What We Choose to Nazi
The Department of Labor is posting Heroic Realism propaganda. What, exactly, are they telling us?
Good morning to everyone, including Long Island wine importer Bill DeBlasio—who accidentally provoked a minor media scandal this week when a reporter from the Times of London emailed him seeking comment on Zohran Mamdani’s policies. That reporter was apparently under the impression that he was reaching out to the former mayor of New York City Bill DeBlasio. When the Times published wine importer DeBlasio’s comments that “the math” of Mamdani’s plans “doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and the political hurdles are substantial,” things went haywire. Former mayor DeBlasio accused the paper of fabricating his quotes, and the Times deleted the story amid mass confusion.
“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio,” wine importer Bill DeBlasio told Semafor yesterday. “I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor. So I just gave him my opinion.”
If there are even MORE Bill DeBlasios out there, waiting to be quoted, we want to know. Our tipline is open.
In other news, we have something special on tap today: At 4 p.m. ET, Huddled Masses reporter Adrian Carrasquillo—the real Adrian Carrasquillo, not a wine-importing imposter—will be holding a Substack chat to take your questions on immigration, Trump’s crackdown, and his reporting. You can join him here. Happy Thursday.
So Wrong It’s White
by Hannah Yoest
A social-media ad campaign from the Department of Labor is going viral for featuring a dozen or more images of young, blond, white men with strong jawlines and cleft chins, in blue-collar workmen’s shirts and jeans—such great jeans. These strapping young men, with their blank, inscrutable, artificially generated stares, smolder in front of the symbols of the bygone American Dream: white-steeple churches, construction cranes, oil rigs, and the Statue of Liberty, all shaded in the piss-yellow that is a hallmark of AI-generated imagery.
But it’s not the use of AI that’s giving everyone pause, of course. It’s that these pictures, released by the Department of Labor social-media accounts and bearing the department’s seal, are uncomfortably reminiscent of posters from the 1930s. To be more specific: the ‘Heroic Realism’ of Nazi propaganda posters and the similarly stylized patriotic posters later produced in the United States.
Why is this style being used now, and what are these images for? Only a few of the images explicitly say. But their purpose is explained in the accompanying captions: They’re promoting the department’s work on Project Firewall, meant to restore “pathways to the American Dream by ensuring American Jobs go to American Workers.”
Project Firewall is an enforcement initiative targeting H-1B fraud and abuse; it was launched last month in tandem with the presidential proclamation restricting the entry of certain immigrant workers and requiring employers to pay $100,000 fees for every worker they want to hire on an H-1B visa. The order caused confusion and chaos among foreign employees. The administration says Project Firewall will be the “MOST AGGRESSIVE” effort to investigate employers and hold them accountable for visa problems. And although the aim is supposedly to protect American workers, it’s not hard to understand why critics think it will amount to a witch hunt for companies hiring too many brown people.
The visual campaign behind the generic blond Übermenschen posts appears to go back to at least July when it was originally using phrases like “Blue Collar Boom” to promote the DOL’s apprenticeship program. That, at least, made some sense. The tenor and content of the newer images, by contrast, are at odds with the reality of the job market the current campaign is based around. The alleged fraud and abuse Project Firewall is apparently combating predominantly occurs in the tech and information sector, not manual labor or blue-collar jobs as shown in the gallery of idealized white patriots.
But the nuances of the job markets here aren’t really the issue. The issue is the use of this propaganda itself. DOL first tested it out with an artificially generated image of Trump himself, in the style later deployed in the recruitment images. The superimposed text says “AMERICA IS HOT!” and the caption refers to the American economy as “the HOTTEST in the world!” Trump is smirking and pointing with his arm outstretched in a pose evocative of many images of authoritarians of the past.
If one wanted to be generous (and willfully ignorant), you could say this collection of images is meant to evoke the history of American kitsch or the art from the New Deal, like the famous posters of the Works Progress Administration. But the DOL’s images are still using the loaded illustrated vernacular and explicit calls to action of wartime recruitment efforts. There are historical associations of Heroic Realism—and the fact that the young idealized patriots featured in these images are uniformly white and have hair styled unmistakably like the Hitler Youth. This compositional style, with its monumental proportions and overt symbolism, is more strongly associated with the legacy of authoritarianism than America’s federally supported arts projects or, say, the paintings Norman Rockwell produced for his Saturday Evening Post covers.
