If you want to know the intentions of the people currently running the US government, it’s helpful to understand their perspective on the world, and to look at what messages they are sending to their base. One of the ways we could predict the current ethnic cleansing being carried out by federal “law enforcement” is the fact that Stephen Miller was a known fan of the French white supremacist novel The Camp of the Saints, which presents a scenario in which the only way to save France is to massacre a vast flotilla of refugees from India. The book describes the Indian people in grotesque and dehumanizing language, and laments that modern society is took weak and liberal to defend itself from this zombie-like invasion of brown people. If you want a more thorough review, I recommend José’s video essay on the subject.

As the ethnic cleansing has been carried out, the White House has put out several dog whistles for America’s neo-Nazis, as Mother Jones reported back in February:

There has been not one, but two posts from our government institutions that reuse a phrase ripped straight from William Gayley Simpson’s book Which Way Western Man?. It was published and promoted by the National Alliance—considered one of the “best organized” neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The book is antisemitic, racist, and explicitly states that Adolf Hitler was right.

[…]

This past year, official social media accounts from the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other government agencies have adopted a distinct voice online. The posts look like memes, utilizing dramatic AI-generated art, general patriotic slogans, and cinematic language about “defending the homeland” and shaping America’s future.

But if you look closer, a pattern emerges.

Many of these phrases, images, and attached media aren’t just regular social media content. They repurpose language, symbolism, and cultural references with direct connections to neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements. It’s content that experts say is instantly recognizable to those who are in the white supremacist know, but can be largely invisible to everyone else.

So, let’s look at a couple of the more egregious examples that reveal this pattern.

There has been not one, but two posts from our government institutions that reuse a phrase ripped straight from William Gayley Simpson’s book Which Way Western Man?. It was published and promoted by the National Alliance—considered one of the “best organized” neo-Nazi groups in the United States. The book is antisemitic, racist, and explicitly states that Adolf Hitler was right.

When reached by email for comment, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said “There are plenty of poems, books, and songs with the same title,” apparently referring to Which Way Western Man?. But a simple search across a variety of online music and literature libraries shows that isn’t necessarily true. One song by the same name did pop up with lyrics like “a war against Antifa, a war against the radical feminists, a war to take back our soul.”

“To cherry pick something of white nationalism with the same title to make a connection to DHS law enforcement. It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she continued.

Just two days after ICE officer Jonathan Ross killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, DHS accounts shared a post with a song titled “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” by the Pine Tree Riots. According to a variety of reports, the track is regularly used in white nationalist circles for its evocation of a race war. And it is easy to see that some of these posts imitate slogans nearly identical to those used by Hitler and the Nazi Party. One of the more brazen examples is from the Department of Labor. It features a bust of George Washington super-imposed over a montage of images the administration regularly use to evoke white Western culture, with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” Reports have noted the resemblance to Hitler’s infamous slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer,” or “One People, One Country, One Leader.” (The White House and Department of Labor did not respond to requests for comment.)

Individually, each post could easily be dismissed, but taken together, they seem to form something more deliberate: a stream of repurposed Nazi propaganda for the everyday person’s feed.

I once heard someone say that when people deny the Holocaust, it’s because they want to do it again. With these dog whistles, the White House is telling committed white supremacists (and anti-fascists who keep up with these things) that if they sign up with ICE and all goes according to plan, they’ll be carrying out something similar, with ICE taking the place of the SS. Dog whistles are a way for a group to communicate in code, in full view of the public.

Like most Americans (I hope), I knew some Nazi iconography from school and from movies like Schindler’s List and the Indiana Jones franchise. I didn’t learn about dog whistles myself till maybe 10-15 years ago, when YouTube brought me into contact with left-wing video essayists, and the shift in US politics gave me motivation to look into the subject more. I also, apparently, made the mistake of assuming most other reasonable people had done something similar, especially as Trump and his movement gained ground. Recent events have demonstrated that was me projecting my experience onto others, so while I have some problems with the ADL, I’ll direct you to their huge (but not exhaustive) list of white supremacist symbols and signals, complete with explanations (PDF). I think it’s worth spending a little time on this stuff, especially because these people currently run the US government, and they’re literally carrying out an ethnic cleansing.

I’m familiar with many of these, but not all, and I’m familiar with a few that aren’t on that list, including symbols relating to the rather bizarre white supremacist mess that was Rhodesia. I learned of that dog whistle when neo-Nazi terrorist Dylan Roof shot up a Black church, killing 9 worshipers in 2015. He wore a Rhodesian flag patch, and at the time I got a brief rundown of why. I have to admit, though, that I don’t really know the history of Rhodesia, or how that attempt at a white supremacist nation came to be replaced by Zimbabwe.

Well, I should say I didn’t know, because I just watched the latest video essay from Step Back History, and now I know a whole lot more. It’s a deep dive not just into the story of Rhodesia, but also how it came to be such a big symbol among white supremacists in the United States. They’re not going to go away when we remove the Republican Party from power, any more than the Segregationists vanished after the Civil Rights Act was passed. I think it would be a good idea if more people kept an eye on them, and knew what signs to look out for, so maybe we can head off the next attempt to enact fascism in the US.