If you don't hear the dog whistle, dogs do
Trib columnist’s anti-Semitism is deliberate and intentional, just like Trump’s racism
Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass denies charges of anti-Semitism, but his coded language — and the law & order rhetoric of President Trump — are nothing new in politics. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ameya Pawar and Ted Cox
Hear that dog whistle? If not, don’t worry; some dog no doubt does.
When it comes to politics and mainstream American society, however, racist dog whistles are just the thing to be worried about. They weaponize deeply held and usually subconscious biases to trigger a fearful knee-jerk response politicians can readily manipulate.
Dog whistles and coded language are in the news this week, thanks not only to President Trump — a persistent offender in that area — but also Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass.
As his more moderate fellow Trib columnist Steve Chapman put it in a tweet about the president: “If you don’t hear someone using a dog whistle, dogs still do.”
Kass found himself basically demoted, with the Page 2 column he inherited from Mike Royko moved to an opinion page back closer to the editorial section, after he drew flak from Jewish groups and his own newsroom colleagues over a piece he wrote last week about George Soros.
The column combined two of the most powerful and persistent dog whistles: Jews as the “invisible hand” manipulating societies and the global economy, and “law and order” as coded language intended to instill fear in White voters. “Overwhelming sense of lawlessness growing,” the headline read, and who was responsible for that lawlessness, in “violent cities” with “overwhelmed police departments?” Soros, an investor and philanthropist and a major contributor to progressive politicians — who just happens to be Jewish, although in anti-Semitic circles there’s nothing “just happens” about it.
Citing contributions to reform-minded Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx in her 2016 election, Kass wrote, “He remakes the justice system in urban America, flying under the radar.”
“The idea of the ‘hidden hand’ is one of the oldest anti-Semitic tropes,” Aviya Kushner wrote in the online Jewish publication Forward. “Or, as Kass put it, ‘flying under the radar.’”
His own colleagues with the Chicago Tribune Guild, the paper’s editorial union, called Kass out and demanded he “apologize for his indefensible invocation of the Soros tropes.” That was in part because the Trib itself ran stories about Foxx’s Democratic primary campaign this spring, in which it explained that she was outspent fivefold by an opponent in a failed bid to make “law and order” the main issue.
In his first column after the move back in the paper, Kass made no mention of Foxx actually being outspent on the campaign trail. Instead, he proudly declared himself anti-union, saying, “I have repeatedly and politely declined to join,” and accused the guild letter of “defaming” him. He then went on to mention Soros no fewer than eight times, stating that the “Soros money … influence on these races is undeniable … against more law-and-order candidates.”
Kass might feign innocence, but he knows as well as anyone in the media that Soros has an all-but-literal target on his back among anti-Semites, where his name is on par with the Nazi demonization of the Rothschilds in the ‘30s and ‘40s. This is coded language, widely recognized, and Kass can’t claim not to know the code. That’s eight sharp, shrill dog whistles.
Chicago Ald. Matt Martin connected the dots, tweeting: “The narrative that George Soros is behind these protests is just the latest manifestation of an old trope that Jews foment civil unrest and that (people of color) don't have the agency to organize ourselves. It's racist and anti-Semitic, and it should never have been published in the Tribune.”
The Tribune’s official Twitter account, by the way, promoted the original Kass column by blaring: “Soros and the (social justice warriors) are here, Chicago. Columnist John Kass writes that with them comes an overwhelming sense of lawlessness and a reason to leave town.”
Even so, the call for “law and order” is only different by degree. Campaigning against rampant crime — as a boogeyman representing restive minorities — is a tried and true political tactic. President Trump declared himself “the law and order candidate” in 2016, and he’s only ratcheting up the rhetoric on that note in the current campaign. In that, he follows in the footsteps of Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968, as well as Ronald Reagan in the ‘80s, when his War on Drugs pledged to White voters that it would round up inner-city gangs peddling crack. And even that’s leaving his myth about “welfare queens” entirely off to the side.
