CZM Rewind: Dogwhistle Politics and Nazi Code Hunting

Summary

CZM Rewind: Dogwhistle Politics and Nazi Code Hunting

It Could Happen Here – Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts
Date: February 2, 2026
Hosts: Garrison Davis, Mia Wong

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Overview

This episode explores the current misuse and overapplication of "dogwhistle" politics, specifically Nazi code-hunting, in online discourse around government rhetoric. Hosts Garrison Davis and Mia Wong dissect how well-meaning anti-fascist education and impulse have morphed into conspiratorial pattern-finding, and why this trend may be missing the forest for the trees—especially when fascist or ethno-nationalist messaging is open rather than secret. Using recent examples from DHS social media and referencing foundational essays in conspiracy and fascist aesthetics, the hosts argue for a shift in focus from decoding supposed hidden signals to confronting explicit, real-world actions and policies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dogwhistles vs. Open Fascism

• Garrison starts with a (satirical) personal account of decoding "Nazi codes" from a hypothetical account "Hell Hitler," poking fun at online code-hunting.

• The episode pivots to critique the current overapplication of anti-fascist code-spotting, especially in analyzing official government communications (e.g., DHS tweets and posts).

• Example: A DHS post using the painting "American Progress" with the caption “A heritage to be proud of, a homeland worth defending” is analyzed—not just for its virulent colonial imagery but for planned word counts (trying to find 14 words, referencing the white supremacist "14 words").

  Notable Quote:

  "People have been noticing patterns, noticing trends in official communications from the DHS... But this is about how we understand the messaging of fascists and how anti-fascist education works, and ways that I think it's currently being misapplied."
  — Garrison Davis (03:02)

• Hosts point out: Instead of focusing on surface-level dogwhistles or covert numerology (e.g., capital letter counts or word-into-number conversions), the actual content and history—such as open use of genocidal symbolism or policies—are evidence enough.

• Mia: "If the regular whistle is already fascist...what purpose does a dogwhistle have?" (08:03)

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2. The Paranoid Style in American Politics

• Garrison reads from Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" (12:36), highlighting how the urge to find secret knowledge becomes all-consuming, even counterproductive.

• The hosts compare current left and right behavior, noting liberals and leftists have mirrored paranoid, conspiratorial frame pioneered by QAnon. Accusations and code-decoding have become ends in themselves.

  Notable Quote:

  "It's such a romantic idea that, that I alone have the info or the clue to, to piece this together and it's my duty to inform the masses."
  — Garrison Davis (15:09)

• Mia: Highlights that, currently, fascist policies are literal:

  "...this is a conception of how a fascist takeover works that is so thuddingly literal that it defies narrativization because...there's no subtlety...they're just doing it." (16:21)

• Hosts stress: Dogwhistles and esoteric codes are less relevant when fascist policies are overt, such as ICE and DHS enacting mass deportations in visible, explicit ways.

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3. The Psychology and Utility of Code-Hunting

• Garrison: Argues online code-hunting (e.g., "counting words and turning capitalized letters into numbers") is more about coping with gut-wrenching reality than about exposing or countering anything new.

• Hofstadter cited: The accumulation of "evidence" in conspiracy thinking.

  Notable Quote:

  "Looking at the horrific state of the federal government...this is a self-preservation mechanism."
  — Garrison Davis (18:24)

• Mia: Dogwhistling's purpose is over—"those guys are already in power." No need for secret signaling.

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4. Dogwhistle Education Backfiring

• The hosts reflect on how well-meant antifascist education about Nazi codes may now be overapplied, and, paradoxically, help normalize or spread the codes.

  Notable Exchange:

  • Garrison: "Is there somebody out there in 2025 who's gonna finally realize that DHS as an agency has fascistic underpinnings...by counting words and turning capitalized letters into numbers?" (21:47)
  • Mia: "We've failed on the normalization front because again, like, it's the President of the United States...It's already become normalized because they have power." (23:03)

• They invoke the "OK" symbol fiasco, where what started as a 4chan in-joke to fool leftists became self-perpetuating until it was sometimes genuinely used as a fascist symbol. There's a fear the same could happen with number codes like "14 words."

