Bullshit Decoder: “Dog Whistle”
A term that once exposed hidden bigotry is now a mind-reading trick.
A dog whistle used to mean something specific: coded language that allowed politicians to signal to racists while maintaining plausible deniability.
Now, it’s thrown around by activists and pundits (especially on the left) who want to shut down uncomfortable conversations about immigration, social cohesion, and anything that threatens their ideological monopoly.
In the UK, the term has become standard-issue abuse in political discourse. When Nigel Farage said Rishi Sunak "doesn't understand our culture," it was labelled a racist dog whistle. When Yvette Cooper published data on foreign offenders, it was called a dog whistle for vigilante mobs. When Keir Starmer suggested limiting migration, his own left flank accused him of dog-whistling to Reform voters.
How did “dog whistle” become one of the defining phrases of the culture wars?
Let’s get into it.
Where did it come from?
The term has a simple origin. In politics, a dog whistle meant saying something that sounded innocent to most voters but contained a coded message for a specific group. Like an actual dog whistle, it operated on a frequency only some could hear.
The classic example comes from the American South. When politicians talked about "states' rights" in the 1960s, everyone knew they weren't expressing a passion for federalism. They were signalling opposition to civil rights without saying the quiet part out loud.
Linguistic analysis of this coded language helped expose how politicians could maintain a veneer of respectability while pandering to extremists. It was plausible deniability for cowards.
So what went wrong?
Somewhere between legitimate political analysis and now, dog-whistle detection became a kind of paranoid superpower. It went from "that politician is clearly signalling to racists" to "anyone who objects to immigration is a far-right agitator."
The modern dog whistle discourse operates on an escalating scale of derangement:
Actual dog whistles: "We need to protect suburban neighbourhoods" — when said by someone literally sued for housing discrimination.
Paranoid pattern matching: "We should enforce immigration law" — could be racist, but more likely said by someone who thinks laws should be enforced.
Full break with reality: Being on time is "white supremacy culture."
Even the right has started playing the same game in reverse. Some conservative pundits now treat words like “equity” as a leftist dog whistle, code for radicalism hiding behind therapeutic jargon. The method's the same: pick a word, project an agenda, and declare intent.
It's no longer about what people say. It's about what you can pretend they meant.
Everyone's a codebreaker now
In truth, what we're looking at here is a scam. Once you've decided someone is dog-whistling, you can make any statement mean anything.
The methodology is simple: take an innocent phrase, add layers of supposed hidden meaning, then declare victory. "Merit-based hiring"? Obviously code for discrimination. "Personal responsibility"? Fascism. "Traditional values"? White nationalism.
It works because dog-whistle accusations are unfalsifiable. Deny you're dog-whistling? Well, that's exactly what a dog-whistler would say. It's witch trial logic, but with algorithmic reach.
Fighting ghosts, missing monsters
It takes a special kind of arrogance to appoint yourself the official decoder of everyone else's secret racism. You're not a mind reader; you're just someone who spent too much time on Twitter.
The problem with dog-whistle hysteria — aside from being dishonest and potentially ruinous for the accused — is that while you're decoding the secret fascism in someone's taste in classical music, genuine bigots are holding rallies and organising online.
And tragically, this helps them. When you've spent years insisting that everything from punctuality to objective reality is a white supremacist dog whistle, people stop listening. The real extremists slip by.
A real-world test case
In 2020, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture released a chart explaining that "objective, rational linear thinking" and "emphasis on scientific method" were aspects of "white culture." When people pointed out this sounded like something actual white supremacists would say, they were told their objections were dog whistles.
Think about that. Criticising a museum for claiming that rationality belongs to white people makes you the racist.
It's the intellectual equivalent of an M.C. Escher drawing: every step takes you further from reality.
The chart also listed "hard work," "self-reliance," and "delayed gratification" as white values. Multiple academics from across the political spectrum pointed out the obvious: this was indistinguishable from white supremacist talking points.
A modest proposal
What if we required actual evidence before accusing people of speaking in code? Perhaps we could point to a pattern of behaviour beyond "used a word I don't like"?
If someone consistently says suspicious things, in suspicious contexts, to suspicious audiences — then fine, maybe there's something there. But if your case is "they mentioned merit, and Hitler believed in hierarchy," you might be the one with the problem.
Not everything is a code. Sometimes words just mean what they mean.
The bottom line
Dog-whistle detection started as legitimate political analysis. When Lee Atwater explained how Republicans moved from saying the N-word to "forced busing" to "tax cuts," that was real. That mattered. It helped us understand how language can be weaponised to hide prejudice.
But like every useful idea that went to university and majored in grievance studies, it's now been weaponised into absurdity. It's less about exposing bigotry, and more about claiming psychic powers to win fights on social media.
If you hear white supremacy every time someone mentions punctuality, you might just be a person who's forgotten how normal humans communicate.
The tragedy, as we've seen, is that real coded bigotry still exists. But after crying wolf at everything from timekeeping to rationalism, you've made it that much harder to call out the real thing.
And if you think this article is a dog whistle, you might want to read it again.