At first glance, there may not appear to be anything unusual about the social media posts that are part of the ongoing recruitment drive by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
But to observers of the far-right, and to members of the far-right themselves, there is something else that is recognizable in the language of the posts.
On Aug 11, 2025, ICE posted an image on its socials of Uncle Sam at a crossroads. It included the tag line “Which way, American man?”
The post echoed a meme popular among right-wing influencers, who use the phrase “Which way, Western man?” to illustrate a choice between an image meant to represent liberal values and an image representing their own preferred option.
But the phrase itself is taken from the title of a 700-page antisemitic nonfiction book written by William Gayley Simpson and published by a neo-Nazi press in the late 1970s.
The book has long been a favourite among white supremacists.
I am SO sick of this passive, milquetoast, normalized, way of reframing the obvious neo-Nazi fascism behind all this. The time for gentle warnings was like 20 years ago. Anyone who at this point still thinks there may not be “anything unusual about the social media posts” needs to have this knowledge urgently beaten into their head with an informational sledgehammer. This kind of gentle, mild, both-sides-ing concern farming is such a waste of breath it’s hard to believe it’s not intentional sandbagging.
You think so, David Lapan? So you think that’s the “wrong type” of individual for their “very serious mission”, huh… for fuck’s sake you blithering idiot. The violent fascist brutality against people unprepared to fight back IS THE WHOLE POINT. That IS their mission and purpose now. Stop living in your idealistic outdated dreamland of what you always imagined these agencies are supposed to be for and start accepting the reality of what they are RIGHT NOW. You can’t afford to keep delaying everyone’s understanding of what is really going on here. And the people who ARE irresponsibly delaying it and softening it and dragging their feet about it, I think, maybe actually want it to succeed.
Like you said, don’t say it in a milquetoast way. The corporate owned media aren’t maybe doing interference for fascism, they are. They don’t want to cause panic because that will hurt shareholder interests and make it harder for the rich to avoid the public’s wrath for backing fascism.
The liberal establishment is also not being honest about how fucked things are because they don’t want to admit they have no power anymore. Liberalism is dead and can only be rebuilt, not saved. They don’t want to admit that it’s dead because that might actually cause people to want to fix the problems that let this happen in the first place. At a fundamental level, they don’t want to recognize that the myth of the American dream is what led to Trump. They don’t want to admit that an ideology of privatization and free markets was the deathcult all the commies and anarchists told them it was.
America will never move forward until it is humbled; until the myths of American exceptionalism are dead and buried. The post Trump era will not be recovery unless people reject the desire to return to the past.