“What homegrown fascism looks like”: The insidious nature of GOP’s not-quite-dog-whistle politics

“DEI hire,” “didn’t earn it,” randomly blaming diversity — rightwing pundits have parroted those claims throughout the year, flinging the language at high-ranking officials or doling them out in the face of tragedy. 

Far-right commentators hurled the phrase at Vice President Kamala Harris both before and after her surprise ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket. But before her, ultraconservative lawmakers, pols and influencers wielded the language against White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, all of whom share in having held prominent positions and being Black.    

For Evelyn Carter, a social psychologist and diversity, equity and inclusion consultant, the anti-DEI refrain from the right sounds all too familiar.  

“It is the latest iteration of a challenge that has come up for, I mean, as long as I can remember. Twenty years ago, it was ‘you’re an affirmative action hire’ or ‘you’re a diversity hire,'” she told Salon, recalling how peers at Northwestern University lobbed such comments at her and other Black students when she attended in the 2000s.

Since the label “DEI hire” has gained popularity among the far-right, many on the left have harangued it as another dog whistle, a form of coded language with multiple meanings, that allows ultraconservative political actors to disparage powerful professionals of color. Others have argued that the phrase is a thinly veiled way of saying the N-word, and even conservative officials have spoken out against its use.

The broad consensus around what “DEI hire” implies — if not outright means — is clear: at best it looks racist and sexist; at worst, it just is. But how easily its meaning is ascertained raises questions about whether “DEI hire” is a dog whistle in the traditional sense, more slur-adjacent as some suggest, or something new.   

Still, if United States history has imparted anything, it’s that this language isn’t isolated to just words. It often materializes in action that works to the detriment of the people the language is meant to exclude. Against a backdrop of a national effort to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies in schools, universities and corporations, the right’s mobilization around “DEI” and “DEI hire” appears all the more dangerous. 

From CRT to DEI — a conservative activist’s strategy

Anti-DEI sentiment erupted into the mainstream in December 2023 as far-right influencers pushed for then-Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s resignation amid campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war. The campaign for her ouster started with far-right activist and journalist Christopher Rufo and found an amplifier online in users like hedge fund manager Bill Ackman before coming to a head after her controversial response to concerns of antisemitism on Harvard’s campus during a congressional hearing.

As the claim that the university’s first Black president was a diversity hire took off, the plagiarism allegations that Rufo and others also leveled about her early research, coupled with the blowback from her response, became evidence of her supposed lack of qualifications. 

Gay’s takedown was strategic — Rufo admitted as much in a January interview with Politico the day after Gay announced her resignation, telling the outlet: “When you put those three elements together — narrative, financial and political pressure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader.”

Rufo had been rallying against what he calls “DEI bureaucracy” long before last winter, and his anti-DEI campaign followed his 2020 crusade against critical race theory (CRT), once understood as an academic, legal framework interrogating the role of color-blind institutions and laws that undergird systemic racism. 

The anti-CRT effort saw some success. In the wake of the 2020 racial justice protests, CRT, with help from Rufo, quickly became something of a “radical left” boogeyman. For the right, it came to represent an educational doctrine hellbent on fortifying racial resentment, and conservative officials felt the need to take action against it.

In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to the anti-CRT effort by enacting the 2022 “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which prohibits classroom discussions and workplace trainings that made students and employees feel discomfort around their race. At the national level, former President Donald Trump in 2020 issued an executive order that admonished “blame-focused diversity training.”

Still, the anti-CRT effort did not receive the kind of traction among the public that anti-DEI sentiment has seen thus far.

“The shift from attacking CRT to attacking DEI enables people to go after Black people and women in positions of power,” said Jason Stanley, a co-author of “The Politics of Language” and a professor of philosophy at Yale University. “It was unclear with the CRT stuff, which was also a dog whistle, how you were going to use it to go after individual people. But what we had coming out of [the George Floyd protests] was a backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion offices, and then the expression morphed.”

Since Gay’s resignation, rightwing pundits have tacked a derogatory “DEI” moniker onto a smattering of subjects and people.

On social media, they sought to blame Boeing aircraft failures on the company’s adherence to an internal diversity initiative. When a container ship crashed into a Baltimore bridge in March, they found fault for the tragic collapse in duly elected Mayor Brandon Scott, who they dubbed the city’s “DEI mayor,” and accused Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a fellow Democrat, of prioritizing diversity in his appointment of Ports of Baltimore Commissioner Karenthia A. Barber (both Barber and Moore are Black). 

