I was forwarded a New York Times article with the following headline and deck:
Homeland Security Hires Labor Dept. Aide Whose Posts Raised Alarms
A young aide behind social posts that echoed white supremacist messaging will help run social media for the much larger Homeland Security Department.
It certainly raised my alarm, as I recently completed teaching a semester of a class called “Where the Truth Lies: Reading Propaganda.” For an assignment I had students discuss marks, symbols and brands that communicate contrasting and opposing messages depending on their users and usage (e.g., swastikas, stars, eagles, “V for Victory” sign language, etc.). In addition, students had to find either historic or contemporary propaganda images that were transformed from negative to positive representations through the aid of montage, Photoshop and, with increased frequency, AI.
One of my students came upon Department of Labor promos that had to be the result of AI prompts used to make posters derived from vintage social, socialist and national socialist imagery. I wrote about some of them here. And shortly after I began looking further and found heroic-leader-big-brother cliches on Instagram.
Retro styling for messages signaling the “heroic homeland” have been common propaganda tropes over the last century, used by both left and right. The ones below are from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Instagram account.
A notorious example of remix stupidity is this 1988 take on a well-known poster, The German Student Fights for the Führer and the People (c. 1935). It was reapplied as a promotion for the U.S. meat industry. (I critiqued it in my book The Swastika as a profoundly ignorant retro “pastiche.”)
Similar reimaginings are familiar as parody and ironic graphic commentary. Usually, employing a famously iconic image (e.g., Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”) is the most effective mental trigger because of wide recognition. We have thus become accustomed to the heroic/patriotic trope in advertising, but with slight twists they become extremist memes, like the Montgomery Flagg recruitment poster below.
Last week, as noted above, my inbox was filled with this news from the Times and other sources:
“The Department of Homeland Security has hired a social media manager from the Department of Labor for a key communications job, despite posts he made on Labor Department media accounts that raised internal alarms over possible white-nationalist messaging.” Below are a few examples of his work.
“Peyton Rollins, 21, was hired this month to help run Homeland Security’s social media accounts, which have become public bullhorns for President Trump’s mass-deportation efforts and come under scrutiny of their own for appealing to right-wing extremists.”
According to his LinkedIn page, Rollins is indeed Homeland Security’s digital communications director. The Daily Heller tried reaching out to query him on why he is using this charged totalitarian-era retro imagery as memes: What is the subtext behind these images of healthy and strong white men and women? Is there someone other than himself who is directing this campaign? One can only assume, given the shiny gold and silver auras of the images, Trump is somewhere in the shadows.