Administration Social Media Posts Echo White Supremacist Messaging
“Government agencies, including the White House, Department of Labor, and Department of Homeland Security, have made social media posts containing imagery and slogans associated with far-right extremist groups. These posts, which reference neo-Nazi literature, QAnon conspiracies, and white nationalist anthems, have raised concerns among experts who study extremism. While some dismiss the accusations as conspiracy theories, others argue that the posts are deliberately coded messages aimed at recruiting a specific segment of the population.
A flurry of posts from the White House, Department of Labor and Department of Homeland Security have included images, slogans and even a song used by the white nationalist right.
The posts have referred to neo-Nazi literature, ethnic cleansing and QAnon conspiracies, mused about deporting nearly a third of the U.S. population, and promoted lyrics from an anthem bellowed by the far-right militants of the Proud Boys.
Their authors are not on society’s fringe. They are in the offices of the White House and the departments of Homeland Security and Labor, using official government accounts.
To some people, the administration’s posts sound patriotic. Others might sense at most a faint dog whistle to extremists. Some posts may just look odd. But those well-versed in the abstruse codes of right-wing extremism hear klaxons.
This month, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security jointly posted a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Instagram, Facebook and X, overlaid with the words “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.”
That’s also the name of a song, written by members of a self-described “pro-White fraternal order,” that has been embraced by the Proud Boys and other white-nationalist groups. Hundreds of explicitly neo-Nazi and white-supremacist accounts have shared the song on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, since 2020. The white supremacist who killed three Black people at a Jacksonville, Fla., dollar store in 2023 included lyrics from the song in his writing.
“There are two types of people to whom these messages will quickly look familiar,” Oren Segal, a vice president for counterextremism at the Anti-Defamation League, said of the panoply of postings, “white supremacists, and those who study white supremacists.”
A Homeland Security spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said that if the ICE recruiting post were actually about the song, it “would be a problem” and “morally repugnant.” But, she said, the post had no relation to the white-supremacist anthem.
“There are plenty of references to those words in books and poems,” she said, adding that she was “in charge of everything” posted on the department’s social media accounts.
But when the post was opened on Instagram’s mobile app, audio from the chorus of the song played in the background. After a reporter pointed this out, Ms. McLaughlin said The Times was participating in a left-wing conspiracy theory.
“I’m telling you it’s not there,” she said.
Less than 40 minutes after the interview on Thursday, the Instagram post — including audio from the song — disappeared from social media. Posts on X and Facebook, which did not include an audio component, are still visible.
It was The Times, Ms. McLaughlin said, that was “mainstreaming racism” by tying the agency’s post to the white nationalist anthem.
Richard Hanania, a political scientist who once wrote for white-nationalist publications under a pseudonym before moderating his views, said such accusations were part of the game.
“They do everything up to the line; it’s kind of clever,” he said. “‘We’ll Have Our Home Again’ is a white-nationalist song.” He added that to his knowledge, no other groups would use it.
In the past month, government agencies have made dozens more social-media posts that include iconography associated with far-right extremist groups.
As President Trump escalated his campaign to seize control of Greenland this month, the White House’s X account posted an image of a crossroads, with a sun-drenched White House on the left and Russia and China to the right. The caption read, “Which way, Greenland man?” Last year, an ICE recruitment post on Homeland Security’s X account asked, “Which way, American man?”
The slogans echo the title of a 1978 book — “Which Way Western Man?” — thatwhite-supremacist groups treat “as foundational,” said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The book claims that Jewish people are plotting to destroy Western civilization, that Adolf Hitler was right and that violence against Jews is justified.
This month, the Labor Department posted a noir-style image with the words “TRUST THE PLAN.” That’s also a central catchphrase of QAnon, an internet conspiracy theory that falsely claims the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles, and that Mr. Trump has been chosen to sunder it.
On New Year’s Eve, the White House’s X account posted a photo of Mr. Trump alongside the word “remigration.” That is a decades-old European concept centered on the expulsion of nonwhite people and immigrants deemed “unassimilated,” said Wendy Via, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
Tens of thousands of Germans protested the concept two years ago after the country’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party secretly met with neo-Nazis to discuss plans to implement it. (More than a dozen AfD politicians have reposted Mr. Trump’s “remigration” photo on X.)
Also this month, the Labor Department posted a video captioned “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” That phrase resembled a German slogan used by Nazis during World War II, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer,” or “One People, One Realm, One Leader.”
The Department of Labor did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, dismissed any connections between the government posts and extremism.
“It seems that the mainstream media has become a meme of their own: the deranged leftist who claims everything they dislike must be Nazi propaganda,” she said, adding, “Get a grip.”
Those who study the online right said one or two posts might be coincidental. But “when you add it all together,” said William Braniff, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, “it’s much harder to dismiss.”
Other experts were equally certain the apparent allusions were not an accident.
“These people used to be in the dark corners of the internet,” said Jessie Daniels, a sociologist at Hunter College who has studied online extremism for 30 years. “Now, they are holding public office.”
Part of the draw of the posts could be their potentially secret codes and numerological clues, especially in the recruitment images. They appear to be an appeal to “a very specific segment” of Americans, young men who live online and are disaffected by what they see as unwanted changes in American life, said Peter Simi, a Chapman University sociologist who studies extremist groups.
Shirin Sinnar, a Stanford law professor who studies the legal treatment of political violence, said “they are plainly trying to recruit a segment of the population that’s moved by this rhetoric.”
For years, Mr. Trump and his campaign have dealt with and rejected accusations that officials in the Trump inner circle were surreptitiously appealing to racists and antisemites. A Twitter post by the candidate in 2016 depicting Hillary Clinton beside a Jewish star, before piles of money, had previously appeared on a message board known for antisemitism and white supremacy.
Mr. Trump’s final campaign commercial that year featured grainy images of George Soros, the liberal American financier; Janet L. Yellen, then the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve; and Lloyd C. Blankfein, then the chairman of Goldman Sachs — all of them Jewish — as Mr. Trump warned darkly about the “global special interests.”
“It’s just a straight line between these ideas and the modern Trump administration,” Mr. Hanania said.
The Trump administration is “mobilizing these people and having them flood Twitter and create this environment that they’re winning,” he said. “The fact that the media and liberals react so strongly to this is kind of a badge of honor.”
Scott Greer, a right-wing podcaster and writer who considers himself part of the “online right” that these posts are ostensibly targeting, is not so sure of the administration’s motivation. Some on the Internet-obsessed right think the posts “are meant to bamboozle them into liking Trump,” he said. For his part, he added, even though some of the posts go “too far with what the normal, not-so-online MAGA base may be for,” he now thinks they reflect the broader trend of politicians “taking this more irreverent tone and using memes from the right and left.”
“We accept it as more a normal part of politics,” he said.
Many Republican leaders vehemently denounce antisemitism, and the Trump administration has put pressure on universities and other parts of American society to protect Jews from hate speech and attacks. But in recent months, some members of the party have openly wrestled with whether to reject some Trump supporters who have made antisemitic, bigoted or extremist remarks.
When asked in December whether far-right extremists and conspiracy theorists should be embraced as part of the Trump coalition, Vice President JD Vance declined to rule them out. In contrast, Mr. Trump said of antisemites in an interview this month with The Times, “I think we don’t need them,” emphasizing, “I think we don’t like them.”
Still, most of the social media posts remain, despite the scrutiny over possible allusions to extremism.“
