DHS’s Neo-Nazi Memes Show the Agency for What It Is

Seeing a federal agency openly circulate racist and antisemitic propaganda as intentionally “edgy” content is disturbing enough. But such a recruitment drive is also coming from an agency that is (or was, under previous administrations) tasked with keeping tabs on white nationalist groups. What this latest propaganda wave from DHS reveals, in part, is an agency that has been weaponized for the Trump administration’s political purposes. But DHS didn’t reluctantly acquiesce to that weaponization, as has sometimes been presumed. Instead, it eagerly assimilated MAGA’s mass deportation mission, adopted its language, and became its standard-bearer online. The shift is, unfortunately, not so shocking, given the agency’s history. From its very origins, DHS has repeatedly downplayed the threat of white nationalism while focusing its law enforcement power on groups—Muslims, immigrants, left-wing activists—it deemed a threat to an imaginary version of the ideal America.

A skeptic might suggest that DHS simply doesn’t know what its posts are invoking. But DHS ought to be familiar with such tropes—and, especially, with The Turner Diaries and the neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups it has influenced. The text was reportedly one inspiration for the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building, which was carried out by a white nationalist. In the past, the agency tracked “domestic violent extremism” and acknowledged that such groups’ ability to recruit and mobilize online was “potentially making extremist individuals and groups more dangerous and the consequences of their violence more severe.” This was the finding of a DHS analyst’s 2009 paper, which DHS subsequently repudiated before disbanding the team behind it. “DHS is scoffing at the mission of doing domestic counterterrorism, as is Congress,” the paper’s author, Daryl Johnson, told Spencer Ackerman at Wired in 2012. Johnson observed that although there had been numerous white supremacist attacks over the previous few years, there were no hearings about the rising white supremacist threat—“but,” he pointed out, “they still hold hearings about Muslim extremism.”

That’s really what the Department of Homeland Security, under which Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates, was built for. It is a product of the American “global war on terror,” as well as one of its engines. Back in October 2001, Nation columnist Patricia J. Williams, a professor of law and philosophy at Northeastern University, noted that already “the word ‘homeland’ has burrowed its way into ordinary conversation and multiplied with astonishing rapidity.” From the start, “homeland” sounded exclusionary and bombastic. “I wonder about the line-drawing such an odd term was calculated to evoke,” Williams wrote. “Like the Bush team’s attempt to sound epic? Like some effort to denationalize and fuse enemy status with that of domestic criminality?”