16
votes
Department of Homeland Security publishes memo with several Nazi/white supremacist dogwhistles
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again
- Published
- Feb 15 2018
- Word count
- 569 words
The first dogwhistle is the fourteen-word headline beginning with "We must secure", a reference to what the Anti-Defamation League calls "the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world":
The second is the fact the memo contains fourteen points (that is, if you count the random bolded paragraph as a point), another reference to 14 Words.
Finally, the second to last point contains a seemingly random statistic: "On average, out of 88 claims that pass the credible fear screening, fewer than 13 will ultimately result in a grant of asylum.". The number 88 is white supremacist slang for "Heil Hitler". Furthermore, it's incredibly weird to phrase it as "out of 88 claims" as opposed to something like "out of every 100 claims".
Is anyone else extremely creeped out by this? I mean, the fourteen points and 88 could probably be passed off as coincidence, but the fact the headline is exactly fourteen words beginning with "We must secure" is the biggest nazi dogwhistle I've ever seen.
I think you're reading a little too much into this. I see only 13 points and the rest of the number references are tenuous in the most generous interpretation.
Yeah, like... this memo is from 133 days ago. 133. Hitler was made Chancellor of the German Reich in January 1933. 01/33. 133. dstaley posts topic with Nazi dogwhistle.
To be fair, there's a chance that whoever wrote this memo is a nazi sympathizer and they did include this imagery on purpose.
I'm not ready to commit to a tinfoil hat on this though. Maybe a tinfoil tennis visor.
Sure, it's always a possibility. But the way these numerology-ish things always work is that people pick out any signals that confirm the conclusion they've already decided on, and ignore everything else. You only look at the positive signals but not any of the negative ones.
I used the "133 days ago" thing because it ended up with a good Hitler connection, but if it didn't work I wouldn't have thought, "never mind, I guess there's no Nazi signals here", I would have just tried other possible numbers until I found a "significant" one. You can pull hundreds of different numbers out of anything if you try, some of them are bound to be ones that seem to have a meaning.
I know what you're saying, but to me the combination of seeing I-can't-believe-it's-not the 14 Words along with divide by 88 is enough to push me into the realm of believing it's not an accident. Seriously, who divides by 88? I can't plausibly call that an accident.
But I totally get how it sounds completely crazy. Being ex-religious, numerology always drove me nuts when it was used to justify the end of the world or drinking your ovaltine or whatever. If I wasn't already familiar with that particular neo-nazi symbolism, I would probably agree with you.
Sure, and I sort of say that in the last sentence, but there's no denying that the headline is a direct mimic of 14 Words. both the first three words ("We must secure") and the fact it's exactly fourteen words is too much of a similarity to be accidental.
I agree that "We must secure" by itself isn't enough to be concerned. It's the fact the headline, not a random sentence, both begins with "We must secure" and is fourteen words long. The length is significant not because the original phrase was also fourteen words long, but because "fourteen words" is a prominently used Nazi symbol.
The chances of innocently using "We must secure" is relatively high. The chances of innocently using "We must secure" in a fourteen word headline is exponentially lower. The chances of innocently using "We must secure" at the beginning of a fourteen word headline about immigration from an administration explicitly supported by white supremacists is so astronomically low as to be borderline impossible.
I feel for you here. By design, pointing this stuff out is going to make you look crazy to those unfamiliar with the symbolism...that's the whole idea. That doesn't make any crackpot theory true, but it does complicate things.
If you're at all familiar with the usage of the 14 Words, though, this immediately sets alarms off. Like this isn't something you'd have to search for. If I saw this without being primed to be looking for Nazi shit, I am 100% sure I would've seen it immediately, particularly given the subject. And it is incredibly pervasive within those circles. I understand that many people haven't come into contact with it much so it seems like you're digging up some obscure shit very few are actually aware of, but that really isn't the case at all. It's something you learn very quickly when you stumble into one of their spaces. /pol/ is very happy about this right now.
That said, I don't know what to do. I think maybe it's not that useful to push this specific instance but rather to keep trying to expose these dogwhistles so people can be aware of things like this on their own. This is only about a half step behind having an off-white swastika behind the text in my eyes, but you can't present it that way because it looks just like plenty of conspiracy theories.
I guess my take is just like...there are so many awful things that are well-known, accepted fact that I don't think it's worth turning to things like these. Even if I think there's validity to this, sticking to concrete information is a better approach.
This is the first I've ever heard of it. I imagine most people in this thread are fairly unfamiliar with Nazi symbols.
I think you're misrepresenting chance. When you look at any specific event, the chance of it happening is extremely rare--especially when you go into great detail. To me, this is all on the level of a conspiracy theory.
This isn't about whether non-Nazis will recognise these symbols: the point is that Nazis will recognise them. They're like a secret code. If you don't know the secret code, you won't notice the secret message. If you do know the code, then you'll notice the message.
