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.
Examples please.
Decades of “liberalism” gave us the Taft-Hartley Act to crush labor movements, McCarthyism to criminalize dissent, and the systematic use of redlining to enforce economic exclusion. We’ve seen the carceral state explode and domestic policing militarize under the guise of “public safety,” proving that the state’s velvet glove always hides an iron fist ready to strike whenever the working class actually organizes.
It’s true. Much of the evil shit Trump does was done under liberalism where it was fairly popular. Christian Nationalists, Americans imperialists, bigots, and bloodthirsty capitalists were able to accomplish their goals within the system. They could get enough of what they wanted at the ballot box because their views had enough popularity to sustain it.
However, as neoliberalism eroded the middle class, as civil rights for minorities became more popular, as there was less support for war and supporting authoritarian allies, as people turned away from churches, the right knew there would come a day when they could no longer win through playing the liberal democratic game. They knew that if they waited long enough, left wing populism would usher in either a progressive era of labor reforms, or even more radical changes that would fundamentally threaten their power.
Under Trump, their goals are either to make their ideas popular, or take away any of the levers of control that regular people could use to stop them. The bigots and the Christians can use the billionaire media and newfound kingdom to enforce their dogma from the top down. Deport enough migrants, create enough anti trans laws, and suppress enough open discussions of sex through payment processors that much of it will become normalized. The billionaires can use those helpful idiots to take away the ballot box as an option and make the hollowed out husk of the government so broken and impotent that any liberal efforts to restrain them will be fruitless. Even the imperialists win because America’s lost ground to China will galvanize future liberals into being more anti communist and cruel in promoting national self interest.
Liberalism may have died, but it’s fully responsible for its own demise. It always had a fascist contingent that used the republicanism liberal ideology afforded to accomplish their own goals.