Weaponizing Truth

Dog Whistles

A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend about parenting and I told him that one of the advantages my son had was being raised in a two-parent household, because not every kid is so privileged.

My friend jumped in, “Whoa, dude, watch the dog whistle!”

What did he mean? Let me translate into Progressive-Speak. By mentioning “two-parent household” it might seem like I’m criticizing communities where that is not the norm. My friend was warning me—in a slightly jokey but semi-serious way—that I was edging into dangerous territory for a good liberal. You’re not supposed to say such things!

Except it’s true. The evidence is that kids in two-parent households do better. That doesn’t mean single moms or dads don’t work hard (I was raised by a single mom) or that there aren’t two-parent homes that are nightmares for the kids, but on average a kid is better off with both parents in the house.¹

And it’s also true that this is a bigger problem in some communities than in others.

The percentage of children in two-parent households has been going down for more than fifty years.

And it’s worse for black kids than for white kids.

This is not the only problem facing black kids—racism hasn’t disappeared in America—but it can’t be a good thing.

Why is there this disparity? I don’t know. I suspect a lot of it has to do with poverty. White people tend to be richer than black people. The middle-class and rich marry more and divorce less than poor people. As most couples know, money problems are a big stressor in relationships. Less money, more stress, more likelihood of a couple breaking up, and now a kid is in a single-parent home.

I don’t know the solutions, but we as a society should be working hard to find them, otherwise we’re letting those kids down. We can’t find them if we don’t talk about them, and yet here was my buddy, calling out my “dog whistle.” Perversely, because he didn’t want me to appear racist, he wanted us to look away from a serious problem facing children in America.

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Willie Horton

In politics, a dog whistle is a message designed to only be heard by the intended target audience. The Oxford English Dictionary has a citation from a 1995 newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen, saying “It's an all-purpose dog-whistle that those fed up with feminists, minorities, the undeserving poor hear loud and clear.”

You use a dog whistle to say an ugly thing without actually saying the ugly thing. You talk about “welfare queens,” as Ronald Reagan did, and you know your white audience will hear “black people.” Say “cosmopolitans” or “international bankers” and an anti-Semite will know you mean Jewish people.

Although the formulation “dog whistle” became popular in the 1990s, the thing itself has been used as long as political messaging has been around. A classic dog whistle was the 1988 Willie Horton ad run during the Bush vs. Dukakis campaign.

The ad talked about crime, not race, but it prominently featured a black man, Horton, who had been released on furlough and then committed terrible crimes. The ad implied this was Dukakis's fault (he had been governor at the time). This story tapped into some white people’s fears of black people. Show a black man and racists prick up their ears, yet you have plausible deniability because non-racists also worry about crime.

Bush won in 1988 and it was assumed that the Willie Horton ad helped. (Although Dukakis’s campaign had made more than their fair share of campaign blunders, including the decision to stage an incredibly goofy photo op of Dukakis atop a tank.)

There’s a long history of Republicans using dog whistles to signal their appeal to racists. In 1981, Republican strategist Lee Atwater, then an aide in the Reagan White House, offered a famously profane quote on how racist dog whistles had been evolving.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

While Republicans were learning how to whistle, liberals were trying even harder to avoid even the hint of the appearance of putting their lips together.

I’m not suggesting that only Republicans pulled dirty tricks. Democrats had their own unscrupulous ways of casting shade and winning elections (including hurling accusations of racism). What was special about the progressive left, however, was its growing tendency to self-censor a broad array of topics partly to avoid giving aid and comfort to the other side.

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Progressive correctness

A big part of living in hyper-progressive circles is learning the words you are and aren’t supposed to use.

The phrase “politically correct” was popularized in the 1970s and 1980s and described a left-wing style that could go to ridiculous extremes to avoid language that might be perceived as offensive. It received a fair bit of ridicule. (Phoebe Maltz Bovy recently wrote a fun essay on the 1992 Official Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook). During the 1990s, the politically correct style faded a bit but never disappeared. Since roughly 2015, this censorious approach has had a revival and become far more dominant in progressive circles.

