A Taxonomy of Right-Wing Dog Whistles

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The first time I witnessed the birth of a right-wing talking point, I was sitting in a crowded ballroom at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, in National Harbor, Maryland. This was the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, and I was listening to Sebastian Gorka deliver remarks that fell somewhere on the spectrum from venting to fomenting.

There he was in his three-piece suit, voice booming: “They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers.” As I jotted down the line about the hamburgers, a sudden sense of unreality came over me.

Democrats want to take my hamburgers? It seemed too preposterous a threat to alarm even the most willing rube. Knowing the origin of the line was perhaps revealing, but made it no less ridiculous. Republicans had taken left-wing concerns about the environmental effects of factory farming and animal slaughter and contorted those worries, casting the Democrats as not just an anti-hamburger party, but a coalition of hamburger thieves—, if you will.