  Notable Quote:

  “Dog whistles end up being created or spread further due to this gamified version of like Easter egg anti-fascism. It's kind of like the Barbra Streisand effect…”
  — Garrison Davis (26:26)

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5. The Aesthetics of Fascism and Liberalism's Response

• Tangent on image vs. substance:
  The hosts discuss how both the public and liberal opponents are distracted by the aesthetics (how deportations look, what uniforms ICE wears, how DHS posts are worded) rather than the acts themselves.

  Notable Exchange:

  • Garrison: "Part of this focus on, on, on like these hidden codes and even just like these like messages online is a liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not necessarily the act itself." (31:44)
  • Mia: "One of the cores of fascism is the replacement of politics with aesthetics." (34:12)

• Mia references Walter Benjamin: Capitalism and fascism replace actual politics with powerful images/aesthetics—creating a situation where even opposition is felt through images, not deeds.

• Garrison brings in Mark Fisher and Guy Debord (“Society of the Spectacle”), arguing “ultra authoritarianism and capital are by no means incompatible. Internment camps and franchise coffee bars coexist...” (35:24)

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6. Where Do We Go From Here?

• Hosts concede anti-fascist code-spotting deserves some consideration, but it's largely beside the point in an era of open fascism.

• Effective opposition now requires action, coalition-building, and confronting the real machinery of state violence, not hunting for patterns.

  Notable Quote:

  “The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was one, has passed.”
  — Mia Wong (41:48)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “Dog whistles don’t matter if the regular whistle is already fascist.”
  — Mia Wong (08:03)

• “Everyone in America wants to have access to secret information...that I alone have the info or the clue to, to piece this together and it's my duty to inform the masses.”
  — Garrison Davis (15:09)

• “There isn’t like a secret thing that you can say to convince people that they're, that all these people are Nazis...everyone hates them already.”
  — Mia Wong (19:40)

• "Dogwhistling is for trying to sneakily get racists or fascists into power while signaling to a nationalistic base that they are one of them. But these guys are already in power."
  — Garrison Davis (18:08 approx.)

• “The only way to denormalize it is not actually to do media critique, it’s to actually oppose them.”
  — Mia Wong (23:15)

• “If you don't exit the sort of mirror world of images...you're just gonna live in the fascist nightmare forever.”
  — Mia Wong (35:49)

• “The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was one, has passed.”
  — Mia Wong (41:48)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening Satire on "Nazi Code Hunting": 00:41–03:59
• Discussing Dogwhistle Overapplication: 03:59–09:00
• Paranoid Style in Politics (Hofstadter Reading): 12:18–16:42
• Conspiratorial Thinking, QAnon/BlueAnon: 16:42–19:19
• The Psychology/Coping of Code-Hunting: 18:24–19:19
• Backfiring of Dogwhistle Education: 21:28–26:26
• OK Symbol as Dogwhistle Parable: 26:26–29:14
• Aesthetic Focus vs. Real Policy: 31:44–35:24
• Walter Benjamin, Society of the Spectacle: 34:12–37:05
• Fisher and Badiou on Aestheticized Politics: 37:05–40:45
• Concluding Reflections: 41:48–41:56

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Conclusion

The episode thoughtfully dissects how obsessing over fascist dogwhistles and secret codes—despite good intentions—increasingly limits the anti-fascist response by focusing on aesthetics, pattern-recognition, and conspiratorial knowledge rather than mobilizing meaningful action against open, admitted state violence and ethno-nationalist policy. The current reality, the hosts argue, is one of open fascism where the time for code-hunting as a primary tactic has passed.