Today we’re more likely to say “woke,” but if you haven’t spent time in such circles, it may be hard to grasp how constant is this avoidance of bad words. It’s like living with a bunch of particularly uptight nuns, only often it’s your own brain warning you against going there, or there, and good gracious definitely not there! And if you stray, as I did with “two-parent household,” your friends will purse their lips and look askance. Or your enemies will form a Twitter pile-on.

This means steering clear of a long list of dangerous topics because they are viewed as bigoted by association. Crime, for example, is off-limits. Progressive Democrats will talk about police brutality but rarely crime. In contrast, New York’s Eric Adams marked himself as a moderate Democrat by putting crime at the center of his mayoral campaign’s message. (And he won.)

Back in 2020, Lee Fang, a reporter for the lefty Intercept, stepped on this linguistic third rail when he tweeted a brief interview with a black man from Oakland. The man, Max, was talking about the endemic violence that black people faced and while he mentioned police violence he also used the phrase “black-on-black crime.”

Lee Fang @lhfang

Asked everyone I spoke with today if there was anything they wanted to get off their chest about the movement. Max from Oakland, a supporter of BLM, had a measured critique he wanted to share.

A colleague of Fang, Akela Lacy, replied with angry tweets:

Tired of being made to deal with my coworker @lhfang continuing to push narratives about black on black crime after repeatedly being asked not to. This isn’t about me and him it’s about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired (June 4, 2020).

Fearing his job was in jeopardy, Fang posted a long apologetic explanation. His interviewee, Max, hadn’t said anything untrue, but Fang felt it necessary to admit that “there are cynical actors, often racists themselves, who weaponize such tropes [black on black crime]” and “I am saddened that my words caused harm to colleagues and to many people whom I care deeply about.”

It’s true that cynical politicians have used racist dog whistles to win elections but crime still exists. Max wasn't making things up. You can pretend it doesn’t—in liberal circles there’s strong social pressure to do so—but that doesn’t make crime go away.

Trying not to be bigoted is laudable, but fearful of appearing bigoted, progressives downplay or ignore important issues.

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Weaponizing truth

A week ago another dog whistling kerfuffle hit Twitter. James Sweet, a historian of the African diaspora, wrote an article that, among other things, was critical of The 1619 Project, the New York Times sponsored reassessment of American history as seen through the lens of slavery. (You can read a longer outline of the Sweet controversy in my Substack essay or in this even more detailed, and angrier, investigation.)

Sweet received a lot of flack from other historians. While they critiqued other aspects of his approach, his real mistake seemed to have been attacking The 1619 Project.

David Austin Walsh @DavidAstinWalsh

One of my early critiques of the anti-1619 literature from the older generation of tenured historians wasn't that the 1619 Project is sacrosanct -- it very clearly isn't -- but the tone and stridency of their critiques was very clearly going to be weaponized by the right.

Professor Walsh claimed that The 1619 Project wasn’t “sacrosanct,” but also suggested that attacking it too strongly would give ammunition to the right. In other words, attacking The 1619 Project was a dog whistle.

Note the word “weaponizing,” the same that Fang used.

David Austin Walsh @DavidAstinWalsh

And the same is very much true of Sweet's essay, which is now being seized upon by such diverse figures as Ph*l M*gn*ss and R*ch*rd Sp*nc*r as brave truth-telling shouted down by the legions of woke historians. In short, a cudgel to delegitimize the discipline.

And for this crime, he should probably resign.

David Austin Walsh @DavidAstinWalsh

Quite frankly, you shouldn't be the president of a major scholarly association if you don't understand the inherent political implications of your public statements and their likely consequences.

But what if Sweet’s criticisms were true? Or at least worth discussing?

From Walsh’s point of view, it didn’t matter. Criticizing The 1619 Project provided ammunition for bad people. It was another dog whistle that could help the right.

This careful avoidance of any “bad” ideas has a major flaw: it only silences voices on the left. Pundits and politicians on the right are thrilled to point out all the weaknesses they can find in The 1619 Project. They’ll also talk about the importance of two-parent households and fighting crime. If progressives refuse to talk about some issues, they are conceding those issues to their ideological opponents. Polls show, for example, that if voters fear crime, they are more likely to vote for Republicans.

Many people on the left are aware of this and pushed back against Walsh et al. Nate Silver, famed election data wonk, pointed out that noble lies tend to hurt a cause far more than they help it. You do it enough, and people stop trusting you. This is a problem mainstream media faces today.

