The U.S. Labor Department is embracing Nazi slogans and tropes, the Pentagon’s research office is deploying neo-Nazi graphic elements in its social-media feeds, and the Department of Homeland Security recently posted lyrics mimicking a popular song by a band with ties to an ethno-nationalist social club.
The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery. The leaders of these departments so far refuse to answer questions about their social-media strategies, but the trend is impossible to miss: Across the federal government, officials are advocating for a radical new understanding of the American idea, one rooted not in the vision of America’s Founders, but in the ideologies of European fascists.
On January 10, the Department of Labor posted a video with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” which sounds eerily similar to the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“One people, one realm, one leader”). The post has 22.6 million views. One week ago, the Pentagon’s research office posted silhouettes of Revolutionary-era troops with glowing white eyes. The glowing eyes, and the filter that gave their boots a red and cyan tint, are often used in the Right Wing Death Squad subgenre of “fashwave” memes—content posted by neo-Nazis trying to make their views more aesthetically pleasing. DHS also recently posted an image of a horse rider with a B-2 bomber overhead, superimposed with the text “We’ll have our home again.” That phrase is nearly identical to lyrics from a song created by a group affiliated with the Mannerbund, a far-right folk group drawing upon Germany’s ethno-nationalist Völkisch movement: “Oh by God, we’ll have our home again.”
The themes and styles of this mimicry vary. And posts with allusions to extremism have popped up on occasion in individual department or agency feeds, especially at DHS, which oversees both Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But the variety and ubiquity of the recent posts points to something new.
In August, the Department of Homeland Security posted an image across multiple platforms that included the line “Which way, American man?” a reference to the book Which Way Western Man, written by the late neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson and later published by the far-right press National Vanguard Books. In November, DHS posted a video highlighting important moments in American history, also edited so that it resembled fashwave videos. In December, the agency posted an image of ICE agents, overlaid with VHS text and a glitchy filter—two characteristics of fashwave memes.
Many of the memes promote the idea of “remigration.” The term can mean the voluntary departure of immigrants to their birth countries but has gained popularity in white-nationalist circles in Europe and America as a euphemism for the expulsion of nonwhite immigrants from Western countries, potentially including naturalized citizens and their descendants.
In November, DHS posted on X, “The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear: Remigration now.” In another DHS post in recent weeks, viewed by 20 million people on X, a vintage car sits on a beach in front of palm trees. Serene, serif text declares “America After 100 Million Deportations.” The same day, the official White House X account posted a portrait of President Trump with a single word: “remigration.”
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The notion of removing 100 million people from the United States is dramatic, to say the least. Deporting all undocumented immigrants would mean removing some 14 million people, according to one of the most recent estimates by the Pew Research Center, from 2023. Canceling all green cards would add roughly 12 million more. Trump has voiced interest in revoking citizenship of naturalized Americans and removing them from the country—an additional 26 million people. But even adding all of those categories together gets only about halfway to the fantasy of 100 million deportations. The only way to reach that figure is to include tens of millions of native-born Americans.
On what basis would they be targeted? Proponents of remigration have taken aim at, for example, the Somali population in the U.S., the majority of whom are citizens. In December, Trump said during a Cabinet meeting, “I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you,” adding that the U.S. will “go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” Last week, during immigration-enforcement actions in Minnesota—a large Somali population center—the administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for Somali nationals, making noncitizen Somalis eligible for deportation. During his remarks on Wednesday at the World Economic Forum, Trump attacked Somalis in Minnesota again. “We’re cracking down on more than $19 billion in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits. Can you believe the Somalians? They turned out to be higher IQ than we thought,” he said, adding, “They’re good pirates, but we shoot them out of the water just like we shoot the drug boats out.” Trump also made clear that he wasn’t targeting just Somalis. “The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass import foreign cultures, which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own,” he also said in his speech, parroting white-supremacist rhetoric about immigration from nonwhite countries.
Some may shrug off the figure of 100 million as an example of Trumpian exaggeration spilling into the ranks of the government’s social-media posters. Others see cause for great alarm. “It is a plan for ethnic cleansing,” Wendy Via, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an advocacy group, told me. “We can’t think of it as anything else. It just is a plan for ethnic cleansing.”
The Trump administration has said little publicly about the specific intentions behind these posts. I mentioned the Instagram post that included “We’ll have our home again” and the phrase’s association with German ethno-nationalism to Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, over email. McLaughlin responded that it’s “pretty milquetoast language about 20 million illegal aliens being removed/exiting the country.” I asked directly about remigration, but she didn’t get into its specifics or its history on the European far right. “There are plenty of policy debates to be had, making up stuff to be outraged about is schizophrenic,” told me. This appears to be the administration-wide response. When I asked the Department of Defense about its meme containing obvious fashwave references, Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson replied in an email: “If you see pro-American content with references to the American Revolution and your brain somehow begins making connections to ‘fashwave’ or ‘neo-Nazism,’ then you may be schizophrenic or have severe Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The Department of Labor didn’t respond to a request for comment and the White House declined to provide one.
The posts’ invocation of language and imagery employed by historical and contemporary white supremacists could, in theory, be a series of unintentional coincidences. Yet the message emanates from the administration in other ways. Amid the memes and mug shots the DHS usually posts, Micah Bock, the deputy assistant secretary of strategic communications, occasionally appears in explainer videos to offer nationalist perspectives. In November, in a DHS video posted on X, he attempted to “dispel a lie” that “America is a nation of immigrants.” On Thanksgiving, Bock offered the standard “thanks for the tireless work of the department under President Trump and Secretary Noem,” but then told viewers that “there will be no second helpings for invaders.”
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Bock’s rhetoric is not as far-right-explicit as many of the DHS’s memes, but he makes similar points. Bock tells the viewer that Thanksgiving is “not a global potluck. It is a feast of specific people remembering specific mercies granted to them and their nation alone.” Bock doesn’t say which “specific people” should enjoy the exclusive privilege of eating a large bird and mashed potatoes in late November every year. But elsewhere in the video, he references early New England settlers who did not suffer harsh 17th-century winters so that “four centuries later, their descendants would hand the table to strangers who never gave thanks for the sacrifices that built it.” His rhetoric echoes something Vice President J. D. Vance said last summer in a speech: “America is not just an idea,” he said at the time. “We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life,” he explained, adding, “The people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.” This is the watered-down, but fleshed-out, version of the memes.
Taken together, the messages represent an effort to redefine what it means to be American so as to justify the expulsion of people who don’t fit that definition. This comes directly from an emerging concept on the right, sometimes referred to as “Heritage America,” or being a “Heritage American.” Not everyone on the nationalist right uses or likes this terminology. But they broadly agree with the principle: that America is not actually “a proposition” of equality and liberty, as Abraham Lincoln described it in his Gettysburg Address, but a specific place, with a specific culture, made up mostly of Anglo-Protestants who can trace their lineage in the U.S. back for generations. It posits a version of America that isn’t based on ideals, but on blood and soil.
Isabel Ruehl and Marie-Rose Sheinerman contributed reporting to this story.
The post The Government’s Posts Just Took a Sharp Far-Right Turn appeared first on The Atlantic.
