Front Burner - Trump 2.0’s Nazi-coded social feeds

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration has explicitly or implicitly borrowed from the Nazi tradition on social media.Specific passages or iconography from the Third Reich have been repurposed in the context of the government’s own legislative program today. The adoption of these extreme symbols, dog whistles and phrases is part of a re-mainstreaming of fascist and Nazi ideas more broadly.Ali Breland, a staff writer at The Atlantic, explains why he sees it as part of an attempt to remake the U.S. from a country defined by ideas like liberty and equality, to one defined by bloodline and heritage. 

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This is a CBC podcast. Hey everybody, it's Jamie. Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration has, on several occasions, explicitly or implicitly, borrowed from the Nazi tradition. Repurposing specific passages or iconography from the Third Reich in the context of their own legislative program today. The adoption of extreme symbols, dog whistles, and phrases is part of a mainstreaming of fascist and Nazi ideas more broadly. one which includes popular political streamers and influencers. And one that our next guest says is part of an attempt to remake America from a country defined by ideas like liberty and equality, into one defined by bloodline and heritage.

Ali Breeland is a staff writer at the Atlantic and he's spent some time decoding a spade of posts made by U.S. government accounts that resemble or borrow from fascist and far-right traditions. Ali, hi. It's really great to have you back on the show. Hey, yeah, thanks so much for having me again. I appreciate it. So the last time that we talked, we talked about the mainstreaming of Nazi ideas in the context of the increasingly popular American influencer Nick Fuentes. We talked about his Groyper movement and his particular resonance in American political life at this moment. But today, we are essentially having the same or very similar conversation about the Trump White House. And a number of social media posts published over the last few weeks,

maybe let's start by asking, at what point did it become clear to you that the tradition of Nazi language and fascist iconography was showing up in Donald Trump's orbit? Yeah, there's like kind of two moments. In one sense, this had been going on for months to like a much lower degree. Like something would pop up and it would have some sort of like weird far right association or sort of like echo something that existed only within white supremacist or neo-Nazi spaces. And so there was articles, I want to say, like, like in the fall or the summertime that kind of observed and acknowledged this. But then within the past couple weeks, really especially around New Year's, there was like on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, there was like a set of posts that really sort of like made this even worse and was like also again a very clear sort of flurry of like references to far right examples. One example was like, we'll have our home again was featured prominently in a post. It was like on a graphic. And then it was a reference to this song by this very niche far-right group that is very, like, nativist. There was other examples of the administration talking about deporting 100 million people, which they would say is probably like a joke or hyperbolic.

But like to joke about deporting 100 million people means that you are deporting people who are citizens of the United States. Just things like that. And just who's posting these? It's mostly the Department of Homeland Security, but it was other agencies within the United States government, including occasionally like the Department of Labor, the White House, the Department of War, aka the Department of Defense. So you mentioned that pose from the Department of Homeland Security, right? With the lyrics, we'll have our home again. and can you walk me through this example with a little bit more detail?

Yeah, so it depicts this like frontier kind of image in the mountains. There's a man on horror or back. There's a B2 bomber in the distance up in the sky. It has the text, like you said, we'll have our home again. When you search that, there's only one kind of like a clear place

that that comes from. And it's this song by this band that has very close ties to white supremacist group. It's unclear if the band is still going or if the specific group is still going, but like this is a specific quote from a specific place. And in isolation, it sounds kind of weird. Like maybe this was a mistake. Maybe this is a weird coincidence, even though this is like a fairly specific quote.

But when you put it in the context of the sort of other posts, like the half a dozen plus other posts of the White House has made recently, it becomes weirder and harder to ignore and harder to write off as not having some sort of far right association. There's another one. it was from the Department of Homeland Security. It featured an image on a number of platforms that depicts like the silhouettes of revolutionary era troops with glowing eyes. And it included the line, quote,

which way American man? And a lay person might not necessarily recognize that visual language or the references being made there. I mean, I didn't. And what does that recall for those with like more knowledge of this? Yeah. So this is like another example where like, maybe in a one-off scenario, you could be like, whatever, there's nothing to it. But which

way American man is a reference to which way Western man, which is a book that was published by a Nazi press. The book itself is like quite far right and like pro nationalist and pro-nativist. But it's like a reference to a book that exists within a very specific territory. It has had like a larger life as like a meme that has kind of gone a little bit beyond that community. But when you put that in the context of we'll have a home again or you put that as a in the context of another thing that the White House posted, which was one homeland, one people, one heritage, which mirrors a very specific and, like, known Nazi slogan. I will spare everyone, you know, my but my butchering the German pronunciation. But the translation of that phrase the Nazis