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Final Summing Up:

“The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was one, has passed.”
— Mia Wong (41:48)

Transcript

[Brooklyn Adams]

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[Garrison Davis]

This is it could happen here. A show about things falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis. This episode I'm joined by Mia Wong. Mia, I have some upsetting news.

[Mia Wong]

Oh no.

[Garrison Davis]

I which is frankly one of the best ways to start this episode and one of the best ways to start this show. So I'm pretty sure that I found this account called let's see Ill Hitler and I think he's posting some things that is a little bit fascist. Oh wow. I have decoded some of Hell Hitler's communiques and I have uncovered a secret. A secret Nazi code. Wow.

[Mia Wong]

This is. This is an incredibly unexpected revelation from. Heil Hitler.

[Garrison Davis]

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 some kind of like, like Germanic military uniform. But I've noticed that there are some runes on this uniform. Oh wow. That look very similar to the odor rune. So I'm thinking because of the rune, this guy might be a Nazi.

[Mia Wong]

Thank you for your work, Harrison. We could never have determined this.

[Garrison Davis]

That's right. I. You can find me at Osint Defender online.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

Oh no, don't send people that O Defender.

[Garrison Davis]

No, that does it for us today and it could happen here now. So this episode we're going to talk about something that' been slowly frustrating me the past few weeks and that is the misapplication of dog whistles. And let's just get right into it. People have been noticing patterns, noticing trends in official communications from the DHSgov online accounts which now is the main way the government sends out communications, unfortunately, especially on X the Everything app. But this, this extends outside of of X the Everything app. 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. So bear with me. This is going to be kind of a. 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 HSgov. A picture of a painting titled 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 a painting depicting the genocide of Native Americans and indigenous people, specifically with, like, a white supremacist outlook, with this enlarged white woman bathed in a white cloak, bringing forth the tide of quote, unquote, progress as indigenous people are forced to flee from the edge of the painting.

[Mia Wong]

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 history class.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

Like, it is like the ur.

[Mia Wong]

Colonialism, good. Genocide, good.

[Garrison Davis]

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. Already an agency that only has the best interests and of. Of really all people who strive for human rights, the dhs. So if you count all of the words in the tweet, guess how many words there are in this tweet. Mia.

[Mia Wong]

15.

[Garrison Davis]

No. So close. So close. 14. 14 words in this tweet, which might remind you of the 14 words. The. The. The Nazi signifier, which I should probably just explain. Surely most people listening to this is familiar with the 14 words, since it seems everybody thinks they are an armchair expert on. On fascist rhetoric. But the 14 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 10, 15 years, usually by implanting 14s and usually 1488s, with 88 meaning Heil Hitler. Because H is the eighth letter of the Alphabet, this became a common Nazi tag. See this in graffiti. You see this embedded into. Into posts. See this in, like, Nazi artwork. And going Back to this DHS post, we can not only count 14 words in this tweet. This is actually a 1488, because two of the H's in this. In this post are capitalized unusually, and that means Hal Hitler. Wow. Because H is the eighth letter. Oh, but wait. Actually, looking at this post again, there's actually other words in this tweet that are also unusually capitalized. But don't worry, don't worry. 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 1 and 4. So it's actually another 14.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

Oh wow.

[Mia Wong]

We're doing.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

We're doing numerology. We're doing gematria, where we've become QAnon.

[Garrison Davis]

We're so back. So if you cannot tell by my, my, my thinly veiled sarcasm in that last section, I think this methodology is a little bit silly. What are we doing? What are we doing here? 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 1488.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

It's literally Germatrio.

[Garrison Davis]

And then also counting the total words in the whole suite while still disregarding the capitalizations in the last four words for another 14. What are we doing? How is 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, hahahaha, I have decoded the secret Nazi message with a h, h d 1, 8, 8, 14. Nice try, Groipers. Meanwhile, 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 ethno nationalist policies, they are doing this.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

This is Homeland Security.

