Hello friends, there's a dogwhistle I've seen used a couple times on tumblr that I want to discuss.
Fellow neurodivergents especially, please listen-- towards the end of this post I describe how some in our community have been using it without knowing what it means.
A fairly common antisemitic dogwhistle used amongst alt-right circles on the internet is being a "noticer," "noticing patterns," "pattern noticer," etc. I've seen this from a couple Tumblr blogs I follow reblogging memes and such that use this term but don't provide any context about what sorts of "things" they may be noticing.
Here's the meme that I saw a blog I'm following reblog last night.
Seems pretty harmless, right? It's a meme with a cute cat.
In alt-right circles, what they are referring to "noticing" is the conspiracy theory that Jews control the world/"noticing" evidence of an imagined globalist (read: Jewish) world order/etc. If you see a meme that uses terms like "noticing patterns" that doesn't elaborate what those supposed patterns are-- just leaves you to fill in the blank yourself-- take a look at the types of things OP might be posting. The alt-right has an idea that it's forbidden to talk about who might be behind the "conspiracies" they talk about (again, the target is frequently Jewish people) so lack of context is often a red flag.
I sent the blog who reblogged this an ask informing them that the meme was a dogwhistle. If you see someone reblog something like this, check what they've been posting. If this seems like an isolated incident, the person probably reblogged it not knowing what the term actually meant. That's why dogwhistles are so effective-- to the average person they look harmless if you don't know what to watch out for!
Let's take a look at how alt-righters use this term.
Here's an alt-right definition of it from Urban Dictionary.
Oh boy, this one gets a bigotry bingo for all the dogwhistles used here. If I miss any, feel free to comment. Here are the ones I found:
-Noseticing: Noticing plus nose, based on the stereotype for Jewish people to have large noses.
-"those who cannot be named"/skirting around saying Jew: again the idea that it's forbidden to talk about who they think is behind their conspiracy theories.
-"world events and agendas": idea that Jewish people have a Globalist agenda etc etc
-Degeneracy: Nazi term to describe the behaviors/people they find undesirable.
-Early life: refers to the section in a person's Wikipedia page. If a person was brought up Jewish, it'll usually say so there.
-Oy vey: a Jewish exclamation of exasperation that Nazis have unfortunately co-opted when talking about Jewish people.
Here's probably the most obviously antisemitic meme I found.
The title and first bullet point include the "noticer" term. This meme also talks about a "group" who controls wealth. Who might the poster be referring to here?
Here's a Twitter account with many similar alt-right terms. Explicitly identifies as a Nazi and ethno-nationalist, etc etc.
A couple other pages. I clicked on them to see if I could find any more examples but the first seemed pretty blank and the second... Well, I don't have a twitter so I couldn't view.
Let's unpack these a little. The first one has "13 outta 52," a statistic used among white supremacists to depict Black people (especially African-Americans) as "savage": 13 referring to the percentage of America that is Black and 52 referring to the alleged percentage of murders in the U.S. that are committed by Black people. "109 countries" refers to the idea that Jewish people have been expelled from 109 countries during history. (Which isn't entirely true. Some "countries" in this count are actually cities, regions, etc.) Some white supremacists may use the number 110 instead to suggest that it should happen again.
The second one has a blurb alleging a global sterilization effort and concerns of fertility. This is likely in connection to pro-natalism for white people. If Nazis want a so-called "Aryan nation," they're going to want white people to populate it, and so they encourage white people to have babies for their cause. Nazi Germany employed this tactic as well, even awarding "Aryan" German women who had four or more children for their contributions to the Nazi cause.
The reason why I'm emphasizing that context matters is that some neurodivergent people have seen this and co-opted it into neurodivergent circles. As a person who is Jewish and autistic, this is pretty alarming to me. I'll show a couple examples from Tumblr:
And
I've left out the URLs of the OPs because I want to give the benefit of the doubt-- they both explicitly refer to being a "pattern noticer" in terms of neurodivergence. And it's easy to see why introducing this term to ND folks would be an easy way to get a dogwhistle passed off as harmless! Since autistic people often have analytical minds, we often make connections that others might not be able to see. But unfortunately, using terms like this only makes it much easier for antisemites to fly under the radar.
Stay safe and let's keep Tumblr free of this shit.
I want to add to the breakdown of the Urban Dictionary entry that I believe the Streisand Effect mention is also a dogwhistle in reference to the fact that Barbra Streisand is Jewish, because I can't think of any other reason they would say it "spurred on" "The Noticing."
