The political dog-whistle, a call to the faithful
Dog-whistles emit a sound above the range
of the human ear but not to that of your dog or domestic cat. It can be very
useful if you’re hunting birds and you want to grab the attention of your dog
without disturbing the birds. A politician would use a dog whistle to alert his
or her the public to a position he or she holds that may be repugnant to the
general population. It’s not a literal dog-whistle. The guy doesn’t get on
stage and blow a whistle. No, he uses certain words or phrases that make her
more radical supporters go, “Hey, is he saying what I think he’s saying?” And
the next thing you know you’ve got white supremacists pushing around a black
woman at one of your rallies after you tell them to “get her out” and you’re
being sued for “inciting violence.” CNN Footage
You may ask, what brought the white-supremacist
to Trump events? Well, it all started with his initial announcement that he was
going to be running for president when he said of Mexicans, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re
rapists.” Then he proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the United States.
If you happen to be white and you believe your race endangered by some
existential threat like African Americans, Mexicans, Muslims or Jews, then a
message of hate regarding at least two of those groups is going to be
appealing.
In July of 2015, he
sent out a patriotic tweet featuring his image superimposed over the stars of
the American flag. Hundred dollar bills with Benjamin Franklin’s image can be
seen through one red stripe, the white house through another and through the
third can be seen three Nazi S.S. soldiers. The “mistake” was blamed on an
intern and quickly corrected however, many within the white supremacist
movement interpreted it as a dog-whistle.
That same month, he
retweets a graphic traced back to a white supremacist displaying a graphic
greatly exaggerating the level of black crime in the U.S. When the media proved
the obvious falsehood of these numbers, Trump defended himself by stating “I
retweeted somebody who was supposedly an expert. Am I going to check every
statistic?” Nevertheless, he’s blown the whistle and the white supremacists
were taking notice. 
In July, Trump, now
the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, begins his attacks on
Hillary Clinton with a tweet that featured her over a pile of money and a Star of
David with the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever” emblazoned in the centre.
Donald quickly corrected the “mistake” however, not before the whistle reached the
white-supremacists and Neo-Nazis. In October, he accused Hillary of colluding “with
international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to
enrich these global financial powers.” In the place of banks, many white
supremacists would read Jews.
With these dog whistles
came endorsements from many white-supremacists. The first was Andrew Anglin who
founded the Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer in late June of 2015 and culminated with David
Duke when, in February of 2016, he stated that voters “have an absolute
obligation to vote for Donald Trump, and to vote against Cruz and Rubio. If you
vote for Ted Cruz, you are acting in a traitorous way to our people. You are
betraying our people. Period.”
In some situations, a candidate blows the whistle and dogs show up in the
most embarrassing of circumstances. Take Kellie Leitch, running for the
leadership of the Conservative Party of Canada. Her website reads, “Kellie has
proposed screening immigrants, refugees, and visitors, for anti-Canadian
values.” She elaborated on her meaning of “Canadian values” in a CBC interview
where she stated that “people who believe women are property—that they can be
beaten, bought or sold, or that gays or lesbians can be stoned because of who
they love—don’t share Canadian values.” Hmm. Could she be referring to a
particular group?
On Sunday, March 26, Ms. Leitch attended a meeting in Brampton organized
by the “Keep Religion Out of Public Schools.” Its purpose was to voice concerns
about the Peel District School Board's policy of allowing Muslim prayer in
public schools. Also in attendance were members of Rise Canada, an organization
that calls Islam “a barbaric ideology of hate that must be banned.” It suggests “a
permanent ban on all Muslim immigrants PLUS mass deportation of existing
Muslims” and recently led a protest outside a mosque in Toronto.
A spokesman for Ms. Leitch claims she had no idea the group was there
even though she can be seen shaking hands with a senior advisor for Rise Canada
in a video of the event. The video also shows the group taking donations to fight
construction of a mosque in Mississauga. Embarrassing or what? Rise Canada
encouraged its members to buy a Conservative membership before the deadline so
they could support Kellie in her bid for the Conservative leadership. Will the
dog-whistle work for Kellie the same way it did for Trump?
Jason Kenney’s another person who’s had the dog-whistle backfire on him.
Like Donald and Kellie, Jason needs to appeal to a broad spectrum of the
electorate and like Donald and Kellie, he holds views that are not shared by the
majority of the population. He’s an ardent Catholic who studied philosophy at the Jesuit University of San Francisco. As a
44-year-old, he was still living with his mom. He may still be living with her.
For those of you who may be unfamiliar with
the Jesuits, they’re a Catholic order created by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in
1540. Loyola was a soldier who discovered religion after his leg was mangled by
a cannon ball. In the spirit of the military, he called his new order the
“Company of Jesus.” Jesuits possess a staunch allegiance to the papacy and
spread his message through education. In New France, they were known as the Black Robes who spread the Pope’s message and disease to the Huron
people. Today, the Jesuits are the world’s largest male religious order.
According to the “Campaign Life Coalition,”
Jason has a perfect voting record on life and family issues. Their “campaign”
is to make both abortion and euthanasia illegal and to advocate for traditional
family values and oppose same-sex marriage. In 2005, Jason voted against the
legalization of gay marriage. In 2012, he voted against the wishes of his
buddy, Stephen Harper, in favour of a backbencher’s motion for an all-party
commission to study when life begins. Of course, the unstated purpose of the
motion was to reopen the question of legalized abortion. That bill was defeated
by a margin of 203 to 91. (Interesting to note that Rona Ambrose was one of
the few cabinet ministers who also voted in favour of the motion.)
Jason might have
thought the statement an innocuous motherhood statement, a simple dog-whistle
to his hard-core Christian base however members of the media and general population
were not so easily duped and reacted with outrage and satire. Does he care? The
general population may forget but his ultra-right Christian base won’t which is
the idea of the dog whistle. It alerts the dog while other animals either don’t
notice or don’t hear it.
The political
dog-whistle seems like a consequence of divided politics and the message
barrage created by social media. Our brain can only attend to so much stimuli
so it necessarily filters the messages reaching our consciousness. Many of us
are not cognizant of all the messages that Donald, Kellie and Jason send out into
the cybersphere through their twitter accounts or Facebook so we necessarily
won’t hear it. But, there are those who do and, in the case of these three
individuals, those messages are received by individuals who don’t respect the
many of the human rights entrenched in the constitutions of our two countries.
Fortunately, the media monitors many of these violations however it is
incumbent that we all remain vigilant.
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