[Mia Wong]

Right. I don't know if people realize that ICE is a part of Homeland Security.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

But like, this is the agency that is literally rounding people up and sending them to camps. We have camps in multiple countries now.

[Mia Wong]

When I say they're being round up and sent to camps, it's genuinely unclear whether what I'm talking about is the.

[Garrison Davis]

Fucking concentration camp in Florida in El Salvador.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. I mean, I think people have now escaped, so I can't technically call the Honduras one a death camp, but like, again, they're sending people to South Sudan.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

They're like, they're just doing this, like, what are we doing here?

[Garrison Davis]

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. Yeah, 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 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. Yeah. If the regular whistle is already fascist. If they're just saying things openly and furthermore doing it. Doing things. Yeah. What purpose does a dog whistle have?

[Cool Zone Media Host]

What are we doing here?

[Garrison Davis]

And this is something that we're going to discuss. I'm not just saying this and closing the episode. We are. We are going to get into these. Yeah. And I think part of what's happening here. Everybody is so cooked by the paranoid style of American politics. Everyone is so eager to decode the hidden messages that were missing. What's right in front of us. QAnon has a total victory. QAnon does not really exist in the way that it did in 2018. That the QAnon cult and conspiracy theory as like a singular cultish project is kind of no more. But QAnon has a cultural victory over the entire United States and not just on the right wing, not just on maga. 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. Which events are staged, who can notice hidden codes, who can decode anonymous messages on the Internet. And this is what. What, like, everything is. And like, the real turning point, I think, for the right wing was probably the 2020 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 realities that that event was staged. And because that door was opened, now I am seeing such a massive flood of things that I would label as blue anon conspiracy theories, which is kind of a nonsense term, but it gets the point across. And I'm going to do a whole piece on blue and on very soon. I've been collecting blue and on conspiracy theories for a while, but I wanted to do something specifically about this 1488 and, like, secret codes thing because it's. 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. Of an essay on that topic after this ad break. And I will let you know. There's going to 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.

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[Garrison Davis]

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[Garrison Davis]

Okay, we are back. Speaking of the paranoid style in American politics, I, I, I want to quote a few sections to kind of frame what I'm talking about here. This was an essay written in the 60s by Richard.

[Mia Wong]

Hofstadter.

[Garrison Davis]

Hofstadter. Richard Hofstadter. One of the first, like modern pieces on American conspiracy culture and politics. I'm gonna, I have three paragraphs here that I, that I selected as, as being relevant to the current, the current topic at hand. Quote. 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 adequately 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. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. Unquote. And I like that section specifically because 1488 is a real dog whistle. We can, we can see this used to be. There's aspects of people who are, who are trying to search for this and trying to search for, for patterns in the communications of an admittedly fascistic government agency that I, I find like, sympathetic, like I can under, I can understand because yeah, that is a real dog whistle. I'm going to continue the quote. Quote. 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 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 an as of yet unaroused public? The paranoid is a militant leader. Demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals. And since these goals are not Even remotely attainable failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration, unquote. Hofstadter is talking about something that me and Robert specifically have discussed a lot on this show before. How everyone in America wants to have access to secret information. Everyone, everyone wants to have the exclusive piece of secret intel that will solve everything. And like having, having that like 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, to piece this together and it's my duty to inform the masses. It's, it's a very romantic notion and.

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

So clear, stunningly literal.

[Garrison Davis]

Like it's all out of the open.

[Mia Wong]

Like what is happening with the Trump administration, okay. In 2020 there is a massive uprising to attempt, to attempt to fundamentally 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 pissed off petite bourgeois fucking car 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.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

Like if this is, this is a.

