Speaker 1: Cool media.
Speaker 2: This is it could happen here, a show about things
Speaker 2: falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by
Speaker 2: Mia Wong.
Speaker 3: Mia. I have some upsetting news.
Speaker 2: Oh no, which is frankly one of the best ways
Speaker 2: to start in this episode and one of the best
Speaker 2: ways to start the show. So I'm pretty sure that
Speaker 2: I found this account called uh, let's see at Haill Hitler,
Speaker 2: and I think he's posting some things that is.
Speaker 3: A little bit fascist. Oh wow.
Speaker 2: I have decoded some of at Hell Hitler's communications and
Speaker 2: I have uncovered a secret a secret Nazi code.
Speaker 3: Wow. This is. This is an incredibly unexpected revelation from
Speaker 3: Hailed Hitler.
Speaker 2: He has posted some pictures in like what I would
Speaker 2: assume is some kind of military uniform that looks like
Speaker 2: I don't know it's it's some kind of like like
Speaker 2: Germanic military inform. But I've noticed that there are some
Speaker 2: runes on this uniform that look very similar to the
Speaker 2: Odal rune. So I'm thinking because of the ruine, this
Speaker 2: guy might be a Nazi.
Speaker 3: Thank you for your work, Harison. We could never have
Speaker 3: determined this. That's right, I am.
Speaker 2: You can find me at osent to Defender Online. No,
Speaker 2: that doesn't for us today, and it could happen here now.
Speaker 2: So this emisode, we're gonna talk about something that's been
Speaker 2: slowly frustrating me the past few weeks, and that is
Speaker 2: the misapplication of dog whistles. And let's just get right
Speaker 2: into it. People have been noticing patterns, noticing trends in
Speaker 2: official communications from the dhs gov online accounts, which now
Speaker 2: is the main way the government sends out communications, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: especially on X the Everything app. But this, this extends
Speaker 2: outside of of X the Everything after, this extends outside
Speaker 2: of Blue Sky the Internet in general. This is about
Speaker 2: how we understand the messaging of fascists and understand how
Speaker 2: rhetoric and anti fascist like education works, and ways that
Speaker 2: I think it's currently being misapplied.
Speaker 3: So bear with me.
Speaker 2: This is going to be kind of an odd episode,
Speaker 2: but I think I think it's worth it because I
Speaker 2: don't want us falling into the same traps that we
Speaker 2: maybe fell into eight years ago. So let's let's let's
Speaker 2: start by talking about some communications posted on the internet
Speaker 2: by at dhs gov. A picture of a painting titled
Speaker 2: American Progress by John Gast, captioned a heritage to be
Speaker 2: proud of, comma a homeland worth defending. So on the surface,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe a slightly hashtag problematic sentiment here with
Speaker 2: a hashtag problematic painting or at the very least of
Speaker 2: painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and Indigenous people
Speaker 2: specifically with like a white supremacist outlook, with this enlarged
Speaker 2: white woman bathed in a white cloak, bringing forth that
Speaker 2: the tide of quote unquote progress as Indigenous people are
Speaker 2: are forced to flee from the edge of the painting.
Speaker 3: It's it's fun because this is a painting we literally
Speaker 3: when they had to explain manifest destiny like colonialism good.
Speaker 3: This is the painting that was in my textbook in
Speaker 3: high school. Is three class like and it is like
Speaker 3: the er, the er colonialism good, genocide, good.
Speaker 2: Painting, genocide good. That that's what the painting is. But
Speaker 2: what I have found through some hashtag research, there might
Speaker 2: be a hidden code in this, in this communication from
Speaker 2: the DHS, who already an agency that only has the
Speaker 2: best interests and of really all people who strive for
Speaker 2: human rights, the DHS. So if you count all of
Speaker 2: the words in the tweet, guess how many words there
Speaker 2: are in this tweet? Mea fifteen no, so close, so close,
Speaker 2: fourteen fourteen words in this tweet, which might remind you
Speaker 2: of the fourteen words the Nazi signifier, which I probably
Speaker 2: just explain. Surely most people listening to this is familiar
Speaker 2: with the fourteen words, since it seems everybody thinks they
Speaker 2: are an armchair expert on fascist rhetoric. But the fourteen
Speaker 2: words we must secure the existence of our people and
Speaker 2: a future for white children. This became a popular hashtag
Speaker 2: dog whistle, especially in the past. I would say ten
Speaker 2: fifteen years, usually by implanting fourteen's and usually fourteen eighty
Speaker 2: eights with eighty eight meaning Hyle Hitler because each is
Speaker 2: the eighth letter of the alphabet. This became a common
Speaker 2: Nazi tag. You could see this in graffiti, You see
Speaker 2: this embedded into into posts, see this in like Nazi artwork.
Speaker 2: And going back to this DHS post, we cannot only
Speaker 2: count fourteen words in this tweet. This is actually a
Speaker 2: fourteen eighty eight because two of the h's in this
Speaker 2: in this post are capitalized unusually, and that means hal
Speaker 2: Hitler Wow because hc eighth letter uh huh oh but wait,
Speaker 2: actually looking at this post again, there's actually other words
Speaker 2: in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized.
