That's not what "dog whistles" are, lol. Dog Whistle means "coded language" basically.
Dog whistles are where someone says something that their audience will understand to mean a specific thing, but will be inaudible or neutral sounding to people who are not in their audience. They are named that because they are like the whistles only dogs can hear, while most people cannot.
"Inner city" is a canonical example of a dog whistle. Where the literal meaning is the districts in a city in the urban center, but is often used to denote poor minority communities. (If the literal meaning is only "city centers", then would you describe Manhattanites as inner city?)
On the left, "tax the rich" might be a dog whistle that carries a similar literal meaning disjoint from the understood meaning within the community.
> Dog whistles are where someone says something that their audience will understand to mean a specific thing, but will be inaudible or neutral sounding to people who are not in their audience. They are named that because they are like the whistles only dogs can hear, while most people cannot.
That's basically what I said, except you're missing that more often than not it's an intentional stretching of a literal phrase in order to cast aspersions on someone who didn't do the thing you're mad about.
For example, here was one of the top results when I googled "trump dog whistle",
> In February 2018, during Trump’s first term as president, the Department of Homeland Security issued a 14-word press release titled “We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again.” I and other investigators of far-right extremism attributed this phrase’s use to a clear dog whistle of the common white supremacist saying known as “the 14 words” – “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
Or this top result from the search "musk dog whistle",
> Omar Suleiman has called on Elon Musk to stop blowing political "dog whistles of Islamophobia"
> Yet, for the past week, you have blown every conceivable dog whistle of Islamophobia, by highlighting a select group of (horrifying) incidents supposedly in the name of Islam
In this case absolutely no examples were given, but that's the great thing about accusing someone of dog whistling - you don't need to provide any evidence! In fact, literally any evidence you can provide would only serve to weaken your accusation because by definition anyone who isn't whichever -ist you're accusing them of will literally be unable to decode the -ism in their phrasing. If it sounds obviously -ist then by definition it can't be a dog whistle.
Just because you can find a bad article with bad examples, and some are for sure coincidences, but that doesn't mean its not true. Musk did heil, Musk does post well known white supremacy signals. Trump might be a racist and like the fascist power but he is not a white supremacist christian like the rest of his cabinet of project2025 people.
Dog whistles are where someone says something that their audience will understand to mean a specific thing, but will be inaudible or neutral sounding to people who are not in their audience. They are named that because they are like the whistles only dogs can hear, while most people cannot.
"Inner city" is a canonical example of a dog whistle. Where the literal meaning is the districts in a city in the urban center, but is often used to denote poor minority communities. (If the literal meaning is only "city centers", then would you describe Manhattanites as inner city?)
On the left, "tax the rich" might be a dog whistle that carries a similar literal meaning disjoint from the understood meaning within the community.