[Mia Wong]

Conception of how a fascist takeover works that is so thuddingly literal that 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 hidden conspiracy in it. It's like, no, they're just doing the thing that they're saying.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, you can argue that we have a groiper occupied government not because of counting words in posts, but because of not only who they're bringing on for Doge, but literally ICE and DHS as of today, which I'm recording this on on Wednesday, I think, because this comes out Wednesday night, are copying like Patriot Front style tactics of loading up ICE agents in U Haul style rentable trucks to, to hunt down people, to assault and kidnap. Like they're, 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, you can, 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 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 moral commitments that can indeed be justified, but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates, quote, unquote, evidence. The paranoid 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 Nazi code hunting. It's actually a, a form of like, self coping. Looking at the horrific state of the federal government, looking at the, 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 was 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 fascists into power while signaling to a, a nationalistic base that they are like one of them. Right. But these guys are already in power. Yeah. And the base already knows that they're in power. There's no point in dog whistling. They're just using ICE to establish an ethno state. They're using explicit ethnostate rhetoric. In a post from this morning which has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 words, not 14, 10 words.

[Mia Wong]

Wow.

[Garrison Davis]

DHS said, quote, 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.

[Mia Wong]

No. And I want to return to something else that the Hofstedter said in 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 any polling at all about anything these 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, like, that's not even a particularly useful project because everyone 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 also fucking hate this. Let's go fucking like do the shit 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 though it's less effective.

[Garrison Davis]

In my discussion of this, like online, on various cursed social media sites, I, I've gotten a lot of pushback to my pushback of these tactics and what I, what I see as a sort of like, abuse of, 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, you know, educate people about like Nazi rhetoric, like in like Nazi signals and dog whistles. Right. And as a, an attempt to hopefully prevent them from expanding their power. And we may have succeeded in education, but we may have failed in the prevention.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

Of them seizing power. And that also makes me kind of question the effectiveness of certain tactics. And it's now very odd to see things that we've, you know, argued for visibility around to kind of be used in ways that don't really make sense, that it's, it's kind of like trying to tame a, tame a monster that you've partially created. And it's so frustrating to me because, I mean, one person who I was, was lightly arguing about this online was, was saying like, this is not numerology and we don't have to be just okay with a clear attempt to normalize white nationalist rhetoric. And like, first of all, like, codes aren't rhetoric, codes are codes. And the textual fascist sentence is the rhetoric. What they're actually like saying which, which has like proto fascist or fascistic aspects. That is the rhetoric and they're, they're doing it. Is there somebody out there in 2025 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 capitalized letters into numbers. It makes a secret Nazi message. Is there one person who's going to become convinced of this? No, that's not the purpose. So trying to conceptualize this as like we have to, 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.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. And also, like, I think, you know, like I, I, I, I think we've sort of, kind of just to some extent we've just failed on, on the normalization front because again, like it's the President of the United States.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

But that's scary.

[Mia Wong]

That's scary.

[Garrison Davis]

That's scary. Mia, do you know it's easy posting on X, the Everything app. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

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 an apparatus that enables it to basically control any events that it wants. Right. This is why it can stage things. This is why it can rig elections. 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 you, 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 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.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah. You're falling victim to the Panopticon. Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

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 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 stomped them.

[Garrison Davis]

Right. And when they drive around in their cars and you can see them through the window, everyone follows them. People can follow them around and alert their Community members on where ICE is.

[Mia Wong]

Like, again, motherfuckers in fucking Lululemon shit are like, screaming at ICE agents when they try to arrest people.

[Garrison Davis]

Like, yeah, that.

[Mia Wong]

That's the actual condition we're in.