Speaker 3: But don't worry. I don't worry.
Speaker 2: This is still a dog whistle because those other words
Speaker 2: that are capitalized in the first sentence are the letters
Speaker 2: A and D, which, if you convert those into numbers,
Speaker 2: are one in four, So it's actually another fourteen.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, we're doing We're doing numerology. We're doing jamatria,
Speaker 3: where we've become Q and on so back.
Speaker 2: So if you cannot tell by my thinly veiled sarcasm
Speaker 2: in that last section, I think this methodology is a
Speaker 2: little bit silly.
Speaker 3: What are we doing? What are we doing here?
Speaker 2: We're converting capitalized letters in the first half of a
Speaker 2: tweet into numbers and then rearranging the order of those
Speaker 2: letters to get a fourteen eighty eight. It's literally jerbatria,
Speaker 2: and then also counting the total words in the whole
Speaker 2: suite while still disregarding the capitalizations in the last four
Speaker 2: words for another fourteen What are we doing? How is
Speaker 2: this the piece of evidence that sinks sinks the Trump
Speaker 2: administration and finally proves that they're fascist. You can just
Speaker 2: look at all of the fascist policies the Trump administration
Speaker 2: is enacting. Instead of doing numerology on tweets, people are thinking,
Speaker 2: ha ha ha, I have decoded the secret Nazi message
Speaker 2: with a HHD one eight eight fourteen. Nice trigroypers. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: you can just look at the actual text of the post.
Speaker 2: You can look at the painting. Both of those things
Speaker 2: have an inherent fascist quality. It's literally defending the concept
Speaker 2: of ethnic genocide, of manifest destiny. While the administration, the
Speaker 2: DHS is currently furthering as no nationalist policies.
Speaker 3: They are doing this. This is homeland security, right. I
Speaker 3: don't know if people realize that ICE is a part
Speaker 3: of homeland security, but like, this is the agency that
Speaker 3: is literally.
Speaker 4: Rounding people up and sending them to camps. We have
Speaker 4: camps in multiple countries now. But I say they're being
Speaker 4: round up and sent to camps. It's genuinely unclear whether
Speaker 4: what I'm talking about is the fucking concentration camp in Florida.
Speaker 3: Sea Coat in nol Salvador. Yeah, I mean I think
Speaker 3: people have now escape, so I can't technically call the
Speaker 3: Honduras want a death camp. But like, again, there's any
Speaker 3: people in South Udan, They're like, they're just doing this,
Speaker 3: Like what are we doing here?
Speaker 2: So this episode I want to focus on how people
Speaker 2: are misusing anti fascist education, or I would argue they're
Speaker 2: misusing anti fascist education and kind of missing the forest
Speaker 2: for a cardboard cutout of trees, not even trees, kind
Speaker 2: of something that could be a tree if you look
Speaker 2: at it from one angle, but maybe isn't actually a
Speaker 2: real tree. And you don't need to sound like a
Speaker 2: da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist to point out the obvious,
Speaker 2: like dog whistles don't matter if the regular whistle is
Speaker 2: already fascist. If they're just saying things openly and doing things,
Speaker 2: what purpose does a dog whistle? And this is something
Speaker 2: that we're going to discuss. Are not just saying this
Speaker 2: and closing the episode, We're going to get into these
Speaker 2: And I think part of what's happening here everybody is
Speaker 2: so cooked by the paranoid style of American politics. Everyone
Speaker 2: is it's so eager to decode the hidden messages that
Speaker 2: we're missing what's right in front of us. QAnon has
Speaker 2: a total victory. Qwanon does not really exist in the
Speaker 2: way that it did in twenty eighteen. That the q
Speaker 2: Andon cult and conspiracy theory as like a singular cultish
Speaker 2: project is kind of no more. But q Andon has
Speaker 2: a cultural victory over the entire United States, and not
Speaker 2: just on the right wing, not just on Mega. So
Speaker 2: much of American politics now is litigating who is and
Speaker 2: is not a pedophile, who is and is not trafficking children,
Speaker 2: who can notice which events are staged, who can notice
Speaker 2: hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on the Internet,
Speaker 2: And this is what like everything is, And like the
Speaker 2: real turning point I think for the right wing was
Speaker 2: probably the twenty twenty election, in like a massive fracture
Speaker 2: from reality in which they think that election was legitimately stolen.