“We know what they want to say, but they don’t have the courage to say the N-word, and the fact that I don’t believe in their untruthful and wrong ideology,” Scott said of the attacks during an appearance on MSNBC’s the ReidOut at the time. 

While Rufo, in his Politico interview, insisted the “DEI hire” invocation against Gay was “absolutely not fueled by racial animus” or sexism, it’s clear the label largely comes off that way. It’s taken on dog whistle status — even if it might not completely operate like one.

“A slightly different functioning dog whistle”

A dog whistle secretly communicates one targeted idea to an in-group while also offering an innocuous separate message to people outside of that group. As such, they often carry two meanings, the first being more acceptable and broadly understood, while the other, problematic meaning is meant to only to be understood by the speaker’s intended audience. The number “88,” for example, when used by white supremacists, is a code for the letters HH, or, “Heil Hitler.”

How that language traditionally works is by relying on plausible deniability when confronted about the hidden message in order to keep it coded, explained Jennifer Saul, a University of Waterloo professor of philosophy whose research focuses on political language, including racist, sexist and deceptive speech.     

While “DEI hire” ticks these boxes — on the surface discrediting the target’s qualifications by claiming a policy privileges their race or gender, while underneath tying that alleged inadequacy to the target’s race or gender, if not standing in for a slur — the plausible deniability component of its function is much harder to locate. 

“In this case, the surface message isn’t very good. It’s not very acceptable either, and it looks pretty darn racist. And the hidden message is even worse,” Saul told Salon. “So if it is working like a dog whistle, it’s a slightly differently functioning dog whistle.”

The term “DEI” on its own already comes with a number of negative associations. It can represent an affront to a supposed American meritocracy, while also being a reminder of a poorly done or cumbersome mandatory workplace training. Packaged into a dog whistle, those negative associations make it a “multifunctional term” that can be doled out in a number of different contexts to do “negative work,” making it a “well-suited attack” for the right, Saul said.

“Dog whistles are only necessary where you’re saying something anti-democratic because democratic public reason is governed by certain norms” like having full, equal respect, added Stanley. Using a dog whistle, then, “is threatening for democracy because democracy is all about equality, not making some people into second class citizens.” 

To Ian Haney López, author of “Dog Whistle Politics” and a UC Berkeley law professor, “DEI hire” is a “classic dog whistle” insofar as it triggers “deeply internalized racial and gender resentments” while offering users a “seemingly neutral and principled way to defend” them.

Where do these fears and resentments come from? One answer is the diversifying population of the country, which research indicates can make white Americans “feel threatened,” offered Carter, whose social psychology research has interrogated how to detect and discuss racial bias. 

“A lot of that is because, when it comes to an understanding of the way that our country and our world operates, it is one that relies on white people and whiteness being the source of power, the main decision makers, and everyone else who is not white or who is not aligned with that practice being on the losing end,” she said.

Claudine Gay, Vice President Harris and other targets of this “DEI hire” language “represent the kind of figurative representatives of this threat to whiteness,” speculated Luvell Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who researches hate speech, racial slurs and racial humor. “Using phrases that aren’t particularly well hidden seem to be more acceptable because the threat seems to loom larger — at least that’s the perception — in a way that it might not have been in the 80s, for example.”

Because most Americans are aware that the phrases are meant to communicate something negative, the use of “DEI hire” against Black professionals and officials “seems to mark a shift in the way that this kind of language is being employed,” Anderson told Salon. That change, he said, follows “what our politics makes possible with respect to the way that power is operating, both at the policy level, but also at the discussion-level.”

Looking to the past to see the future

Haney López’s theory of “dog whistle politics” locates the strategy’s origins in the 1960s, with the 1964 campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater and the 1968 bid of then-Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon. Both deployed the “Southern strategy,” described as such because it strove to appeal to white Southern voters who opposed racial integration following the Civil Rights Movement’s success.

While Goldwater’s direct opposition to the Civil Rights Act failed to garner enough support to secure an electoral victory, Nixon’s re-up on the strategy four years later, using racially coded language like “states’ rights,” “forced busing” and “law and order” to describe policies that let those voters know he had their interests in mind — “maintaining white dominance” as Haney López puts it — proved more successful. 

Here, “the plausible deniability is a deniability about the racial strategy, the racist demagoguery of Goldwater and mixing themselves,” explained Haney López, whose scholarship explores constitutional law and race. 

