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And yet, 99.99999% of the people who have responded to these supposed calls to violence have responded by protesting. I'm saying that if your dogwhistle is so subtle that it's functionally indistinguishable to a neutral observer from normal disagreement, then I consider it the same as not a dogwhistle. It's the same as how I don't really care about arguing how morally good a hypothetical person is who wants to carry out a crime but is so risk-averse that they spend forever waiting for an impossibly perfect opportunity and never actually do anything. When you leave hypothetical-land and enter reality, it's nearly impossible to identify such a person in an unbiased way outside of such a person admitting it themselves.
I don't trust a single person to fairly distinguish an actual dogwhistle from "anything I disagree with is a dogwhistle." I set the burden of proof closer to where multiple people from different ideological backgrounds can look at the behavior and agree that it's extremely suspicious.
It's not indistinguishable. People have noticed that the attacks on Trump have been unprecedented violations of norms pretty much since they began.
The left didn't listen to them, because they didn't want to, but plenty of people noticed.
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