Because neo-nazis have essentially perfected coopting “respectability” politics in public online discourse. Calling out dogwhistles can have a nasty blowback effect because they’ve manufactured cover (eg “I’m just quoting what [a party with unknown intentions] wrote on wikipedia!”) that gives them footing to claim misinterpretation at the mildest, or outright persecution in other cases.
HN is actually a really interesting case for this stuff, because the Primary Sin here is “violating decorum”. If I wanted to A/B test hateful dogwhistles, this site would be the perfect place. Nobody is allowed to post “Fuck off nazi/tankie/[insert other toxic group]”
Respectability and Decorum are how we open the door to obvious but just-subtle-enough crap like that.
> The alt-right sense emerged from The Honkler, a version of Pepe the Frog meme featuring a red clown nose and rainbow wig, characterized as honking a bicycle horn whenever liberals speak. That meme is associated with the use of honk honk ("HH") as a dog whistle for heil Hitler.
It is worse than I thought. At least "woke" has to be used "ironically" to be coopted. There's literally no where to go with "heil hitler" - it's written right on the tin. Why is our discourse polluted with these dog whistles?
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clown_world