Rhetorical tactics: Dogwhistling and horsewatering [Monikers]

or: two methods to advocate for your horrible beliefs without ever explicitly saying so

Political discourse is full of misleading rhetorical tactics. Naming these tactics makes them easier to call out and refute.

Most people are familiar with dogwhistling, where someone hides their true beliefs behind innocent language. I'd like to introduce another misleading rhetorical tactic: Horsewatering.

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Definition: What is dogwhistling?

Dogwhistling is a common rhetorical tactic. In short, you try to promote an unacceptable viewpoint using acceptable language. The dogwhistling strategy goes as follows:

1. Abhorrent belief: You support a belief, [X]. However, [X] is very unpopular or morally abhorrent. You cannot openly promote [X] without negative consequences.

2. Double meaning: Instead, you promote a statement that has "double meaning":

   • [m1] Your first meaning, the obvious one, hopes to win support from the general public.

   • [m2] Your second meaning, the less obvious one, hopes to win support for [X].

For example, "state's rights" has a double meaning:

• [m1] local regions should have power over local policy

• [m2] local regions should use that power to protect racial segregation

3. Plausible deniability: If attacked as an [X] supporter, you claim plausible deniability: You were merely promoting [m1], and it's outrageous to suggest you support [m2].

4. Results: Over time, the general public learns that promoting [m2] often implies supporting [m1]. If you won, that's because they also support [X] -- also known as death of the euphemism. If you lost, that's because people learned to identify your misleading rhetoric.

Dogwhistling takes its name from dog whistles, which are audible to dogs but not to people.

In short: A dogwhistle is a statement intended to support a privately-held view with a double meaning and plausible deniability.

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Definition: What is horsewatering?

Many examples of "dogwhistling" are actually examples of another rhetorical tactic, which I call horsewatering.

Horsewatering is similar to dogwhistling. In short, you try to promote an unacceptable viewpoint by supporting its premises without explicitly supporting it as your conclusion. The horsewatering strategy goes as follows:

1. Abhorrent belief: You support a belief, [X]. However, [X] is very unpopular or morally abhorrent. You cannot openly promote [X] without negative consequences.

2. Everything but the conclusion: Instead, you promote the premises {[p1], [p2], [p3], ...} necessary to conclude that [X] is true.

3. Plausible deniability: If attacked as an [X] supporter, you claim plausible deniability: You were merely discussing the premises {[p1], [p2], [p3], ...}, and it's outrageous to suggest you support [X].

4. Results: Over time, the general public learns that arguing the premises {[p1], [p2], [p3], ...} often implies supporting the conclusion [X]. If you won, that's because they believe those premises and also support [X]. If you lost, that's because people learned to identify your misleading rhetoric.

Horsewatering takes its name from an inversion of the idiom "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink"", which means "you can give someone an opportunity, but you can't make them take it".

When the horsewaterer says "I never said [abhorrent belief X]!", they're saying "I led the horse to water, but I didn't make them drink!" And, indeed, they didn't: They just made it as easy as possible for the horse to do so.

(Some other proposed names were: "Kuleshoving" and "Ideological Paint by Numbers".)

Horsewatering is usually far longer and far more explicit than dogwhistling:

• By necessity, dogwhistles must be short messages (or else their intent would be obvious) and cannot be very explicit (or else their intent would be obvious)

• By necessity, horsewaters must be long messages (or else they couldn't meaningfully explain the premises) and must be fairly explicit (or else the premises would be unclear)

This is one reason I think that many examples of "dogwhistling" are "horsewatering": They are literally too long and too obvious to be dogwhistles, as you'll see in the examples below.

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Examples of dogwhistling

A good explanation of dogwhistling comes from white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. In a rare moment of candor, Fuentes explained how he tries to use irony and humor to hide his true beliefs (short video clip, archive with transcript):

Irony is so important for giving a lot of, like, cover and plausible deniability for our views. That's what these people don't understand. [....]

Richard Spencer is the kind of person, where if a journalist [...] asked him if he's a fascist, he would give some extremely academic convoluted 20 minute answer which was, like, a roundabout way of saying yes. [....]

