August 7, 2025 • 40 mins
Garrison and Mia unravel whether the DHS is posting coded nazi messages, and discuss the limits of treating anti fascism as an easter egg hunt.
Sources:
https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
https://files.libcom.org/files/[Mark_Fisher]_Capitalist_Realism_Is_There_no_Alte(BookZZ.org).pdf
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20p36e62gyo
https://bsky.app/profile/bishonentype.bsky.social/post/3luq3qktltc2n
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
This is it could happen here, a show about things
falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by
Mia Wong.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Mia. I have some upsetting news.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Oh no, which is frankly one of the best ways
to start in this episode and one of the best
ways to start the show. So I'm pretty sure that
I found this account called uh, let's see at Haill Hitler,
and I think he's posting some things that is.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
A little bit fascist. Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
I have decoded some of at Hell Hitler's communications and
I have uncovered a secret a secret Nazi code.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Wow. This is. This is an incredibly unexpected revelation from
Hailed Hitler.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
He has posted some pictures in like what I would
assume is some kind of military uniform that looks like
I don't know it's it's some kind of like like
Germanic military inform. But I've noticed that there are some
runes on this uniform that look very similar to the
Odal rune. So I'm thinking because of the ruine, this
guy might be a Nazi.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Thank you for your work, Harison. We could never have
determined this. That's right, I am.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
You can find me at osent to Defender Online. No,
that doesn't for us today, and it could happen here now.
So this emisode, we're gonna talk about something that's been
slowly frustrating me the past few weeks, and that is
the misapplication of dog whistles. And let's just get right
(01:38):
into it. People have been noticing patterns, noticing trends in
official communications from the dhs gov online accounts, which now
is the main way the government sends out communications, unfortunately,
especially on X the Everything app. But this, this extends
(01:59):
outside of of X the Everything after, this extends outside
of Blue Sky the Internet in general. This is about
how we understand the messaging of fascists and understand how
rhetoric and anti fascist like education works, and ways that
I think it's currently being misapplied.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
So bear with me.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
This is going to be kind of an odd episode,
but I think I think it's worth it because I
don't want us falling into the same traps that we
maybe fell into eight years ago. So let's let's let's
start by talking about some communications posted on the internet
by at dhs gov. A picture of a painting titled
(02:41):
American Progress by John Gast, captioned a heritage to be
proud of, comma a homeland worth defending. So on the surface,
you know, maybe a slightly hashtag problematic sentiment here with
a hashtag problematic painting or at the very least of
painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and Indigenous people
(03:06):
specifically with like a white supremacist outlook, with this enlarged
white woman bathed in a white cloak, bringing forth that
the tide of quote unquote progress as Indigenous people are
are forced to flee from the edge of the painting.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
It's it's fun because this is a painting we literally
when they had to explain manifest destiny like colonialism good.
This is the painting that was in my textbook in
high school. Is three class like and it is like
the er, the er colonialism good, genocide, good.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Painting, genocide good. That that's what the painting is. But
what I have found through some hashtag research, there might
be a hidden code in this, in this communication from
the DHS, who already an agency that only has the
best interests and of really all people who strive for
human rights, the DHS. So if you count all of
(04:05):
the words in the tweet, guess how many words there
are in this tweet? Mea fifteen no, so close, so close,
fourteen fourteen words in this tweet, which might remind you
of the fourteen words the Nazi signifier, which I probably
just explain. Surely most people listening to this is familiar
(04:26):
with the fourteen words, since it seems everybody thinks they
are an armchair expert on fascist rhetoric. But the fourteen
words we must secure the existence of our people and
a future for white children. This became a popular hashtag
dog whistle, especially in the past. I would say ten
(04:49):
fifteen years, usually by implanting fourteen's and usually fourteen eighty
eights with eighty eight meaning Hyle Hitler because each is
the eighth letter of the alphabet. This became a common
Nazi tag. You could see this in graffiti, You see
this embedded into into posts, see this in like Nazi artwork.
(05:11):
And going back to this DHS post, we cannot only
count fourteen words in this tweet. This is actually a
fourteen eighty eight because two of the h's in this
in this post are capitalized unusually, and that means hal
Hitler Wow because hc eighth letter uh huh oh but wait,
(05:32):
actually looking at this post again, there's actually other words
in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
But don't worry. I don't worry.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
This is still a dog whistle because those other words
that are capitalized in the first sentence are the letters
A and D, which, if you convert those into numbers,
are one in four, So it's actually another fourteen.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Oh wow, we're doing We're doing numerology. We're doing jamatria,
where we've become Q and on so back.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
So if you cannot tell by my thinly veiled sarcasm
in that last section, I think this methodology is a
little bit silly.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
What are we doing? What are we doing here?
Speaker 2 (06:12):
We're converting capitalized letters in the first half of a
tweet into numbers and then rearranging the order of those
letters to get a fourteen eighty eight. It's literally jerbatria,
and then also counting the total words in the whole
suite while still disregarding the capitalizations in the last four
words for another fourteen What are we doing? How is
(06:33):
this the piece of evidence that sinks sinks the Trump
administration and finally proves that they're fascist. You can just
look at all of the fascist policies the Trump administration
is enacting. Instead of doing numerology on tweets, people are thinking,
ha ha ha, I have decoded the secret Nazi message
with a HHD one eight eight fourteen. Nice trigroypers. Meanwhile,
(07:00):
you can just look at the actual text of the post.
You can look at the painting. Both of those things
have an inherent fascist quality. It's literally defending the concept
of ethnic genocide, of manifest destiny. While the administration, the
DHS is currently furthering as no nationalist policies.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
They are doing this. This is homeland security, right. I
don't know if people realize that ICE is a part
of homeland security, but like, this is the agency that
is literally.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
Rounding people up and sending them to camps. We have
camps in multiple countries now. But I say they're being
round up and sent to camps. It's genuinely unclear whether
what I'm talking about is the fucking concentration camp in Florida.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Sea Coat in nol Salvador. Yeah, I mean I think
people have now escape, so I can't technically call the
Honduras want a death camp. But like, again, there's any
people in South Udan, They're like, they're just doing this,
Like what are we doing here?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
So this episode I want to focus on how people
are misusing anti fascist education, or I would argue they're
misusing anti fascist education and kind of missing the forest
for a cardboard cutout of trees, not even trees, kind
of something that could be a tree if you look
at it from one angle, but maybe isn't actually a
(08:19):
real tree. And you don't need to sound like a
da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist to point out the obvious,
like dog whistles don't matter if the regular whistle is
already fascist. If they're just saying things openly and doing things,
what purpose does a dog whistle? And this is something
(08:42):
that we're going to discuss. Are not just saying this
and closing the episode, We're going to get into these
And I think part of what's happening here everybody is
so cooked by the paranoid style of American politics. Everyone
is it's so eager to decode the hidden messages that
(09:04):
we're missing what's right in front of us. QAnon has
a total victory. Qwanon does not really exist in the
way that it did in twenty eighteen. That the q
Andon cult and conspiracy theory as like a singular cultish
project is kind of no more. But q Andon has
a cultural victory over the entire United States, and not
(09:25):
just on the right wing, not just on Mega. So
much of American politics now is litigating who is and
is not a pedophile, who is and is not trafficking children,
who can notice which events are staged, who can notice
hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on the Internet,
And this is what like everything is, And like the
(09:47):
real turning point I think for the right wing was
probably the twenty twenty election, in like a massive fracture
from reality in which they think that election was legitimately stolen.