Speaker 2: And obviously there was many events leading up to that
Speaker 2: which which contributed to this. Yeah, And I think one
Speaker 2: of the biggest fracture points for liberals was the attempted
Speaker 2: assassination of Donald Trump, with people creating whole new alternate
Speaker 2: realities that that event was staged. And because that door
Speaker 2: is opened now I'm seeing such a massive flood of
Speaker 2: things that I would label as blueing on conspiracy theories,
Speaker 2: which is kind of a nonsense term, but it gets
Speaker 2: the point across and I'm gonna do a whole piece
Speaker 2: on bluing on very soon. I've been collecting blueing on
Speaker 2: conspiracy theories for a while, but I want to do
Speaker 2: something specifically about this fourteen eighty eight and like secret
Speaker 2: codes thing, because it's so evocative of like, you know,
Speaker 2: Q drops, and it's evocative of, you know, searching for
Speaker 2: Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have been doing
Speaker 2: for generations. And we're to talk about that more and
Speaker 2: read a little bit of an essay on that topic
Speaker 2: after this ad break, and I will let you know
Speaker 2: there's gonna be two messages in the ad break that
Speaker 2: if you decode, you win a special prize at the
Speaker 2: end of the episode, So make sure you listen to
Speaker 2: every single second of the ad in case you miss
Speaker 2: the code. Okay, we are back, speaking of the paranoid
Speaker 2: style in American politics. I want to quote a few
Speaker 2: sections to kind of frame what I'm talking about here.
Speaker 2: This was an essay written in the sixties by Richard
Speaker 2: hoff Setter Hoffstetter Richard Hoffstetter one of the first like
Speaker 2: modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics. I'm gonna
Speaker 2: I have three paragraphs here that I that I selected
Speaker 2: as being relevant to the current the current topic at hand.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: There is a style of mind that is far from
Speaker 2: new and that is not necessarily right wing. I call
Speaker 2: it the paranoid style simply because no other word added
Speaker 2: evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy
Speaker 2: that I have in mind. Nothing really prevents a sound
Speaker 2: program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style.
Speaker 2: Style has more to do with the way in which
Speaker 2: ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of
Speaker 2: their contact.
Speaker 3: Unquote.
Speaker 2: And I like that section specifically because fourteen eighty eight
Speaker 2: is a real dog whistle. We can see this used.
Speaker 2: There is aspects of people who are trying to search
Speaker 2: for this and trying to search for patterns in the
Speaker 2: communications of an admittedly fascistic government agency that I find
Speaker 2: like sympathetic, Like can I can understand because Yeah, that
Speaker 2: is a real dog whistle. I'm going to continue the quote.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms.
Speaker 2: He traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds,
Speaker 2: whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is
Speaker 2: always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at
Speaker 2: a turning point. Like religious millenarianists, he expresses the anxiety
Speaker 2: of those who are living through the last days, and
Speaker 2: he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.
Speaker 2: As a member of the avant garde who is capable
Speaker 2: of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to it.
Speaker 2: As of yet to unaroused public, the paranoid is a
Speaker 2: militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation
Speaker 2: of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not
Speaker 2: even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: Hofstetter is talking about something that that me and Robert
Speaker 2: specifically have have discussed a lot on this show before.
Speaker 2: How everyone in America wants to have access to secret information.
Speaker 3: M h. Everyone wants to.
Speaker 2: Have the exclusive piece of secret intel that will solve everything,
Speaker 2: and like having having that informational exclusivity in a world
Speaker 2: of information saturation, right of a vortex of like meaningless noise.
Speaker 2: It's it's such a romantic idea that that I alone
Speaker 2: have the info or the clue to pieces together, and
Speaker 2: it's my duty to inform the masses. It's a very
Speaker 2: romantic notion, and.
Speaker 3: It's also one that is exactly perfectly anti suited for
Speaker 3: the moment we live in, which is actually just a
Speaker 3: moment where everything that is happening is just so clearingly literal,
Speaker 3: like it's all out of the oden, Like what is
Speaker 3: happening with the Trump administration. Okay, in twenty twenty, there
Speaker 3: is a massive uprising to attempt to attempt to fundamentally
Speaker 3: change like the structurally racist nature of the United States,
Speaker 3: to deal with its fucking class inequalities, to deal with
Speaker 3: the structural violence of the state. This was reacted to
Speaker 3: by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade
Speaker 3: gaining power and then finally took power in the form
Speaker 3: of like a bunch of pistol petite bourgeois fucking car
Speaker 3: dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed
Speaker 3: by the richest tech company guy in the world, right,
Speaker 3: and they came together to build fascism. This is the
Speaker 3: most straightforward, like if this is a conception of how
Speaker 3: a fascist takeover works, that he's so thuddingly literal that
Speaker 3: It defies narrativization because it's just there. There's no subtlety
Speaker 3: to it. They're just saying it. They just want to
Speaker 3: do it, and they're doing it. But everyone is convinced
Speaker 3: that there's like some kind of secret hitting conspiracy and
Speaker 3: it's like no, they're just doing the thing that they're saying.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can argue that we have a griper occupied
Speaker 2: government not because of counting words and posts, but because
Speaker 2: of not only who they're bringing on for DOGE, but
Speaker 2: literally Ice in DHS as of today, which I'm recording
Speaker 2: this on Wednesday, I think because this comes out Wednesday night,
Speaker 2: are copying like Patriot Front style tactics of loading up
Speaker 2: ICE agents in U haul style rentable trucks to hunt
Speaker 2: down people to assault and kidnap, like they're just copying
Speaker 2: the Patriot Front playbook. Here, the ICE director said that
Speaker 2: he wants an Amazon like mass deportation system, calling it
Speaker 2: quote unquote Amazon Prime, but with human beings. They're saying this,
Speaker 2: you can listen to the actual words. I'm going to
Speaker 2: read another quote here from the Paranoid Style of American
Speaker 2: Politics essay quote. A final characteristic of the paranoid style
Speaker 2: is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of
Speaker 2: the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between
Speaker 2: its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality
Speaker 2: it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to
Speaker 2: prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can
Speaker 2: be believed respectable. Paranoid literature not only starts from certain
Speaker 2: moratal commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully
Speaker 2: and all but obsessively accumulates quote unquote evidence. The paranoid
Speaker 2: seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world,
Speaker 2: but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his
Speaker 2: cherished convictions from it unquote. And I think that gets
Speaker 2: into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this,
Speaker 2: this naze code hunting. It's actually a form of self coping,
Speaker 2: looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking
Speaker 2: at the brazenness in which ICE is operating, and this
Speaker 2: is a self preservation mechanism. Someone on Blue Sky that
Speaker 2: I was talking to about this is like arguing, like
Speaker 2: Ice doesn't need to dog whistle, they have no reason
Speaker 2: to like dog whistling is for trying to like sneakily
Speaker 2: get racists or fascist into power while signaling to a
Speaker 2: nationalistic base that they are like one of them.