Republican candidates would continue to build on dog whistle politics as a strategy to appeal to white Southern evangelicals over the next few decades.

During his campaign in the 80s, Ronald Reagan’s warning of the “welfare queen” misusing government funds soon came to evoke an image of a Black single mother who exploited that financial support to the detriment of American taxpayers. George W. Bush’s use of “wonder-working power” during his presidential campaign, while benign to a general audience, also called upon a religious association in evangelical circles that signaled allegiance to the group, according to Luvell Anderson.  

But dog whistle politics, though not explicitly termed as such, also stretch much farther back through history to the post-enslavement era, argues Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a Harvard University professor of history, race and public policy.

Over a century ago, when Black people began to migrate from the South, Americans in the North used the language of Black criminality to justify segregation in places like Philadelphia, Chicago and New York, attempting to characterize Black people as criminal threats to distinguish themselves from Southerners who’d employ racial slurs. Later, in the South, the Jim Crow laws that restricted Black Americans’ 14th Amendment rights and freedoms used “colorblind language” in an effort to use other legal maneuvers as proxies for race, like in the case of disenfranchising clauses that prohibited someone from voting if they weren’t descended from people who had been voters. 

“American politics, for 120 years since the end of slavery, has been defined by uses of political speech to signal a commitment to keeping Black people in their place, to limiting their freedom,” Muhammad said. 

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Those politics still remain in policies and practices that work to reinforce that supposed place for Black Americans and other minoritized groups, Haney López argued, citing Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow.”

Mass incarceration, which disproportionately impacts Black Americans, grew, in large part, in response to “dog whistle competition about who could use the language of crime to stampede white voters in their fears of African Americans,” Haney López explained. Racial politics and resentment expressed in coded language drove the erosion of the social safety net, helped along by the Republican Party’s interest in boosting big business and dismantling marketplace regulations. The “violence and rhetoric of criminality” applied to Central American migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border also buttresses the nation’s mass deportation, he added, noting Border Patrol’s status as the nation’s largest law enforcement agency.

The right’s mobilization around DEI also raises the possibility that similar consequences can arise, Haney López and Muhammad said. 

“The danger here is that, by scapegoating, maligning and essentially holding up a vision of America that is in stark contrast to the realities of a country that is becoming populated by more people of color, political violence will be normalized as results in a way that we haven’t seen in a generation or two,” Muhammad said. “In other words, we’d be reaching back into a kind of arsenal of weapons that have long been deployed against nonwhite people who had the audacity to make claims on the same rights as white Americans.”

He pointed to the “authoritarian and arguably fascist regimes” Black Americans lived under post-slavery and Reconstruction: antagonism from a police state, having to contend with propaganda that held the natural leaders were white, Jim Crow politics that rejected Black women’s bodily autonomy, particularly with respect to sexual violence and forced sterilization. 

“If you want to see the future, you only have to look to what happened to Black people in this country 400 years after slavery began,” Muhammad said, noting that the difference now is that the right is “targeting anyone who is not on board with an authoritarian vision of an American future” as evidenced by ongoing attacks on civil liberties, bodily autonomy and explicit calls for theocracy. “That’s what homegrown fascism looks like in America.”

“Racism is the core”

By the rise of the Trump era, dog whistles’ form had changed, according to Haney López. Instead of the plausible deniability of their hidden messages being directed outward to deny claims of bigotry from critics, it now turns inward from the speaker to — in this case — the MAGA base.

This new function of plausible deniability allows the base to tell itself, “We’re not racist, we’re just worried about criminals,” or, “We’re not racist, we’re just concerned unqualified applicants are getting important jobs they don’t deserve.” This change, Haney López explained, is, in part, due to the success of the Civil Rights Movement, which transformed white America’s racist perspective into a belief that such views are immoral. 

Trump and other Republican’s rhetorical tactics play off that form, giving the base a rationale for embracing their fears, while also building solidarity with the group by eliciting accusations of bigotry, he said. The galvanizing force Trump generated from backlash around Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” comment serves as an example of that dynamic.

So, too, does a 2022 ad for JD Vance, then running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, titled, “Are you a racist?” In the ad, which opens with Vance asking the viewer the title question and if they “hate Mexicans,” Vance concludes with a staunchly populist message: “I’m JD Vance and I approve this message because whatever they call us, we will put America first.”