And obviously there was many events leading up to that
which which contributed to this. Yeah, And I think one
of the biggest fracture points for liberals was the attempted
assassination of Donald Trump, with people creating whole new alternate
(10:09):
realities that that event was staged. And because that door
is opened now I'm seeing such a massive flood of
things that I would label as blueing on conspiracy theories,
which is kind of a nonsense term, but it gets
the point across and I'm gonna do a whole piece
on bluing on very soon. I've been collecting blueing on
conspiracy theories for a while, but I want to do
something specifically about this fourteen eighty eight and like secret
(10:30):
codes thing, because it's so evocative of like, you know,
Q drops, and it's evocative of, you know, searching for
Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have been doing
for generations. And we're to talk about that more and
read a little bit of an essay on that topic
(10:50):
after this ad break, and I will let you know
there's gonna be two messages in the ad break that
if you decode, you win a special prize at the
end of the episode, So make sure you listen to
every single second of the ad in case you miss
the code. Okay, we are back, speaking of the paranoid
(11:18):
style in American politics. I want to quote a few
sections to kind of frame what I'm talking about here.
This was an essay written in the sixties by Richard
hoff Setter Hoffstetter Richard Hoffstetter one of the first like
modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics. I'm gonna
(11:43):
I have three paragraphs here that I that I selected
as being relevant to the current the current topic at hand.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
There is a style of mind that is far from
new and that is not necessarily right wing. I call
it the paranoid style simply because no other word added
evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy
that I have in mind. Nothing really prevents a sound
program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style.
(12:12):
Style has more to do with the way in which
ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of
their contact.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Unquote.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
And I like that section specifically because fourteen eighty eight
is a real dog whistle. We can see this used.
There is aspects of people who are trying to search
for this and trying to search for patterns in the
communications of an admittedly fascistic government agency that I find
like sympathetic, Like can I can understand because Yeah, that
(12:43):
is a real dog whistle. I'm going to continue the quote.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms.
He traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds,
whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is
always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at
a turning point. Like religious millenarianists, he expresses the anxiety
(13:06):
of those who are living through the last days, and
he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.
As a member of the avant garde who is capable
of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to it.
As of yet to unaroused public, the paranoid is a
militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation
(13:28):
of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not
even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Hofstetter is talking about something that that me and Robert
specifically have have discussed a lot on this show before.
How everyone in America wants to have access to secret information.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
M h. Everyone wants to.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Have the exclusive piece of secret intel that will solve everything,
and like having having that informational exclusivity in a world
of information saturation, right of a vortex of like meaningless noise.
It's it's such a romantic idea that that I alone
have the info or the clue to pieces together, and
(14:15):
it's my duty to inform the masses. It's a very
romantic notion, and.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
It's also one that is exactly perfectly anti suited for
the moment we live in, which is actually just a
moment where everything that is happening is just so clearingly literal,
like it's all out of the oden, Like what is
happening with the Trump administration. Okay, in twenty twenty, there
is a massive uprising to attempt to attempt to fundamentally
(14:41):
change like the structurally racist nature of the United States,
to deal with its fucking class inequalities, to deal with
the structural violence of the state. This was reacted to
by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade
gaining power and then finally took power in the form
of like a bunch of pistol petite bourgeois fucking car
(15:02):
dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed
by the richest tech company guy in the world, right,
and they came together to build fascism. This is the
most straightforward, like if this is a conception of how
a fascist takeover works, that he's so thuddingly literal that
(15:23):
It defies narrativization because it's just there. There's no subtlety
to it. They're just saying it. They just want to
do it, and they're doing it. But everyone is convinced
that there's like some kind of secret hitting conspiracy and
it's like no, they're just doing the thing that they're saying.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah, you can argue that we have a griper occupied
government not because of counting words and posts, but because
of not only who they're bringing on for DOGE, but
literally Ice in DHS as of today, which I'm recording
this on Wednesday, I think because this comes out Wednesday night,
are copying like Patriot Front style tactics of loading up
(15:59):
ICE agents in U haul style rentable trucks to hunt
down people to assault and kidnap, like they're just copying
the Patriot Front playbook. Here, the ICE director said that
he wants an Amazon like mass deportation system, calling it
quote unquote Amazon Prime, but with human beings. They're saying this,
(16:21):
you can listen to the actual words. I'm going to
read another quote here from the Paranoid Style of American
Politics essay quote. A final characteristic of the paranoid style
is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of
the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between
its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality
(16:45):
it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to
prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can
be believed respectable. Paranoid literature not only starts from certain
moratal commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully
and all but obsessively accumulates quote unquote evidence. The paranoid
(17:06):
seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world,
but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his
cherished convictions from it unquote. And I think that gets
into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this,
this naze code hunting. It's actually a form of self coping,
(17:27):
looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking
at the brazenness in which ICE is operating, and this
is a self preservation mechanism. Someone on Blue Sky that
I was talking to about this is like arguing, like
Ice doesn't need to dog whistle, they have no reason
to like dog whistling is for trying to like sneakily
get racists or fascist into power while signaling to a
(17:50):
nationalistic base that they are like one of them.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Right, But these guys are.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Already in power, and the base already knows that they're
in power. There's no point in dog whistle. They're just
using ice to establish an ethno state. They're using explicit
ethno state rhetoric. In a post from this morning which
has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight nine
ten words not fourteen ten words, Wow, DHS said quote,
(18:16):
serve your country, defend your culture, no undergraduate degree required.
Defend your culture. It's not about locking up criminal migrants.
It's about defending a culture from its destruction through ethnic
demographic shifts. It's they're not trying to obscure what they're
doing in the slightest No.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
And I want to return to something else that the
Hofstater said that in that second paragraph that you read
about how like one of the central conceits is that like,
you know, there's this giant conspiracy that's being unleashed and
the American public doesn't know anything about it, and like, yeah,
you can. You know, it is distressing to a large extent,
the extent to which people just don't know what the
government is doing. But also like if you look at
(18:58):
any pulling at all, but anything the people are doing,
everyone hates it. There isn't like a secret thing that
you can say to convince people that they're that all
these people are Nazis, because it's like and that's not
even a particularly useful project because everyone fucking hates them already,
like trying to fight this in the realm of sort
of the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of
in the realm of like, Hi, i'm your neighbor, you
(19:21):
also fucking hate this. Let's go fucking like do this
should people are doing in la and like follow these
fucking ice fans around, right, That is stuff that people
are doing, but it doesn't have the kind of like
instant emotional gratification and register of trying to like accumulate
hordes of secret knowledge, so people do it less even
(19:43):
though it's less effective.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
In my discussion of this, like online on various cursed
social media sites, I've gotten a lot of pushback to
my pushback of these tactics and what I see as
a sort of like abuse of anti fascist education, right,
because people like you know, Robert Evans, myself, you know,
Molly Conger spent the past eight years trying to actually,
(20:06):
you know, educate people about like Nazi rhetoric, like in
like Nazi signals and dog whistles, right, and as an
attempt to.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Hopefully prevent them from expanding their power.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
And we may have succeeded in education, but we may
have failed in the prevention.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Of them seizing power.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
And that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness
of certain tactics. And it's now very odd to see
things that we you know, argued for visibility around to
kind of be used in ways that don't really make sense.
That it's it's it's kind of like trying to tame
a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating
(20:47):
to me because, I mean, one person who I was
lightly arguing about this on line was was saying, like,
this is not numerology, and we don't have to be
just okay with a clear attempt to normal white nationalist rhetoric.
And like, first of all, like codes aren't rhetoric. Codes
are codes, and the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric.
(21:11):
What they're actually like saying which has like proto fascist
or fascistic aspects, that is the rhetoric and they're doing it.
