The White Supremacist Regime

The Trump administration is using racist and Nazi propaganda to recruit ICE agents. They're laying out their vision of America as a racial autocracy. The world's richest man is joining in.

It feels like things in the US have finally tipped over an invisible edge. ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot an unarmed woman in the face, muttering “fucking bitch” as he walked away. The Trump regime has not only defended him, it has leveraged the full weight of the US government to support its false narrative. The Department of Justice is investigating the victim, Renee Good, and her wife — not the officer who killed her. Various officials, including Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, have told the public demonstrable, flat-out lies about the incident, things that flatly contradict widely-available videos.

Americans are living under an authoritarian regime.

And it’s growing clearer that we are living under an unabashedly white supremacist regime. And I don’t mean that in the amorphous sociocultural way, as in, systemic racism has been a part of America’s story since its beginning, white supremacy is everywhere and it’s our job to see it and resist it, everyone’s a little bit racist, etc etc. I mean it in a very stark and literal way, as in: There are Nazis in positions of power. There are people in power for whom “white people are the superior race and should therefore dominate” is a foundational belief. “White MAGA conservatives and those who share our politics will violently subjugate those who are not us” is a message being broadcast by the US government.

After ICE killed Renee Good, Noem stood behind a platform reading, “One of Ours, All of Yours” — a chilling threat of collective punishment, but also a clear statement that this administration sees some Americans as worthy of their protection, and others as outsiders and worthy targets of state violence.

It’s hard to overstate just how obscene this is. Whether one voted for Trump or not, his administration works for all Americans, and this country is all of ours; there is no “ours” and “yours.” Every president in my lifetime, and for decades before my lifetime, has been clear that there is only one America, that they preside over the whole of it, and that they work for all of us. They may not have always acted accordingly, but this — the statement that there are in-group Americans and out-group Americans, and that all of the out group will be liquidated if even one of the in group gets a paper cut — is truly unprecedented in modern times. It is the language not just of authoritarianism, but of collective punishment and crimes against humanity.

In case that wasn’t clear enough, the Department of Homeland Security and the president himself directly threatened Minnesota residents: “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”

I don’t know how many ways to say that presidents should not threaten their own citizens with “reckoning and retribution.” But it’s clear, especially to ICE agents, that they have this regime’s permission to behave with total impunity — to abuse citizens, and to break the law. When Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner tweeted that ICE agents who commit crimes in his district would face prosecution, DHS responded with a meme: A listless “oh no” and then “anyway…”

That isn’t DHS saying “our officers have the right to defend themselves.” That is DHS saying: Our officers can break the law, and we don’t care.

ICE is also recruiting agents using white supremacist advertising, and Trump administration agencies are ripping off Nazi slogans. The US Department of Labor posted on social media: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.” Grammatical errors aside, the phrasing was awfully reminiscent of the Nazi slogan Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer (One People, One Realm, One Leader).

The Department of Homeland Security tweeted lyrics to a white supremacist anthem, “we’ll have our home again.” The same department asked, “Which Way, American Man?” — nearly word-for-word the title of a well-known white nationalist book. They posted a painting glorifying Manifest Destiny (and the genocide of Native Americans) with the caption, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth defending.” The Department of Homeland Security shared a propaganda poster of Uncle Sam telling Americans to “report all foreign invaders” — an image they seem to have pulled from a white nationalist account (“Wake Up White Man” reads the account’s bio). The White House shared that one, too.

Unsurprisingly, many ICE agents and employees have turned out to be racists and neo-Nazis varying degrees. A captain at an ICE facility was an active member of a white supremacist internet group. ICE prosecutor James Rodden ran an X account in which he praised Hitler and wrote that “America is a White nation,” “All blacks are foreign to my people,” and “‘Migrants’ are all criminals.” He still has his job, and is appearing in Texas immigration court.

Having intentionally recruited agents who respond positively to racist propaganda, ICE is now being dispatched en masse to Minnesota, a state that has angered Trump by not voting for him, and by being home to a large Somali population. ICE agents, like the rest of us, have been told by this regime that Somalis in Minnesota are subhuman “garbage” people who should not be in the country. Even Somali-Americans who have worked their way to positions of power in the American political system are not immune: Rep. Ilhan Omar may be a member of Congress and an American citizen, but her racist colleagues still call to deport her — so does Donald Trump, and the richest man in the world.

Speaking of that man — the one who has more resources than any human being in the history of human civilization, who had the president’s ear, who owns a popular social media platform — he has recently been tweeting about his nostalgia for apartheid-era South Africa, his affection for Rhodesia (a white supremacist state in which the white minority had near-total control over the Black population), and his belief in the need for white solidarity against the non-white hordes. White-run Rhodesia was “where the primordial darkness of the Stone Age was vanquished,” claims the tweet Elon Musk quote-tweeted to share. White rule across much of Africa was “a century of civilization;” now, it has turned back into a “Dark Continent.” Musk also gave a signal of approval — “100!” he wrote — to a tweet from a white supremacist who goes by Jerr. Musk shared it to his 232 million followers, and it reads: “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive.” Jerr followed that tweet up with one advertising his book, which “explains why racism is moral and why White men were sentenced to emasculation after WW2.”

This is not a drill. These are not dog whistles or insinuations. This is a coordinated federal strategy to attract racists and to fold white supremacist ideology into the governing of the nation. This is the world’s richest man, and one of its most powerful, promoting white minority rule.

We have tipped into autocracy. There wasn’t a single moment; it was more like weights slowly added to one side of a scale. And this autocracy is an explicitly racial one. That isn’t new for America — the Southern US has had long periods of being a racist authoritarian sub-state — but it is different this time around, with different tools and pressure points, and with a federal government united in the imposition of tyranny. I don’t know how we navigate it, let alone come back from it. But the moment is here. It is, of course, our duty to defy despair and resist this regime however we can. And the absolute least we can do is call it what it is.

xx Jill