Hacker News Reader

Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

It means what everyone thinks it does. The first sentence is 14 words [1] and 88 ads [2] were run, notorious neo-Nazi numerology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

[2] https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1273644108561686530?s=20

View on HN

And your second sentence is 14 words.

So people can produce that by accident, even when they're aware of the significance of 14 words. Condemning someone for a sentence with 14 words in it is likely to produce a huge number of false positives.

Reminds me of this comparison from my childhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coinci...

"Each assassin's name is composed of fifteen letters.[5]"

and my favorite: Booth ran from the theater and was caught in a warehouse; Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.[5]

I'm not a multibillion dollar plaform with access to several PR firms hand-crafting social media posts using OG Nazi imagery for the same purpose that Nazis used them for to target to millions in a bid for the most powerful office on earth. Don't judge me by th same standards.

What is your standard for Trump? Can he or his campaign never, ever use a sentence with 14 words, or it's proof that he's dogwhistling?

Can his campaign never use a sentence with 14 words in a campaign ad?

Can they never use 14 words in the first sentence?

Where are your lines where you decide he's guilty, and why are they there? Or have you already decided that, and you're just hunting for additional confirmation?

You're one of my favorite commenters here, and I find myself agreeing most of the time. But in this instance I really do think you're wrong. Here's why:

1. the context is specifically vilifying a loose collective of anti-fascists using a symbol that was used by nazis to mark (among others) anti-fascists. 2. the source is a president who definitely exhibits fascist tendencies, and is very popular with white supremacists. 3. there's a history of weird borderline dog-whistling (see the Twitter thread linked to elsewhere. I think it makes a pretty good case.). 4. if the 'removed 88 ads' is correct, surely that's a very weird coincidence?

I'd say that if the 88 thing is false, I might believe the 14 words thing is a coincidence. But that doesn't change the fact that the red triangle or even the weird focus on antifa as being a terrorist organization is deeply worrying to me.

I am generally skeptical of conspiracy theories, but this one really does strike me as too coincidental to actually be a coincidence.

That said, I also wouldn't be surprised if it's more of a 'trolling' thing than Trump going 'mask off' or whatnot. I'm only arguing that I don't think it's a coincidence.

EDIT: I'll add that considering the popularity of Trump among white supremacists and trolls, it's quite possible that someone somewhere in the organization got to make an ad and decided to fill it up with incindiary dog-whistles. That scenario still makes me uncomfortable, as I really don't want 4chan anywhere near the most powerful country in the world, but it would make the whole thing less of a conspiracy theory. I truly believe Trump is too dumb to have any kind of consistent ideology, so it's possible.

First: Thanks! I'm rather astonished to be on anyone's list of favorite commenters.

I've been discounting the 88 thing. Would it have been 88 ads if Facebook hadn't stopped the ad campaign at exactly that time? Even if 88 ads was the full campaign, that seems to me to be a fairly difficult number for a random right-winger to be able to determine, and therefore like a poor channel to try to send a dogwhistle through. (It's hard for right-wingers to simultaneously be too stupid to understand why their position is wrong, and so clever that they can find all these insanely clever side-channels through which to send dogwhistles - though I guess the actual Nazis did pretty well at being technologically literate barbarians.) To me, it just feels like seeing morse code in the campfire smoke - that is, seeing a deliberate pattern in randomness.

I'll admit that the 14 words at the start of the DHS "We must secure the border" statement seem a lot more real to me - not just the word count, but it's also echoing the start of the actual words.

I'd be more likely to buy the "trolling" idea - that the attempt is to put the most innocent-looking-to-most-people thing possible out there to trigger the reaction, to make those reacting look like hysterical nutcases - except I'm not sure that Trump is smart enough or skilled enough to pull it off this well.

TL;DR: It feels too flimy to me to be a deliberate dogwhistle, but I'm not totally certain of that.

Do you really think their marketing team does everything in groups of 14s and 88s to keep up with neo-Nazi numerology?

I think certain influential members of the administration, such as Stephen Miller, are absolutely familiar with them even if Trump himself isn't.

And this isn't even particularly obscure knowledge, it's something that a large number of mass murderers in recent years have made an extensive use of in their messaging: https://twitter.com/originalspin/status/1273653992514412544

And this is exactly how this tactic works. The campaign can send dog whistles that neo-Nazis the world over will immediately recognize and appreciate, and useful idiots can come along and argue that all these blatantly obvious things are just coincidences.

Yes of course they do and comments like yours are exacltly why there continues to be an incentive to use dogwhistles like this. It's an inexhaustable source of plausible deniablity with a clear channel for singaling.

Not "everything". That's a convenient exaggeration that makes the claim seem silly. But of course they demonstrably do engage in this practice.

"Demonstrably"? Demonstrate it, then, by all means.

Right here [0] Homeland Security uses a 14-word headline that even shares the "We must secure" phrasing with the Nazi version of the fourteen words.

[0] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/we-must-secure-border-an...

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/we-must-secure-border-an...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com