“Racism is the core of their campaign,” Haney López said, “and yet they want a public discourse in which the very idea that they’re racist is not only absurd, but offensive and indicative of liberal condescension and bias.”

That dynamic has translated into policy and legal challenges as Republicans have mobilized against critical race theory and DEI — and the impacts of those moves have become visible.

In June of last year, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott enacted a ban on diversity, equity and inclusion in the state’s universities, which included eliminating campus multicultural centers and identity groups. A 2023 Florida ban on dedicating state funding to DEI policies and programs at state universities shuttered their DEI offices, eliminated connected positions and reallocated dedicated millions to other measures. 

Some institutions of higher education across the nation have begun to review and roll back race-conscious scholarships in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling race-based affirmative action in university admissions unconstitutional. Others have seen dips in Black, Latino and Asian American student enrollment as the new academic year gets underway. 

In the private sector, grant programs seeking to address inequities in access to funding for women of color have been hit with lawsuits. Fearless Fund’s grant program, which aimed to boost Black women’s businesses with $20,000 in venture capital funding, on Wednesday announced that they agreed to discontinue it in a settlement after a lengthy legal battle. 

Shelton Goode, a diversity, equity and inclusion expert, told Salon that the crusade against DEI has also placed a strain on the industry as practitioners navigate the shift in attitudes. He said his business consultancy, Icarus Consulting, saw a 68% drop in its revenue between June 2023 and June 2024, which he attributes to the successful weaponization of DEI. 

This movement against DEI, an extension of Nixon-era politics, “undoes the progress that we’ve made and that we’re still trying to make toward being an integrated, multiracial society,” Haney López said. “It redescribes the progress as instead racial threat.”

The characterization of Vice President Harris is an “escalation” of the ousting of Claudine Gay, which is also an escalation of the attack on DEI in Florida, Texas and other states, added Muhammad. 

“So Kamala Harris, in some ways, represents an answer to Trumpism, and it is her embodiment of all of the work of trying to make this country embrace its future and live up to its full demographic possibilities, a country that will, by definition, look more like Kamala Harris than Donald Trump in the future,” he said. “This is what this is all about. It is a political movement to forestall, to roll back, to destroy, the effort to make American democracy work for everyone.”

The threat to democracy

When Nika White, a DEI practitioner and the founder of Nika White Consultancy, first saw how the far-right was wielding “DEI hire” against the vice president, she didn’t have much of a reaction to it.

“I decided that I wanted to be more unbothered by it, and that felt a bit more empowering and like a way to reclaim agency,” she told Salon, noting she expected that rhetoric to arise. “It’s a distraction. It sows discord, and it’s something that I don’t want to give power to.”

Since the rightwing crusade against DEI began, White said she has lost a handful of clients, including a university system in her state of South Carolina responding to the affirmative action decision. At the same time, she said she’s also had an equal number of clients renew their commitment to DEI and continue their work, and she’s instructed them to fortify their legal preparedness in the face of the attacks. 

Still, White and Goode are concerned with what’s next for DEI work and practice. They pointed to the proposed eradication of federal diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives outlined in “Project 2025,” a 900-page policy guideline created by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation for what the next conservative administration, presumably that of Trump should he win, should work to implement if elected this November.

The proposals culling DEI from government agencies and offices, White and Goode warn, pose a danger to the practice and the people DEI is meant to assist by raising the potential for more hostility to be directed toward them and eliminating policies that increased the number of qualified people of color and other marginalized groups in career fields in which they are underrepresented.  

But “regardless of whether Trump wins, it’s already happened — that future is already here,” Muhammad argued. “The only question is: will the federal government become an instrument of authoritarian state-level politics and policy vision — that the Heritage Foundation has now enshrined in a document — that would then eliminate any form of power or resistance to defining the entirety of America that way?”

When reached for comment over email, a Heritage Foundation spokesperson said someone at the organization would be able to respond via phone call. After providing a number, Salon never received a phone call, nor did the organization respond to a follow-up email. 

While at least 140 of his former aides and associates have been connected with “Project 2025,” Trump maintains he has nothing to do with, nor knows anything about, the document.

“We know what the tools of domination look like. More of our future hinges on this election than at any point, and more of our future will depend on what even happens if Harris wins or the Democratic Party secures the White House — it’s not over. It ain’t over,” Muhammad said. “There’s way more to come, much more work to do, and looking at what’s happening at the state-level tells us all we need to know about what their vision is for the entire nation.”

This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.