“DHS in particular is trying to use Twitter [and Instagram] as a form of not just recruitment but also promotion,” says Joan Donovan, assistant professor at Boston University and the coauthor of Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America, “and the kind of promotion that they’re doing is targeted toward, I would say, young men in their teenage years or twenties.”
When asked for comment, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin responded: “What a silly little story. Who are these “experts”?
“What’s “cruel” is the media continuing to ignore victims of murder, rape, human trafficking, and gang violence as you continue to do the bidding of violent criminal illegal aliens,” McLaughlin added.
In response to a request for comment, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “The White House social media account often highlights the deportations of heinous criminal illegal aliens who have terrorized American communities. WIRED and their so-called ‘experts, that they refused to provide additional information on, should cover what’s actually cruel—criminal illegal aliens murdering, raping, and assaulting innocent American citizens as a direct result of Joe Biden’s open border and Democrat sanctuary city policies. And while WIRED runs cover for criminal illegal aliens, we won’t apologize for posting banger memes.”
(Around 70 percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record at all, and many of those with convictions committed only minor crimes, like traffic or immigration infractions).
The mainstreaming of dehumanizing humor is what troubles Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor in the school of communication at American University who studies the persuasive effects of extremist propaganda. “I don’t think that this messaging is bad because it’s mean, or because it’s sloppy, or because it’s unbecoming of the Office of the President, although all these things I do believe are true,” says Braddock. “My biggest problem with it is that it normalizes aggression. With the normalization of aggression and the normalization of the dehumanization of others, immigrants or otherwise, it’s not much of a jump to actual violence.”
Memes have always been core to President Donald Trump’s political strategy, says Donovan: “One of the things that was very distinctive about Trump’s meme campaigns in 2016 is his Twitter account almost appeared to most people as just chaos, because he had about six or seven different audiences that he was talking to all at once.”
That chaotic style of messaging now extends to his administration. Some of these posts rack up tens of thousands of likes and get reshared across other platforms, like on Proud Boy’s Telegram channels or big pro-police Facebook groups. A few of them have even inspired T-shirt designs.
Taken all together, the DHS social feeds reflect the jumbled far-right ecosystem, which combines the banal language of everyday memes with 4chan humor, old-school white-supremacist dog whistles, and overtures to Christian nationalism. And the new, shiny packaging is very much the point. “Short bursts of imagery and music appeal emotionally in ways that facts and data often don’t,” says Brian Levin, the founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. “It functions as an emotionally familiar and comforting gift-wrap that here revolves around protection, preservation, fear and tribalism.”
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