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's *also* the case that academics and journalists often mispredict how their arguments will be weaponized over the long run; noble lies often backfire and credibility matters.

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Muddling reality

This liberal knee-jerk tendency to self-censor handicaps policymakers. One example was an August 5 interview with an Oregon health official that made a splash and received a fair bit of justifiable ridicule.

The topic was monkeypox, and the interview with Dr. Tim Menza of the Oregon Health Authority was an attempt to provide important information about the spread of the virus. Monkeypox is being transmitted almost entirely by men who have sex with men. The risk to those who don’t have such sex is very small. Sadly, Dr. Menza was handicapped by his desire to avoid any words that might appear homophobic, even words that might be true, so he kept tip-toeing around reality.

When asked about reducing risk, rather than zeroing in on sex, he responded with a meandering unfocused discussion of levels of risk.

We can kind of try to put activities to specific risk levels. Things that I would say are unlikely to transmit hMPXV are things like taking public transportation, going out to eat, going to the grocery store, going to have coffee with friends, being in an office with your coworkers and learning in a classroom. Those things are all low risk activities. Hanging out outside at a bar or a club or a cafe, totally low risk activities.

Being in more crowded spaces where there’s less clothing and more skin-to-skin contact, like a bar or club perhaps, that’s where that skin-to-skin contact comes into play. We’ve been trying to message to folks to just consider the amount of skin-to-skin contact you might expect in a situation or a place that you might be or an event that you might be attending.

And then the things that then move up in scale are things that include more prolonged skin-to-skin contact. Like perhaps massaging an area with skin that is affected by hMPXV, or hugging in contact with skin that is affected by hMPXV. Or perhaps cuddling. The other thing is we know that when we talk about respiratory secretions we think about saliva too. So things like kissing or sharing a toothbrush might be a little bit higher risk.

And then the things that have the most risk is when there’s that really direct prolonged skin-to-skin contact with the sores, the scabs or the fluids of the rash.

When asked specifically about men who have sex with men, Menza still waffled.

In the United States, we know that people assigned male at birth who have sex with men and people assigned female at birth, including at least one pregnant person, have been affected by hMPXV in Oregon. We know that cisgender, men and nonbinary people are affected by hMPXV. While most identify as gay or queer and report close contact with people assigned male at birth, we have cases that also identify as straight and bisexual and report close contact with people assigned female at birth.

“At least one pregnant person”? I’m sure that’s true but talk about taking your eye off the ball.

As a health official facing a health crisis, someone concerned about the health of gay men, and not a good progressive trying to avoid dog whistles, he should simply have said, “Almost all the cases are spread by men who have sex with men. While it can be spread by other means, it’s that particular group that needs to be taking the most care.”

Instead, afraid of being seen as stigmatizing gay men, afraid of providing homophobic ammunition to the enemy, he spewed a stream of fuzzy language that obscured the important health message he should have been conveying.

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Eroding trust

None of this waffling around the truth works in the long run. It can cover things up for a while, especially if people who think like you dominate the conversation, but reality will keep happening and other people can still talk. If people on the left manage to suppress certain conversations, voices on the right will fill up that void.

Not talking about issues doesn’t make them go away.

On a recent, We the Fifth podcast, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie, talked about why it’s wrong to try and suppress information that you think is in some way bad.

“The impulse, understandably, might be let’s control those things… Let’s tame them, let’s get all the bad voices and only keep the good voices.” but that approach is “making the problem worse.” “By combating misinformation directly by playing Whac-A-Mole with it they actually erode trust.”

The progressive censorious impulse to suppress discussion of certain problems because they’re dog whistles, because they might be weaponized by the right, or just because they make us feel uncomfortable, won’t make those problems disappear. All it will do is reduce trust in liberal institutions and make it harder to find solutions.²

1. My son’s high school had such tight schedules for parent-teacher nights that it was literally impossible for one parent to see all the teachers. My wife and I would divide them between us, texting each other the wait times outside various classrooms as we scampered down hallways and up stairs. It required military-grade coordination.

2. This was an essay about the left, but the right has its own problems with the truth. Consider the refusal of many Republican officials to publically admit that Trump legitimately lost the 2020 election, a fact that they’ll agree with in private.