[Garrison Davis]

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 as, as leftists almost falling into this trap, like, more so than others. And it's, It's a little bit evident of something that, like, I've described as, like, the forever 2016. How we're all kind of stuck in the mindset of this 2016, 2017, 2018 era. And we have this unwillingness to realize that that's not the political situation on the ground anymore. We. We are actually not in Charlottesville. This is a different situation. This is 2025. And one other, like, defense of this, you know, code hunting that I've seen people say is, is, quote, Nazis love playing games like this, so it's important that we call it out. 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, this is not a game. This is actual people's lives 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 egg. Anti fascism. It's kind of like the Barbra Streisand effect where you end up almost accidentally making them start doing the thing which Nazis always have, have that, like, frustrating impulse because they're the little bitch boy ideology. I think, as Rat Limit put it, one of one of my favorite posters. And like, I'm not saying that Nazi signposting should be ignored, but I think we should be thoughtful and careful of how we do it to, 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 try to convince regular people that anyone who uses, like, the okay hand symbol is secretly a fascist. And this scheme worked. And eventually the okay symbol became 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 14 words dog whistle. With an increased use of the 14 words and invoking the 14 words among far right accounts specifically because of this whole debacle with the DHS Gov account and their heritage to be proud of homeland worth defending American progress like ethno nationalist posting. And I truly cannot say one way or another if that American progress post had a intentionally embedded 14 words dog whistle inside. I can't. I can't tell you that. And the point I'm 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 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. But you know what I do want right now?

[Mia Wong]

Is it the products and services that support this podcast.

[Garrison Davis]

Another ad break. That's right. Be sure to listen for the third and fourth hidden clue in these ads.

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[Garrison Davis]

Ilia Malini redefining this sport Friday at.

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[Garrison Davis]

All right, we are back to briefly.

[Mia Wong]

Take a small tangent here. I think there is something very important about like the fact that we're all stuck in 2016, 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?

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it's not this sort of like irony pill, deniability shit. They just do it and people are just not prepared for that.

[Garrison Davis]

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 ass it for plausible deniability, memify the backlash and then start 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 its 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. There's this current trend on X the everything apt where white girl aspiring influencers are doing Nazi style salutes and trying to memify the backlash with several posts going, going viral of these, of these, like, like aspiring influencers either at the pool or cooking or doing laundry or walking your dog while having your arm in a Elon Musk, my heart goes out to you. Nazi salute style fashion.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

And I think focusing media attention on someone like Musk doing a Nazi salute makes sense. Right? He's like an actual person affiliated with the government, but making a whole media blitz about random blue check Twitter girls. Maybe not 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 Heil Hitler salute in their kitchen next to their Insta pot.

[Mia Wong]

I, I keep coming back to the thing that I wrote about the original Nazi 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, and think in the image of action instead of like actually existing things.

[Garrison Davis]

That's what I want to talk about next. Yeah, yeah, let's do this.

[Mia Wong]

Let's do this. Yeah, go for it. Go for it.

[Garrison Davis]

No, I think part of this focus on, on, on like these hidden codes and even just like these like messages online is a liberal opposition to the aesthetics of deportation, but not necessarily the act itself. Yeah, it's carrying out deportations in a mode that seems not in line with like neoliberal governing. 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. It's. I'm not saying these things are good. Yeah. Those things are still bad.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah.

[Garrison Davis]

But when that gets focused on slightly more than just the pure act of deportation itself, that I think is evident of being trapped in this like capitalist realism. Being trapped in this, like, like this neoliberal.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, the society, the spectacle.

[Garrison Davis]

Exactly right. Let's. Like In June, ICE arrested 30,000 people and did 18,000 deportations. In May, it was 24,000 arrests and 18,000 deportations. Since February, the Trump admin has averaged about 14,700 deportations a month. The highest number of deportations ever was in 2013 under Obama, averaging 36,000amonth. The Biden admin averaged almost 13,000. 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. Colombia also barred two military planes full of migrants, but later caved as Trump threatened punitive tariffs. And 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.

[Mia Wong]

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.

[Garrison Davis]

Benjamin is, is quoted in these sections that Fisher is, is pulling from as well.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

Yep, yep, I, I, I'm going to the source. I'm like, I'm not going through the CRU bullshit like pop Marxist, bourgeois running dog Marxist.

[Mia Wong]

But, no, but like, you know, like one of the things 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 allow you to, you know, feel 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 analyses 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, 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 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.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah.

