Earlier this month, the official X account of the US Department of Labor posted a black-and-white video combining a collage of patriotic imagery with a soundtrack that seemed to be designed to evoke dystopian science fiction. The text accompanying the video read:
One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.
Remember who you are, American.
The day before, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted the recruitment website for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) along with an image of a cowboy riding under a drone and the slogan, “We’ll have our home again.” This is a phrase that’s unlikely to mean much to most Americans, but it’s the title of a white supremacist anthem sung to the tune of a nineteenth-century sea shanty.
The administration’s winks at the furthest edges of the Right have lost their subtlety, if they ever had any. Last year, the DHS put out an ICE recruitment post with the slogan, “Defend your culture.”
It’s obvious enough who this vision of the American “culture,” “heritage,” and “home” is meant to exclude. If rounding up unauthorized immigrants from Latin America is a way of not just enforcing laws but defending American culture, then any American with cultural roots in Latin America is pretty clearly being positioned as an outsider. But who’s on the inside, with the singularly correct “one heritage” all true Americans are supposed to have in common? Do only people with prerevolutionary American roots count? Or maybe anyone whose ancestors came over before the waves of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
One subset of Americans who would mostly be excluded by even this more generous cutoff is American Jews.
When it comes to leftists protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Trump administration has frequently claimed to be concerned about antisemitism — so concerned, in fact, that it’s willing to trample basic free-speech principles in…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
