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Notes -
I was around when this stuff first came up.
The whole reason it became a dog whistle is because leftists were and are categorically unable to just say "yes, that is correct" when faced with that statement.
Which was the reason it was deployed in the first place. If lefties/SJWs were capable of reacting to this statement as if it were an uncontroversial nonissue, it would have no power whatsoever. Anytime they want, the lefties can take this 'debate' completely off the table.
But they cannot agree to the statement "It's okay to be white" because that runs counter to their ideological tenets. And so they react poorly to it in a way that is completely disproportionate to the actual semantic content of the phrase. Their interpretation of the phrase is where the controversy comes from, so it's only 'white supremacist' to a particular point of view that is not universal.
So sure, you can characterize it as a dog whistle, but it's a whistle that is only audible to lefties and the only reason it is used by far-righties is because the left erected the framework within which the statement is controversial.
I think politically-active Americans, and politically active American leftists in particular, are used to phrases that sound like they have a literal meaning not meaning what the literal meaning suggests. Take, for example, the phrase "black lives matter". Literally speaking, it's a statement almost everyone would agree with. The people who push back on it are mostly pushing back because they think that if they say "yes, black lives do matter", that will be taken as an endorsement of the sorts of things done by other people who think that black lives matter.
Like I think "it's ok to be white" and "black lives matter" are both primarily communications of group membership, not communications of object-level opinions.
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