Under the second Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security has become a prolific producer of images. Memes and propaganda are one in the same. But DHS’s aesthetic messaging is muddled. Mitch Therieau examines the visual world the department has crafted, seeking meaning in the murk:
We hardly need a decoder ring to see the images produced by this cadre as crude, jingoistic, and bloodthirsty. The images wear their malice openly, with shit-eating grins. One recent video shared to the White House’s X account—in which a clip of SpongeBob asking, “Wanna see me do it again?” is followed by night-vision footage of a drone strike, apparently on Iran—seems to respond tauntingly to Iranian cleric Shahab Moradi’s 2020 statement that SpongeBob and Spider-Man are the closest things the U.S. has to national heroes. Everything is right there on the surface. Already in the first Trump administration, debunking the government’s false claims was a losing game. Today it is utterly nonsensical: the penguin image cannot be “brutally fact-checked,” as one news organization purported to do to the post; it is not a claim to be awarded “Pinocchios” or designated “Pants on Fire.” It is something altogether different.
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“[E]very so often, if you dig into a piece of internet ephemera, the context—the who, what, when, where, and why—have the potential to dramatically enhance your understanding of the freak accident that you just witnessed.”
