The DHS posted a bizarre new video to social media platforms on Thursday featuring footage of federal agents arresting protesters in Portland. The video uses a song that became very popular among Nazis and white supremacists at the tail end of Donald Trump’s first term, in what appears to be a dog whistle to far-right extremists.DHS captioned the video, “End of the Dark Age, beginning of the Golden Age,” on sites like X and Instagram, along with a link to the ICE recruitment website. The video was also posted to Bluesky, the social media platform that many federal agencies joined one week ago to troll its more liberal userbase.The song in the video, MGMT’s “Little Dark Age,” was released in 2018, though it’s been slowed down to an absurd degree. And while nothing in the song suggests sympathy with far-right ideology (quite the opposite, in fact), the song was adopted by far-right content creators in late 2020 to pair with Nazi and white supremacist imagery.The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a British think tank that tracks global extremism online, published a study in 2021 that noted how popular the song was with Nazis. One example used in the report shows how the song was paired on TikTok with a slideshow of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, who was killed in 1967.But the report also explains how popular the song has been to promote esoteric Nazism, featuring memes and fictional characters with far-right symbols like the Sonnenrad or Black Sun. The fact that the song is also slowed down in a very exaggerated manner in the DHS video is another hallmark of the far-right videos that went viral in the early 2020s.
Again, nothing about the song (whose lyrics criticize police violence) makes sense as a ballad for the far-right. The Guardian described the far-right’s affinity for the song in an article from 2024: “Certainly, its adoption doesn’t say much for your average neo-Nazi’s ability to understand English. Little Dark Age’s lyrics are, fairly obviously, an excoriation of Trump-era America and racist police violence.”One right-wing political commentator on X had the idea back in July, writing, “DHS should drop a little dark age edit just to fuck with people.” And many far-right accounts on X clearly understood the message that was intended by posting a video with that song.“Dhs is posting little dark age edits. Crazy timeline on our hands,” wrote one account that features a profile picture of an anime character wearing a Nazi hat.Another extremist account quote-tweeted the DHS video with, “Good job @DHS! You caught up to were we where 4 years ago!” That account included an upload of another video, which features Adolf Hitler along with the text “12 years not a slave,” and a screenshot from the livestreamed rampage of white supremacist terrorist Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.Since President Trump returned to office in January, DHS has posted a lot of fascist content clearly intended to signal to Americans just how extreme the agency has become. Back in August, Border Patrol, which is part of DHS, posted a video to Instagram and Facebook with the “banned” version of Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us,” specifically a 13-second clip in which Jackson sings, “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, kike me, don’t you black or white me.” The video only gained widespread attention last week and Border Patrol removed it and reuploaded it with new music, but never explained why it was posted in the first place.
Who said nazis don't have great taste