use as one people, one realm, one leader, when you put all of these things together, it's just like this recurring pattern that keeps happening over and over where Nazi and white supremacist iconography and slogans are referenced repeatedly. How would you describe the like particular kinds of propaganda or the aesthetic language used by the Nazi government? It was always like very about the people, but in talking about the people they were referencing a specific certain type of person. And it was by saying things like, you know, we are one people. They're also implicitly saying other people are not well. which is also a sort of de facto message that the Trump administration has been pushing. It's like there are certain types of people who are not welcome. And at first, it was just primarily Latino illegal immigrants. But you can kind of see how that's expanding with the sort of recent interest and targets that the administration is put on Somali people. Yeah. There's a movement that you make repeated reference to in your reporting. It's called, quote, fascia wave. Yeah, fashion. And can you, yeah, can you talk to me about what exactly that is?

Yeah, that's another point that like sort of adds on to this like weird pile of like things that don't seem like coincidences. There's this one image that they posted the administration, one of its accounts posted of revolutionary era soldiers that were modified to have glowing eyes and to have this sort of like the weedy effect on their boots. And if you're just like looking at the image, it's kind of weird. I don't know, you might not have context for it. But what it is is this style of edits and this aesthetic style that has been. popularized on the far right internet called Bashwave. It incorporates like the typeface used in VHS videos and it's like this sort of, it's a riff on this 80s cyber aesthetic called Vaporwave specifically adopted into like making pro far right images. And this has become this sort of

visual or aesthetic linguistic lingua franca for really far right people online who are trying to aestheticize white supremacist politics and make it cool. And in this case, like the White House was directly using it. And they weren't even just using it. They were using this specific rare iteration of Fash Wave that was referencing like right wing death squads, which is like this gamer subvariant that has been like referenced by far right groups. It sounds like nutty when I say it out loud. It sounds like very goofy and weird, but it's like very specific. And it has like a lot of very clear, it has a very clear provenance.

Ultimately, like who do you think these messages are for? Are they aimed at like the general public or a much. narrower audience that might already have ideological fluency in these kind of extreme ideas and symbols? I'm very curious as to who the specific audience is. I sort of expect that it is the base and an extremely online base of like younger men who do understand these kinds of things and can make sense of these references. And then there's like probably a subset who maybe doesn't exactly have the same kind of

understanding of what's going on. in his granular level of detail, but, like, thinks they're kind of cool. And then I think that the other sort of, like, wider impact, too, is to try to shift the discourse of, like, what is permissible and what's okay in the mainstream and, like, slowly kind of like, like, let these ideas drip out and try to make it more and more okay to talk about things like the Great Replacement or talk about America as a place for a specific type of, like, white Christian person, um, where everyone else is kind of, like, subordinate to that. Right, this idea of like shifting the Overton window, people talk about that, right? Normalizing these ideas over time through repetition, slowly pushing the boundaries of what is reasonable debate. Yeah, exactly. People online make jokes about how they're sick of hearing about the Overton window. But it is like a really useful way to understand these things. And it is exactly how a lot of people who are posting these kinds of things are thinking about what they're doing too. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers.

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With BDC, you get financing and advice adapted to your projects. Discover how at BDC.ca.ca slash financing. BDC, financing, advising, no-how. It feels to me like these images and texts and ideas associated with the Nazi ideology. You know, now they're coming from this administration, but they have been more present in public life today than ever before in my lifetime. And I'm sorry, I'm just going to read a bunch of examples right now for a while. I just think it's important that we really get the scope of this. So, like, I'm thinking about Elon Musk and Steve Bannon appearing to have done Nazi salutes during.

events last year. Thank you. My heart goes out to you. The only way that they win is we retreat and we're not going to retreat. We're not going to surrender. We're not going to quit. Fight, fight, fight, fight.

Donald Trump, giving a private audience to Nick Fuentes, Trump's very fine people on both sides' comment following the Nazi event in Charlottesville in 2017. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group. I'm sure you'll remember that late last year there was a group chat

with a bunch of senior members of one of the largest youth conservative organizations in the country and it was leaked. And these chats had all kinds of illusions to Hitler and Nazis. And one just read, I love Hitler. There were jokes about gas chambers and concentration camps. Some Republicans have denounced the language while Vice President J.D. Vans dismissed the messages as edgy offensive jokes.

