This is One Thing, I'm David Rind, and when the Trump administration tweets out, we'll have our home again.

What do you hear? If you are a white supremacist and you see that coming out of government Twitter accounts, it sends a message that, oh, like our guys are in control.

Stick around.

'The Department of Homeland Security is once again in the spotlight, following the killing of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Preti in Minneapolis.

This looks like a situation where an individual arrived at this scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement.

Many Americans, including some Republican lawmakers, have been listening to officials like DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Top Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino over the past few days, comparing their version of events to the video evidence and found they didn't quite match up.

He came there before him for a reason.

How do you know that?

Because he was there.

But all he was doing was filming and documenting it, which is legal.

That disconnect and the massive outrage that followed seems to have forced President Donald Trump to shake things up on the ground in Minneapolis. Bovino is out, White House Borders R. Tom Homan is in. And according to a source familiar with the matter, Bovina also had his access to his social media account suspended as a part of this. He had been replying directly to people on X about the shooting over the weekend. This is all part of the Trump administration's MO. Nearly all federal agencies blast out memes to push out their messaging. They write like internet reply guys. Even Vice President J.D. Vance is not afraid to jump in the replies.

JD Vance tweeted, killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military. To which a liberal commentator, Brian Krastenstein responded, killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime. And then JD Vance responded, quote, I don't give a shit what you call it.

Now some of those memes and posts are crass and insulting, yes, but lately some experts have noticed something else, something potentially more sinister.

Now you might have seen some claims out there, especially on social media, that the Trump administration is using phrases and imagery and memes. Days and appeal to white supremacists.

'They say some of these memes echo the language of white nationalists or neo-Nazi propaganda. They allege officials are using the massive megaphone of the federal government to appeal to some of the most hateful people out there.

On Wednesday, the White House posted this image on X, showing two Greenlandic dog sled teams facing a crossroads, captioned, which way, Greenland man? According to experts, the phrase originated with a book from 1978 called, Which Way, Western Man? Written by an avowed white supremacist, William Gaylor Simpson, who among other disturbing beliefs, argued that Hitler was right.

The administration has strenuously argued that anyone making these connections is grasping at straws. But what's really going on here? Is this targeted or simply a coincidence? And does that distinction even matter to hate groups on the receiving end? Let's bring in John Lewis. He is a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. OK, John, so we already knew the Trump administration was extremely online, that it would be willing to kind of use the language of the internet and memes to needle its opponents. But when did you first start to notice that the online content being put out by the administration was maybe something more than that?

Yeah, pretty early on in the administration, I think you really saw a tone shift, not only in the sort of underlying racist, xenophobic messaging, but the memes and the references that they were making. I think, you know, you really jumped down these rabbit holes into really terminally online references. You know, calling out to these niche online subcultures in a way that we really haven't seen from mainstream social media accounts, let alone from government social media counts.

Right. I mean, so do you have a few examples that have kind of stood out to you?

Yeah. So, uh, the around Christmas DHS tweeted out this, this reference to a Gartha, you know, which again is just this niche esoteric.

That's blowing right past me, so you're gonna have to break that down.

'Yeah, it's, you know, this deeply anti-Semitic, white supremacist conspiracy that revolves around this hollow Earth theory, the true origin of the purported Jews. It's really just a mess from start to finish. But at the core, if you've spent years just steeped in these online ecosystems, It's a it's a dog whistle. And I think that that's really for a lot of these memes, a lot of these references, whether it's the moon man meme that DHS has posted a couple of times, whether it's...

What is that? Can you paint that picture?

'Yeah, again, it's this cartoon image of literally a cartoon moon man figure that is just popular across all of these white supremacist online spaces. And again, I think what's important with a lot of these memes is they don't have deeper hidden meanings, right? This isn't like, you have to go... Figure out what this means to figure out what this mean to uncover this true secret. It's really surface level and it's racist dog whistles. I think that it's this coded language where if you are a neo-Nazi, if you're a white supremacist and you see that coming out of government Twitter accounts, it sends a message that, oh, like our guys are in control. Like someone that has grown up on 4chan. Someone who has grown up in Kiwi Farms, someone who has spent years just consuming this racist, xenophobic slop is now running an official government Twitter account.

So you're saying for like, for someone like me who is not steeped in this world, it may seem a little obtuse, but for people who are really in it, it's clear what is being, you know, sent through these messages.