Speaker 3: Right, But these guys are.
Speaker 2: Already in power, and the base already knows that they're
Speaker 2: in power. There's no point in dog whistle. They're just
Speaker 2: using ice to establish an ethno state. They're using explicit
Speaker 2: ethno state rhetoric. In a post from this morning which
Speaker 2: has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight nine
Speaker 2: ten words not fourteen ten words, Wow, DHS said quote,
Speaker 2: serve your country, defend your culture, no undergraduate degree required.
Speaker 2: Defend your culture. It's not about locking up criminal migrants.
Speaker 2: It's about defending a culture from its destruction through ethnic
Speaker 2: demographic shifts. It's they're not trying to obscure what they're
Speaker 2: doing in the slightest No.
Speaker 3: And I want to return to something else that the
Speaker 3: Hofstater said that in that second paragraph that you read
Speaker 3: about how like one of the central conceits is that like,
Speaker 3: you know, there's this giant conspiracy that's being unleashed and
Speaker 3: the American public doesn't know anything about it, and like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you can. You know, it is distressing to a large extent,
Speaker 3: the extent to which people just don't know what the
Speaker 3: government is doing. But also like if you look at
Speaker 3: any pulling at all, but anything the people are doing,
Speaker 3: everyone hates it. There isn't like a secret thing that
Speaker 3: you can say to convince people that they're that all
Speaker 3: these people are Nazis, because it's like and that's not
Speaker 3: even a particularly useful project because everyone fucking hates them already,
Speaker 3: like trying to fight this in the realm of sort
Speaker 3: of the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of
Speaker 3: in the realm of like, Hi, i'm your neighbor, you
Speaker 3: also fucking hate this. Let's go fucking like do this
Speaker 3: should people are doing in la and like follow these
Speaker 3: fucking ice fans around, right, That is stuff that people
Speaker 3: are doing, but it doesn't have the kind of like
Speaker 3: instant emotional gratification and register of trying to like accumulate
Speaker 3: hordes of secret knowledge, so people do it less even
Speaker 3: though it's less effective.
Speaker 2: In my discussion of this, like online on various cursed
Speaker 2: social media sites, I've gotten a lot of pushback to
Speaker 2: my pushback of these tactics and what I see as
Speaker 2: a sort of like abuse of anti fascist education, right,
Speaker 2: because people like you know, Robert Evans, myself, you know,
Speaker 2: Molly Conger spent the past eight years trying to actually,
Speaker 2: you know, educate people about like Nazi rhetoric, like in
Speaker 2: like Nazi signals and dog whistles, right, and as an
Speaker 2: attempt to.
Speaker 3: Hopefully prevent them from expanding their power.
Speaker 2: And we may have succeeded in education, but we may
Speaker 2: have failed in the prevention.
Speaker 3: Of them seizing power.
Speaker 2: And that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness
Speaker 2: of certain tactics. And it's now very odd to see
Speaker 2: things that we you know, argued for visibility around to
Speaker 2: kind of be used in ways that don't really make sense.
Speaker 2: That it's it's it's kind of like trying to tame
Speaker 2: a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating
Speaker 2: to me because, I mean, one person who I was
Speaker 2: lightly arguing about this on line was was saying, like,
Speaker 2: this is not numerology, and we don't have to be
Speaker 2: just okay with a clear attempt to normal white nationalist rhetoric.
Speaker 2: And like, first of all, like codes aren't rhetoric. Codes
Speaker 2: are codes, and the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric.
Speaker 2: What they're actually like saying which has like proto fascist
Speaker 2: or fascistic aspects, that is the rhetoric and they're doing it.