What is required is somebody who is tactical with their language. Tactical, okay? Use irony because, you know, when it comes to something like holocaust revision, I mean, this is a subject that you cannot deviate from the popular consensus on. I also think you really can't, heh, tell the truth, if you adhere to that. [....]

When it comes to a lot of these issues, you need a little bit of, uh, maneuverability that irony gives you: [...] "Well, I was being ironic, well, I was joking, well, it's whatever, well, you don't understand the tone, well, you don't understand humor."

In short:

• Fuentes supports Holocaust denial, which is so abhorrent that he can't openly promote it [X]

• Fuentes uses jokes to give him "maneuverability" (plausible deniability) by letting him "tell the truth" [m2] but later say "I was joking" and "you don't understand humor" [m1].

This is the essence of dogwhistling.

Example 1: Nick Fuentes denies the Holocaust

Ironically, Fuentes is terrible at dogwhistling. For example, take this infamous clip of Fuentes doing very overt, very detailed Holocaust denial "as a joke" that's often cited as "dogwhistling" (archive with transcript):

Wait a second — it takes one hour to cook a batch of cookies, and you have 15 ovens probably in four different kitchens right? Doing 24 hours a day every day for five years how long would it take you to make six million? Hmmm. I don’t know. It certainly wouldn’t be five years, right?

[Aushwitz II Birkenau had 5 crematoria and 52 ovens. The camp office estimated Birkenau's body burning capacity at 4756 per day (1.7 million per year). Birkenau received 1.3 million prisoners over ~2.7 years from 1942 to 1944, giving time to burn ~4.7 million bodies. Birkenau guards killed 1.1 million people.]

I don’t think you would get to six million. Maybe 200 to 300 thousand cookies? Maybe the red cookie association said something like that, maybe 200,000 to 300,000 cookies baked probably?

[The Red Cross documents in question counts (1) documented deaths that (2) received an application from family. Most concentration camp victims were killed en masse, with no individual documentation. Dead families can't make applications.]

In addition, you know, in this hypothetical, I imagine if you took aerial photographs over the kitchens, you would need to see certain smoke stacks to release the smoke from baking the cookies and the smoke stacks would project certain shadows, but I guess they’re not visible in the aerial photographs taken over the kitchens.

[The crematoria rarely produced enough smoke to be aerially visible. (They made more soot than smoke.) You can see some of those days here. You can also clearly see massive smoke plumes coming from the burn trench behind the gas chamber, such as on 23 August 1944. You can also see these open air burn pits in the Sonderkommando Photographs. You can also see soot on chimneys of Crematoria 4 soon after construction but not before.]

And the ovens that they use — they actually did sort of an ad hoc use of that particular kind of an oven even though they made a perfectly good kind of ovens for a different purpose for delousing. I mean, you know, for something else.

[Auschwitz Birkenau had dedicated delousing chambers, used in part for the ~1 in 11 inmates used as forced labor. The gas chambers were not listed among them. The gas chambers had special ovens because they needed high throughput.]

So, six million cookies, uh-uh. I don’t buy it. It's all irony, I'm an irony bro, that's all irony, you know, I love and respect everyone, everything that the government says is true.

Let's be honest: This dogwhistling sucks. It's obvious Holocaust denial. Even racist idiots like Caleb Hull see right through it.

This is too long and too obvious to be an effective dogwhistle. It's closer to horsewhistling: Fuentes explains the logic behind Holocaust denial (specific reasons why a Holocaust event could not have occurred) without ever explicitly endorsing Holocaust denial ("I'm an irony bro, that's all irony").

Example 2: Hasan unionizes a Chipotle

For a small but oddly successful dogwhistle, see mentioning Hasan and the first successful Chipotle unionization:

Last fall, Atulya took a break from his shift at a Chipotle Mexican Grill in Lansing, Michigan, and began thumbing through his copy of Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life. When his co-worker Harper came along and spotted the book, he "pointed to it and asked, 'Do you also know Hasan Piker? Do you know Noam Chomsky?'" Dora-Laskey told me. "It was the closest you could get to a leftist dog whistle." [....] By October, thanks to a mutual frustration with their workplace, McNamara and Dora-Laskey were talking casually about forming a union.

This dogwhistle is much better.

