đź”’ I Am Begging the Left to Quit Focusing on Nazi Numerology
As government embraced the internet as a tool for messaging to its citizens it was only a matter of time before it was infected by a particular kind of cultural rot. Governments and politicians, just like brands, hire savvy young professional influencers to run their social media profiles, and with the Trump administration’s shameless fascism they have a preferred type in mind. And so it appears likely that there is at least one employee fluent in the internet’s underground neo-Nazi culture running the Department of Homeland Security Twitter and Meta accounts.
That’s not very surprising given that these accounts are, on the whole, racist law enforcement pornography, but in between photos of tough white men shoving minorities into trucks, the accounts have been posting ominous odes to Manifest Destiny illustrated with oil paintings of frontier settlers and with oddly worded captions.
“Remember your Homeland’s Heritage,” one post reads, above a painting of a young couple nursing a newborn in a covered wagon. They correctly credit the artist but, very strangely, invent a new title for the piece. Morgan Weistling’s painting is actually titled “A Prayer For a New Life.” Maybe that didn’t push the message hard enough so the DHS made a unilateral decision to retitle it. Weistling was not consulted, nor did he approve.
But see the tweet itself: Homeland’s Heritage, neither word a proper noun. This is a characteristic of Donald Trump’s writing style that his followers have picked up as a signal of fealty and admiration—mimicry, and a type of virtue signal like liberal overuse of the R-word. Trump flagrantly disregards any rule of grammar and types like he speaks, in a type of brutalist poetry, Capitalizing words he wants you to Notice, buckshot with “scare quotes” for seemingly Random “emphasis,” AND OCCASIONALLY DOING THIS WHEN HE IS PARTICULARLY “ENTHUSIASTIC” ABOUT SOMETHING!! Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Even still, the specific emphasis of two H words raises eyebrows for a different reason. And, as though emboldened, a couple of weeks later DHS social media put out this follow-up:
John Gast’s “American Progress,” correctly titled this time, is a loving tribute to the extermination of the Native American population. The angelic white specter of Lady Columbia floats majestically across the wild American landscape, guiding gun-toting settlers westward, valiantly driving savage and terrified Indian squatters off rightfully White new lands.
“A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” A-H-H-D. When you include the artist’s name and title, the tweet is exactly 14 words long.
From what I’m able to determine, and this is almost certainly not exhaustive, these are the forbidden codes of what I’ve come to think of as Groyper Numerology:
The keystone is the number “1488.”
“14” refers to the so-called “14 words,” the slogan of the neo-Nazi terrorist organization The Order, which reads: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
“88” is code for “HH” because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet. “HH” is, in turn, code for “Heil Hitler.”
“18” is code for “AH,” which in turn is code for “Adolf Hitler.”
“16” is 8 x 2, so 16 means 88. 16 has a double meaning when paired with 23 because letters 23 and 16 are W and P, which stands for White Power.
“A” and “D” are the first and fourth letters of the alphabet, together forming the number 14.
The cypher is that any time you see the numbers 8, 14, 16, 18, 23, or 88, or the letters AH, HH, AD, or WP are emphasized, you are looking at a Nazi dogwhistle written by a Nazi.
Now take a step back and notice that, when you write it out like that, you sound fucking stupid. And that is exactly the intention behind this sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong here—the code is very real, but the people using it aren’t sending codes to each other so much as they’re messing with you.
The internet left is obsessed with the Groyper Numerology to a point that I think is probably counterproductive. There is a popular truism that there is no such thing as a coincidence, and the problem with that is that there is absolutely such a thing as a coincidence. In the vast number of things that happen every day, sometimes there are just 14 of something.
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