Is there somebody out there in twenty twenty five who's
gonna finally realize that DHS as an agency has fascistic
underpinnings via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if
you count words and turn certain captize letters into numbers,
(21:34):
it makes a secret Nazi message.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Is there one person is going to become convinced to us? No,
that's not the purpose.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
And so trying to conceptize this is like we have
to make sure we call out the use of Nazi
rhetoric that doesn't apply to this specific thing that we're
talking about.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah, and also like I think, you know, like I
think we've sort of kind of just to some extent,
we've just failed on the normalization for it, because again,
like it's the President of the United States. Yeah, this
is the official account of the Department of Homeland Security.
It has already become normalized because they have power. The
only way to denormalize it is not actually to do
media critique. It's to like actually oppose them. But that's scary,
(22:16):
that's scary. Report to marry Meia. Do you know what's
easy posting on X the everything app Yeah, this is
how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually empowers the state,
because the central conceit of the conspiratorial worldview is that
there is a nearly all powerful agency that controls in
apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that
(22:37):
it wants. Right, this is why you can stage things.
This is why I can recollection. This is why it
can like I don't know, like it can just like
magically like disappear anyone. It can replace them with anyone.
It can stage any protest movement it wants to, right,
And I think you've seen this a lot in the
American case, where like I see people who are like
genuinely well meaning leftists who are convinced that if you
(22:57):
do anything to resist the American State, you will immediately
be killed because the American state is all powerful and irresistible.
And that's just fascist propaganda. Yeah, you're falling victim to
the panoptic house. Yeah, but it's fascist propaganda that fits
into the narrative structure of conspiracy. And because the state
is dangerous, right and can hurt you, it's very very
(23:19):
easy to you know, accumulate structures of evidence that support
the emotional sort of core of this thing that is
just literally fascist propaganda. People are resisting the state every day, right,
Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking
like hiding people in like fucking U hauls to jump
out and grab people. It's because when they tried to
fucking mass we stomp them, right.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
And when they drive around in their cars and you
can see them.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
Through the window, everyone follows them.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
People can follow them around and alert their community members
on where ICE is.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Like again, mother motherfuckers and fucking Lulu Levin shit, are
like screaming at ICE agents when they try to arrest people,
like yeah, that's the actual condition we're in.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
And like, yeah, regular people. And that's why I find
some people who would be you know, self described as
like anti fascists or self described is as leftists almost
falling into this trap like more so than others. And
it's a little bit evident of something that like I've
described as like the forever twenty sixteen, how we're all
kind of stuck in the mindset of this twenty sixteen,
twenty seventeen twenty eighteen era, and where you have this
(24:21):
unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on
the ground anymore. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This
is a different situation. This is twenty twenty five. And
one other like defense of this, you know, code hunting
that I've seen people say is quote, Nazis love playing
games like this, so it's important that we call it out.
(24:42):
And another person saying, quote, this is a fun little
game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote,
and like, first of all.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
This is not a game.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
This is actual people's lives, who are who are being deported,
who are being sent to foreign prison camps. These are
not games. And and I think that view of like
anti fascist like education risks repeating like the Okay symbol
debacle right where dog whistles end up being created or
spread further due to this gamified version of like Easter
(25:14):
egg anti fascism. It's kind of like the Barber streisand
effect where you end up almost accidentally making them start
doing the thing, which Nazis always have that like frustrating
impulse because they're the little bitch boy ideology. I think
as a rat limit put it one of one of
my favorite posters, and like, I'm not saying that Nazi
(25:35):
signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be
thoughtful and careful of how we do it. To recap
the Okay symbol thing that was invented as like a
fake dog whistle to try to trick leftists into convincing
like the media, and had then having the media trying
to convince the people that anyone who uses like the
okayhand symbol is secretly a fascist, and this scheme worked,
(25:58):
and eventually the Oka symbol big came an actual symbol
used for fascists to identify each other through this ironic
detachment because it was being talked about in the news
as a secret Nazi symbol, even though this whole thing
was like invented as like a joke online. And I'm
afraid I've started to already see a similar thing happen
with the fourteen words dog whistle, with an increased use
(26:21):
of the fourteen words and invoking the fourteen words among
far right accounts, specifically because of this whole debacle with
the dhs gov account and there a heritage to be
proud of homeland worth defending American Progress like ethnonationalist posting.
And I truly cannot say one way or another if
(26:42):
that American Progress post had a intentionally embedded fourteen words
dog whistle inside, I can't. I can't tell you that.
And the point trying to make is that it kind
of doesn't matter. But the way we talk about dog
whistles does matter. And as frustrating as it is that,
(27:02):
sometimes this feels like we're just living in the meme
where the Nazi starts shaving his head because everyone's calling
him a Nazi. That is how Nazis work sometimes. And
I don't want to play into this attention spectacle that
they so badly want.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
But you know what I do want right now? Is
it the process and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Another ad break, that's right, be sure to listen for
the third and fourth hidden clue in these ads.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
All right, we are back to briefly take a small
tangent here. I think there is something very important about
like the fact that role stuck in twenty sixteen, which
was sort of like the peak of irony right as
a social affect, has left us really unprepared for now
where everything is just sort of like, you know, they're
just doing it and saying it right. Yeah, And it's
(28:00):
not this sort of like irony pill deniability shit. They
just do it and people are just not prepared for that.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
They're able to wage this war kind of on both fronts,
and I think they are still pushing this. I'm going
to quote from a friend of the pod rat Limit,
one of my favorite mutes quote prediction, the Nazi salute
will become common within two years. Right wingers will half
asset for plausible deniability, mimify the backlash, and then start
(28:28):
fully doing it quote unquote as a joke to quote
unquote troll the Libs for being hysterical enough to think
that they were doing it in the first place. Fascism
is a little bitch ideology because it's too timid to
enact as cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as
retaliation against others for anticipating it. And this has been
proven right faster than I think what rat Limit predicted.
(28:50):
There's this current trend on x the Everything app where
white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi style and trying
to mimify the backlash. Several posts going viral of these
of these like aspiring influencers either at the pool or
cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having
(29:13):
a your arm in a Elon Musk, my heart goes
out to you Nazi salute style fashion. Yeah, and I
think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a
Nazi salute makes sense, right, he is like an actual
person affiliated with the government. But making a whole media
bled just about random blue check Twitter girls, Maybe not
(29:34):
so much. Maybe that doesn't have any actual value if
a random like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is
trying to garner backlash by doing a Hyle Hitler salute
in their kitchen next to their instapot.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
I keep coming back to the thing that I wrote
about the original Loss salute and about the ways that everyone,
you know, like one of the functions of capitalism is
that everyone has been trained to experience the world and
think in the image of action instead of like actually
existing things. That's what I want to talk about next. Yeah, Yeah,
let's do this, Let's do this. Yeah, go for it,
(30:09):
go for it.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
No. I think part of this focus on like these
hidden codes and even just like these messages online is
a liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not
necessarily the act itself. It's carrying out deportations in a
mode that seems not in line with like neoliberal governing.
(30:31):
And that's I think what a bunch of the backlash
being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, Like
how they film like gaudy ASMR videos that they post
from the White House account of deportations and use military planes.
Those are aesthetic differences, and those differences may be important,
and they're they're bad, right. I'm not saying these things
are good. Those things are still bad. Yeah, But when
(30:53):
that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure
acted deportation itself, that I think is evident of being
trapped in this like capitalist realism, being trapped in this
like like this neoliberal.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
Yeah, the society of the spectacle exactly right.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Let's like in June, Ice arrested thirty thousand people and
did eighteen thousand deportations. In May it was twenty four
thousand arrests in eighteen thousand deportations. Since February, the Trump
admin Has averaged about fourteen thousand and seven hundred deportations
of month. The highest number of deportations ever was in
twenty thirteen under Obama, averaging thirty six thousand a month.