Speaker 2: Is there somebody out there in twenty twenty five who's
Speaker 2: gonna finally realize that DHS as an agency has fascistic
Speaker 2: underpinnings via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if
Speaker 2: you count words and turn certain captize letters into numbers,
Speaker 2: it makes a secret Nazi message.
Speaker 3: Is there one person is going to become convinced to us? No,
Speaker 3: that's not the purpose.
Speaker 2: And so trying to conceptize this is like we have
Speaker 2: to make sure we call out the use of Nazi
Speaker 2: rhetoric that doesn't apply to this specific thing that we're
Speaker 2: talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and also like I think, you know, like I
Speaker 3: think we've sort of kind of just to some extent,
Speaker 3: we've just failed on the normalization for it, because again,
Speaker 3: like it's the President of the United States. Yeah, this
Speaker 3: is the official account of the Department of Homeland Security.
Speaker 3: It has already become normalized because they have power. The
Speaker 3: only way to denormalize it is not actually to do
Speaker 3: media critique. It's to like actually oppose them. But that's scary,
Speaker 3: that's scary. Report to marry Meia. Do you know what's
Speaker 3: easy posting on X the everything app Yeah, this is
Speaker 3: how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually empowers the state,
Speaker 3: because the central conceit of the conspiratorial worldview is that
Speaker 3: there is a nearly all powerful agency that controls in
Speaker 3: apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that
Speaker 3: it wants. Right, this is why you can stage things.
Speaker 3: This is why I can recollection. This is why it
Speaker 3: can like I don't know, like it can just like
Speaker 3: magically like disappear anyone. It can replace them with anyone.
Speaker 3: It can stage any protest movement it wants to, right,
Speaker 3: And I think you've seen this a lot in the
Speaker 3: American case, where like I see people who are like
Speaker 3: genuinely well meaning leftists who are convinced that if you
Speaker 3: do anything to resist the American State, you will immediately
Speaker 3: be killed because the American state is all powerful and irresistible.
Speaker 3: And that's just fascist propaganda. Yeah, you're falling victim to
Speaker 3: the panoptic house. Yeah, but it's fascist propaganda that fits
Speaker 3: into the narrative structure of conspiracy. And because the state
Speaker 3: is dangerous, right and can hurt you, it's very very
Speaker 3: easy to you know, accumulate structures of evidence that support
Speaker 3: the emotional sort of core of this thing that is
Speaker 3: just literally fascist propaganda. People are resisting the state every day, right,
Speaker 3: Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking
Speaker 3: like hiding people in like fucking U hauls to jump
Speaker 3: out and grab people. It's because when they tried to
Speaker 3: fucking mass we stomp them, right.
Speaker 2: And when they drive around in their cars and you
Speaker 2: can see them.
Speaker 3: Through the window, everyone follows them.
Speaker 2: People can follow them around and alert their community members
Speaker 2: on where ICE is.
Speaker 3: Like again, mother motherfuckers and fucking Lulu Levin shit, are
Speaker 3: like screaming at ICE agents when they try to arrest people,
Speaker 3: like yeah, that's the actual condition we're in.
Speaker 2: And like, yeah, regular people. And that's why I find
Speaker 2: some people who would be you know, self described as
Speaker 2: like anti fascists or self described is as leftists almost
Speaker 2: falling into this trap like more so than others. And
Speaker 2: it's a little bit evident of something that like I've
Speaker 2: described as like the forever twenty sixteen, how we're all
Speaker 2: kind of stuck in the mindset of this twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen twenty eighteen era, and where you have this
Speaker 2: unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on
Speaker 2: the ground anymore. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This
Speaker 2: is a different situation. This is twenty twenty five. And
Speaker 2: one other like defense of this, you know, code hunting
Speaker 2: that I've seen people say is quote, Nazis love playing
Speaker 2: games like this, so it's important that we call it out.
Speaker 2: And another person saying, quote, this is a fun little
Speaker 2: game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote,
Speaker 2: and like, first of all.
Speaker 3: This is not a game.
Speaker 2: This is actual people's lives, who are who are being deported,
Speaker 2: who are being sent to foreign prison camps. These are
Speaker 2: not games. And and I think that view of like
Speaker 2: anti fascist like education risks repeating like the Okay symbol
Speaker 2: debacle right where dog whistles end up being created or
Speaker 2: spread further due to this gamified version of like Easter
Speaker 2: egg anti fascism. It's kind of like the Barber streisand
Speaker 2: effect where you end up almost accidentally making them start
Speaker 2: doing the thing, which Nazis always have that like frustrating
Speaker 2: impulse because they're the little bitch boy ideology. I think
Speaker 2: as a rat limit put it one of one of
Speaker 2: my favorite posters, and like, I'm not saying that Nazi
Speaker 2: signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be
Speaker 2: thoughtful and careful of how we do it. To recap
Speaker 2: the Okay symbol thing that was invented as like a
Speaker 2: fake dog whistle to try to trick leftists into convincing
Speaker 2: like the media, and had then having the media trying
Speaker 2: to convince the people that anyone who uses like the
Speaker 2: okayhand symbol is secretly a fascist, and this scheme worked,
Speaker 2: and eventually the Oka symbol big came an actual symbol
Speaker 2: used for fascists to identify each other through this ironic
Speaker 2: detachment because it was being talked about in the news
Speaker 2: as a secret Nazi symbol, even though this whole thing
Speaker 2: was like invented as like a joke online. And I'm
Speaker 2: afraid I've started to already see a similar thing happen
Speaker 2: with the fourteen words dog whistle, with an increased use
Speaker 2: of the fourteen words and invoking the fourteen words among
Speaker 2: far right accounts, specifically because of this whole debacle with
Speaker 2: the dhs gov account and there a heritage to be
Speaker 2: proud of homeland worth defending American Progress like ethnonationalist posting.
