This past year, official social media accounts from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other government agencies have adopted a distinct voice online. The posts look like memes, utilizing dramatic AI-generated art, general patriotic slogans, and cinematic language about “defending the homeland” and shaping America’s future.
But if you look closer, a pattern emerges.
Many of these phrases, images, and attached media aren’t just regular social media content. They repurpose language, symbolism, and cultural references with direct connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. It’s content that experts say is instantly recognizable to those who are in the white supremacist know, but can be largely invisible to everyone else.
There has been not one, but two posts from our government institutions that reuse a phrase ripped straight from William Gayley Simpson’s book Which Way Western Man?. It was published and promoted by the National Alliance—considered one of the “best organized” neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The book is antisemitic, racist, and explicitly states that Adolf Hitler was right.
It just took a handful of connected conspiracists with no principles and some forward thinking about how to sow the worst seeds.
Names like Bannon, Epstein and others who funded them worked in the dark and with great amounts of support from a variety of institutions, worked to simultaneously make fascism cool and make average Americans too distracted to care. Eroded attention spans, people fighting online until nobody knows how to relate to each other anymore, dissolving communities and amplifying the most ridiculous or rage-baiting takes on both sides of ever issue.
That’s all it took for people to stop caring as cartoonishly iconic fascists and nazis took power in the US, and the whole time we were thinking that cartoonishly stereotypical “bad guys” belong only in hollywood and can’t possibly be real.
We all said that to some degree as the cartoonishly iconic and stereotypical villains rose in power and people were too burnt-out or distracted to give it any deeper thought.