• It's got a double meaning: "Hasan Piker" is a socialist to his fans, and "who?" to most of the general public.

• It's got plausible deniability: "I just watch Azan for the plot".

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Examples of horsewatering

Example 1: The Bell Curve on dysgenics

For an older example of horsewatering, see The Bell Curve, a 1994 scientific racist book. Its authors, Herrnstein and Murray, never explicitly endorse eugenics toward single mothers, Black people, or poor people.

However, as Horsburgh 1996 explains, it makes the case implicitly:

See [The Bell Curve] arguing Blacks are genetically less intelligent than whites, singling out for special emphasis single mothers on welfare, and that government programs to equalize socioeconomic conditions are misguided. While the authors do not explicitly endorse eugenic sterilization, they encourage the reader to draw this conclusion.

Liberal pundit Matt Yglesias made a similar note in Vox in 2018:

These claims about the baleful impact of social assistance spending are not uncontroversial claims about science. Indeed, they are not claims about science at all. [...] [B]ecause Murray is a policy writer rather than a scientist, it is correct and proper for fair-minded people to read the book for what it actually is: a tract proposing the comprehensive revision of the American welfare state along eugenicist lines.

And it's not hard to see how they reach that conclusion. Support for eugenics is commonly based in claims that society suffers from "dysgenic" selection, in which higher fertility rates between of "lower quality" human groups reduce overall "genetic quality" over time. Here's some quotes from Chapter 16 of The Bell Curve which support the claim of dysgenic selection :

Mounting evidence indicates that demographic trends are exerting downward pressure on the distribution of cognitive ability in the United States and that the pressures are strong enough to have social consequences. [....]

Something worth worrying about is happening to the cognitive capital of the country. Improved health, education, and childhood interventions may hide the demographic effects, but that does not reduce their importance. Whatever good things we can accomplish with changes in the environment would be that much more effective if they did not have to fight a demographic head wind.

And here's a quote from Chapter 22 of The Bell Curve, the policy suggestion section:

We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers.

But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility.

The technically precise description of America’s fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended.

In reality, support for dysgenic selection is very weak. Human populations have become hugely more intelligent over time, known as the Flynn effect. Meta-studies like Trahan et al 2014 have found little reason to believe that trends has reversed:

Our finding that the Flynn effect has not diminished over time and may be larger for modern than older tests is not consistent with Sundet et al.’s (2008) hypothesis relating increasing IQ scores and decreasing family size, although we do not have data for a direct evaluation. [....] [A]lthough we cannot directly address cohort effects in this meta-analysis, we note that the magnitude of increases in Wechsler and SB scores has remained close to the nominal value of 3 IQ points per decade since 1984 (Flynn, 2009a). [....] Our study did not find evidence for the plateauing or decline of the Flynn effect in the United States, as has been documented in Norway (Sundet et al., 2004) and Denmark (Teasdale & Owen, 2005, 2008), respectively.

Beyond the continuing Flynn effect, there is no reason to believe that dysgenic effects are accelerating. For example, Conley and Domingue 2016 -- who find small dysgenic effects in a sample of older Americans -- write that: "[W]e do not seem to be experiencing increasing dysgenic dynamics, despite the fears of H&M, among others (Lynn 2011)."

Example 2: Jordan Peterson on women in the workplace

For a modern example of horsewatering, see this 2017 interview of Jordan Peterson. Peterson explicitly raises the question of whether men and women can work together -- and repeatedly offers reasons why the answer might be "no" -- but never explicitly says the answer is "no".

Here's some relevant excerpts (it's long because it took ten minutes to get Peterson toward anything concrete):

Peterson: Here's a question -- here's a question, let's have a real question. Can men and women work together in the workplace? [....]

Jay: Do you think men and women can work in the workplace together without sexual harassment?

Peterson: I don't know. We'll see. [....]

Peterson: Why do you make your lips red? Because they turn red during sexual arousal, that's why. Why do you put rouge on your cheeks? Same reason. [....]

Jay: [Are you saying that w]hen women put on makeup in the workplace, when they make their lips red, when they sort of put on rouge, right, that when they enter that workplace, if a man notices that, that there is sort of a complicitness with which the woman has said: "I am going to sexualize myself in the workplace, and therefore, whatever comes will come."

