Code-Talking Politicians

Today JOI encountered one of the sillier conspiracy theories that pops up from time to time like a perennial weed. This is the claim that some politician’s speech contains code words or “dog whistles” to communicate subversive messages to his/her followers without his opponents catching on. (Some even have claimed that a politician’s speechwriters inserted the code without the politician’s knowledge.) Inevitably, it is the politician’s opponents who first detect the code words and announce them to the world. Before then, it rarely occurs to the politician’s average supporter that the speech might mean anything other than what it says. It is not a useful code if the opposition can so easily decode the message but the intended recipients cannot. This is not to say that politicians always say what the mean. But it is more reasonable to attribute their lies, half-truths, and obfuscations to common dishonesty than to invent conspiracy theories about code words.