The DOL posters are also coming amid a broader, possibly illegal, attempt by other arms of the government to normalize the Trump administration’s rapid descent into authoritarian rule. The Department of Homeland Security is also posting AI memes and copyrighted material branded with government logos, calling for Americans to join ICE and to “stop the flood” of immigrants.
There is a final irony. As millions of Americans are facing a real possibility of hunger in the days ahead and as tech giants like Amazon lay off tens of thousands of workers—adding to the material conditions that will make enlisting in the army ICE is building a more appealing option—all this AI-generated slop is being used to harden false, in-group thinking among impressionable and disillusioned young men. The very AI tools that are adding to today’s employment problems are being used by the Trump administration to chip away at reality, one white-supremacy meme and one fascistic propaganda video at a time.
Heresy At DOJ
by Andrew Egger
In June 2023, a Washington man named Taylor Taranto drove cross-country to the nation’s capital on a mission. In YouTube livestreams, he said he had fitted his van with a detonator and intended to use it to blow up a government building. He posted an address online purporting to be Barack Obama’s home—one day after Donald Trump posted the same address on Truth Social—then drove around D.C.’s Kalorama neighborhood in an apparent attempt to find it. Approached by Secret Service agents, Taranto attempted to flee, but was arrested. When agents searched his van, they found multiple guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. A search of his online trail revealed a man positively addled by right-wing conspiracy theories who had been making threats against prominent Democrats—Obama, Kamala Harris, Jamie Raskin—for months.
This year, Taranto was convicted of carrying the guns and ammo without a license and of making a hoax bomb threat. His sentencing hearing is today—but the prosecutors who charged him, assistant U.S. attorneys Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, won’t be attending. They were placed on administrative leave yesterday, hours after filing a sentencing brief in which they committed a forbidden act: acknowledging that the January 6th attack on the Capitol, which Taranto attended, was carried out by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters.”
Last night, after Valdivia and White were placed on leave, a new set of prosecutors for U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro filed an updated sentencing brief. Identical in nearly every respect, the new brief removed all mention of January 6th and scrubbed the suggestion that it was Trump’s post that had informed Taranto where to look for Obama immediately prior to his arrest.
Should we be surprised? Probably not. But this outrageous story does serve as a useful reminder about the current condition of federal prosecution in America. Today’s Justice Department is not a body determined to pursue justice according to the law independent of political pressure. It’s the law-enforcement arm of the Trump administration, and the Trump administration’s political dictates don’t just determine who gets targeted; they determine what facts the Justice Department is permitted to consider true.
It is, of course, an indisputable fact that the Capitol was sacked on January 6th by “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters,” and that Taranto was one of them. Even the most galaxy-brained MAGA conspiracy theories about January 6th do not deny that a riot occurred.
But Valdivia and White’s inclusion of that fact constituted a heresy against the regime. It cut against ex cathedra dogma that those convicted of crimes that day were simply noble patriots preyed upon by Joe Biden’s predatory politicized justice system. For the government to acknowledge that one of those pardon recipients later turned up in D.C. again, hunting Democrats to kill, is a career-ending offense for the one who speaks the unspeakable word.
If there’s anything surprising about this story, it’s the speed and smoothness with which the inquisition occurred. It was mere hours after the filing of their brief that Valdivia and White were relieved of their duties, mere hours after that that the apostate brief was corrected and refiled. The offending thought was corrected, the offending thinkers were quarantined, order was restored. The system ticks on. Soon we won’t even be able to see it operate at all.
AROUND THE BULWARK
MAGA’s Tough-Guy Civil War Comes for Tom Homan... On The Next Level, JVL, SARAH, and TIM talk about the intra-MAGA war inside immigration enforcement and the bizarre fall of Tom Homan.
Does RFK Jr. Make a Good Campaign Villain? Not every Democrat is so sure, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
Trump Swaps Decorated Admiral With 33-Year-Old DOGEr... The highly unorthodox personnel change affects a critical government research role. JOE PERTICONE reports this #scoop in Press Pass.