[Mia Wong]

And it also is doing the same thing to us. But the thing is they have the fucking state and we don't.

[Garrison Davis]

Right?

[Mia Wong]

And so if you don't fucking exit, if you don't exit the sort of mirror world of aesthetic of sort of like, of fucking living in images, right? And, you know, go do the actual shit that Debord is talking about in the society of spectacle, where you and all your friends form workers councils and fucking start taking all of the shit.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

Back from all of the people who've been taking it from you, you're just.

[Mia Wong]

Gonna live in the fascist nightmare forever.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, you could look at the union resistance to ICE deportations, specifically in LA with restaurant workers. That'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 asceticized politics. And you can even see that insofar as its focuses on, you know, like, race and like ethnic purity, like 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 aestheticized politics on, like, a very pure level. And again, to quote from my goat, the anti goat quote, Mark Fisher in capitalist realism, quote, ultra authoritarianism 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, unquote. This is very similar to something that me and Mia talked about right as Trump got elected, in terms of the state becoming more removed but hostile.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah. Although. Although, I see, again, I disagree with Fisher here because the neoliberals 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, like, sure.

[Garrison Davis]

I mean, that's what. Contrary to their official health.

[Mia Wong]

Yeah, yeah.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

And it's like, you know, quote, such.

[Garrison Davis]

A blight can only be eased by an intervention that can be no more anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first place. Action is pointless. Only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition 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 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 validation which no penance can ameliorate. 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 MI is talking about with Guy Deborah and society of the spectacle. That's the trap that I think a lot of people are falling into right now. And though it's arguable that living in a liberal contradiction may be preferable to fascist authoritarianism, that still doesn't mean it's, like, good, right? That's not. That's not what we're arguing here. Fisher then quotes French philosopher Alain Badu. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead they've 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 like Lovich. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, unquote. And already parts of this are slightly outdated.

[Mia Wong]

Oh, yeah.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

No, because it's already. We're doing this shit now. Like.

[Garrison Davis]

But this is the thing is both are tragedies where millions of people die, Right? One of them is through the aesthetics of neoliberalism. The other one is through aesthetics of racist nationalistic declarations, which the Trump administration is currently playing with. That is what they decided to do. Yeah. And so the reaction to it is on this aesthetic note, not necessarily on this pure, actual humanistic opposition to deportations as a process that is inhumane that we should not allow at all.

[Mia Wong]

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, well, but what about criminals?

[Garrison Davis]

And it's like, some. Some deportations. What are you.

[Mia Wong]

This is the structural logic of the original, like, deportation blitz from Trump, creating.

[Garrison Davis]

A class of undesirables that you can then always add to and press the border on, like, what Carl Schmidt talks about.

[Mia Wong]

This is the structural logic of fascism.

[Garrison Davis]

Yeah, but.

[Mia Wong]

But every. 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 this sort of pure opposition to the aesthetics and actually start, you know, having, having a kind of totalizing opposition to the system that is doing this, we're just going to be stuck here.

[Garrison Davis]

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 video is all white people, which this sentiment is the same thing as the 14 words. Yeah, except it has 15 words. So therefore not a Nazi dog whistle. Yeah, we're safe, guys. We're good. I counted the words. There's 15 of them. So you can disregard what the actual text is saying. And I think that is, is the, is like the prime, the prime contradiction in which I am growing increasingly frustrated. So that's most of what I have to say about the limits of Nazi code hunting and the, the aesthetics of superstition and the paranoid style in American politics. Mia, do you have any, any final, wise, wise notes?

[Mia Wong]

The time for Nazi code hunting, if there ever was one, has passed.

[Cool Zone Media Host]

It is now time to end the episode right here.

[Garrison Davis]

That's right, it is. We're late for a meeting. 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. Bye bye.

[Cool Zone Media Announcer]

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in Episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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