JAQing Off, Figleaves and Dog Whistles
How We Built the Golden Age of Semantic Warfare
"Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" King Henry II's 1170 question allegedly directly inspired Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket's murder.
Eight centuries later, a man walked into a D.C. pizza restaurant with a loaded gun, convinced he was rescuing nonexistent children from a basement that didn't exist. Between these moments lies the evolution of humanity's deadliest rhetorical weapon: inciting action while maintaining plausible deniability.
Dog whistle language is communication that appears innocuous or abstract to general audiences while carrying hidden, resonant meaning for an "initiated" group, those who share specific worldviews, ideologies, or prejudices. It allows plausible deniability ("I didn't mean that!") while signaling loyalty to an ideological base.
The term comes from literal ultrasonic devices, Francis Galton's 1876 invention that could summon dogs with frequencies inaudible to human ears.
By the 1990s, it had become political metaphor for messages that activate specific audiences while remaining invisible to others.
We created optimal conditions for this to flourish at industrial scale. Algorithms that reward engagement over truth, amplifying ambiguity as a feature, not a bug. A post-truth ecosystem where "just asking questions" became a superweapon that can destroy reputations, incite violence, and topple governments, all while the speaker shrugs innocently.
This isn't about politicians being sneaky. This is about how we accidentally created the optimal conditions for semantic warfare to flourish at industrial scale.
The Jeffrey Epstein Stress Test
Watch how any Epstein discussion demonstrates the machinery in action.
Start with documented facts: sex trafficking, powerful connections, mysterious death. Within minutes, you're in a linguistic minefield where "powerful networks" means Jewish conspiracies, "cosmopolitan elites" activates antisemitic folklore, and "just asking questions" becomes a delivery system for centuries-old blood libel.
The real cleverness of the technique isn't in making the subtle suggestion, it's in having a built-in way to deny responsibility when called out.
Challenge the speaker and they retreat: "I'm just asking about prosecuting sex criminals. Why are you being defensive?" The questioner becomes the aggressor. The conspiracy theorist becomes the truth-seeker.
This is "JAQing off", Just Asking Questions, the performative naivety that has become the dominant mode of conspiracy discourse. It's a meta-dog whistle that signals "I'm about to say something I can't say directly" while maintaining perfect deniability. The technique exploits our cultural respect for curiosity and inquiry, weaponizing intellectual humility as a delivery system for extremist content.
This is philosopher Jennifer Saul's insight: we've been playing defense against a multi-weapon system using single-weapon tactics. She identified three distinct mechanisms operating simultaneously:
Overt codes work like traditional dog whistles, messages for insiders that sound innocent to outsiders. When politicians speak of "urban voters" or "globalist networks," general audiences hear geography or international trade while initiated groups receive racial or antisemitic signals.
Covert priming operates below conscious awareness.
A pro-Andrew Cuomo super PAC called "Fix the City" produced a mailer featuring a manipulated photo of NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani with a "darker, thicker beard." The PAC source confirmed that a "filter" was applied to make Mamdani's beard "bushier." The audience gets influenced without realizing they received a blatant islamophobic message.
Figleaves provide cover for explicit bigotry. "I'm not racist, but these communities have cultural problems with violence." "I'm not antisemitic, but you have to admit there's disproportionate Jewish influence in media." The preface attempts to license what follows, making hate seem reasonable and evidence-based.
The system's ‘elegance’ is that calling out any single mechanism makes you look paranoid, oversensitive, or politically motivated. You're fighting a three-front war with one-front tactics.
Legal Frameworks and Linguistic Evolution
Anti-hate speech laws create evolutionary pressure that drives linguistic innovation rather than eliminating extremist discourse. In France, the Loi Gayssot rightfully criminalized Holocaust denial. The Loi Pleven made racist defamation illegal. But paradoxically, these crucial protections pushed explicit hatred underground, where it mutates into more sophisticated forms.
French extremists pioneered the portmanteau dog whistle, compound words that collapse distinct identities into single threatening entities.
"Islamo-gauchiste" (Islamo-Leftist) merges Islam and leftism, suggesting infiltration and civilizational decay without making legally actionable claims.
"Judéo-bolchévique" did identical work in the 1920s, manufacturing an imaginary Jewish-communist alliance that could explain any social disruption.
These neologisms follow consistent patterns: two identities get conflated (often contradictory ones), one component signals ideology ("Islamo," "Judéo," "Éco," "Gender"), while the other adds threat dimension ("-gauchiste," "-bolchévique," "-fasciste"). "Judéo-maçonnique" binds Jews and Freemasons. "Feminazi" merges feminism with fascism. "Gaystapo" combines homosexuality with authoritarian enforcement.
The words don't describe any reality, they manufacture the enemy they claim to identify. This is discursive hijacking: taking legitimate political concepts and weaponizing them through strategic combination.
French comedian Dieudonné perfected the comedy escape hatch, wrapping Holocaust minimization in humor. His "quenelle", a reverse Nazi salute he calls "anti-establishment"—went viral precisely because comedy provides ultimate deniability. Every accusation gets deflected: "Where's your sense of humor?"