Speaker 2: And I truly cannot say one way or another if
Speaker 2: that American Progress post had a intentionally embedded fourteen words
Speaker 2: dog whistle inside, I can't. I can't tell you that.
Speaker 2: And the point trying to make is that it kind
Speaker 2: of doesn't matter. But the way we talk about dog
Speaker 2: whistles does matter. And as frustrating as it is that,
Speaker 2: sometimes this feels like we're just living in the meme
Speaker 2: where the Nazi starts shaving his head because everyone's calling
Speaker 2: him a Nazi. That is how Nazis work sometimes. And
Speaker 2: I don't want to play into this attention spectacle that
Speaker 2: they so badly want.
Speaker 3: But you know what I do want right now? Is
Speaker 3: it the process and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 2: Another ad break, that's right, be sure to listen for
Speaker 2: the third and fourth hidden clue in these ads.
Speaker 3: All right, we are back to briefly take a small
Speaker 3: tangent here. I think there is something very important about
Speaker 3: like the fact that role stuck in twenty sixteen, which
Speaker 3: was sort of like the peak of irony right as
Speaker 3: a social affect, has left us really unprepared for now
Speaker 3: where everything is just sort of like, you know, they're
Speaker 3: just doing it and saying it right. Yeah, And it's
Speaker 3: not this sort of like irony pill deniability shit. They
Speaker 3: just do it and people are just not prepared for that.
Speaker 2: They're able to wage this war kind of on both fronts,
Speaker 2: and I think they are still pushing this. I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote from a friend of the pod rat Limit,
Speaker 2: one of my favorite mutes quote prediction, the Nazi salute
Speaker 2: will become common within two years. Right wingers will half
Speaker 2: asset for plausible deniability, mimify the backlash, and then start
Speaker 2: fully doing it quote unquote as a joke to quote
Speaker 2: unquote troll the Libs for being hysterical enough to think
Speaker 2: that they were doing it in the first place. Fascism
Speaker 2: is a little bitch ideology because it's too timid to
Speaker 2: enact as cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as
Speaker 2: retaliation against others for anticipating it. And this has been
Speaker 2: proven right faster than I think what rat Limit predicted.
Speaker 2: There's this current trend on x the Everything app where
Speaker 2: white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi style and trying
Speaker 2: to mimify the backlash. Several posts going viral of these
Speaker 2: of these like aspiring influencers either at the pool or
Speaker 2: cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having
Speaker 2: a your arm in a Elon Musk, my heart goes
Speaker 2: out to you Nazi salute style fashion. Yeah, and I
Speaker 2: think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a
Speaker 2: Nazi salute makes sense, right, he is like an actual
Speaker 2: person affiliated with the government. But making a whole media
Speaker 2: bled just about random blue check Twitter girls, Maybe not
Speaker 2: so much. Maybe that doesn't have any actual value if
Speaker 2: a random like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is
Speaker 2: trying to garner backlash by doing a Hyle Hitler salute
Speaker 2: in their kitchen next to their instapot.
Speaker 3: I keep coming back to the thing that I wrote
Speaker 3: about the original Loss salute and about the ways that everyone,
Speaker 3: you know, like one of the functions of capitalism is
Speaker 3: that everyone has been trained to experience the world and
Speaker 3: think in the image of action instead of like actually
Speaker 3: existing things. That's what I want to talk about next. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 3: let's do this, Let's do this. Yeah, go for it,
Speaker 3: go for it.
Speaker 2: No. I think part of this focus on like these
Speaker 2: hidden codes and even just like these messages online is
Speaker 2: a liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not
Speaker 2: necessarily the act itself. It's carrying out deportations in a
Speaker 2: mode that seems not in line with like neoliberal governing.
Speaker 2: And that's I think what a bunch of the backlash
Speaker 2: being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, Like
Speaker 2: how they film like gaudy ASMR videos that they post
Speaker 2: from the White House account of deportations and use military planes.
Speaker 2: Those are aesthetic differences, and those differences may be important,
Speaker 2: and they're they're bad, right. I'm not saying these things
Speaker 2: are good. Those things are still bad. Yeah, But when
Speaker 2: that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure
Speaker 2: acted deportation itself, that I think is evident of being
Speaker 2: trapped in this like capitalist realism, being trapped in this
Speaker 2: like like this neoliberal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the society of the spectacle exactly right.