'Yeah, I think there's absolutely a very clear base message being sent, right? Because they're tying, you know, these pictures of, you know, penguins in the Arctic. They're posting pictures of the sort of return to post-World War II, the white family with the white picket fence and this message.

Look at what they took from us. Yeah, tell me about the artwork. I know there was a kind of dust up with Norman Rockwell and his art kind of being used for these purposes. I think his estate wasn't too thrilled with that, but it does seem like they're kind of reaching for some kind of image that people conjure of a different time. But that seems like a simple way to put it, right? Like, what do you think they're actually going for there?

'Yeah, it's racist, nostalgia slop, right? And again, I mean, this is, if you've spent even five, 10 minutes in, which I hope many people haven't, but in any neo-Nazi telegram channel, this is plastered across every single image, every single meme is some form of this, right. I think one of the most common messages in so many of those neo-nazi spaces was that idea of return to tradition, return to this sort of previous time before when things were good, when the white man was in control, when you had the white nuclear family, before things were ruined by insert desired enemy or outgroup that we're trying to target this week. Really startling the degree to which so many of these ideas have escaped containment, right? Even something like the Great Replacement Conspiracy, which, you know, if you go back five, six, seven years, I mean, you have to go looking for that kind of content. You have to go into some password-protected invite-only chat room to really consume that sort of content, and today it's being posted by official government Twitter accounts and You know, when stuff is that main street, again, it really does just broaden out the aperture of folks who are gonna go look up, what is the great replacement? What is Agartha? Who is Moonpin? And they're gonna end up going down these rabbit holes and then consuming just the worst content you could ever imagine.

So it's not only a dog whistle in your view to folks who already believe this stuff, but for people impressionable folks online who might see it and be like, oh, I kind of agree with this.

And I mean, look, you just look at cases like the Charleston Church shooting, Dylann Roof, you know, he starts down that rabbit hole by Googling black on white crime. The Buffalo Top supermarket shooter, Peyton Gendron, he becomes obsessed with looking up the Great Replacement Conspiracy on Reddit. And so we have seen, unfortunately, in the past that there are consequences to this, right? When there's this much noise, when the zone is just flooded, it's just designed to, yeah, push normies, push your average American down that rabbit hole, because as we've seen in the past, once you're in those online rabbit holes, once you are down in those spaces, it's awfully hard to climb back out.

Alright, when we come back, this concerning language isn't just happening online. John Lewis and I will be back in a bit. Stick around.

The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass import foreign cultures, which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own. I mean, we're taking people from Somalia, and Somalia is a failed, it's not a nation. Got no government, got no police, got no military, got nothing.

And I think we've also seen, you know, not just online rhetoric, but actual speech by some of these top officials, including the president and the vice president, kind of pushing the envelope of how they describe things, especially around immigration.

America is not just an idea where a particular place with a particular people in a particular set of beliefs and way of life

obviously could be interpreted as xenophobic, but for the Trump administration, they would probably say that this is hyperbole, exaggeration, that folks are just kind of conflating things. In your view, why is this different and not just an exaggeration of how this language is being used?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the dehumanizing aspect of it all, right? It's the fact that the cruelty is so clearly the point and that creating this us versus them has been the stated goal and objective of so many of these incidents. I mean you look at the Haitians in Springfield, you look at any of these unverified claims, they're designed to dehumanize, they are designed to create this us versus them. And I think the overarching tone is one of, we have to send back everyone who does not belong here. We have to reclaim this country and reclaim this country for white Americans, for white Christian Americans. You're not going to see an Orthodox Jew in any of these posts. You are not going see a multiracial family in any of these post.

Yeah, I think the Department of Labor got some heat for this campaign that they did, and it was nearly all white people in the images.

Yeah, and again, I mean, there are no shortage of these kinds of examples.

I mean, and it's really militaristic too. I saw a post where they kind of used the image from the video game, Halo, with the slogan, destroy the flood. And in the game, I played the game as a kid a lot. The flood is a swarm of parasitic aliens. So when you make that leap, it's like, that's really stark.

'Yeah, and look, I cannot stress enough the degree to which this feels as though every single communications staffer, every single head of communications in these executive branch agencies came out of these explicitly racist right-wing online spaces in 2016-17. These are people who grew up radicalized, who got into these spaces radicalized and You are now able to use their positions to push that clearly racist, clearly xenophobic messaging using the memes from 4chan, from these telegram spaces to send that message.