Peterson: No, I didn't say the last part of that. I didn't say that "so whatever comes will come". But I think the issue of complicitness -- how about high heels? [....]

Peterson: They're there to exaggerate sexual attractiveness. That's what high heels do, they tilt your pelvis forward so your hips stick out, that's what they do, and they tighten up your calf muscles. They're a sexual display. Now, I'm not saying that people shouldn't use sexual displays in the workplace -- I'm not saying that. [....]

Jay: I don't think that anyone would say that women wearing makeup to the office is in some way {sexually deviant or something like that} or {that it's inviting a sort of atmosphere of sexuality within the workplace} --

Peterson: I would say that, the second part, sure. It's exactly what it's doing. Why else would you wear lipstick? I'm not saying that women shouldn't do it, and I'm also not saying that it should be banned, but I'm saying that you're absolutley naive if you think it doesn't have anything to do with sexuality. Obviously it does. [....]

Jay: Yes or no question: Do you feel that women wearing makeup in the workplace contributes to sexual harassment?

Peterson: Sure, it contributes.

Jay: And so what should be done about that? You, as a clinician, who believes that there should be prescriptive ideas that don't mandate behavior but that will guide behavior.

Peterson: I don't know. I don't know what the answer to that is.

Modern models of sexual harassment are "power models":

• Men in general have social power over women.

• Supervisors in particular have power over subordinates.

These facts enable male coworkers to exploit female coworkers and higher-ups to exploit lower-downs. This is why hierarchical organizations (like the military) and male-dominated professions (like STEM) are more prone to sexual harassment.

In contrast, Peterson's description of women and sexual harassment is that men are simply too attracted to women to stop themselves from sexually harassing them, which makeup and high heels exacerbate. This view is closer to the (now-disfavored) "natural-biological model", which McDonald 2011's literature review describes as follows:

Consistent with the initially recognized scenario of SH, where a male boss harasses a female subordinate, the natural-biological model proposes that SH results from natural and inevitable feelings of sexual desire expressed primarily by men towards women (Berdahl 2007). The biological model holds that SH is not actually harassment and, consequently, does not have deleterious consequences, is not sexist and is not discriminatory (Tangri et al. 1982). Unsurprisingly, this explanation has been largely dismissed in the recent literature, not least because of the lack of rigour in allowing for differential predictions of behaviour and a lack of flexibility to explain phenomena such as same-sex harassment and harassment of lower status men by women in positions of power (Foote and Goodman-Delahunty 2005).

Peterson doesn't explicitly endorse the natural-biological model of sexual harassment. But he repeatedly offers reasons to believe that such a model is correct.

Peterson also doesn't explicitly endorse the view that, as a result of natural-biological sexual harassment, men and women cannot cooperate in the workplace. But he is very happy to just ask questions, over and over.

This is an example of horsewatering.

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Delineation: How do you determine when someone is dogwhistling or horsewatering?

It's common for people to accuse pundits of dogwhistling. (And now, potentially, of horsewatering.) It's also common for people to reject such accusations. How do you decide who's right?

I propose a simple three-step test: Denounce, explain, prescribe:

1. Denounce: The person should denounce the morally abhorrent conclusion [X] of the potential dogwhistle / horsewater.

2. Explain: The person should explain in detail why [X] is factually wrong.

3. Prescribe: The person should prescribe a solution -- some policy or social norm -- that opposes [X].

For example, a "former" white nationalist like Lauren Southern could demonstrate that they truly oppose white nationalism by explaining, in detail, why "scientific racism" is false and by prescribing specific anti-racist policies.

This is a useful test because it's a fairly costly signal. If someone is trying to dogwhistle or horsewater a belief [X], then explaining why belief [X] is false and prescribing anti-[X] solutions actively hurts their goals.

(This is also a useful standard for apologies: If someone claims that they no longer hold view [X], but does not explain why [X] is factually wrong, or does not prescribe an anti-[X] solution, then they're just covering their ass.)

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Conclusion and shilling

In short: Horsewatering is a rhetorical tactic that supports a morally abhorrent belief by giving someone the premises necessary to conclude that that belief is true, without ever explicitly endorsing that belief.

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