We're not canceling kids because they do something stupid in a group chat. But reports say at least eight of the 11 participants in the group chat are between 24 and 34 years old and include a state senator from Vermont and a federal official. Last fall, Trump's nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, Paul O'Grasio. Announcing he is withdrawing his name from consideration. All of this comes just one day after that exclusive report with Politico saying that had reviewed messages Ingracia sent on a text change that included a half-thousen Republican operatives and influencers, with Ingracia allegedly writing in one, quote,

I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time. NBC News. John Kelly said that Trump once said that Hitler did some good things. I could keep going. The U.S. president is not necessarily responsible for the beliefs of his supporters, but it is true that a number of white supremacist, Nazi and far-right organizations have publicly supported him the leader of the Aryan Freedom Network, Henry Stout, told Reuters, he's the best thing that's happened to us. And so, Ali, I know that's a long list of incidents and controversies, but, like,

how do we make sense of all of this? What does this tell us about Trump and the government that he's leading? I think that the, like, no pun intended, most conservative way that you can kind of interpret this is that even if you take a lot of these people at their word, that they, are not sincerely like Nazis. They're not interested in like very, very far right sort of like aggressively white supremacist politics. It's clear that even if like you fully accept that, this is so endemic to large chunks of the right. And it's just the water that they trade in that like they're engulfed in it, whether or not it's the politics that they consciously want to have to the point where it is influencing the direction of the American right. There's

of these examples, there's more with like we talked about before, the rise of Nick Fuentes and how, like, he is so influential amongst the youth. That was at the Turning Point flagship conference in December. And I was able to find, I spoke to probably about a dozen college Republicans. And half of them were either like, yeah, I think Nick Fuentes is sick. I agree with his politics. The other half were like, I hate him, but he is an enormous problem that is just like here to stay. Nick himself wouldn't say that he's a Nazi or a neo-Nazi, but he has very, very explicit, like, white supremacist politics. He does believe in an ethno state. The United States should be an ethno state. He believes that minorities are subordinate to white people. I mean, I don't know. This is just like a thing that exists is a permanent fixture on the right and is engulfed in everything, even if the people spreading it, like, are doing a bunch of accidents over and over and over. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I didn't even mention like Greg Bevino, the guy who until very recently was the Border Patrol commander and the face of ISIS operations in Minnesota. and his aesthetic, he wears this long coat, right?

And Dear Spiegel has said that his look recalled that of literally, quote, of a Nazi officer. You know, do you have a sense of how this kind of rhetoric resonates outside the U.S., particularly in Europe, where these symbols originate and in many cases are illegal in many contexts? Is there like a different resonance for this kind of language in the U.S. when compared to other parts of the world? Yeah. Basically, like, there are guys like Martin Selner in Europe and other far right parties that have spoken very favorably about the kinds of memes that are being shared in the kinds of ideology. I was at the New York Young Republicans Club rally to, excuse me, not rally, but gala two years ago. And I was speaking to people within the AFD that were present. And they told me that they, were both like shocked and inspired by the sort of nativist and like nationalist anti-immigrant things that people on stage were saying and they were amazed that like this could be said in public and the

a fd is like very far right it's a it's a party that denies it's a nazi party in germany but recurrently has members that are outed as nazis or having nazi sympathies um they were president at the new york and republican gala club gala again this past december um So it is like a thing that does have a resonance and like people are kind of excited by. And then there is this sort of feedback where Americans are getting ideas from these groups as well. A really big example of this is remigration, which is this concept of not just like limiting immigration or not just getting rid of, you know, illegal immigrants, but also like remigrating anyone who does not quote unquote properly assimilate into the culture, including nationalized citizens and potential. even the descendants of naturalized citizens. Yeah.

And can you talk me about how explicitly Trump has endorsed it and how it kind of fits into the administrations? Trump has used the word directly, and then his staff has posted images. There's one, it was like during the spate of New Year's posts, I believe. There's just an image of his face with just the word remigration next to it. I think that when he's talked about it or been questioned about it, He sort of like tried to moderate the definition of what like remigration means and has been like not as straightforward in saying like we need to deport naturalized citizens.

We have criminals that came into our country and they were naturalized maybe through Biden or somebody that didn't know what they were doing. If I have the power to do it, I'm not sure that I do, but if I do, I would denaturalize absolutely. Do you have a question? Yeah. What do you mean by? It means to get people out that are in our country. Get them out of here. I want to get them out. You can see the administration sort of inching towards that where they post other things like I referenced earlier about deporting 100 million people. Yeah, I know in your piece, one of the experts you talked to when as far as to say that that plan is, quote, a plan for ethnic cleansing.

