Chick-fil-A is right coded. “Rent” and “Hamilton” are left coded. Comedy and wrestling are right coded. Independent movie theaters and capoeira are left coded. “Yellowstone” is right coded and “White Lotus” is left. There’s a case for the HBO show “Girls” being right coded. “Superbad” is a little unclear.
People have often signaled their values in the shows they watch (“The West Wing”), clothes they wear (white pantsuits) and restaurants they frequent. But it has become wildly popular in recent years, and especially in recent months, to read cultural tea leaves with the word “coded.” In group chats, on Reddit and on X, we’re calling anything and everything right or left “coded.” It’s like playing a game of charades, gesturing at the qualities a certain celebrity or bar or podcast has without saying exactly what you mean. Linguists notice it too, pointing to Google data that shows a spike in the use of “coded,” with its current meaning, since the 2010s.
“It’s a way of acknowledging that even when something isn’t literally conservative, it can still convey conservativeness,” said Lal Zimman, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
To understand why the word “coded” spread — why “The Big Short” is millennial coded and Timothée Chalamet is Proust coded and “Yellowstone” is NIMBY coded — requires going back to tree trunks in ancient Rome. That is where the word “code” itself was born, according to the historical linguist Danny Bate.
Tracing the history of the word, Mr. Bate found that an etymon had been used to refer to tree trunks. Those trees were chopped into pieces that were used to write laws on, which led to the term “code of law.” In the early 1800s, in another twist, European military leaders started using “code” to refer to the secrets of military life that were understood but not made explicit. In the 1960s, in academia, “coded” became a useful way of discerning subtle messages about identity groups, calling a doll “girl coded,” for example. And in the 2010s, in online forums, fans of the TV show “Steven Universe” gave the word “coded” its modern meaning, talking about how cartoon characters could be “coded” as gay.
If the words we use both reflect and reshape the upside-down moment we’re in, “coded” is a sign of the times. It sorts the shifty, amorphousness of culture into the hard and fast lines of our polarized politics.
To understand why “coded” became part of our political conversations today, it seemed useful to go to the spaces where people were using it: events for young people who are posting about what’s coded as right or as left. This started with Butterworth’s, the Capitol Hill restaurant that has become a hangout spot for President Trump’s supporters.
On a Thursday night in April, some 200 young conservative people gathered for a party hosted by The Conservateur, a right-wing women’s lifestyle magazine, whose editor in chief, Caroline Downey, 27, affirmed that “coded” had wound its way into her vocabulary: “I think it has to do with how being overt or heavy handed about culture is considered. …” She paused. “I feel like the right word is cheugy.” (In other words, lame.)
The women behind The Conservateur — a site whose recent not-so-subtle political features include “D.E.I. Hires Have Gone Too Far” and “The Future Is Female Under Trump” — called their party “America Is Hot Again.” The upstairs room at Butterworth’s was festooned in right-wing coded party supplies. There were drinks themed “J’adore Cowboys” and “God and Country.” There was a baseball cap hanging on the wall that read “I really don’t care, do U?” — a callback to the jacket Melania Trump wore while on a trip to tour a migrant children’s center in 2018. There were Conservateur caps that read “Make America Hot Again.”
The Conservateur founders said they grew up reading magazines that were or became left coded, like Teen Vogue and Cosmopolitan, as well as books like “The Care and Keeping of You,” which they felt were filled with progressive messaging about diversity and sex. Now they want to reclaim conversations about style and beauty for the right.
“Hotness is conservative coded,” said Jayme Franklin, 27, the chief executive, explaining she was referring to both inner and outer beauty. “The left is trying to degrade that. They almost have an uglification of culture.”
Ms. Franklin and Ms. Downey believe that since Mr. Trump took office, magazines, movies, fashion and other cultural outputs are skewing right, nudged by young people like readers of The Conservateur. Ms. Franklin pointed to the box office slump of “Snow White.” Ms. Downey listed unexpected places she had seen “right coded-ness” surface.
“The holistic health movement is one of those things that is now conservative coded,” she said. “Andrew Schulz is an example of a comedian that I never would have guessed would have had Trump on his show in a friendly conversation — but being an irreverent comedian and having an aversion to political correctness is conservative coded now.”
“I’m constantly confounded,” Ms. Downey continued, “by some things that were never considered conservative coded and now are.”