This too is coded language. When Nixon appealed to the “Silent Majority,” he didn’t have to say, “Hey, Southern Whites, working-class Whites, these lawless hippies and belligerent Black and Brown people are the problem.” He didn’t have to. As with Jewish philanthropists working “under the radar,” it’s the normalization of a racist trope, codification of language saying, “We are going to target Black people.”
This sort of nonracist racism is widespread in politics, and again it’s widely recognized by those in the know, but to cite a clear example Kass might recall it was used by former Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne in 1987 when she tried to reclaim the office in a Democratic primary battle with Mayor Harold Washington. As Gary Rivlin wrote in his book “Fire on the Prairie,” her team manipulated police statistics so that “crime was a centerpiece of Byrne’s campaign.”
In 1983, Washington had to overcome overt racism, with campaign literature reading: “You will be robbed or killed. White women will be raped. With a Black police chief there will be absolute chaos in the city.” Rivlin wrote: “Four years later, the terminology was much tamer, but the message was the same.” Or as one media consultant put it, crime “stirs up racial feelings. It’s a good issue to yell about to whip Whites up.”
That’s what’s behind Trump’s persistent attacks on Chicago, as Mayor Lori Lightfoot has frequently charged, and on the unmarked federal agents sent into Portland, Wash., where conservative media have made it seem that protests in just a small area of a few blocks surrounding federal buildings have reduced the city to rubble. It doesn’t make sense to magnify it to suggest that the city is somehow under siege — unless, again, you’re trying to stir up fears and a knee-jerk political response.
Trump doubled down on that racist strategy this week, taking it to the suburbs where he has lost support — resulting in victories by Democrats like U.S. Reps. Lauren Underwood and Sean Casten, who succeeded in turning traditional red districts blue two years ago. Trump announced he was rolling back fair-housing rules imposed by the Obama administration, tweeting, “I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood.”
No one should have to have the racism in that tweet explained. As one person responded on Twitter, it’s like an overt defense of redlining — the old real-estate policy of setting neighborhoods aside for particular races. Or, as Chapman tweeted Thursday: “When Trump vows to protect the suburbs, that's not a dog whistle. More like a hog call.”
In that, it’s no different from when Bruce Rauner would attempt to demonize Chicago by referring to “those people” living in the city, with their lousy schools, like “crumbling prisons,” getting a “bailout” from taxpayers downstate, even after a study by the Paul Simon Policy Institute dismissed that charge that downstaters were subsidizing Chicago as patently untrue — but often repeated by politicians seeking to divide elements of the state against each other.
Yet think about what Trump really suggests: that accepting equality in housing, and the equal rights of anyone to live anywhere, threatens not only you and your family but the value of your home — for many suburbanites their largest single investment. And for suburbanites who read that, you have to admit, it creates a little twinge, doesn’t it.
Bruce Rauner and Donald Trump are both natural results of what’s been going on for 50 years and more, in that as people march for civil rights and economic equality, the response to that has been to use code words to suggest that what this is really about — this social “chaos,” to use Kass’s word — is other things, more sinister things, things that have to be implied.
Look, it’s human nature for people to be territorial. It’s hard-wired into the genes over millennia for people to be leery of “the other,” those who look or act differently. It’s under the surface, but most people come to know better, because they recognize their innate biases and are able to acknowledge and then question them. That’s always there. It’s when it gets weaponized that it becomes a serious problem in our politics and in our society.
And it gets weaponized when conspiracy theories, anti-Semitic tropes, and racist code language that usually survives in the shadows, on the fringes of society, gets ushered into the mainstream so that people who usually make references to these topics in hushed tones are emboldened to say it all out loud.
In short, it’s not necessarily about John Kass. It’s about what it means when he quite consciously ushers these insidious tropes and coded language into the columns of a mainstream newspaper. His own colleagues recognize that.
No one is calling out your politics as a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Just understand what your politics have become.
Ameya Pawar is the executive director and co-founder of One Illinois. He is also a Leadership in Government Fellow with George Soros's Open Society Foundations (OSF). Pawar is funded by OSF to work on national public banking efforts. https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/grants/leadership-in-government-fellowship