Speaker 2: Let's like in June, Ice arrested thirty thousand people and
Speaker 2: did eighteen thousand deportations. In May it was twenty four
Speaker 2: thousand arrests in eighteen thousand deportations. Since February, the Trump
Speaker 2: admin Has averaged about fourteen thousand and seven hundred deportations
Speaker 2: of month. The highest number of deportations ever was in
Speaker 2: twenty thirteen under Obama, averaging thirty six thousand a month.
Speaker 2: The Biden admin averaged almost thirteen thousand. When the Trump
Speaker 2: administration started using military planes for deportations back in January,
Speaker 2: mainly as an aesthetic choice that triggered backlash and rejections
Speaker 2: from Mexico and Colombia. Mexico refused to allow US military
Speaker 2: aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country. Columbia
Speaker 2: also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later
Speaker 2: caved as Trump threatened unitive tariffs. You can see the
Speaker 2: same thing about deploying military to the border, something that
Speaker 2: Biden also did, but has a larger aesthetic backlash under Trump.
Speaker 2: Do you have something you want to say on this
Speaker 2: like image aspect? I have some quotes from Fisher and
Speaker 2: that's kind of all I have left.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it is very fitting of our styles
Speaker 3: of politics that you're going to Fisher here, and I'm
Speaker 3: going to Benjamin. Benjamin is quoted in these sections that
Speaker 3: Fisher is pulling from as well. Yep, yep. So I'll
Speaker 3: go into the source. I'm not going through the fucking
Speaker 3: cru bullshit like pop marksis running doc but no, but like,
Speaker 3: you know, like one of the things that that Walter Benjamin,
Speaker 3: who people genuinely really should read. He's one of the
Speaker 3: great original theorists of fascism, and he fucking died trying
Speaker 3: to flee the Nazis. And one of his arguments was that,
Speaker 3: you know, one of the cores of fascism is the
Speaker 3: replacement of politics with aesthetics. Right, that aesthetics would have
Speaker 3: allow you to you know, feel represent like feel representation
Speaker 3: instead of do the action. And this is this is
Speaker 3: an analysis that has been sort of like folded through
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of different analyzes of how capitalism functions. Right,
Speaker 3: This is this is one of the three lines of
Speaker 3: the society a spectacle, and it's this real issue that
Speaker 3: we're dealing with now because again kind of in a sense,
Speaker 3: what has happened to everything, right, And you can argue
Speaker 3: to some extent that like our channel being called cool
Speaker 3: zone media is sort of this is that all politics
Speaker 3: from every side has been completely reduced to aesthetics. And
Speaker 3: completely reducing it to aesthetics allows like allows the fascist
Speaker 3: mode of politics to simply draw in a bunch of
Speaker 3: people who can sort of just now passively experience living
Speaker 3: through these sort of through this sort of collection of
Speaker 3: images and this emotional aesthetic. Yeah, and it also is
Speaker 3: doing the same thing to us. But the thing is
Speaker 3: they have the fucking state and we don't, right, And
Speaker 3: so if you don't fucking exit, if you don't exit
Speaker 3: the sort of mirror world of esthetic of sort of
Speaker 3: like a fucking living in images, right, and you know,
Speaker 3: go do the actual shit that the Boord is talking
Speaker 3: about in the society a spectacle, were you and all
Speaker 3: your friends formed workers councils and fucking start taking all
Speaker 3: of the ship back from all of the people who
Speaker 3: were taking it from you. You're just gonna live in
Speaker 3: the fascist time heare forever.
Speaker 2: I mean, you could look at the union resistance to
Speaker 2: icedy importations, specifically in LA with russaurant workers that it's
Speaker 2: literally doing that. And like I would argue, like now,
Speaker 2: it's not so much that fascism is politics as aesthetics,
Speaker 2: but especially now, it is an aestheticized politics. And you
Speaker 2: can even see that in so far as its focuses
Speaker 2: on you know, like race and like ethnic purity, like
Speaker 2: blood and soil. That's why they're posting American progress, driving
Speaker 2: out the indigenous people with the aryan white lady carrying
Speaker 2: the torch of progress. It is an asceticized politics on
Speaker 2: like a very pure level. And again, to quote from
Speaker 2: my goat, uh this antiat quote Mark Fisher in captus
Speaker 2: ualism quote, ultra tarianism and capital are by no means incompatible.
Speaker 2: Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist. Neoliberals, the capitalist
Speaker 2: realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space,
Speaker 2: but contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering
Speaker 2: away of the state, only a stripping back of the
Speaker 2: state to its core military and police functions.
Speaker 3: Unquote. This is very similar to something.
Speaker 2: That me and Mia talked about right as Trump got elected,
Speaker 2: in terms of the state becoming more removed but hostile.
Speaker 3: Yeah, although although I see again I disagree official here,
Speaker 3: because the neo liberals understood what they were doing to
Speaker 3: begin with. They were never trying to wither the state away.