(31:32):
The Biden admin averaged almost thirteen thousand. When the Trump
administration started using military planes for deportations back in January,
mainly as an aesthetic choice that triggered backlash and rejections
from Mexico and Colombia. Mexico refused to allow US military
aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country. Columbia
(31:53):
also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later
caved as Trump threatened unitive tariffs. You can see the
same thing about deploying military to the border, something that
Biden also did, but has a larger aesthetic backlash under Trump.
Do you have something you want to say on this
like image aspect? I have some quotes from Fisher and
that's kind of all I have left.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
Yeah, I mean it is very fitting of our styles
of politics that you're going to Fisher here, and I'm
going to Benjamin. Benjamin is quoted in these sections that
Fisher is pulling from as well. Yep, yep. So I'll
go into the source. I'm not going through the fucking
cru bullshit like pop marksis running doc but no, but like,
(32:38):
you know, like one of the things that that Walter Benjamin,
who people genuinely really should read. He's one of the
great original theorists of fascism, and he fucking died trying
to flee the Nazis. And one of his arguments was that,
you know, one of the cores of fascism is the
replacement of politics with aesthetics. Right, that aesthetics would have
(33:00):
allow you to you know, feel represent like feel representation
instead of do the action. And this is this is
an analysis that has been sort of like folded through
a whole bunch of different analyzes of how capitalism functions. Right,
This is this is one of the three lines of
the society a spectacle, and it's this real issue that
we're dealing with now because again kind of in a sense,
(33:21):
what has happened to everything, right, And you can argue
to some extent that like our channel being called cool
zone media is sort of this is that all politics
from every side has been completely reduced to aesthetics. And
completely reducing it to aesthetics allows like allows the fascist
mode of politics to simply draw in a bunch of
(33:41):
people who can sort of just now passively experience living
through these sort of through this sort of collection of
images and this emotional aesthetic. Yeah, and it also is
doing the same thing to us. But the thing is
they have the fucking state and we don't, right, And
so if you don't fucking exit, if you don't exit
the sort of mirror world of esthetic of sort of
like a fucking living in images, right, and you know,
(34:05):
go do the actual shit that the Boord is talking
about in the society a spectacle, were you and all
your friends formed workers councils and fucking start taking all
of the ship back from all of the people who
were taking it from you. You're just gonna live in
the fascist time heare forever.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
I mean, you could look at the union resistance to
icedy importations, specifically in LA with russaurant workers that it's
literally doing that. And like I would argue, like now,
it's not so much that fascism is politics as aesthetics,
but especially now, it is an aestheticized politics. And you
can even see that in so far as its focuses
on you know, like race and like ethnic purity, like
(34:37):
blood and soil. That's why they're posting American progress, driving
out the indigenous people with the aryan white lady carrying
the torch of progress. It is an asceticized politics on
like a very pure level. And again, to quote from
my goat, uh this antiat quote Mark Fisher in captus
(34:58):
ualism quote, ultra tarianism and capital are by no means incompatible.
Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist. Neoliberals, the capitalist
realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space,
but contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering
away of the state, only a stripping back of the
state to its core military and police functions.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
Unquote. This is very similar to something.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
That me and Mia talked about right as Trump got elected,
in terms of the state becoming more removed but hostile.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Yeah, although although I see again I disagree official here,
because the neo liberals understood what they were doing to
begin with. They were never trying to wither the state away.
That was just the lies that they told the fucking basses.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Like sure, I mean, that's what contrary to their official Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yeah, and it's like you know, quote, such a.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Blight can only be eased by an intervention that can
be no more anticipated than was the onset of the curse.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
In the first place.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Action is pointless, only senseless. Hope makes sense. Superstitious and
religion the first resorts of the helpless proliferate unquote. This
is part of what I conceptualize as this code. Hunting
is almost a form of this hopeless superstition to continue quote.
The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road, nor has
it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There
(36:18):
is no punctual moment of disaster. The world doesn't end
with a bang. It winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.
What caused the catastrophe to occur? Who knows its cause?
Lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the
present as to seem like the caprice of a maligned
being a negative miracle, a melidation which no penance can ameliorate.
(36:40):
The turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship
is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist
realism unquote. And yeah, that's what me is talking about
with Gidebor and society of the spectacle. That's a trap
that I think a lot of people are falling into
right now. And though it's arguable that living in a
(37:02):
liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that sullys
that mean it's like good, right, That's not what we're
arguing here. Fisher then quotes French philosopher Alawn Badeu quote
to justify their conservatism. The partisans of the established order
cannot really call it ideal or wonderful, so instead they've
(37:22):
decided to say that all of the rest is horrible. Sure,
they say, we may not live in a condition of
perfect goodness, but we are lucky that we don't live
in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect,
but it's better than bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but
it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans
die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations
(37:45):
like Lamosovich. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we
don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
Unquote. And already parts of this are slightly outdated. Oh yeah, because.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
Now, but this is the thing is both are tragedies
where millions people die right. One of them is through
the aesthetics of neoliberalism. The other one is through asthetics
of racist nationalistic declarations, which the Trump administration is currently
playing with. That is what they decided to do, and
so the reaction to it is on this aesthetic note,
(38:18):
not necessarily on this pure actual humanistic opposition to deportations
as a process that is inhumane that we should not
allow at all.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yeah. I see the logic of this all the fucking time,
talking to people, where like we'll be like, okay, like
no deportations, and then you get a whole bunch of
people being like, wow, but what about criminals just like
some some deportation. What is this is the structural logic
of the original like deportation blitz from Trump.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Creating a class of undesirables that you can then always
add to and press the border on, like what Karl
Schmidt talks about.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
This is the structural logic of fascism. Yeah, but everyone
everyone thinks about deportations this way now, and they're mad
that Trump is doing it and not Biden. But you know,
until people actually break through the sort of pere opposition
to the aesthetics and actually start you know, having a
kind of totalizing opposition to the system that is doing this.
(39:08):
We're just going to be stuck here.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
And this is I think one of the limits of
using anti fascism as this, like aesthetic code hunting, is
because a few days ago the THS posted a Woody
Guthrie song, his song America the Beautiful, with the DHS
posting the promise of America is worth protecting, the future
of our homeland is worth defending. Notably, everyone in this
(39:32):
video is all white people, which this sentiment is the
same thing as the fourteen words, except it has fifteen words,
so therefore not a Nazi dog whistle. We're safe, guys,
We're good. I counted the words. There's fifteen of them,
so you can disregard what the actual text is saying.
And I think that is like the prime, the prime
(39:54):
contradiction in which I am growing increasingly frustrated. So that's
most of what I have to say say about the
limits of Nazi coode hunting and the aesthetics of superstition
and the paranoid style in American politics. Mia, do you
have any any final wyse Wise notes.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was
one has passed. It is now time to end the
episode right here.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
That's right, it is related for anything. Oh and if
you were able to decode the hidden message in the
ad break, send the contents of the message via email
to your local congressman to redeem your prize.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
By bye.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Cool media.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
This is it could happen here, a show about things
falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode, I'm joined by
Mia Wong.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Mia. I have some upsetting news.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Oh no, which is frankly one of the best ways
to start in this episode and one of the best
ways to start the show. So I'm pretty sure that
I found this account called uh, let's see at Haill Hitler,
and I think he's posting some things that is.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
A little bit fascist. Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
I have decoded some of at Hell Hitler's communications and
I have uncovered a secret a secret Nazi code.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Wow. This is. This is an incredibly unexpected revelation from
Hailed Hitler.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
He has posted some pictures in like what I would
assume is some kind of military uniform that looks like
I don't know it's it's some kind of like like
Germanic military inform. But I've noticed that there are some
runes on this uniform that look very similar to the
Odal rune. So I'm thinking because of the ruine, this
guy might be a Nazi.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Thank you for your work, Harison. We could never have
determined this. That's right, I am.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
You can find me at osent to Defender Online. No,
that doesn't for us today, and it could happen here now.