'So I should say we did reach out to DHS, the Labor Department, the White House, and the Pentagon multiple times about all this. As we record this on Tuesday morning, I've only gotten something back from the Pentagon, and I just want to read a statement they sent me from Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson, quote, if you see pro-American content with references to the American Revolution and your brain somehow begins making connections. To neo-Naziism, you may be schizophrenic or have severe Trump derangement syndrome. What do you make of that response?

'Yeah, I think there has long been an effort to sort of wrap a lot of these, you know, the fascism, the racism, the xenophobia, in the American flag, right? And that kind of claiming of patriotism. We've unfortunately seen for years neo-Nazis, white supremacists, using those sorts of images and corrupting them, right, so you'd have George Washington with the neo-nazi laser eyes, right? I mean, the neo-Nazi group Patriot Front, who marched in D.C. Just this past week, they wear red, white, and blue. They carry American flags. They are also neo-nazis. Unfortunately, these things are not mutually exclusive. And I think that when you look at the sheer number of posts that have come out of the Pentagon, of DHS, of Labor Department, that are, I mean again, they're not even dog whistles at this point. They're bull horns. It's hard to come to any other rational conclusion than that.

And like, there have been enough stories on this done at this point that if these agencies were truly not aware of any of these connections or if it was truly a mistake, they could have taken down the stuff, but they've doubled down and the stuff remains up.

Yeah, and look, I think that kind of speaks to a broader point of, like, we're in a time when nothing seems to matter anymore, and there don't seem to be consequences for things like this. And I think, unfortunately, the administration knows that they can just kind of laugh it off, brush it off, and then move on to the next day when there'll be a new story for the media cycle. I mean, this is sort of a badge of honor in the administration, and so it's unfortunately not too much of a surprise.

Yeah, obviously the administration, they take pride in trolling. I think there was a statement a while back like that. We will not apologize for posting banger memes or something like that, but why troll with something like this?

Yeah, because they can. Because, again, because the cruelty is the point, because they know they won't face repercussions from it, because they can just push back with the broader claim of like, this is the woke media. We're not going to stand, you know, we're we're not gonna give up. We're going to see an inch to these people. They're trying to destroy us. And I think once you have a group of people who are so ingrained in that us versus them mindset. There is no retreat, right? There is no taking a step back, toning down the temperature, because I think so many of the people in positions of authority really do view this as a culture war, as a very real battle being fought on Twitter, which is sad in its own right, but for these people, I think this is the battlefield, and they're refusing to retreat from this point.

And also, the administration is so wrapped up in its immigration priorities, and a lot of these memes or posts kind of intersect with that in some obviously some dark and potentially hateful ways. And so you can kind of understand why they aren't backing down on this point. But play this out for me going forward. If there is this entrenchment of folks who are versed in this language and are going to continue posting on these official government accounts. Like, what kind of permission structure does that create for someone just on the internet looking around and maybe, you know, tempted by some of these ideas?

'When you're terminally online, when your brain has just been poisoned by these means, when you're entire outlook on life is shaped by the 16 hours a day that you spend on Twitter, on Truth Social, on 4chan, on Reddit, and you have your congressional representative, you have the DHS Twitter account, you have Stephen Miller. All tweeting out that, you know, this minority group in this small town near you is the bane of our existence, the ill, what's causing all of our problems. It's only a matter of time before that person picks one of those tweets up as justification. He has a bad day, his dog dies, his wife divorces him, whatever that personal conflict is. But there is just every day he has a every single justification he could ever want, to go commit an act of violence, to go attack a synagogue, to go to attack a refugee community in Minneapolis, in Ohio, and somewhere else. I think it's unfortunately inevitable that some neo-Nazis, some white supremacists, some mentally unbalanced individual. Is going to take one of these messages as the call to arms. And we've seen that before, and I think unfortunately we will probably see that again.

Yeah, we've heard story after story of mass shooters, other violent perpetrators being radicalized by all kinds of things, but it really does get ramped up when you're talking about official government mouthpieces, potentially being the source of that. Well, John, thanks for the perspective. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

After John and I spoke on Tuesday, White House Spokesperson Abigail Jackson responded to our questions with a statement that read, quote, It seems that CNN has become a meme of their own. The deranged leftist who claims everything they dislike must be Nazi propaganda. This line of attack is boring and tired. Get a grip. All right. That's all for us today. We'll be back on Wednesday. Make sure you're following the show wherever you listen so the new episode pop in your feed right away. I'll talk to you later.