Dog-Whistling Or Calling A Spade and Spade

The project of silencing people and the manufacture of consent

I believe that openly communicating your views and telling it like it is essential for the functioning of democracy. That is why being able to call a spade a spade is integral to the flourishing of a culture of freedom.

Unfortunately today sections of the legacy media and the Establishment that dominates the cultural institutions of western societies are wary of calling a spade a spade. They even constructed a trigger warning against the use of this term on the ground that it has racial connotations. A term that has been used since the Ancient Greeks to convey the sentiment of ‘tell it like it is’ has become racialized[i]. Regrettably, these days just about any phrase can become racialized in order to assist the project of controlling what can and cannot be said.

The racialization of calling a spade a spade is particularly egregious since so many of the icons of Black American culture used the term positively in their communication. W.E.B Du Bois, arguably the greatest Black American intellectual and civil rights activist wrote in his famous 1919 editorial "Returning Soldiers" about the struggles of African-American men in the following terms;

"We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land."[ii]

Du Bois who called out racism a long time before it became fashionable cause within Anglo-American culture had no problem about calling a spade a spade.

Warnings against using the term calling a spade a spade are principally motivated by the motive of ensuring that people are silenced from telling it like it is. Censorship is not simply about controlling what can and cannot be said. It is also about assuming a monopoly of power over interpreting what people really mean when they say calling a spade a spade. As a result, they can seize hold of an innocent remark and rebranded as a racist term of hatred.

Take the words groomers/grooming. According to some accounts they serve as a code for attacking certain groups in society. These terms are called dog-whistles by the cultural elites. According to a guide on dog whistles and hidden messages:

The terms ‘grooming’ and ‘groom’ have become popular dogwhistles in both the US and the UK, though they largely target different groups. In the US (and sometimes the UK), the term ‘groomer’ is used primarily to refer in a derogatory way to LGBTQ people, based on the false and defamatory stereotype that they’re attempting to make children trans or gay. In the UK, the term ‘grooming gang’ is used primarily to perpetuate stereotypes of Pakistani men, referencing some particular cases of child abuse…In both cases, users of these terms are able to fall back on the claim that they’re concerned about child abuse, rather than about trans people or Pakistani men[iii].

As it happens the association of grooming gangs in the UK has nothing to do with perpetuating stereotypes. It just so happens that a disproportionate number of the members of UK based rape gangs are members of this community. Those who wish to cover up this inconvenient fact about how multiculturalism is a mixed blessing accuse those who tell it like it is of dog whistling.

The premise on which the concept of dog whistling is based is that there are ideas, assumptions and words that should not and ideally cannot be said in public. Its intention in to prevent certain voices from being taken seriously. In particular, the charge of dog-whistling is used to shut down discussion on matters about which the political and cultural establishment feels insecure. The British Labour Minister Lucy Powell adopted this stratagem when she reacted to a member of the populist Reform Party who raised the problem of the grooming gang scandal during the course of a television debate in May 2025. The scandal referred to the despicable behaviour of mainly Pakistani rape gangs that preyed on white working class girls in Northern England. The scandal which had been covered up for years due to the reluctance of the authorities to acknowledge how badly multiculturalism went wrong finally became a public issue in 2024. Lucy Powell responded by dismissing the scandal as a ‘dog whistle issue’ and hoped that her comment would close the discussion down[iv]. In this instance her comment had the opposite effect and instead of silencing discussion of the rape gangs it led to a public outcry led by the families of the victims of the rape gangs.

Populists who question the way society is run are frequently characterized as dog-whistlers. It does not much matter what populists say even a relatively innocent remark will be represented by their opponents as an expression of racism, fascism or as one of the many phobias. Their critics often examine their words for a hidden meaning. Populist speakers are often accused of dog-whistling – that is communicating a hidden message – through using euphemism and outwardly unexceptional words. For example, someone expressing concern about the introduction of Sharia Law can be accused of conveying an Islamophobic message. In fact, any statement that hints at a problem with Islamic Culture risks being mercilessly denounced as Islamophobic

Take the case of Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. She is frequently accused by her detractors of being a closet fascist. According to Roberto Saviano commentator in The Guardian,

‘Meloni dog-whistles to her neo-fascist ancestors with the Mussolini era slogan, “God, homeland family”. She did it 2019, screaming from the stage at a rally in San Giovanni: “I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am a Christian’.[v]

As far as Meloni is concerned her slogan ‘God, homeland family’ is not a fascist slogan but a ‘beautiful declaration of love’. However, Meloni is denied the right to have her comments interpreted at face value. Her anti-populist critics believe that they have the right to decide that her words mean that she is a dog-whistler and likely to be a closet-fascist.

In effect the charge of dog whistling is used to de-legitimate people’s public statement. The meaning of dog- whistle politics is defined in the following way:

“Dog-whistle politics” refers to the use of ostensibly innocuous discursive cues that prime more insidious outgroup hostilities, particularly among those who share the ideological predilections of the speaker. In practice, such coded language often evokes racially charged attitudes, but it has also been used in religious and anti-immigrant discourse. The metaphor is a reference to high-pitched dog-training whistles that use frequencies inaudible to humans’[vi].

The charge of dog-whistling hurled at populists empowers their opponents to decide what their statement means. As far as they are concerned there are no ‘innocuous discursive cues’ in the populist narrative. The term conveys the claim that populist rhetoric cannot be taken seriously since it always communicates a hidden appeal to racist or xenophobic sentiment. In effect the charge of dog-whistling serves as a weapon designed to gain control of over how a statement made by a political opponent should be interpreted.

The term dog-whistling serves the goal of dispossessing people of their right to decide the meaning of their words. The accusation of dog-whistling serves as a claim to have the right to judge what some actually meant by the words they used. This is an insidious form of language control that aims to silence those of us who wish to create a world where freedom and democracy are not just empty words!

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[i] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763/is-it-racist-to-call-a-spade-a-spade

[ii] Cited in https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/09/19/224183763/is-it-racist-to-call-a-spade-a-spade

[iii] https://blog.oup.com/2024/09/dogwhistles-10-examples-of-disguised-messages/

[iv] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/05/03/labour-minister-dismisses-rape-gangs-as-dog-whistle-problem/

[v] https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2022/sep/24/giorgia-meloni-is-a-danger-to-italy-and-the-rest-of-europe-far-right

[vi] Bonikowski, B. and Zhang, Y., 2023. Populism as dog-whistle politics: Anti-elite discourse and sentiments toward minority groups. Social Forces, 102(1), pp.180-201.