“Are you a human?”

I asked this question when answering the phone in a bar the other day. Someone else in the bar did a double take. After I hung up, they asked “Did you just ask someone if they are human?”

“Well, no. I asked a robocall if they were human.” This is what I do when I suspect I’m getting a robocall. As a former telemarketer, I try not to hang up on sales calls and I’m polite to telemarketers so that, when I ask them to take me off their call list, they actually do it. But robots? Even better. No hurt feelings, no nastiness. Just “Are you a human?” Click.

So I wonder how people are responding to the new robocalls in Iowa urging them to support Donald Trump. I imagine for folks in early-voting states—people who are courted so amorously during presidential elections that it must be both flattering and exhausting—that they have one of two reactions: immediately hang up, or listen intently to see if this message will help them to decide who to vote for. And I wonder how Iowans felt about the message itself, which boils down to: I’m a white nationalist and I support Donald Trump. If you are also a racist, you should too.

It’s not the first time Trump’s gotten a white supremacist endorsement. In August, former Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke expressed enthusiasm about Trump’s popularity. Trump responded that he neither wanted nor needed Duke’s support, but as white nationalist Jared Taylor told The New Yorker, “I’m sure he would repudiate any association with people like me, but his support comes from people who are more like me than he might like to admit.” White nationalists love Trump, whether he wants them to or not.

If this is even a problem for the Trump campaign—and I’m not convinced that it is—it is a problem of his own making. He kicked off his campaign by accusing Mexican immigrants of being rapists, has threatened to ban all Muslims from entering the country, and has made it downright acceptable for his supporters to beat the hell out of black protestors at his events. Politicians often use various degrees of dog whistle racism, but Trump has no whistle. He doused the whistle in gasoline, set it on fire, and chucked it into a ravenous audience of supporters who pummeled it to death.

But Trump knows how far this obvious racism can go, and blatant white nationalism is one toe over the line. It’s an icky label, not palatable to those who consider themselves less racist than practical. It’s not unlike the Reddit phenomenon wherein, given the right circumstances and context, Stormfront copypasta gets massively upvoted for spreading racist pseudoscience and bad statistics that suit the more subtle racist arguments endemic to the site. It’s maybe a little embarrassing when it’s revealed to originate from a super duper racist source, but it confirms something that cultural studies scholars and sociologists have known all along—these hegemonic, oppressive, and dangerous ideologies are always bubbling just below the surface of “respectable” discourse. It was always already there. It’s only the label that we don’t like.

Research suggests that robocalls don’t work. But these things are difficult to measure—you can’t exactly create a controlled environment in which to evaluate their effects, and elections are so incredibly complicated that knowing what tactics will sway a voter base is largely guesswork. In fact, robocalls might just annoy potential voters to the point that they’re dissuaded. But, they’re cheap. They’re easy. They’re legal. So we keep using them.

But how effective can these calls possibly be when they’re so brazenly white supremacist? How many white nationalists can there really be? Probably more than you think. It’s hard to track for obvious reasons. As organizations like the KKK have become less socially acceptable, many hate groups have gone underground. The internet allows hate groups to operate anonymously, which means that individuals can spout whatever hateful ideas they want without fear of criticism or consequence. For all you know, your polite neighbor who brought you Christmas cookies last month may be the editor of a holocaust-denying newsletter.

One of the leading white nationalists websites Stormfront has nearly 300,000 registered users, but that doesn’t count all of the visitors who never register. Formerly “out” white nationalist groups have changed their names to more innocuous-sounding titles, like the Council of Conservative Citizens, formerly the collection of White Citizens Councils. The white supremacist robocalls supporting Trump are paid for by The American National Super PAC, a name that could refer to literally anything in American politics. Other words like “patriot” or “liberty” often serve as code words for “racist,” allowing some groups to operate publicly without immediately being pegged as a hate group.

Pinning Trump to his white supremacist supporters could go one of two ways: fans may distance themselves from him, or they may like him even more. I lean towards the latter for two reasons. First, condemning Trump for this association falls directly in line with the right’s critique that liberals will blow anything out of proportion to attack conservatives. Their argument will go: Trump can’t control who endorses him, and he’s obviously not a racist. He’s a “realist.” Conservatives love when the left attacks their leaders, and these attacks mostly shore up support. Second, it’s highly likely that many Trump supporters are already closeted white nationalists. They may not even know it, or at least they may not have a name for it. It’s even possible that these endorsements will draw Trump supporters to white nationalist groups. In all likelihood, white nationalist leaders know this too.

I said earlier that robocalls don’t seem to work, but that research analyzes the effects of robocalls on elections. And maybe they don’t sway election results, but what if, in this case, they serve a different purpose? Maybe the question isn’t “Do they work?” but “For whom do they work?”

Is The American National Super PAC interested in getting voters to support Trump? Sure. But I think a much more fundamental agenda for these robocalls is increasing their own support. It’s about branding. It’s about seizing on a politically opportune moment to spread your own message, tying your horse to the right cart and settling in for the ride. Therein lies the danger of Trump’s rhetoric; it opens the floodgates, ups the threshold of acceptable racist discourse, and draws more people into movements that they may have only heard of thanks to the buzz he creates. White nationalists aren’t supporting Trump for Trump’s sake—they’re supporting him for their own.

Britney is on Twitter.