The Twittersphere’s collective ears perked up Friday at a tweet from former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Trump Gives Speech to the People of Poland, Says 14 Words That Leave Americans Stunned https://t.co/8iKHEQemn9
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) July 7, 2017
Promoting a Young Conservatives analysis of President Donald Trump’s pro-Western and nativist speech Thursday in Poland, Palin tweeted the article and posted it to Facebook. The social posts contained the phrase “14 words.”
It appeared on its face to be a nod to the well-known white supremacist slogan, commonly referred to only by its word count: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
The specific language of Palin’s social posts appeared to reflect the default social-media language of the article itself. The headline below automatically appears when posted to Facebook:
Twitter user @johnkirrane noticed the same, the Daily Beast reported.
However, in an email to the Daily Beast that he later forwarded to TPM, the co-founder of Young Conservatives, Joshua Riddle, disputed that “14 Words” was a reference to white supremacy.
He said it referred to Trump’s closing line in the speech, buried in the middle of the article: “Let us all fight like the Poles. For family, freedom, for country, for God.”
Riddle threatened the Daily Beast with legal action if the site did not delete the article. (Read Riddle’s full response below.) And Young Conservatives added an extra section to the bottom of the article noting various number-centric headlines the site has published.
Asked about the headline in an email, Todd Gutnick of the Anti-Defamation League seemed to agree that it wasn’t a reference to white supremacy. “We don’t believe she meant those 14 words,” he said, referring to Palin. “Not a story here.”
Read Riddle’s email to the Daily Beast, which Riddle forwarded to TPM, below:
Hi Andrew,
Your article about Young Conservatives recently came to our attention.It contains malicious and false claims. For this reason, please immediately remove the article and publish a written apology on Daily Beast.This is the 14-word quote the social media post is referencing: “Let us all fight like the Poles. For family, freedom, for country, for God.”About 2 minutes of research would have revealed how there is a long history of our site (and countless others) using word counts in social media headlines. To jump to the conclusion in your article is slanderous, dishonest, lazy, and very unprofessional and harmful to our business.If you intend not to fully redact the article, can you please provide us the mailing address for you and DailyBeast. Our lawyers will contact you individually in regards to our intent to sue. If the article is unpublished and an apology issued, we will not demand compensation for damages.Josh RiddleCEO Young Conservatives, LLC
‘Legal action’? WTF? Stop with the BS.
Tie this to Rachel Maddow’s revelation about attempts to push false stories to the media so that they can point to those false stories and claim media bias. Rovian dirty tricks everywhere.
Welcome to America - the land of opportunists. (er, I mean opportunity)
All the dogs in the neighborhood sure perked up when I read it aloud.
No idea whether BabbleBarbie knew it because, indeed, it’s questionable whether she knows anything. But I do know that the thing that makes right wing racist dog-whistling dog-whistling, rather than just whistling, is pretext and deniability. The way they went directly onto the attack is step two in the racist dog whistle three-step waltz: 1) spurt out coded message to other racists, 2) launch instant faux-wounded attack when called out on it, and then, 3) turn back to the other racists and tell them that that whoever called them out is the “real” racist.
The idea that no one at the Young Conservatives has ever heard “14 Words” and was unaware of the connotation is ridiculous. The fact that the banal sentence they pulled out of a speech by Trump has a certain thematic resonance to the “14 words,” just as the speech itself was straight out of the white nationalist alt-right Breitbart fever swamp id was no coincidence.
And the thing is, even if it was just a total coinkydink, there is nothing from the past sixteen years that gives us any reason to grant them the benefit of the doubt on that point.
Huh. Can someone help me figure out how this somehow un-douchebags her or the Young Conservatives?
Bingo. It’s all about plausible deniability. Heck, it’s not even that really, because it’s generally just not plausible. Rather, it all just has the rudiments of plausibility…the barest of edges on which their denial can scrabble for a toe hold.
"You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
-Lee Atwater, Champion Waltzer, Grand Wizard of the Dogwhistle (see Willie Horton ad)