This article was originally posted on Yahoo News by Melissa Gira Grant.
As it begins building the largest law enforcement agency in the country, the Department of Homeland Security has lately turned to social media to recruit immigration enforcement officers. These posts have been characterized as “mean memes,” or as another sign of the Trump regime’s penchant for “kitsch,” but one particularly egregious example posted Monday shows quite clearly how meanness and kitsch are ideal vehicles for neo-Nazi messaging. “Which way, American man?” the @DHSgov account on X posted, along with an AI-sloppy cartoon of Uncle Sam considering competing road signs: “Cultural Decline,” “Homeland,” “Invasion,” “Opportunity.” It’s a message meant to help the agency with its “rapid recruitment” of 14,050 new immigration enforcement agents, as decreed by Trump (and with new funding from Congress).
The phrase is a nod to the 1978 book Which Way, Western Man?, a foundational text for white nationalists. The book’s most accessible edition was published by the neo-Nazi press National Vanguard Books, which was founded by William Luther Pierce III, the author of the racist dystopian novel The Turner Diaries. Elements of The Turner Diaries’ fascist climax, “the Day of the Rope,” made their way into the far-right imaginary, and into the shape of the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.
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