So this emisode, we're gonna talk about something that's been
slowly frustrating me the past few weeks, and that is
the misapplication of dog whistles. And let's just get right
(01:38):
into it. People have been noticing patterns, noticing trends in
official communications from the dhs gov online accounts, which now
is the main way the government sends out communications, unfortunately,
especially on X the Everything app. But this, this extends
(01:59):
outside of of X the Everything after, this extends outside
of Blue Sky the Internet in general. This is about
how we understand the messaging of fascists and understand how
rhetoric and anti fascist like education works, and ways that
I think it's currently being misapplied.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
So bear with me.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
This is going to be kind of an odd episode,
but I think I think it's worth it because I
don't want us falling into the same traps that we
maybe fell into eight years ago. So let's let's let's
start by talking about some communications posted on the internet
by at dhs gov. A picture of a painting titled
(02:41):
American Progress by John Gast, captioned a heritage to be
proud of, comma a homeland worth defending. So on the surface,
you know, maybe a slightly hashtag problematic sentiment here with
a hashtag problematic painting or at the very least of
painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and Indigenous people
(03:06):
specifically with like a white supremacist outlook, with this enlarged
white woman bathed in a white cloak, bringing forth that
the tide of quote unquote progress as Indigenous people are
are forced to flee from the edge of the painting.
Speaker 3 (03:25):
It's it's fun because this is a painting we literally
when they had to explain manifest destiny like colonialism good.
This is the painting that was in my textbook in
high school. Is three class like and it is like
the er, the er colonialism good, genocide, good.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Painting, genocide good. That that's what the painting is. But
what I have found through some hashtag research, there might
be a hidden code in this, in this communication from
the DHS, who already an agency that only has the
best interests and of really all people who strive for
human rights, the DHS. So if you count all of
(04:05):
the words in the tweet, guess how many words there
are in this tweet? Mea fifteen no, so close, so close,
fourteen fourteen words in this tweet, which might remind you
of the fourteen words the Nazi signifier, which I probably
just explain. Surely most people listening to this is familiar
(04:26):
with the fourteen words, since it seems everybody thinks they
are an armchair expert on fascist rhetoric. But the fourteen
words we must secure the existence of our people and
a future for white children. This became a popular hashtag
dog whistle, especially in the past. I would say ten
(04:49):
fifteen years, usually by implanting fourteen's and usually fourteen eighty
eights with eighty eight meaning Hyle Hitler because each is
the eighth letter of the alphabet. This became a common
Nazi tag. You could see this in graffiti, You see
this embedded into into posts, see this in like Nazi artwork.
(05:11):
And going back to this DHS post, we cannot only
count fourteen words in this tweet. This is actually a
fourteen eighty eight because two of the h's in this
in this post are capitalized unusually, and that means hal
Hitler Wow because hc eighth letter uh huh oh but wait,
(05:32):
actually looking at this post again, there's actually other words
in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
But don't worry. I don't worry.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
This is still a dog whistle because those other words
that are capitalized in the first sentence are the letters
A and D, which, if you convert those into numbers,
are one in four, So it's actually another fourteen.
Speaker 3 (05:53):
Oh wow, we're doing We're doing numerology. We're doing jamatria,
where we've become Q and on so back.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
So if you cannot tell by my thinly veiled sarcasm
in that last section, I think this methodology is a
little bit silly.
Speaker 3 (06:11):
What are we doing? What are we doing here?
Speaker 2 (06:12):
We're converting capitalized letters in the first half of a
tweet into numbers and then rearranging the order of those
letters to get a fourteen eighty eight. It's literally jerbatria,
and then also counting the total words in the whole
suite while still disregarding the capitalizations in the last four
words for another fourteen What are we doing? How is
(06:33):
this the piece of evidence that sinks sinks the Trump
administration and finally proves that they're fascist. You can just
look at all of the fascist policies the Trump administration
is enacting. Instead of doing numerology on tweets, people are thinking,
ha ha ha, I have decoded the secret Nazi message
with a HHD one eight eight fourteen. Nice trigroypers. Meanwhile,
(07:00):
you can just look at the actual text of the post.
You can look at the painting. Both of those things
have an inherent fascist quality. It's literally defending the concept
of ethnic genocide, of manifest destiny. While the administration, the
DHS is currently furthering as no nationalist policies.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
They are doing this. This is homeland security, right. I
don't know if people realize that ICE is a part
of homeland security, but like, this is the agency that
is literally.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
Rounding people up and sending them to camps. We have
camps in multiple countries now. But I say they're being
round up and sent to camps. It's genuinely unclear whether
what I'm talking about is the fucking concentration camp in Florida.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Sea Coat in nol Salvador. Yeah, I mean I think
people have now escape, so I can't technically call the
Honduras want a death camp. But like, again, there's any
people in South Udan, They're like, they're just doing this,
Like what are we doing here?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
So this episode I want to focus on how people
are misusing anti fascist education, or I would argue they're
misusing anti fascist education and kind of missing the forest
for a cardboard cutout of trees, not even trees, kind
of something that could be a tree if you look
at it from one angle, but maybe isn't actually a
(08:19):
real tree. And you don't need to sound like a
da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist to point out the obvious,
like dog whistles don't matter if the regular whistle is
already fascist. If they're just saying things openly and doing things,
what purpose does a dog whistle? And this is something
(08:42):
that we're going to discuss. Are not just saying this
and closing the episode, We're going to get into these
And I think part of what's happening here everybody is
so cooked by the paranoid style of American politics. Everyone
is it's so eager to decode the hidden messages that
(09:04):
we're missing what's right in front of us. QAnon has
a total victory. Qwanon does not really exist in the
way that it did in twenty eighteen. That the q
Andon cult and conspiracy theory as like a singular cultish
project is kind of no more. But q Andon has
a cultural victory over the entire United States, and not
(09:25):
just on the right wing, not just on Mega. So
much of American politics now is litigating who is and
is not a pedophile, who is and is not trafficking children,
who can notice which events are staged, who can notice
hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on the Internet,
And this is what like everything is, And like the
(09:47):
real turning point I think for the right wing was
probably the twenty twenty election, in like a massive fracture
from reality in which they think that election was legitimately stolen.
And obviously there was many events leading up to that
which which contributed to this. Yeah, And I think one
of the biggest fracture points for liberals was the attempted
assassination of Donald Trump, with people creating whole new alternate
(10:09):
realities that that event was staged. And because that door
is opened now I'm seeing such a massive flood of
things that I would label as blueing on conspiracy theories,
which is kind of a nonsense term, but it gets
the point across and I'm gonna do a whole piece
on bluing on very soon. I've been collecting blueing on
conspiracy theories for a while, but I want to do
something specifically about this fourteen eighty eight and like secret
(10:30):
codes thing, because it's so evocative of like, you know,
Q drops, and it's evocative of, you know, searching for
Masonic codes, something that American conspiracy theorists have been doing
for generations. And we're to talk about that more and
read a little bit of an essay on that topic
(10:50):
after this ad break, and I will let you know
there's gonna be two messages in the ad break that
if you decode, you win a special prize at the
end of the episode, So make sure you listen to
every single second of the ad in case you miss
the code. Okay, we are back, speaking of the paranoid
(11:18):
style in American politics. I want to quote a few
sections to kind of frame what I'm talking about here.