Yeah. There's not really, even if you deport like 50 million people, which is half of 100 million, like, I think that that still requires. you to deport U.S. citizens. I think that that goes beyond the scope of people who are here. One, it requires you to deport legal residence, but then it also requires you to deport people beyond that as well, citizens. Worth mentioning here, this idea, remigration as a phenomenon is by no means uniquely American or European. Our producers, Matt and Mac, were recently attending a conservative party event where they were telling us that leaders were feeling questions about remigration. So certainly it's here, too. Trump's team has, of course, denied any accusations which stand to tie postings made by his administration to the Nazis. How are they

responding to your queries? I know you contacted them during your reporting. Yeah, the thing that they told me repeatedly and that I've seen them post publicly about, too, is that they're trying to say that people seeing these kinds of connections are, quote-unquote, schizophrenic. And they're sort of, they sent me a meme of a Bob's Berger's cartoon character grasping for straws. They keep grasping for straws with like a goofy meme. They also interestingly, a New York Times writer wrote a very similar story to what I wrote about kind of trying to decode these memes yesterday. And the DHS doubled down and said that it was like ridiculous. There was like no connections to any of these things. If there was a connection to the far right song and we will have a home again that that would be

concerning. New York Times pointed out that the DHS used that specific song as the soundtrack for their post on Instagram. And within an hour, I think that that post is deleted. So, like, they understand that they're maybe going too far a little bit, but they're also, like, really digging their toes in at the same time. I'm not sure any of this can really necessarily be described as a surprise, right? Like, Trump did campaign on hardcore immigration policies and deporting massive amounts of people he and those around him have framed his second administration as an opportunity to remake the country to course correct, to change some of the fundamental principles which have come to define modern American life. One of the core changes here,

as you framed it, seems to be to narrow the definition of what an American actually is. You've referred to this new American identity as a, quote, heritage American, which describes a very specific Anglo-Protestant tradition of people who can trace their lineage to early white American settlers. Or as you've written, quote, it posits a version of America that isn't based on ideals but on blood and soil. And do you see this as the beginning of something new for the U.S. or a return to a long and storied American tradition? Yeah, that is a good question. I think that America has consciously, this is a historical, in the sense of what America has like consciously tried to be. Since like the Declaration of Independence, it's, you know, tried to assert that all men are created equal. There have been just an understatement, but like enormous aberrations from that with like child of slavery. It's just like one example. And so then like in terms of actual practice, there have been like lots of aberrations. Jim Crow and Termin camps, the Trail of Tears and so on and so forth. But intellectually and like consciously, I think that America is like large. largely tried to make itself a proposition experiment based off of people with a shared set of

ideas that are not bound by a religious heritage. We don't have a national religion that are not bound by ethnic heritage. It's just like people coming together who all kind of like roughly believe in the same sorts of ideals and we debate these things out. And so that's like always what it's been. Lincoln reiterated this. Like this is historically what it's been even as like we've come short of this. Where heritage American conceptions of that like. So, start to differ is it's an attempt to like reconstitute what we are consciously saying this country should be and the people that believe in it which initially were just like influential but still people online they were saying that like america should now just be a nation of people that have a

shared heritage who are from a specific place um who have been here for generations and they are owed more than people who have come here more recently and it's no longer just an idea that's confined to the fringes of the internet. J.D. Vance now, the vice president has said rhetoric to basically this effect. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the civil war have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong. Senator Eric Schmidt has also said in public remarks at NatCon this past year at the National Conservatism Conference, something to this effect. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America, with the new myths, a new people.

But America doesn't belong to them. It belongs to us. It's our home. It's a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It's a way of life that is ours and only ours. If we disappear, then America too will cease to exist. People who are influencers but have an ear in the White House like Jack Bissobic have also talked about the term heritage American favorably. So, yeah, is best thought of as a way to recone.

constitute what America's consciously been and abandon the project of it being an experiment that is inclusive, that is based on shared ideals. And just to put a point on that, you know, if the U.S. is not an idea based in these principles of equality, however imperfect, right, if it is not a multiracial experiment, but a bloodline, what are the implications of that? the implications are I guess a lot of these people would point to European countries as like a benign example where like there are different groups but mostly like white people that have a heritage in the country are like elevated and that seems to work out okay I guess I would argue that there is like a lot of racism and that has produced like suboptimal outcomes for the countries and for specific populations but they would try to say that that's what we're going towards but I think that in the very specific ways that they're approaching it and trying to make America a blooded soil nation, like you're going to end up with like very dark blood and soil results. I don't want to go back. It's very cheap to like return to the most obvious association of what a blood and soil nation is, which is like Nazi Germany.

But any place that values people differently is a place that will treat people unjustly and immorally. Okay. Ali, thank you so much for this. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.