Using Pragmatic Analysis to Explore Dog Whistles in Extremist Texts

When seeking widespread support despite their controversial ideas, political extremists often use dog whistles (language that hides controversial ideas from most people) in their public statements. In this paper, I suggest that pragmatic analysis – a particular form of discourse analysis that operates by making the implicit contents of statements explicit – can help scholars muster evidence when identifying and exploring dog whistles and the controversial ideas they obscure. I suggest that intentional dog whistles function by what I call the two-audience trick. Working through an example from an extremist group in the U.S., I demonstrate how lessons learned from pragmatics (a subfield of linguistics, not to be confused with pragmatism in philosophy) can help scholars strengthen their investigations of extremist ideas.