Elon Musk's straight-armed salute at Trump's inauguration followed an identical pattern: when challenged, he responded not with denial but with Nazi-themed puns, weaponizing humor as the ultimate figleaf.
Legal constraint doesn't eliminate hate speech, it makes it more sophisticated.
The Algorithmic Accelerator
Social media platforms reward engaging content over accurate content. A clear factual statement gets ignored. An ambiguous insinuation generates massive engagement from supporters hearing the signal and opponents sensing but unable to prove the subtext.
Ambiguous dog whistles spread faster because they avoid content moderation while maximizing partisan engagement. The collapse of authoritative interpretation means the same phrase can simultaneously mean different things to different audiences, and platforms can't moderate meanings that exist in the spaces between words.
Hyper-fragmentation of audiences into interpretive tribes accelerates this dynamic. Each group develops its own decoding mechanisms while remaining invisible to others sharing the same digital spaces.
The "just asking questions" format became the meta-dog whistle, a signal that signals. JAQing off exploits platform dynamics perfectly because questions appear reasonable, can't be fact-checked, and make questioners seem curious rather than conspiratorial. Joe Rogan wondering about vaccine ingredients isn't making medical claims, he's activating vaccine skepticism while maintaining perfect deniability. Tucker Carlson questioning election results isn't spreading disinformation, he's just intellectually curious!
The platforms accidentally created a reward structure that optimizes for exactly the content they claim to prohibit.
The Global Operating System
This pattern replicated globally with local variations:
Britain's "Take back control" meant sovereignty to moderates, racial purity to extremists. The same phrase activated completely different mental models depending on the listener's existing anxieties.
India's Modi references "infiltrators" and communities that "breed faster", demographic dog whistles playing on Hindu nationalist fears while maintaining plausible deniability about discussing immigration policy.
Brazil's Bolsonaro divided the world into "cidadão de bem" (good citizens) versus communists, corrupt elites, and foreign influences, creating in-group/out-group dynamics without explicit racial or class markers.
"Cultural Marxism" shows how this sanitization process works globally. Defenders claim it's legitimate critique of the Frankfurt School's critical theory. But genealogical analysis reveals it as direct descendant of the Nazi propaganda term "Cultural Bolshevism", the conspiracy theory that Jews were using culture to destroy Western civilization. The Frankfurt School's prominent figures, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, were Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany. "Cultural Marxism" operates on identical logic, suggesting deliberate civilizational subversion rather than academic inquiry.
For general audiences, it sounds like intellectual debate. For initiated groups, it's sanitized antisemitism with century-old roots.
The template works everywhere because it exploits universal cognitive biases while adapting to local cultural triggers.
The Violence Pipeline
This isn't just rhetorical games. Stochastic terrorism describes the systematic process: influential figures demonize target groups using coded language, making violence statistically inevitable while maintaining plausible deniability. Someone eventually acts on the programming. The programmer denies responsibility.
There is the 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators, there were claims that Haitian immigrants were stealing pets and eating them, leading to the city of Springfield receiving dozens of bomb threats, Elon Musk’s published and then deleted post on X, that some took to be a call for assassination attempts against Harris and President Biden - Musk has claimed that the post was meant as a joke.
The correlation between extremist rhetoric and hate crimes is documented, but proving direct causation between specific words and specific violence remains nearly impossible, which is precisely what makes the strategy effective.
The AI Escalation
Next-generation threats are already emerging. AI systems learn to reproduce coded patterns without explicit programming. Large language models trained on human text naturally absorb and amplify these rhetorical techniques.
Soon: personalized dog whistles crafted for audiences of one, based on individual digital footprints. Mass-produced propaganda that speaks directly to each person's specific anxieties and biases. Deepfakes that literalize plausible deniability, creating "evidence" for any claim while making authentic evidence suspect.
The Strategic Reality
We're not experiencing a breakdown of civil discourse, we're experiencing the optimization of civil discourse for goals other than truth or understanding. The system is working exactly as designed by the incentive structures we created.
Legal frameworks that reward deniability. Algorithmic systems that amplify engagement over accuracy. Information ecosystems that fragment audiences into interpretive tribes. Economic models that monetize attention regardless of the content's social impact.
The dog whistle's golden age isn't an accident or a temporary political moment, it's the logical outcome of how we structured our information systems. Understanding the machinery is the first step toward not getting played by it.
In an environment where every statement carries multiple possible meanings, where every question contains its own answer, where every joke is serious and every serious claim is performance, literacy means recognizing the game being played, not just the words being said.
The perfect storm isn't passing. It's intensifying. The question isn't whether we can return to some imagined era of straightforward communication. The question is whether we can develop the analytical sophistication to navigate a world where language itself has been weaponized infrastructure.
Our defense against semantic warfare isn't (only) fact-checking or content moderation. It's pattern recognition. Learn the signatures. Watch the machinery operate. Understand how meaning gets manufactured and distributed in systems designed to obscure rather than illuminate.
The golden age of the dog whistle is also the moment of its greatest visibility. We can see the machine now. That's the beginning of not getting caught in it.