Speaker 3: That was just the lies that they told the fucking basses.
Speaker 2: Like sure, I mean, that's what contrary to their official Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's like you know, quote, such a.
Speaker 2: Blight can only be eased by an intervention that can
Speaker 2: be no more anticipated than was the onset of the curse.
Speaker 3: In the first place.
Speaker 2: Action is pointless, only senseless. Hope makes sense. Superstitious and
Speaker 2: religion the first resorts of the helpless proliferate unquote. This
Speaker 2: is part of what I conceptualize as this code. Hunting
Speaker 2: is almost a form of this hopeless superstition to continue quote.
Speaker 2: The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road, nor has
Speaker 2: it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There
Speaker 2: is no punctual moment of disaster. The world doesn't end
Speaker 2: with a bang. It winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.
Speaker 2: What caused the catastrophe to occur? Who knows its cause?
Speaker 2: Lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the
Speaker 2: present as to seem like the caprice of a maligned
Speaker 2: being a negative miracle, a melidation which no penance can ameliorate.
Speaker 2: The turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship
Speaker 2: is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist
Speaker 2: realism unquote. And yeah, that's what me is talking about
Speaker 2: with Gidebor and society of the spectacle. That's a trap
Speaker 2: that I think a lot of people are falling into
Speaker 2: right now. And though it's arguable that living in a
Speaker 2: liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that sullys
Speaker 2: that mean it's like good, right, That's not what we're
Speaker 2: arguing here. Fisher then quotes French philosopher Alawn Badeu quote
Speaker 2: to justify their conservatism. The partisans of the established order
Speaker 2: cannot really call it ideal or wonderful, so instead they've
Speaker 2: decided to say that all of the rest is horrible. Sure,
Speaker 2: they say, we may not live in a condition of
Speaker 2: perfect goodness, but we are lucky that we don't live
Speaker 2: in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect,
Speaker 2: but it's better than bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but
Speaker 2: it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans
Speaker 2: die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations
Speaker 2: like Lamosovich. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we
Speaker 2: don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda.
Speaker 3: Unquote. And already parts of this are slightly outdated. Oh yeah, because.
Speaker 2: Now, but this is the thing is both are tragedies
Speaker 2: where millions people die right. One of them is through
Speaker 2: the aesthetics of neoliberalism. The other one is through asthetics
Speaker 2: of racist nationalistic declarations, which the Trump administration is currently
Speaker 2: playing with. That is what they decided to do, and
Speaker 2: so the reaction to it is on this aesthetic note,
Speaker 2: not necessarily on this pure actual humanistic opposition to deportations
Speaker 2: as a process that is inhumane that we should not
Speaker 2: allow at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I see the logic of this all the fucking time,
Speaker 3: talking to people, where like we'll be like, okay, like
Speaker 3: no deportations, and then you get a whole bunch of
Speaker 3: people being like, wow, but what about criminals just like
Speaker 3: some some deportation. What is this is the structural logic
Speaker 3: of the original like deportation blitz from Trump.
Speaker 2: Creating a class of undesirables that you can then always
Speaker 2: add to and press the border on, like what Karl
Speaker 2: Schmidt talks about.
Speaker 3: This is the structural logic of fascism. Yeah, but everyone
Speaker 3: everyone thinks about deportations this way now, and they're mad
Speaker 3: that Trump is doing it and not Biden. But you know,
Speaker 3: until people actually break through the sort of pere opposition
Speaker 3: to the aesthetics and actually start you know, having a
Speaker 3: kind of totalizing opposition to the system that is doing this.
Speaker 3: We're just going to be stuck here.
Speaker 2: And this is I think one of the limits of
Speaker 2: using anti fascism as this, like aesthetic code hunting, is
Speaker 2: because a few days ago the THS posted a Woody
Speaker 2: Guthrie song, his song America the Beautiful, with the DHS
Speaker 2: posting the promise of America is worth protecting, the future
Speaker 2: of our homeland is worth defending. Notably, everyone in this
Speaker 2: video is all white people, which this sentiment is the
Speaker 2: same thing as the fourteen words, except it has fifteen words,
Speaker 2: so therefore not a Nazi dog whistle. We're safe, guys,
Speaker 2: We're good. I counted the words. There's fifteen of them,
Speaker 2: so you can disregard what the actual text is saying.
Speaker 2: And I think that is like the prime, the prime
Speaker 2: contradiction in which I am growing increasingly frustrated. So that's
Speaker 2: most of what I have to say say about the
Speaker 2: limits of Nazi coode hunting and the aesthetics of superstition
Speaker 2: and the paranoid style in American politics. Mia, do you
Speaker 2: have any any final wyse Wise notes.
Speaker 3: The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was
Speaker 3: one has passed. It is now time to end the
Speaker 3: episode right here.
Speaker 2: That's right, it is related for anything. Oh and if
Speaker 2: you were able to decode the hidden message in the
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Speaker 2: to your local congressman to redeem your prize.
Speaker 3: By bye.
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