{"id":35135,"date":"2016-06-22T02:00:35","date_gmt":"2016-06-22T06:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35135"},"modified":"2016-06-20T10:32:04","modified_gmt":"2016-06-20T14:32:04","slug":"the-art-of-the-dog-whistle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/06\/22\/the-art-of-the-dog-whistle\/","title":{"rendered":"The art of the “dog whistle”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scott Alexander<\/a> on the horribly anti-semitic dog whistle that cost Ted Cruz the Republican presidential nomination (or something):<\/p>\n

Back during the primary, Ted Cruz said he was against \u201cNew York values\u201d.<\/p>\n

A chump<\/em> might figure that, being a Texan whose base is in the South and Midwest, he was making the usual condemnation of coastal elites and arugula-eating liberals that every other Republican has made before him, maybe with a special nod to the fact that his two most relevant opponents, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, were both from New York.<\/p>\n

But sophisticated people<\/em> immediately detected this as an \u201canti-Semitic dog whistle\u201d, eg Cruz\u2019s secret way of saying he hated Jews. Because, you see, there are many Jews in New York. By the clever strategem of using words that had nothing to do with Jews or hatred, he was able to effectively communicate his Jew-hatred to other anti-Semites without anyone else picking up on it.<\/p>\n

Except of course the entire media, which seized upon it as a single mass. New York values is coded anti-Semitism. New York values is a classic anti-Semitic slur. New York values is an anti-Semitic comment. New York values is an anti-Semitic code word. New York values gets called out as anti-Semitism. My favorite is this article whose headline claims that Ted Cruz \u201cconfirmed\u201d that he meant his New York values comment to refer to Jews; the \u201cconfirmation\u201d turned out to be that he referred to Donald Trump as having \u201cchutzpah\u201d. It takes a lot of word-I-am-apparently-not-allowed-to-say to frame that as a \u201cconfirmation\u201d.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, back in Realityville (population: 6), Ted Cruz was attending synagogue services at his campaign tour, talking about his deep love and respect for Judaism, and getting described as \u201ca hero\u201d in many parts of the Orthodox Jewish community\u201d for his stance that \u201cif you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he once said \u201cNew York values\u201d, so clearly all of this was just really really deep cover for his anti-Semitism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scott Alexander on the horribly anti-semitic dog whistle that cost Ted Cruz the Republican presidential nomination (or something): Back during the primary, Ted Cruz said he was against \u201cNew York values\u201d. A chump might figure that, being a Texan whose base is in the South and Midwest, he was making the usual condemnation of coastal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[304,188,321,517],"class_list":["post-35135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-antisemitism","tag-electionwatch","tag-nyc","tag-republican"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-98H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35135"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35136,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35135\/revisions\/35136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}