THE VIDEO OPENS with dim shots of men preparing weapons and equipment in the dark. Over the moody noodling of an electric guitar, the actor Robert Pattinson’s voice can be heard. “They think I’m hiding in the shadows,” he growls. “But I am the shadows.” A rolling electronic beat comes in under the guitar, and we see the men march into the night.
So far, so The Batman (2022). But there are signs that we have left the DC Comics universe. The men have American flags on their uniforms, and as the soundtrack builds, a Bible verse slowly materializes over the b-roll: “The wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are as bold as a lion.” (It’s Proverbs 28:1.)
The video is not a trailer but a bleak riff on the superhero film intended as a warning—“TO EVERY CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIEN IN AMERICA”—and tweeted by the official X account of the Department of Homeland Security. The portentous caption continues: “Darkness is no longer your ally. You represent an existential threat to the citizens of the United States, and US Border Patrol’s Special Operations Group will stop at nothing to hunt you down.”
The faux-Batman video exemplifies DHS’s recent posting strategy, which combines appeals to scripture, dark and foreboding imagery, nihilistic memes, combative and often cruel rhetoric, and allusions to homegrown American mythology about our country’s history, especially in the form of paintings evoking the frontier. The overall effect is disconcertingly surreal.
And the strategy’s objectives are even darker than the remixed Batman clip suggests.
For example, almost every current or former American high school student will remember seeing American Progress, an 1872 painting by John Gast, reprinted in the pages of their history textbooks. It is most commonly used to illustrate the rhetoric of “manifest destiny” that provided an ideological basis for the country’s westward expansion. The painting depicts a mythical vision of the settling of the continent: A radiant classical goddess floats across the plains stringing telegraph wire as white farmers plow the earth and pioneers and settlers travel by Conestoga wagon, stagecoach, and railroad. Herds of buffalo and small groups of Native Americans flee in front of them—into darkness.
DHS recently posted the painting on X—but rather than use it as an occasion for reflecting on American self-mythologizing (especially when it comes to our country’s history of conquest), as generations of high-school history teachers have done, DHS simply endorsed the vision of American Progress with a short caption:
Reposted by the White House, this tweet is a good example of Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to wrap himself and his movement in the legend of the frontier. “In reaffirming our heritage as a free nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation,” he said during his 2020 State of the Union address. At his second inauguration five years later, he reiterated the theme: “Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.” His plan for a National Garden of American Heroes includes $200,000 statues of famous frontiersmen Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill Cody, a showman after Trump’s own heart.
Trump’s rhetoric of MAGA frontier optimism depends on maintaining a rosy, uncritical view of the past—reviving and perpetuating the myths that generations of students have been taught to think about more critically. This is the goal of several of the president’s executive orders designed to reshape the story our country tells about itself. There is the mandate to make American public school classrooms sites of “patriotic education,” and another aimed at “restoring truth and sanity to American history” by policing monuments, museums, and parks across the nation for signs of any attempt to “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” The tendency of these orders should be clear. As Sen. Cory Booker said during his record-breaking 25-hour speech from the Senate floor, “I don’t want a whitewashed history. I don’t want a homogenized history. Tell me the wretched truth about America, because that speaks to our greatness.”
But while the Department of Homeland Security’s blithe view of our country’s history is deeply concerning, the real message of the Gast tweet—and other DHS posts like it—isn’t about how we interpret the past. It’s about the Trump administration’s vision of the future.
IS IT POSSIBLE there is another meaning hidden in that oddly worded, quaintly capitalized tweet? That’s a theory going around; you be the judge. There are fourteen words in the tweet, and two words beginning with “h” are capitalized. Highlighting these features, a law professor in Illinois named Evan Bernick wrote that “there is literally Nazi code” in DHS’s post.
Bernick argued that the DHS post was subtly but directly invoking the Aryan Nations’ white supremacist numerology of 14/88. The first part of this formulation refers to “the 14 words,” neo-Nazi terrorist David Eden Lane’s white-supremacist mantra: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children, because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.” And the 8s of the latter part refer to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled up to signify the Nazi greeting: “Heil Hitler.”
Lane and his ilk had their own point of view on America’s westward expansion in the nineteenth century; the Aryan Nations drew on frontier ideology and iconography to promote a secessionist and segregationist “white homeland,” a domain they intended to carve out of the Northwest while displacing any Jewish and nonwhite residents. The goddess striding across Gast’s painting as people flee before her takes on more sinister meanings when this context for DHS’s caption is taken into account.