This was an essay written in the sixties by Richard
hoff Setter Hoffstetter Richard Hoffstetter one of the first like
modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics. I'm gonna
(11:43):
I have three paragraphs here that I that I selected
as being relevant to the current the current topic at hand.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
There is a style of mind that is far from
new and that is not necessarily right wing. I call
it the paranoid style simply because no other word added
evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy
that I have in mind. Nothing really prevents a sound
program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style.
(12:12):
Style has more to do with the way in which
ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of
their contact.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Unquote.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
And I like that section specifically because fourteen eighty eight
is a real dog whistle. We can see this used.
There is aspects of people who are trying to search
for this and trying to search for patterns in the
communications of an admittedly fascistic government agency that I find
like sympathetic, Like can I can understand because Yeah, that
(12:43):
is a real dog whistle. I'm going to continue the quote.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms.
He traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds,
whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is
always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at
a turning point. Like religious millenarianists, he expresses the anxiety
(13:06):
of those who are living through the last days, and
he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.
As a member of the avant garde who is capable
of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to it.
As of yet to unaroused public, the paranoid is a
militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation
(13:28):
of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not
even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Hofstetter is talking about something that that me and Robert
specifically have have discussed a lot on this show before.
How everyone in America wants to have access to secret information.
Speaker 3 (13:51):
M h. Everyone wants to.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Have the exclusive piece of secret intel that will solve everything,
and like having having that informational exclusivity in a world
of information saturation, right of a vortex of like meaningless noise.
It's it's such a romantic idea that that I alone
have the info or the clue to pieces together, and
(14:15):
it's my duty to inform the masses. It's a very
romantic notion, and.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
It's also one that is exactly perfectly anti suited for
the moment we live in, which is actually just a
moment where everything that is happening is just so clearingly literal,
like it's all out of the oden, Like what is
happening with the Trump administration. Okay, in twenty twenty, there
is a massive uprising to attempt to attempt to fundamentally
(14:41):
change like the structurally racist nature of the United States,
to deal with its fucking class inequalities, to deal with
the structural violence of the state. This was reacted to
by a massive fascist movement that spent half a decade
gaining power and then finally took power in the form
of like a bunch of pistol petite bourgeois fucking car
(15:02):
dealers and like literally a billionaire real estate mogul backed
by the richest tech company guy in the world, right,
and they came together to build fascism. This is the
most straightforward, like if this is a conception of how
a fascist takeover works, that he's so thuddingly literal that
(15:23):
It defies narrativization because it's just there. There's no subtlety
to it. They're just saying it. They just want to
do it, and they're doing it. But everyone is convinced
that there's like some kind of secret hitting conspiracy and
it's like no, they're just doing the thing that they're saying.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yeah, you can argue that we have a griper occupied
government not because of counting words and posts, but because
of not only who they're bringing on for DOGE, but
literally Ice in DHS as of today, which I'm recording
this on Wednesday, I think because this comes out Wednesday night,
are copying like Patriot Front style tactics of loading up
(15:59):
ICE agents in U haul style rentable trucks to hunt
down people to assault and kidnap, like they're just copying
the Patriot Front playbook. Here, the ICE director said that
he wants an Amazon like mass deportation system, calling it
quote unquote Amazon Prime, but with human beings. They're saying this,
(16:21):
you can listen to the actual words. I'm going to
read another quote here from the Paranoid Style of American
Politics essay quote. A final characteristic of the paranoid style
is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of
the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between
its fantasized conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality
(16:45):
it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to
prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can
be believed respectable. Paranoid literature not only starts from certain
moratal commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully
and all but obsessively accumulates quote unquote evidence. The paranoid
(17:06):
seems to have little expectation for actually convincing a hostile world,
but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his
cherished convictions from it unquote. And I think that gets
into the psychological mechanisms on why people are doing this,
this naze code hunting. It's actually a form of self coping,
(17:27):
looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking
at the brazenness in which ICE is operating, and this
is a self preservation mechanism. Someone on Blue Sky that
I was talking to about this is like arguing, like
Ice doesn't need to dog whistle, they have no reason
to like dog whistling is for trying to like sneakily
get racists or fascist into power while signaling to a
(17:50):
nationalistic base that they are like one of them.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Right, But these guys are.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Already in power, and the base already knows that they're
in power. There's no point in dog whistle. They're just
using ice to establish an ethno state. They're using explicit
ethno state rhetoric. In a post from this morning which
has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight nine
ten words not fourteen ten words, Wow, DHS said quote,
(18:16):
serve your country, defend your culture, no undergraduate degree required.
Defend your culture. It's not about locking up criminal migrants.
It's about defending a culture from its destruction through ethnic
demographic shifts. It's they're not trying to obscure what they're
doing in the slightest No.
Speaker 3 (18:36):
And I want to return to something else that the
Hofstater said that in that second paragraph that you read
about how like one of the central conceits is that like,
you know, there's this giant conspiracy that's being unleashed and
the American public doesn't know anything about it, and like, yeah,
you can. You know, it is distressing to a large extent,
the extent to which people just don't know what the
government is doing. But also like if you look at
(18:58):
any pulling at all, but anything the people are doing,
everyone hates it. There isn't like a secret thing that
you can say to convince people that they're that all
these people are Nazis, because it's like and that's not
even a particularly useful project because everyone fucking hates them already,
like trying to fight this in the realm of sort
of the accumulation of the evidence of conspiracy instead of
in the realm of like, Hi, i'm your neighbor, you
(19:21):
also fucking hate this. Let's go fucking like do this
should people are doing in la and like follow these
fucking ice fans around, right, That is stuff that people
are doing, but it doesn't have the kind of like
instant emotional gratification and register of trying to like accumulate
hordes of secret knowledge, so people do it less even
(19:43):
though it's less effective.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
In my discussion of this, like online on various cursed
social media sites, I've gotten a lot of pushback to
my pushback of these tactics and what I see as
a sort of like abuse of anti fascist education, right,
because people like you know, Robert Evans, myself, you know,
Molly Conger spent the past eight years trying to actually,
(20:06):
you know, educate people about like Nazi rhetoric, like in
like Nazi signals and dog whistles, right, and as an
attempt to.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Hopefully prevent them from expanding their power.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
And we may have succeeded in education, but we may
have failed in the prevention.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Of them seizing power.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
And that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness
of certain tactics. And it's now very odd to see
things that we you know, argued for visibility around to
kind of be used in ways that don't really make sense.
That it's it's it's kind of like trying to tame
a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating
(20:47):
to me because, I mean, one person who I was
lightly arguing about this on line was was saying, like,
this is not numerology, and we don't have to be
just okay with a clear attempt to normal white nationalist rhetoric.
And like, first of all, like codes aren't rhetoric. Codes
are codes, and the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric.
(21:11):
What they're actually like saying which has like proto fascist
or fascistic aspects, that is the rhetoric and they're doing it.
Is there somebody out there in twenty twenty five who's
gonna finally realize that DHS as an agency has fascistic
underpinnings via a chronically online Twitter user explaining that if
you count words and turn certain captize letters into numbers,
(21:34):
it makes a secret Nazi message.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
Is there one person is going to become convinced to us? No,
that's not the purpose.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
And so trying to conceptize this is like we have
to make sure we call out the use of Nazi
rhetoric that doesn't apply to this specific thing that we're
talking about.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Yeah, and also like I think, you know, like I
think we've sort of kind of just to some extent,
we've just failed on the normalization for it, because again,
like it's the President of the United States. Yeah, this
is the official account of the Department of Homeland Security.
