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.

  • Ilixtze@lemmy.ml
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    17 days ago

    "Nazis won’t stop promoting their own nazi made propaganda; Nazis are loving it. "

    • AlecSadler@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      16 days ago

      I don’t know how to stop it either, because I don’t think we can (short of violent rebellion).

      Unfortunately, everyone’s just sitting around waiting for the midterms like it’s some panacea. I don’t think they understand that the damages done already will take at least 40+ years to reverse and that there’s a very, very high likelihood the midterms don’t really happen.

      • HubertManne@piefed.social
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        16 days ago

        can stop if we don’t effectively create wealth. If our economy slowed to a crawl because maybe all our workers were not the most efficient. Some people won’t do violence but we can all bartelby the scrivner it up.

        • AlecSadler@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          16 days ago

          I suppose I could get behind the concept of that working.

          I don’t think I believe for a second enough people can do it, because the majority of us are stuck in the check to check cycle.

          • HubertManne@piefed.social
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            16 days ago

            im not saying quit. im not saying show up. but I am saying don’t worry about getting fired and take your time. They say time is money and that is very much what they have stolen from us. We have been robbed of using all the nice formal niceties and taking our time and talking with customers and coworkers in an unhurried way.

  • Eddbopkins@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    how did America become the NAZI home front? all the other countries needs to put a massive embargo on the USA untill this administration is out of power.

    • NotASharkInAManSuit@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      Well, it all started with the greatest and most successful genocide of human history, during which time we became the monolith of chattel slavery. This is literally what inspired the holocaust. So we started being the nazi home front somewhere around 100+ or so years before the nazis ever existed.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      Europe is working on it. Notice how they’re starting to adopt open source software and are working on their own credit card processor?

      Right now, their governments and economies are too reliant on US-based tech companies that can be ordered to cut them off. So they’re working on eliminating that reliance ahead of sanctions.

    • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      short version or long version? because bringing over a bunch of nazi scientists and engineers into our security apparatus in 1945 so they didn’t join the USSR certainly didn’t help.

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      16 days ago

      It just took a handful of connected conspiracists with no principles and some forward thinking about how to sow the worst seeds.

      Names like Bannon, Epstein and others who funded them worked in the dark and with great amounts of support from a variety of institutions, worked to simultaneously make fascism cool and make average Americans too distracted to care. Eroded attention spans, people fighting online until nobody knows how to relate to each other anymore, dissolving communities and amplifying the most ridiculous or rage-baiting takes on both sides of ever issue.

      That’s all it took for people to stop caring as cartoonishly iconic fascists and nazis took power in the US, and the whole time we were thinking that cartoonishly stereotypical “bad guys” belong only in hollywood and can’t possibly be real.

      We all said that to some degree as the cartoonishly iconic and stereotypical villains rose in power and people were too burnt-out or distracted to give it any deeper thought.

  • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    In a tiny bit of fairness. The US gov has always done a lot of things just like the nazi’s. It’s oh soo much worse right now, and they are not trying very hard (or at all) to hide it like the past. But some people are just now coming around to see how much the government manipulates the people rather than help them. So don’t expect the next administration to “fix” these things.

  • Jollyllama@lemmy.world
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    16 days ago

    If I were a conspiracy theorist I would say they are signaling to the Nazis that if the 2028 election doesn’t go their way the administration has their back at insurrection part two electric boogaloo.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
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    16 days ago

    I bet Kristi Noem has a leather nazi costume hanging in her closet with all her other “work uniforms”.

    • GhostedIC@sh.itjust.works
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      16 days ago

      We should have elected the guy who made a ministry of truth and used it to censor true facts under the guise of “misinformation” instead :(

  • Astrius@lemmy.ml
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    15 days ago

    I mean, we practiced a lot of fascist stuff for decades, usually with a liberal smile. Now it is mask off.

      • Astrius@lemmy.ml
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        15 days ago

        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.

        • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          15 days ago

          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.