do you know what's easy posting on X the everything app Yeah, this is how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually empowers the state, because the central conceit of the conspiratorial worldview is that there is a nearly all powerful agency that controls in apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that it wants. Right, this is why you can stage things.

This is why I can recollection. This is why it can like I don't know, like it can just like magically like disappear anyone. It can replace them with anyone.

It can stage any protest movement it wants to, right, And I think you've seen this a lot in the American case, where like I see people who are like genuinely well meaning leftists who are convinced that if you do anything to resist the American State, you will immediately be killed because the American state is all powerful and irresistible. And that's just fascist propaganda. Yeah, you're falling victim to the panoptic house. Yeah, but it's fascist propaganda that fits

into the narrative structure of conspiracy. And because the state is dangerous, right and can hurt you, it's very very easy to you know, accumulate structures of evidence that support the emotional sort of core of this thing that is just literally fascist propaganda. People are resisting the state every day, right, Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking like hiding people in like fucking U hauls to jump

out and grab people. It's because when they tried to fucking mass we stomp them, right.

falling into this trap like more so than others. And it's a little bit evident of something that like I've described as like the forever twenty sixteen, how we're all kind of stuck in the mindset of this twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen twenty eighteen era, and where you have this unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on the ground anymore. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This

is a different situation. This is twenty twenty five. And one other like defense of this, you know, code hunting that I've seen people say is quote, Nazis love playing games like this, so it's important that we call it out. And another person saying, quote, this is a fun little game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote, and like, first of all.

egg anti fascism. It's kind of like the Barber streisand effect where you end up almost accidentally making them start doing the thing, which Nazis always have that like frustrating impulse because they're the little bitch boy ideology. I think as a rat limit put it one of one of my favorite posters, and like, I'm not saying that Nazi signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be

thoughtful and careful of how we do it. To recap the Okay symbol thing that was invented as like a fake dog whistle to try to trick leftists into convincing like the media, and had then having the media trying to convince the people that anyone who uses like the okayhand symbol is secretly a fascist, and this scheme worked, and eventually the Oka symbol big came an actual symbol used for fascists to identify each other through this ironic detachment because it was being talked about in the news

as a secret Nazi symbol, even though this whole thing was like invented as like a joke online. And I'm afraid I've started to already see a similar thing happen with the fourteen words dog whistle, with an increased use of the fourteen words and invoking the fourteen words among far right accounts, specifically because of this whole debacle with the dhs gov account and there a heritage to be proud of homeland worth defending American Progress like ethnonationalist posting.

And I truly cannot say one way or another if that American Progress post had a intentionally embedded fourteen words dog whistle inside, I can't. I can't tell you that. And the point trying to make is that it kind of doesn't matter. But the way we talk about dog whistles does matter. And as frustrating as it is that, sometimes this feels like we're just living in the meme where the Nazi starts shaving his head because everyone's calling

him a Nazi. That is how Nazis work sometimes. And I don't want to play into this attention spectacle that they so badly want.

that they were doing it in the first place. Fascism is a little bitch ideology because it's too timid to enact as cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as retaliation against others for anticipating it. And this has been proven right faster than I think what rat Limit predicted. There's this current trend on x the Everything app where white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi style and trying

to mimify the backlash. Several posts going viral of these of these like aspiring influencers either at the pool or cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having a your arm in a Elon Musk, my heart goes out to you Nazi salute style fashion. Yeah, and I think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a Nazi salute makes sense, right, he is like an actual person affiliated with the government. But making a whole media bled just about random blue check Twitter girls, Maybe not

so much. Maybe that doesn't have any actual value if a random like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is trying to garner backlash by doing a Hyle Hitler salute in their kitchen next to their instapot.

And that's I think what a bunch of the backlash being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, Like how they film like gaudy ASMR videos that they post from the White House account of deportations and use military planes. Those are aesthetic differences, and those differences may be important, and they're they're bad, right. I'm not saying these things

are good. Those things are still bad. Yeah, But when that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure acted deportation itself, that I think is evident of being trapped in this like capitalist realism, being trapped in this like like this neoliberal.

The Biden admin averaged almost thirteen thousand. When the Trump administration started using military planes for deportations back in January, mainly as an aesthetic choice that triggered backlash and rejections from Mexico and Colombia. Mexico refused to allow US military aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country. Columbia also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later

caved as Trump threatened unitive tariffs. You can see the same thing about deploying military to the border, something that Biden also did, but has a larger aesthetic backlash under Trump. Do you have something you want to say on this like image aspect? I have some quotes from Fisher and that's kind of all I have left.

who people genuinely really should read. He's one of the great original theorists of fascism, and he fucking died trying to flee the Nazis. And one of his arguments was that, you know, one of the cores of fascism is the replacement of politics with aesthetics. Right, that aesthetics would have allow you to you know, feel represent like feel representation instead of do the action. And this is this is an analysis that has been sort of like folded through

a whole bunch of different analyzes of how capitalism functions. Right, This is this is one of the three lines of the society a spectacle, and it's this real issue that we're dealing with now because again kind of in a sense, what has happened to everything, right, And you can argue to some extent that like our channel being called cool zone media is sort of this is that all politics

from every side has been completely reduced to aesthetics. And completely reducing it to aesthetics allows like allows the fascist mode of politics to simply draw in a bunch of people who can sort of just now passively experience living through these sort of through this sort of collection of images and this emotional aesthetic. Yeah, and it also is

doing the same thing to us. But the thing is they have the fucking state and we don't, right, And so if you don't fucking exit, if you don't exit the sort of mirror world of esthetic of sort of like a fucking living in images, right, and you know, go do the actual shit that the Boord is talking about in the society a spectacle, were you and all your friends formed workers councils and fucking start taking all of the ship back from all of the people who

were taking it from you. You're just gonna live in the fascist time heare forever.

blood and soil. That's why they're posting American progress, driving out the indigenous people with the aryan white lady carrying the torch of progress. It is an asceticized politics on like a very pure level. And again, to quote from my goat, uh this antiat quote Mark Fisher in captus ualism quote, ultra tarianism and capital are by no means incompatible.

Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist. Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space, but contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions.

What caused the catastrophe to occur? Who knows its cause? Lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a maligned being a negative miracle, a melidation which no penance can ameliorate. The turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist realism unquote. And yeah, that's what me is talking about

with Gidebor and society of the spectacle. That's a trap that I think a lot of people are falling into right now. And though it's arguable that living in a liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that sullys that mean it's like good, right, That's not what we're arguing here. Fisher then quotes French philosopher Alawn Badeu quote to justify their conservatism. The partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful, so instead they've

decided to say that all of the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect goodness, but we are lucky that we don't live in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect, but it's better than bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations

like Lamosovich. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda.

so therefore not a Nazi dog whistle. We're safe, guys, We're good. I counted the words. There's fifteen of them, so you can disregard what the actual text is saying. And I think that is like the prime, the prime contradiction in which I am growing increasingly frustrated. So that's most of what I have to say say about the limits of Nazi coode hunting and the aesthetics of superstition and the paranoid style in American politics. Mia, do you have any any final wyse Wise notes.