It has already become normalized because they have power. The
only way to denormalize it is not actually to do
media critique. It's to like actually oppose them. But that's scary,
(22:16):
that's scary. Report to marry Meia. Do you know what's
easy posting on X the everything app Yeah, this is
how this kind of conspiratorial worldview actually empowers the state,
because the central conceit of the conspiratorial worldview is that
there is a nearly all powerful agency that controls in
apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that
(22:37):
it wants. Right, this is why you can stage things.
This is why I can recollection. This is why it
can like I don't know, like it can just like
magically like disappear anyone. It can replace them with anyone.
It can stage any protest movement it wants to, right,
And I think you've seen this a lot in the
American case, where like I see people who are like
genuinely well meaning leftists who are convinced that if you
(22:57):
do anything to resist the American State, you will immediately
be killed because the American state is all powerful and irresistible.
And that's just fascist propaganda. Yeah, you're falling victim to
the panoptic house. Yeah, but it's fascist propaganda that fits
into the narrative structure of conspiracy. And because the state
is dangerous, right and can hurt you, it's very very
(23:19):
easy to you know, accumulate structures of evidence that support
the emotional sort of core of this thing that is
just literally fascist propaganda. People are resisting the state every day, right,
Why is ICE fucking doing patriot prayer tactics and fucking
like hiding people in like fucking U hauls to jump
out and grab people. It's because when they tried to
fucking mass we stomp them, right.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
And when they drive around in their cars and you
can see them.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
Through the window, everyone follows them.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
People can follow them around and alert their community members
on where ICE is.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
Like again, mother motherfuckers and fucking Lulu Levin shit, are
like screaming at ICE agents when they try to arrest people,
like yeah, that's the actual condition we're in.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
And like, yeah, regular people. And that's why I find
some people who would be you know, self described as
like anti fascists or self described is as leftists almost
falling into this trap like more so than others. And
it's a little bit evident of something that like I've
described as like the forever twenty sixteen, how we're all
kind of stuck in the mindset of this twenty sixteen,
twenty seventeen twenty eighteen era, and where you have this
(24:21):
unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on
the ground anymore. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This
is a different situation. This is twenty twenty five. And
one other like defense of this, you know, code hunting
that I've seen people say is quote, Nazis love playing
games like this, so it's important that we call it out.
(24:42):
And another person saying, quote, this is a fun little
game for their group chats while they kill and disappear people, unquote,
and like, first of all.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
This is not a game.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
This is actual people's lives, who are who are being deported,
who are being sent to foreign prison camps. These are
not games. And and I think that view of like
anti fascist like education risks repeating like the Okay symbol
debacle right where dog whistles end up being created or
spread further due to this gamified version of like Easter
(25:14):
egg anti fascism. It's kind of like the Barber streisand
effect where you end up almost accidentally making them start
doing the thing, which Nazis always have that like frustrating
impulse because they're the little bitch boy ideology. I think
as a rat limit put it one of one of
my favorite posters, and like, I'm not saying that Nazi
(25:35):
signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be
thoughtful and careful of how we do it. To recap
the Okay symbol thing that was invented as like a
fake dog whistle to try to trick leftists into convincing
like the media, and had then having the media trying
to convince the people that anyone who uses like the
okayhand symbol is secretly a fascist, and this scheme worked,
(25:58):
and eventually the Oka symbol big came an actual symbol
used for fascists to identify each other through this ironic
detachment because it was being talked about in the news
as a secret Nazi symbol, even though this whole thing
was like invented as like a joke online. And I'm
afraid I've started to already see a similar thing happen
with the fourteen words dog whistle, with an increased use
(26:21):
of the fourteen words and invoking the fourteen words among
far right accounts, specifically because of this whole debacle with
the dhs gov account and there a heritage to be
proud of homeland worth defending American Progress like ethnonationalist posting.
And I truly cannot say one way or another if
(26:42):
that American Progress post had a intentionally embedded fourteen words
dog whistle inside, I can't. I can't tell you that.
And the point trying to make is that it kind
of doesn't matter. But the way we talk about dog
whistles does matter. And as frustrating as it is that,
(27:02):
sometimes this feels like we're just living in the meme
where the Nazi starts shaving his head because everyone's calling
him a Nazi. That is how Nazis work sometimes. And
I don't want to play into this attention spectacle that
they so badly want.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
But you know what I do want right now? Is
it the process and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
Another ad break, that's right, be sure to listen for
the third and fourth hidden clue in these ads.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
All right, we are back to briefly take a small
tangent here. I think there is something very important about
like the fact that role stuck in twenty sixteen, which
was sort of like the peak of irony right as
a social affect, has left us really unprepared for now
where everything is just sort of like, you know, they're
just doing it and saying it right. Yeah, And it's
(28:00):
not this sort of like irony pill deniability shit. They
just do it and people are just not prepared for that.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
They're able to wage this war kind of on both fronts,
and I think they are still pushing this. I'm going
to quote from a friend of the pod rat Limit,
one of my favorite mutes quote prediction, the Nazi salute
will become common within two years. Right wingers will half
asset for plausible deniability, mimify the backlash, and then start
(28:28):
fully doing it quote unquote as a joke to quote
unquote troll the Libs for being hysterical enough to think
that they were doing it in the first place. Fascism
is a little bitch ideology because it's too timid to
enact as cruelty until it can frame its cruelty as
retaliation against others for anticipating it. And this has been
proven right faster than I think what rat Limit predicted.
(28:50):
There's this current trend on x the Everything app where
white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi style and trying
to mimify the backlash. Several posts going viral of these
of these like aspiring influencers either at the pool or
cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having
(29:13):
a your arm in a Elon Musk, my heart goes
out to you Nazi salute style fashion. Yeah, and I
think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a
Nazi salute makes sense, right, he is like an actual
person affiliated with the government. But making a whole media
bled just about random blue check Twitter girls, Maybe not
(29:34):
so much. Maybe that doesn't have any actual value if
a random like a random Twitter poster from Missouri is
trying to garner backlash by doing a Hyle Hitler salute
in their kitchen next to their instapot.
Speaker 3 (29:48):
I keep coming back to the thing that I wrote
about the original Loss salute and about the ways that everyone,
you know, like one of the functions of capitalism is
that everyone has been trained to experience the world and
think in the image of action instead of like actually
existing things. That's what I want to talk about next. Yeah, Yeah,
let's do this, Let's do this. Yeah, go for it,
(30:09):
go for it.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
No. I think part of this focus on like these
hidden codes and even just like these messages online is
a liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not
necessarily the act itself. It's carrying out deportations in a
mode that seems not in line with like neoliberal governing.
(30:31):
And that's I think what a bunch of the backlash
being focused on the aesthetics of the Trump administration, Like
how they film like gaudy ASMR videos that they post
from the White House account of deportations and use military planes.
Those are aesthetic differences, and those differences may be important,
and they're they're bad, right. I'm not saying these things
are good. Those things are still bad. Yeah, But when
(30:53):
that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure
acted deportation itself, that I think is evident of being
trapped in this like capitalist realism, being trapped in this
like like this neoliberal.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
Yeah, the society of the spectacle exactly right.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Let's like in June, Ice arrested thirty thousand people and
did eighteen thousand deportations. In May it was twenty four
thousand arrests in eighteen thousand deportations. Since February, the Trump
admin Has averaged about fourteen thousand and seven hundred deportations
of month. The highest number of deportations ever was in
twenty thirteen under Obama, averaging thirty six thousand a month.
