Your masked pal that's fun to be with!

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) social media team have decided that white Christianist nationalism is the way to go:

If you mashed together a Vietnam War epic with a Christian end-times movie, what might emerge is one of the recent social media videos produced by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In early July, the department posted a minute-long short showing agents in tactical gear bathed in eerie red light — among them, Homeland Secretary Kristi L. Noem — piling into a helicopter, from which they survey a landscape as if preparing for an aerial attack. The soundtrack is a cover of the 1940s folk tune “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” by the San Francisco rock band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. As the action unfolds, a man is heard quoting from the Book of Isaiah: “I heard the voice of the Lord say, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go forth for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me.’”

The theme was echoed three weeks later by another DHS video showing murky images of heavily armed agents conducting a nighttime raid on a building.

The videos conjure a veritable holy war, in which God’s soldiers prepare to battle evil, a.k.a. undocumented immigrants. These adversaries are largely implied, rendered as shadows visible only through night vision goggles — a stunning bit of dehumanization. As in a lot of propaganda, facts get twisted to fit the message. The quote from Isaiah is wildly out of context. Read the chapters from which it is drawn, and you’ll learn that God was asking Isaiah not to spearhead a masked army, but to warn against profligacy and corruption. “Learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor,” reads a verse in Chapter 1, “defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.” In other words, nothing to do with a helicopter full of people armed to the teeth.

These Christian-themed videos are part of a larger barrage of propaganda that clogs the social media feeds of DHS and those of its subdivision Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Log on to their Instagram, X and Facebook feeds, and it is as if someone took humdrum government recruitment ads, marinated them with unhinged 21st-century meme culture, then seasoned them with a bit of Bible and Batman.

Stylistically, the posts are all over the map, but they share a tone of petty meanness straight out of 4chan. You might find an AI-generated illustration of alligators wearing ICE baseball caps, used to promote a detention center in the Florida Everglades. Or you might stumble onto an image macro touting self-deportation that features a still from the 1982 film “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” “Even E.T. knew when it was time to GO HOME,” reads the text. As journalist Tess Owen wrote in Wired, the maliciousness appeals to “the casual cruelty of the highly online far-right,” using “humor to make ICE seem like some sort of fun fraternity.”

I am so sick of these people. Most Americans are. But with the Republicans in Congress recently authorizing an eye-watering budget for the agency, the ethos these posts exhibit becomes downright scary. Read the history of the Schutzstaffel if I'm not being clear enough.

We've always had right-wing nationalism in this country; there's a good argument that the Founders were, to some extent, right-wing nationalists. (Less right-wing by the standards of their time than their ideas are today, of course.) These guys, though, are more nihilist than coherent in their ideology, which makes them far worse. We have 14 months to get Congress back. I hope that's enough time.