Mother Jones illustration; @WhiteHouse/X
In March, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested a woman they accused of drug trafficking and entering the country illegally. Standing in a parking lot, they photographed her, weeping, eyes half-closed in anguish, her arms cuffed behind her back. And then—in a cruel innovation specific to the Trump administration—the White House’s official Twitter account used an AI tool to make a cartoon illustration of her crying and handcuffed, in the style of the beloved Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli. The tweet got 155,000 likes, a mix of outraged and delighted responses, and, as it was designed to, a lot of attention: it’s so far been viewed 76 million times. On Twitter, many users posted positive responses declaring that the image was exactly what they’d had voted for.
“It’s classic, textbook propaganda.”
This is, at the moment, the official voice of the U.S. government: a rancid mixture of trolling, cruelty, propaganda, and crass jokes about the human suffering they’re creating, an effort, as Wired’s Tess Owen recently put it, to turn actions like mass deportation into “one big joke.” On Instagram and Twitter (their largest audience), government entities including the White House, ICE, and the Department of Homeland Security attempt to surf viral trends to expanded public attention: they twist memes and sounds popular on TikTok, repurpose South Park’s parodies for their own self-promotion, and blend it all with images that draw on or directly reproduce classical art and Americana paintings that are designed to stir nostalgia for an imagined past. (The use of some of this art, as the Washington Post has written, has stirred the ire of the artists themselves or their representatives; it’s not easy to extract a stern condemnation from the estate of treacly pastoral painter Thomas Kinkade, but this government managed to do it.)
A lot of the trends are specifically designed to appeal to young white men, like one that repurposes a 1970s-looking ad for a van to ask, “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” Another ICE recruitment effort asks “Which way, American man?” in front a befuddled-looking Uncle Sam gazing at a crossroads post labeled with signs including “INVASION,” “CULTURAL DECLINE” pointing one way, and, pointing the other, “SERVICE,” “OPPORTUNITY”; in Uncle Sam’s hands lies “LAW AND ORDER.” The phrase “Which way, American man” is a barely-altered reference to the phrase “Which way, Western man?,” the title of a book by white nationalist author William Gayley Simpson that’s been popularized by the far-right as a meme. In this case, the white supremacist undertones are more like overtones.
While the government uses social media to bolster its philosophical choices on issues like mass deportations, it also deploys it to prop up support for deeply unpopular aspects of its plans, like “Alligator Alcatraz”—an immigration detention camp, trolling opportunity, marketing bonanza for amoral swag-sellers, including Florida’s attorney general. Before the tent prison was even officially open, Trump administration officials and their proxies in right-wing media bragged about the camp, joked about escapees dying by alligator and python, and made AI-generated images of President Trump standing alongside alligators wearing ICE hats.
Disinformation researchers and experts on propaganda have followed the sludge and bile emanating from these governmental accounts with alarm.
“What you have is this desire to get people to buy into the fun of sadism,” says Jason Stanley; he’s a philosopher, author, and professor at University of Toronto who’s in the process of leaving the United States because of, as he baldly puts it, “concerns over fascism.”
The memes about brutal detention and deportation, specifically, invite audiences to delight in what Stanley calls “torture,” to see themselves in what the government is doing, to say, as he puts it, “This is something we’re doing together, we’re having a blast, we’re laughing and those wimpy liberals are saying it’s scandalous. We’re going to show our power over them by having as much fun as possible.”
“They’re offering them delight in the torture of others.”
Stanley says that it’s part of the overall structure of what his colleague Timothy Snyder calls “sadopopulism“: putting policies into place that inflict real pain and harm on the U.S. populace, while also encouraging scapegoating and xenophobia against stigmatized groups. (“If you hurt people you create a resource of pain, of anxiety and fear which you then direct against others,” Snyder explains in a video explaining the concept.)
“What they’re offering people is not health insurance or economic security,” Stanley says, “They’re offering them delight in the torture of others.”
“It’s classic, textbook propaganda” echoes Joan Donovan, a disinformation scholar and the co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute; she’s also a co-author of the book Meme Wars, which looked at how the far-right has weaponized memes to draw people to their cause.
“They’re most effective when they’re authorless,” Donovan says, as the government’s have been. But she suspects the memes are being produced by younger men, “who work for relatively cheap or for free, for the glory of Trump resharing a meme. And they do see themselves similar to the way that QAnon [adherents] did, being digital soldiers, being part of the information war.”
The government’s expanded, meme-heavy propaganda efforts, Donovan points out, are happening at the the same time that ICE is lifting the age cap on who can join, and sharing memes about fathers and sons joining together to hunt migrants.
Donovan worries about the effect these propaganda efforts will have on the far-right, and the effect for them to create “a new, potentially very violent street movement that’s being catalyzed right now through the use of these dehumanizing memes and also the recruitment by ICE.” Outside government, she says, ‘there’s a larger cultural shift,” with extremists more present and blatant on social media: “There’s quite a bit more derogatory memes and content flowing through X and other social media platforms.”
Attempts to sanitize and popularize state violence through mass media and popular culture go back far further than the edgelords manning the Twitter controls at ICE, of course. During the Holocaust, cartoons envisioning Jews as rats were meant to provoke loathing and disgust, linking them with disease and contagion—something to be cast out of the body of society. Supporters of Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ past president, helped popularized his brutal and deadly drug war through what Buzzfeed News called “a never-ending meme-driven propaganda campaign.” Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found that Russian milbloggers—ultranationalist and often explicitly pro-war accounts—hugely increased the number of propagandistic, and often manipulated, images they were posting on Telegram in the two weeks leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It’s an example of another government deploying what the researchers call “Politically Salient Image Patterns,” which, as they put it, “serve to influence, demean, manipulate, and motivate various audience segments.”
Using trolling to thinly veil a serious, and deeply bigoted, aim is also not new. In late 2017, for instance, Gawker‘s Ashley Feinberg obtained a copy of the style guide for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,” its author wrote, while going on to admit that his real objective was to “gas” Jewish people, who he identified with a slur. Openly calling for violence was forbidden at the site, but the guide directed that “whenever someone does something violent, it should be made light of.” And the author counseled that writers for the site should “always claim we are winning, and should celebrate any wins with extreme exaggeration.”
The walk between those sentiments and the people now behind the government’s social media wheels is far shorter than it should be. “These accounts are offering up a view of America that isn’t about inclusivity and democracy,” Donovan says. “We need to help people understand the symbols and what’s happening in the background… It’s so important for young people to have a sense of pride of place and duty to their country. But not in this way, not in a way that oppresses the human dignity of others.”
History, Donovan adds, “is our cipher here. It’s going to help decode some of the imagery, the dog whistles, the derivative way in which they’re using aspects of culture, the grotesque and cheap versions of Uncle Sam.”
And in the end, she says, whether it comes sooner or far too late for the victims it’s meant to dehumanize, “There’s a price to pay for that kind of behavior.”