(31:32):
The Biden admin averaged almost thirteen thousand. When the Trump
administration started using military planes for deportations back in January,
mainly as an aesthetic choice that triggered backlash and rejections
from Mexico and Colombia. Mexico refused to allow US military
aircraft carrying deported migrants to land in their country. Columbia
(31:53):
also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later
caved as Trump threatened unitive tariffs. You can see the
same thing about deploying military to the border, something that
Biden also did, but has a larger aesthetic backlash under Trump.
Do you have something you want to say on this
like image aspect? I have some quotes from Fisher and
that's kind of all I have left.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
Yeah, I mean it is very fitting of our styles
of politics that you're going to Fisher here, and I'm
going to Benjamin. Benjamin is quoted in these sections that
Fisher is pulling from as well. Yep, yep. So I'll
go into the source. I'm not going through the fucking
cru bullshit like pop marksis running doc but no, but like,
(32:38):
you know, like one of the things that that Walter Benjamin,
who people genuinely really should read. He's one of the
great original theorists of fascism, and he fucking died trying
to flee the Nazis. And one of his arguments was that,
you know, one of the cores of fascism is the
replacement of politics with aesthetics. Right, that aesthetics would have
(33:00):
allow you to you know, feel represent like feel representation
instead of do the action. And this is this is
an analysis that has been sort of like folded through
a whole bunch of different analyzes of how capitalism functions. Right,
This is this is one of the three lines of
the society a spectacle, and it's this real issue that
we're dealing with now because again kind of in a sense,
(33:21):
what has happened to everything, right, And you can argue
to some extent that like our channel being called cool
zone media is sort of this is that all politics
from every side has been completely reduced to aesthetics. And
completely reducing it to aesthetics allows like allows the fascist
mode of politics to simply draw in a bunch of
(33:41):
people who can sort of just now passively experience living
through these sort of through this sort of collection of
images and this emotional aesthetic. Yeah, and it also is
doing the same thing to us. But the thing is
they have the fucking state and we don't, right, And
so if you don't fucking exit, if you don't exit
the sort of mirror world of esthetic of sort of
like a fucking living in images, right, and you know,
(34:05):
go do the actual shit that the Boord is talking
about in the society a spectacle, were you and all
your friends formed workers councils and fucking start taking all
of the ship back from all of the people who
were taking it from you. You're just gonna live in
the fascist time heare forever.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
I mean, you could look at the union resistance to
icedy importations, specifically in LA with russaurant workers that it's
literally doing that. And like I would argue, like now,
it's not so much that fascism is politics as aesthetics,
but especially now, it is an aestheticized politics. And you
can even see that in so far as its focuses
on you know, like race and like ethnic purity, like
(34:37):
blood and soil. That's why they're posting American progress, driving
out the indigenous people with the aryan white lady carrying
the torch of progress. It is an asceticized politics on
like a very pure level. And again, to quote from
my goat, uh this antiat quote Mark Fisher in captus
(34:58):
ualism quote, ultra tarianism and capital are by no means incompatible.
Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist. Neoliberals, the capitalist
realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space,
but contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering
away of the state, only a stripping back of the
state to its core military and police functions.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
Unquote. This is very similar to something.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
That me and Mia talked about right as Trump got elected,
in terms of the state becoming more removed but hostile.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Yeah, although although I see again I disagree official here,
because the neo liberals understood what they were doing to
begin with. They were never trying to wither the state away.
That was just the lies that they told the fucking basses.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
Like sure, I mean, that's what contrary to their official Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:44):
Yeah, and it's like you know, quote, such a.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
Blight can only be eased by an intervention that can
be no more anticipated than was the onset of the curse.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
In the first place.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
Action is pointless, only senseless. Hope makes sense. Superstitious and
religion the first resorts of the helpless proliferate unquote. This
is part of what I conceptualize as this code. Hunting
is almost a form of this hopeless superstition to continue quote.
The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road, nor has
it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There
(36:18):
is no punctual moment of disaster. The world doesn't end
with a bang. It winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.
What caused the catastrophe to occur? Who knows its cause?
Lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the
present as to seem like the caprice of a maligned
being a negative miracle, a melidation which no penance can ameliorate.
(36:40):
The turn from belief to aesthetics, from engagement to spectatorship
is held to be one of the virtues of capitalist
realism unquote. And yeah, that's what me is talking about
with Gidebor and society of the spectacle. That's a trap
that I think a lot of people are falling into
right now. And though it's arguable that living in a
(37:02):
liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that sullys
that mean it's like good, right, That's not what we're
arguing here. Fisher then quotes French philosopher Alawn Badeu quote
to justify their conservatism. The partisans of the established order
cannot really call it ideal or wonderful, so instead they've
(37:22):
decided to say that all of the rest is horrible. Sure,
they say, we may not live in a condition of
perfect goodness, but we are lucky that we don't live
in a condition of evil. Our democracy is not perfect,
but it's better than bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust, but
it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans
die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations
(37:45):
like Lamosovich. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we
don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda.
Speaker 3 (37:52):
Unquote. And already parts of this are slightly outdated. Oh yeah, because.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
Now, but this is the thing is both are tragedies
where millions people die right. One of them is through
the aesthetics of neoliberalism. The other one is through asthetics
of racist nationalistic declarations, which the Trump administration is currently
playing with. That is what they decided to do, and
so the reaction to it is on this aesthetic note,
(38:18):
not necessarily on this pure actual humanistic opposition to deportations
as a process that is inhumane that we should not
allow at all.
Speaker 3 (38:27):
Yeah. I see the logic of this all the fucking time,
talking to people, where like we'll be like, okay, like
no deportations, and then you get a whole bunch of
people being like, wow, but what about criminals just like
some some deportation. What is this is the structural logic
of the original like deportation blitz from Trump.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
Creating a class of undesirables that you can then always
add to and press the border on, like what Karl
Schmidt talks about.
Speaker 3 (38:48):
This is the structural logic of fascism. Yeah, but everyone
everyone thinks about deportations this way now, and they're mad
that Trump is doing it and not Biden. But you know,
until people actually break through the sort of pere opposition
to the aesthetics and actually start you know, having a
kind of totalizing opposition to the system that is doing this.
(39:08):
We're just going to be stuck here.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
And this is I think one of the limits of
using anti fascism as this, like aesthetic code hunting, is
because a few days ago the THS posted a Woody
Guthrie song, his song America the Beautiful, with the DHS
posting the promise of America is worth protecting, the future
of our homeland is worth defending. Notably, everyone in this
(39:32):
video is all white people, which this sentiment is the
same thing as the fourteen words, except it has fifteen words,
so therefore not a Nazi dog whistle. We're safe, guys,
We're good. I counted the words. There's fifteen of them,
so you can disregard what the actual text is saying.
And I think that is like the prime, the prime
(39:54):
contradiction in which I am growing increasingly frustrated. So that's
most of what I have to say say about the
limits of Nazi coode hunting and the aesthetics of superstition
and the paranoid style in American politics. Mia, do you
have any any final wyse Wise notes.
Speaker 3 (40:13):
The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was
one has passed. It is now time to end the
episode right here.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
That's right, it is related for anything. Oh and if
you were able to decode the hidden message in the
ad break, send the contents of the message via email
to your local congressman to redeem your prize.
Speaker 3 (40:35):
By bye.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
Speaker 3 (40:49):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
You can now find sources for It Could Happen here,
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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