The Decoding
When political power changes hands, the linguistic terrain around it changes, too. Those whose party is in power tend to feel emboldened to share their beliefs openly, not in subtle or coded ways. Meanwhile, those who disagree with their political leaders are, in many cases, concerned about the social or legal repercussions of speaking their minds — for obvious reasons.
“Whoever feels safe is more likely to use un-coded terms, say things straight out,” said Robin Lakoff, a retired professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Language is just a reflection of reality.”
What was audible at Butterworth’s, as women toasted to America being hot again, was a sort of decoding. Across more than a dozen conversations with guests packing the room, slurping up oysters and sipping champagne, it was clear that the young conservative women drawn to the event were feeling emboldened to speak their minds. It was their moment, many said, to say the quiet parts aloud.
Ava Holle, a marketing consultant who grew up in Denver, said that as a teenager she stayed hushed during conversations about abortion, because when she called herself “pro-life,” friends told her she lacked empathy. “If someone were to ask me about it, I’d try to change the subject,” she said.
She also used to tell people she was an independent or moderate, but today she identifies as conservative. “I don’t need to seek social approval,” she said as she sipped her cocktail, partygoers in sequins milling around her.
Ms. Downey, the editor in chief, said she too was watching her conservative social circles become more outspoken. “There’s a tendency to speak candidly,” she said. “It’s not like they’re couching every word so carefully.”
In silver heels, Ms. Downey climbed on a chair and delivered this message to her party guests emphatically: “We are the zeitgeist now.”
The Recoding
In social circles on the right, people are decoding, being brash about political messages they once tried to quietly convey, while on the left, some people say they are seeing political debates, especially online, go through a sort of recode.
One week after The Conservateur party, the left-leaning literary magazine The Drift hosted a panel in Lower Manhattan called “What Was Twitter?” It was a sort of elegy for the platform, which has increasingly skewed right. (Panels on Twitter are left coded, even though the platform itself is not.)
When Elon Musk bought the site, his own account became the most followed, driving daily conversation on X as well as support for Mr. Trump. Some voices that feuded with Mr. Musk saw their reach collapse, as New York Times reporting showed. Plenty of left-wing accounts left the site and decamped to Blue Sky.
There were audience members at the Drift event who said they were feeling pressured to share their political beliefs with extra caution on the internet, some pointing to examples of people who lost their jobs because of statements about the Israel-Hamas war. Devin Williams, 28, who works at a tech start-up and writes a newsletter on Substack about cultural trends, said that because of the tech industry’s support for President Trump, she was more circumspect about the views that she publicized. She is keenly aware of juggling her identities as a writer and a tech industry employee, adding that she feels like “an undercover agent.”
“I’m aware of really wanting to keep those identities separate,” Ms. Williams said. “It hasn’t stopped me from saying anything on my newsletter. I’m just cognizant that I may be critical of a thing that the world my job is in isn’t critical of.”
One event panelist, Sam Adler-Bell, 35, a left-wing writer and a host of “Know Your Enemy,” a podcast about the history of American conservatism, said his research had required following far-right accounts on X for years. It is only in recent months that he has seen many choosing to shed their anonymity.
“Because of various vibe shifts,” Mr. Adler-Bell said, “there are accounts that used to be anonymous and are no longer anonymous — and now they’re getting jobs in the White House.”
The culture — and how we code it — is constantly changing. Maybe nothing is more 2025 coded than trying to make sense of what is changing by coding it all, and decoding the moment in the process.
A 19-year-old writer in the room said he had found unexpected delight in watching left-wing accounts co-opt and subvert conservative humor. Memes that used to be right coded are being repurposed by left-leaning accounts, said Alex Bronzini-Vender, a Columbia student. He pointed, for example, to viral photoshopped images of JD Vance, as well as to posts by the left-wing podcast “TrueAnon” that were written in the style of an artificial intelligence bot.
“Maybe one of the ways the left is going to engage in the Trump era,” Mr. Bronzini-Vender suggested, “is by messing with the language of the right.”
Source photographs by Scott Olson/Getty Images (Chick-fil-A); HBO (“Girls”); Paramount (“Yellowstone”); Gabby Jones for The New York Times (American Girl dolls); Anna Webber/Getty Images (Teen Vogue); Ethan Miller/Getty Images (wrestling); Getty Images (microphone)
Emma Goldberg is a business reporter covering workplace culture and the ways work is evolving in a time of social and technological change.
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