Dog Whistle

According to Wikipedia, Dog-whistle politics is "political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the population of the general public at large while also simultaneously having an additional, different, or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup."

This is, of course, a perfectly legitimate definition, at least on its face. The analogy, of course, is to the original dog whistle, which produces a sound at a pitch above human hearing. The term, as such, is an epithet in the sense that the "target subgroup" is being compared to dogs. The article goes on to discuss examples from the politics of four English-speaking countries, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Evidently, then, the term is exclusive to English-speaking politics.

What makes the term of interest to this site's author is its increasing use in heated political discourse. Naturally, any fancy new term will tend to penetrate further and further into political discourse as new people grasp its meaning and its heft as an epithet. The second reason for its mention here is that it appears, predominantly, to be an epithet hurled by progressives and/or postmodernists against all forms of conservatives (not to mention actual Nazis or white supremacists, as such). As such it can be compared with an epithet that is increasingly hurled by conservative activists at progressives and/or postmodernists. That term is Virtue signaling.