I’ll be honest: I don’t even know what to do with Alan Jacobs suggesting that dog whistles aren’t a thing. The entire trap Republicans set for themselves by electing Trump is that their decades of dog whistles suddenly became speaking the quiet part out loud. Jacobs is rabidly disingenuous here. Meanwhile, the way we know that The Letter was not what it superficially was purported to be is by the fact that this is the editor who led the charge, my first encounter of whom came last year when he tweeted his ignorance of civility being subject to asymmetric power imbalances and typically used as a weapon to punch down. The Letter was anodyne precisely to entice people who otherwise would see through the charade to sign it.
Addenda
- For the record, Jacobs deleted and partially rewrote the above-linked post, incorporating the bits from his now-deleted followup post.