The OP is faulty. The purpose of the dog whistle is that it is not heard consciously by the intended audience but responded to on an emotional level. The opposition audience will hear the dog whistle, if anyone is going to.
“in which certain phrases have a particular meaning to a segment of the audience that passes unnoticed by the rest. This allows a candidate to surreptitiously signal agreement with that group, without alienating the rest of the audience, among whom the ideas might be unpopular if plainly stated.” XKCD explained.
“Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup.” wiki
While an aide in Ronald Reagan’s White House, Lee Atwater told us pretty much everything we need to know. In this excerpt from an interview he gave in 1981, which was never supposed to be publicly revealed (“now, y’all aren’t quotin’ me on this…?”), he backhandedly explains how the refrain of “nigger, nigger, nigger” morphed into Republican economic policies via the Southern Strategy.
Lee Atwater went on to manage the 1988 presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush and then became the chairman of the Republican National Committee. However, he died before the comments were publicly released. Although, he does not mention the term dog whistle, what he’s talking about here is the very epitome of dog whistle politics where the very economic policies underpinning modern Republican ideology, in fact, evolved as dog whistles intended to attract the votes of racists without the candidates themselves sounding racist (i.e. “…doing away with the racial problem…”).
Is this really rocket science for the OP? Hell, leaving the political sphere alone, there’s examples from everyday life. Take this… back in the day when I used to waitress, frequently customers would be passed to the newest staff to wait on if they were “Canadian.” I live in Texas, and after a couple of these, I was more than baffled. 1) That they could tell. I mean, they looked just like everyone else and weren’t dressed head-to-toe in maple leaves, and 2) I couldn’t grasp what the problem was even if they were.
So finally, it was explained to me that being called “Canadian” was code for being a bad tipper. And if anyone overheard, then you had plausible deniability and could explain it away as “Your accent vaguely sounded like my cousin Rita’s in Winnipeg.” or “When I vacationed in Vancouver, I saw lots of town folks who wore styles just as awesome as these!” Or whatever.
Yeah, it’s there. The other sad thing about it was, shockingly, this was mostly leveled at minorities and the elderly. Therefore, largely racist and ageist as well. But I can tell you, that for me who never turned down a table, I found it to be bullshit and the jackasses who employed this tactic were both shitty servers and bigots in other, equally sneaky areas. I can only conclude that weren’t tipped much because they and their service sucked, undoubtedly due to their attitudes.
As i said before, that’s bad journalism. First the interviewer promised Lee’s name would never be used. Next that quote is deliberately taken out of context. if you listen to the entire interview, you’ll see his meaning is *exactly the opposite *of what is implied by the out of context quote.
So, it doesn’t count because he thought he was going to be able to keep this bigotry a secret? Please.
Actually, what you have here is an example of doublespeak. He does this throughout the interview. Indeed, he even makes the paradoxical claim that the “whole” Southern Strategy was entirely based on coded racism but it somehow wasn’t done in a “blatantly discriminatory” way (5:50). The quote:
Evidently, he only considers something bigoted when the n-word is explicitly used. Clearly, his mind resided in fantasyland because that’s absurd. Also, I will point something else out. See the portion I highlighted. He explicitly claims the objections to busing were coded racism. Well, here is a video of Ronald Reagan bitching about busing and trying to stop it the moment it started in California in 1970. And here is a 1976 campaign ad in which Ronald Reagan is bitching about busing. It’s difficult for me to see how anyone can plausibly claim Ronald Reagan was not knee-deep in this Southern Strategy business. Certainly, the interviewer had to keep going at him to get the most damning admissions but they are not invalid because Atwater was employing doublespeak. That’s what people of this mindset do. If you’d like to continue trying to impeach the credibility of this interview or the undeniable damnation coming out of Atwater’s own mouth, I’m more than happy to continue pointing the facts concerning what he says out to you.
That does make the journalist unethical. Which makes his story questionable.
No, if you listen to the whole interview, you can see that that portion is taken out of context and thus the quote is the exact opposite of what Atwater was saying.
Your claims are turning toward the ridiculous. How is the story “questionable” when this is a sound recording of Lee Atwater himself speaking? Good lord, it’s straight from the horse’s mouth!
Frankly, I think you have your head in the sand because you just can’t bring yourself to believe it. You’re giving us the “say it ain’t so” line of reasoning.
Don’t you see? He’s effortlessly receiving Atwater’s secret intended message, which the rest of us can’t detect! Thus proving the existence of dog whistles!
And, like i said, I went ahead and listened to the entire interview, and that section is taken entirely out of context. Atwater was saying just the opposite.
I have listened to the entire interview, several times. However, something tells me you’re simply going to fall back on “he could have edited it” no matter what failures of logic I cite from the audio. So, I’m just not going to bother.
Diversity of tactics. A euphemism used in discussions among the activist left that essentially means we’re willing to at least consider things outside strict non-violence. A Greenpeace hosted blog post on the phrase:
So where’s a clear use of one? Occupy Oakland did. Sadly the link to the Occupy Oakland cite in wikipedia is gone but they are quoted in this article about a statement put out before their “Fuck the Police” demonstrations which turned into riots. My underline added.