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.
On the balance of evidence I think the most likely case with the DHS social media accounts is that, yes, we’re dealing with a groyper. If you’re not in the loop, a “groyper” is a name that a particular breed of troll-minded neo-Nazis gave to themselves. No, I don’t know what the word means, and neither, it seems, does anybody else. The most prominent one, and basically their leader, is Nicholas Fuentes, a Hitler-loving Catholic extremist who recently turned against Trump for supporting Israel instead of, I dunno, nuking it or something. But he used to be a Trumper until very recently—he was at January 6, and notoriously managed to get an audience with Trump when they were introduced at a dinner party by Kanye West, whose own presidential campaign Fuentes was managing.
We know that there are groypers in DOGE, the department of teenage edgelords Elon Musk hired to seek and destroy any government program that helps people. It’s fairly likely that either one of these kids or someone of a very similar profile has been employed to run federal US social media. Being generals in a “troll army” memeing for Hitler makes these snotrags feel like an Aryan Adonis from a German propaganda poster when they look in the mirror.
On the broader picture, though, how much does it matter? We know that the American order has broken down into a grotesque naked singularity that now openly and boastfully engages in the kind of abuse that it kept secret only 20 years ago, out of shame, in Abu Ghraib. We know the Overton Window is strapped to a rightward jetpack and the media has abdicated its responsibility in a desperate gambit to present the New Normal as anything resembling normal.
What can we do in the face of this monumental threat? It’s simple: We count the number of emojis in Elon Musk’s tweets.
This one is pretty lame, but it made the lede in popular independent journalist Marisa Kabas’ Handbasket newsletter.
On Saturday, Trump posted this quote on X/Twitter: "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law." It’s apparently from the 1970 movie Waterloo, which is about Napoleon. Then Musk quote tweeted it at 2:14pm (14:14 in the 24-hour clock) with 14 American flags, a reference to the white supremacist ‘14 Words,’: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” It was about as subtle as his Hitler salute on Inauguration Day.
Musk posted 14 flags on the 14th minute of the hour. Kabas stresses that it was also the 14th hour as though time zones don’t exist. But we have to pump up the number of 14s that appear so that they don’t dwarf the number of 14s that don’t appear—because there are a lot of numbers here that aren’t involved in Groyper Numerology at all, but we disregard them because they don’t fit the pattern. The tweet was sent out on the 15th day of the 2nd month. It’s replying to a tweet that has 10 words. Trump capitalizes C and L, but these aren’t groyper codes, they’re noise.
I get it, though—Elon did The Arm Thing. He’s also a very passionate Zionist. So, does he want to kill all the Jews or not?
We on the left have this kind of irritating problem where it’s not enough for somebody to be evil—for them to be bad at all, they have to be, very specifically, a Nazi. We need to know that the bad guy is a Nazi before we fight them. And so, in the face of what is clearly a 21st century fascist incarnation head-on, we keep searching for permission to fight back, and that means constantly scouring the enemy’s communications for any sign of 8 14 16 18 88 AD AH or HH, flagging any hits and dismissing any misses.
And they know this! They fucking know this! The trolls and the groypers, some of whom truly believe in the tenets of National Socialism and some who are just edgy privileged assholes who don’t give a shit as long as they’re upsetting people (we don’t even know this ratio) drop these little codes everywhere in the hope that we will lean all the way into it and poison our own credibility reservoir with a bunch of false positives.
Because, at the end of the day, when we’re poring through tweets, counting words, whispering the alphabet as we count on our fingers, rushing to the keyboard to report on our findings, most people who aren’t into Groyper Numerology just see this:
I’m not saying it’s not terrifying that there are groypers in the US government, especially when they are in Homeland Security. Here’s another one that looks pretty convincing to me, this one from the first Trump administration: In 2018 the DHS posted this article with the headline “We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again.”
Anyone even passingly familiar with neo-Nazi rhetoric will feel punched in the face when they open the Department of Homeland Security website and see a big bold sentence starting with “We Must Secure The …”
Not only is that the literal opening to the 14 words, but the headline is also 14 words long. Buried in the article is also a statistic that oddly uses the number 88, which is an unusual number to drop when statistics like this usually open with a round number: “On average, out of 88 claims that pass the credible fear screening, fewer than 13 will ultimately result in a grant of asylum.”
The evidence here doesn’t feel as strong as the DHS social media posts, but I can buy it. The 88 stands out, and I have to admit in most cases it does feel out of place. It’s an unusual looking number that just has a way of standing out and being loud in your mind like when you glance at a digital clock and the time is 11:11.