Against the Crime-Scene Halloween... Bring on the spooky and screamy, creepy and kitschy decor. Just don’t treat lurid murder imagery as frivolous fun this Halloween, argues CLARE COFFEY.
Twilight of the Democratic Influencer Candidates... Online celebs keep trying to turn big followings into viable congressional campaigns. Democrats should stay wary, warns KAIVAN SHROFF.
Quick Hits
PARDON FOLLIES: In Trump 2.0, indescribably stupid storylines never really go away—they just go dormant for a while. Back in March, we wrote about the malicious idiocy of Trump’s announcement that many of the pardons issued by Joe Biden in his closing months in office—including those preemptively pardoned to protect them from baseless political retribution by Trump himself—were “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” on the supposed grounds that they had been issued without his knowledge or consent. Biden denied this in July, telling the New York Times that “I made every decision” on pardons and calling those who said otherwise “liars.” But Republicans on the House Oversight Committee have spent months quietly building a case to support Trump’s assertion. This week, they unveiled the fruits of their labors.
The committee’s investigation revealed no actual evidence that pardons had been signed without Biden’s knowledge. But committee Republicans flipped the burden of proof on its head, alleging that all Biden actions signed by autopen should be considered forged unless a documentary record could be produced showing he authorized them. Barring such documentation, committee Chair James Comer wrote in a Tuesday letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “the Committee deems void President Biden’s executive actions that were signed using the autopen.”
This is manifest nonsense—the equivalent of Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy. It is not the job of the House Oversight Committee to confirm or rule void presidential pardons or executive orders. But it comes as the White House seems to be gearing up to make a real push to punish both the Biden pardon recipients and those who worked on giving them those pardons. “I can tell you unequivocally,” U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin wrote in a Monday email to Comer reported by CNN, “that my Office cannot support the validity and ongoing legal effect of pardons and commutations issued during the Biden Administration without further examination.”
FLYING BLIND: The Federal Reserve cut interest rates a quarter of a percentage point at its fall meeting yesterday, as the ongoing government shutdown continues both to put additional drag on the economy and to obscure policymakers’ general view of how it is faring. Chairman Jerome Powell said there were “strongly differing views” among the Fed governors for the prudent path forward at the central bank, and that further rate cuts were far from a foregone conclusion. The Washington Post reports more:
After keeping rates steady since January to assess the impact of President Donald Trump’s trade and immigration policies, the Fed cut rates in September and signaled cautiously that more reductions could be coming, even as inflation remains persistently high. However, Fed officials are increasingly worried about the state of the labor market. Major companies such as Amazon and UPS are among those that announced mass layoffs this week, and the federal shutdown continues to weigh on the labor market with trickle-down effects for federal contractors.
Trump has pushed for dramatically lower rates to juice the economy and to help finance cheaper borrowing costs for the United States. He has repeatedly attacked Powell and is trying to fire another sitting Fed governor. Speaking in South Korea on Wednesday, Trump again derided Powell for perceived delays in cutting rates, referring to the Fed chief as “too late.”
BRAZENING IT OUT: Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) found herself the unwelcome holder of an unusual distinction yesterday: She has officially gone longer after her election without being sworn in than any other House member this century. House Speaker Mike Johnson continues to insist that Grijalva will not be sworn in until the House returns to session, and that the House will not return to session until the government shutdown ends.
As a reminder, there is no reason Johnson could not swear Grijalva in during a pro-forma session, even if he continues to keep the House adjourned. He did so earlier this year for a pair of Republican special-election winners. But keeping Grijalva out solves a problem for Mike Johnson—it postpones the moment at which he will have to start thinking about the Epstein files again, since hers would be the critical 218th signature on a discharge petition demanding the release of those files. For now, Arizona’s 7th district remains—as it has since the March death of Rep. Raul Grijalva, Adelita Grijalva’s father—unrepresented in the House. And Grijalva has lost approximately one month of service in what was supposed to be a 15 month term.
Hannah Yoest is a national treasure.
I would like to point out the irony that all these Republicans rushing to nullify autopen pardons Biden says he intentionally issued were perfectly happy to accept that Donald Trump declassified all the classified documents in his Maralago bathroom mentally, without telling anyone and with no paper trail whatsoever.