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 Today's post is ICHH's "Dogwhistle Politics and Nazi Code Hunting." Gare and Mia take a deep dive into what is, superficially, a comparatively minor issue—that of conspiratorial thinking on the left. They take as their jumping off point a tweet from the Gestapo featuring John Gast's "American Progress." It's an overtly fascist tweet because the artwork itself celebrates the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the text reinforces that the poster thinks that this genocide is a good thing, and also because an overtly fascist organization that is currently carrying out a genocide tweeted it. If they'd tweeted a picture of kittens, it would still be a fascist tweet, because it is a fascist organization posting on a platform owned by fascists. Nevertheless, certain segments of the extremely online left and liberals have convinced themselves that there are also secret fascist messages in the tweet.

The basic thesis of the episode is, "no, you fools, they don't need to dogwhistle anymore because they are in power and doing fascism." But there's another, even more important point here, which is that we're all still basically stuck in 2016-7 and we need to be updating both our thinking and our strategies. I feel a certain way about this because for all that I mocked it back in the day, conspiratorial thinking worked very well for the right, and I sort of disagree with Gare and Mia that it won't reach a particular type of low-information voter who likes to feel privy to exciting secret knowledge. But also, it is counterproductive and has people who might otherwise be useful and productive chasing their tails playing numerology on X, the Everything App.

At any rate, it's an interesting psychological insight and as someone who is not immune from Extremely Online Thinking, it's a useful check-in.

 I'm behind on my podcasts as usual but "AI Minstrel Shows" on It Could Happen Here aired a few days ago and was really good. Apparently there's a whole genre of AI video that I'd managed to avoid but should have guessed at. Racist buffoons on the internet now have the technology to generate completely fake Black people saying things that conform to white supremacists' ideology, which means that they can now do minstrel shows again. For free. Because AI content creators are the worst people imaginable so of course they have to do the worst things imaginable and this is one of them.

Bridget Todd does a great public service in not only making us aware of this shit but in tying it to historical uses of blackface and the ways in which punching-down "comedy" was used to create propaganda, enforce white supremacist institutional power, and transmit ideology. It's truly horrifying stuff and yet another reason to oppose the use of so-called AI in any creative space.