That said, 13 isn’t one of the Nazi numbers, as far as I’m aware. If someone was manufacturing a fake statistic to drop this code, wouldn’t they put a 14 there? There are over 20 numbers in this document and only one of them is associated with Groyper Numerology. Doesn’t that suggest a likelihood that this is a case of simple chance?
And before you accuse me of being dismissive or stupid or blind or, god help me, some sort of apologist, take a step back and realize they are building concentration camps. They are kidnapping people in the street who have committed no crime and shipping them to overseas labor camps. What are we doing analyzing press releases for coded signs that these people might be fascists? “Missing the forest for the trees” is a cliché but the forest is “Alligator Alcatraz” and the trees are “things that add up to 14 in a tweet.”
Here’s another really silly one: Back in January, everyone collectively did the DiCaprio point-at-television meme when Trump signed Executive order 14188, titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.” The bastard had the gall to sign an executive order about Jews and put the digits 14 and 88 in the title! He’s boasting about protecting Jews while at the same time broadcasting that he intends to exterminate them!
But you have to stand back and think about this for a minute. How did they pull this off? The list of orders is chronological dating back to Lincoln. Order 14188 is nested between 14187 (outlawing transgender kids) and 14189 (his dumb military parade). How did they manage to limit the number of orders Biden signed in order to make sure that the 1488ish one landed at the beginning of Trump’s term? Or is the idea that this was purely opportunistic and serendipitous? I know for a fact Trump himself doesn’t care about the Groyper Numerology, so who put this scheme together? Stephen Miller? He’s Jewish.
Why do we need to look at the numbers for clues about fascism when we can look at the text? Order 14188 is a fascist order that brings the hammer down on speech and it would be fascist if it were numbered anything else, and in fact, orders 14187 and 14189 are also fascist.
We are kicking our own asses, here, but people get incredibly upset if you publicly express doubt about a Groyper Numerology callout. I got dogpiled in an anti-Musk Discord channel last year for expressing skepticism about his announcement, that he would unveil Robotaxi on August 8th, being an explicit Nazi bat-signal. If you express this skepticism then you just get called a Nazi yourself, which is infuriating because I hate this white supremacist dipshit and I hate that his white supremacism is being obfuscated and diminished by people hunting for 8s.
Here's an example of a similar phenomenon from the other side of politics. Back in 2007, WikiLeaks published an internal FBI document that showed symbols known to be used by pedophile groups to identify one another. They are simple, innocuous looking things, like triangles and spirals and butterflies.
This is, presumably, a real thing. The FBI certainly thinks so. There genuinely are underground pedophile networks which use symbols like these, and sometimes, if you come across one, you might actually have stumbled upon a real nefarious communication.
But the right who see pedos behind every corner see triangles and spirals and butterflies everywhere, right out in the open, in logos and designs, and report to social media that they have cracked the cypher.
This is one of the reasons hardcore Musk fans freaked out so much about Twitter competitors Bluesky and Threads.
All of this looks nuts! Obviously! And those in the groyper circuit, many of whom are unfortunately savvy little racists with broccoli floret haircuts who get off on the thought of Mexicans being eaten by alligators, are aware of the mechanics of this type of symbol obsession and love to weaponize it. They want to make us look like that.
This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about the Groyper Numerology and why you should ignore it. Two years ago (almost exactly to the day, it turns out) I wrote about RFK Jr’s own Nazi Numbers faux pas, and why it was a distraction from the greater issue of just making sure that lunatic never gets anywhere near government (whoops! Haha, fucking WHOOPS!)
Please don’t make hay of the fact that I published that in August and I’m publishing this in August and that is 8 + 8. I bring that piece up because it goes into a lot more detail about how groypers deliberately set these traps up for the left to walk into and diminish the legitimacy of our concerns.
Basically, this whole project is an exercise of—to put it in terms Steve Bannon is fond of using—"flooding the zone with shit.” In this case, they’re just seeding the clouds and watching us flood the zone ourselves.
If we’re going to fight this monster we have to stop letting it lead us around. They never stop brainstorming these campaigns. Not only did the right basically manufacture this stupid Sydney Sweeney jeans controversy, they’ve now got people counting words and letters in American Eagle press releases and even suggesting the conspiracy dates back to her birth when her parents insidiously decided to give her the initials “SS.”
The Groyper Numerology is real, and it isn’t. We have more than enough evidence from the Trump administration’s actions and statements that it is a fascist movement, we don’t need to whip out our calculators and thesauruses and World War II encyclopedias and open the ADL website in another tab every time one of them posts a tweet to determine if they are sufficiently fascist. Sometimes, there are 14 of something.
I’m writing a book about how the types of people who tweet out Groyper Numerology crap wound up controlling the United States government within a single generation of the creation of the internet. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:
S Peter Davis