THE GAST POST IS FAR FROM UNIQUE in DHS’s social-media output, either in terms of theme or tone. The account regularly posts pictures of brown people in handcuffs and ebullient, trolling hype edits of chained deportees being shuttled onto planes to be sent “literally anywhere but here.” One recent post (captioned “Admin reveal,” jokingly implying we’re seeing a picture of the individual running the social-media account) shows an AI-generated white man in shades holding a machine gun as a bald eagle perches on his shoulder. In another from last month, DHS reposted an old Uncle Sam poster retooled with AI to tell people to “help your country and your self” by “reporting all foreign invaders” to ICE. The poster revision was done by a white nationalist known as Mr. Robert, who also praised similar work done by an account called “whitelandia.” As Noah Lanard points out, people like this, whose posts are being shared by the official accounts of government organizations, “envision an America that is forever dominated by whites—at almost any cost” He mentions another Mr. Robert post that invokes the imagery of Nazi soldiers while declaiming against the right of due process being afforded to nonwhite people. This kind of rhetoric is extreme, but it is aligned with the cruel actions of this administration’s “barbarous immigration regime.”
In Los Angeles, where Gast’s painting is currently on display at the Autry Museum of the American West, masked ICE agents have been targeting nonwhite people, sometimes evoking Gast’s image of terrorized Native Americans fleeing their homes. Refusing to identify themselves and wearing masks, ICE’s agents have embraced a kind of state-sponsored vigilantism in terrorizing Angelenos, whether immigrants or U.S. citizens.
Fear is rising. L.A. County Supervisor Hilda Solis told a reporter that “people are petrified”; local pastor Martin Chairez said “I think it’s revealing that people from Central and South America are being targeted but people from Europe are not.” An L.A.-area radio host put a point on it: “You’re scared to be brown. You’re scared to look a certain way right now.”
That fear—it’s a natural response. Consider this event that took place in mid-June: a botched raid on the home of a pregnant American citizen (they were looking for her husband) that had been staged so that DHS secretary Kristi Noem could ride along and potentially create a bit of content for television and social media.
But fear is also the desired response. Before Trump’s political ascent, the idea of “self-deportation” was believed too extreme to appeal to the voters the GOP needed to win over to win elections, now it is a watchword of the administration. Encouraging undocumented immigrants to remove themselves from the country is an objective the Trump administration is spending large amounts of money to pursue, including through the purchase of frightening ad spots on Spanish-language networks. Not just the cruelty, but the fear is the point. DHS’s cavalier social-media posting serves this instrumental goal, as do other actions of the department in our endlessly surveilled world.
On the same day as the botched raid, Noem—speaking at a news conference in the Federal Building in Los Angeles, where passports get issued—proclaimed that “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor had placed on this country.” At that moment, Sen. Alex Padilla tried to ask a question, but he was quickly stopped, forcibly removed from the room, wrestled to the ground, and placed in restraints. “If this administration is willing to handcuff a U.S. senator,” Padilla later wrote, “imagine what it is willing to do to any American who dares to speak up.”
SOME HISTORIANS ARGUE that nationalism has taken two predominant forms in American history. The first is civic nationalism, which stresses values and ideals, cherishing the universalism of the Declaration of Independence and the idea that all people have natural rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The second is racial nationalism, whose advocates have always seen this country as a special domain established providentially for the benefit of white people.
It’s this latter vision that glows darkly at the heart of MAGA. It’s why Trump and his agents respect no legal citizenship lines; some of them have called for the denaturalization and deportation of New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Trump’s State Department is creating an “Office of Remigration,” employing a term favored by extremists who call for, as Mother Jones puts it, “the forcible repatriation or mass expulsion of non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of immigration status or citizenship, and an end to multiculturalism.” And Trump wants the power to exile by personal fiat: “We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time . . . many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too.” Who is deciding, without due process, who the “bad people” are?
Sending away the “others” to make way for white people to flourish is at the literal center of Gast’s painted vision of the West. That vision is reproduced in Homeland Security’s own videos, which portray America in black and white, darkness and light. “Others” are confined to darkness where they will be hunted or driven out while the privileged are bathed in light.
Or check out the new thirty-second video DHS dropped on Wednesday morning, featuring America’s resplendent landscapes—Mount Rushmore, Yosemite Valley, redwood forests, the Statue of Liberty, and a beach on which a mother strolls, looking to the future. The soundtrack is country singer Sam Hunt’s cover of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Guthrie would likely have been appalled by his song’s use in DHS propaganda—after all, the musician fought for an inclusive America and wrote “this machine kills fascists” on his guitar, and one of his most poignant songs was written in memory of “deportees”—migrants from Mexico—killed in a plane crash.
Donald Trump and his Department of Homeland Security are trying to Make America Manifest Destiny Again. Trump’sexecutive orders make it more difficult for students in our public schools to learn the truth about our history of exclusions and removals, including of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and Japanese Americans. DHS is creating real-life scenes to match John Gast’s image of terrorized indigenous people fleeing their homes.The images Trump and DHS want Americans to keep in mind come straight out of this nation’s past: a new “trail of tears” for anyone who embodies opposition to their exclusive vision for the country.