I'm not a Nazi, by any means, but the use of "88" to refer to Hitler (because the two words in "Heil Hitler" start with "H" which is the 8th letter of the alphabet) has filtered through even to me. I'm even aware of the "14 words" significance - although I don't tend to count words, so I wouldn't notice this.
I'm not sure about the "14" connection in this memo, but the use of "88" in a statistic is extremely unusual. We tend to use 10 and powers of 10 in our statistics: "1 in 10 people..."; "43% of companies surveyed... [43/100]"; "53 incidents per 100,000 population...". We don't use "88" for statistical purposes. Noone calculates that 13/88 asylum cases will succeed: it would be expressed as 14/100. That "88" is very strange.
The reason they're called dog whistles is because they're silent to most people
Well... yes.
That's the hope! These symbols are internal symbols used by white supremacists, not things that are common knowledge to a layperson. That's why I provided the additional context.
I found this...14 house democrats...8 committee chairmen...headline of 8 words...1488!...also mentions "Homeland", another nod to the Nazis...definitely a dog whistle to white supremacists!...oh, wait...it's from Democrats challenging the border wall...hmmm...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/07/AR2008040702361.html?noredirect=on
Democrats to Challenge Plans to Finish Border Fence
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Fourteen House Democrats, including eight committee chairmen, said yesterday that they will file a brief supporting a legal challenge to the Bush administration's plans to finish building 470 miles of fencing and other barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border by the end of the year.
Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) led the group, which includes the heads of the energy and commerce, transportation, intelligence, education, rules, and veteran affairs panels.
Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club asked the Supreme Court last month to review whether the administration's decision to waive environmental laws to finish the fence is constitutional. That waiver was approved by the Republican-led Congress in 2005.
"Our responsibility to be stewards of the earth cannot be thrown aside for the sake of an ill-conceived border fence," said Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.).
I am Sam
Sam I am
I do not like green eggs and ham
Many sentences are 14 words long, including this sentence which I just created now. You'll find it is easy to craft a sentence that is 14 words long. Just because a sentence is 14 words long doesn't mean much - context is key. I understand why you might jump to such conclusions but I advise caution here. Perhaps if we had more documents signaling similar language we could draw better conclusions.
I think this argument might be less convincing to people who aren't familiar with the 14 Words and 88, because looked at objectively, it does sound a bit crazy. But those dog whistles are definitely real.
All I see is a sensationalist post title and a lot of tin foil shaped into head wear...
There is definitely some confirmation bias going on here.
It's easy to dismiss, but at the same time isn't that true of a lot of hidden messaging? For context please consider who would want to work at ICE and be successful under a Trump administration? Is it the well-meaning person who thinks they can change it from within, or the racist who thinks they're helping keep America white? The point is that anyone who is looking for those symbols will see them, because Nazis are looking for those symbols. They know the 14 words by heart. They know 88. That's their signal that they will be welcomed at ICE.
There are plenty of documented cases of hidden symbolism, for example in a lot of the architecture in DC there are Masonic symbols. It's not a coincidence - even though it could be - it's a secret organization sending messages to people who are attuned to those messages.
There's also that whole thing where the FBI warned of white supremacists in law enforcement 10 years ago. (2016)
And now reportedly ICE is rounding up green card holders
It's easy to brush things off as conspiracy theories, but something folks don't often appreciate is that conspiracies actually happen in the real world. Just because someone is theorizing about a conspiracy does not automatically mean it's without intellectual merit.
Right, but with these types of situations the whole point is you can't say it's one way or the other without further proof.
Even if you don't find the headline suspicious, what reasoning is there for
Out of 88...fewer than 13...it's not a convenient fraction, and by saying fewer than 13 it makes the 88 look completely arbitrary. Do we think they threw a dart at a board to decide to use 88 and 'fewer than 13'? Why wouldn't they just say 15% or 10% or whatever?
I realize that, I'm not saying i'ts not suspicious or that it shouldn't be looked into. But we don't know what resources the writer was looking at or much more than that. I just mean to emphasize that we can't draw any solid conclusions. We can be suspicious but I don't know if we can decide one way or the other until you see this kind of thing popping up repeatedly and somewhat consistently.
Meanwhile, Milo Yiannopoulos has been suspended from Paypal for sending a Jewish journalist $14.88. https://twitter.com/blakersdozen/status/1012463261613035520
Hmm, I wonder what Milo had to say about it on his twitter account.
It's an old, tired meme at this point, I know... but it honestly makes me immensely happy every time I see it. The man is absolutely insufferable and deserves every ounce of shit he receives.
Who would write "13 out of 88" instead of just "15%"? That's a tell if I ever saw one.
I would have thought this was a joke if it weren't for the current political climate. Sure, the Department of Homeland Security is run by Nazis. Why not?