For political figures like Donald Trump and his advisers, such as former chief strategist Steve Bannon, there are gains to be made by issuing dog whistles to the alt-right and manosphere communities. Such rhetoric, like Trump’s derisive advice to four Democratic congresswomen of color and American citizens to “go back” to the countries they originally came from, is greeted with wild applause across the masses frequenting extremist websites.1 But a buffer of plausible deniability is also important in order to avoid alienating a more mainstream base: a feat achieved by publicly disavowing racism
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