NM won’t bow before these Neo-Nazis

Recent tweets from the Trump Administration have been unapologetically racist and coded with white supremacist language while celebrating mass deportation.

Those of you who are still supporting this fascist purge will be remembered in our history books as a stain on our nation. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

“Defend your culture!” That’s what an Aug. 5 tweet from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security screamed in asking people to take jobs rounding up immigrants.

A few weeks earlier, a July 23 tweet from Homeland Security made clear exactly what the Trump Administration means when it calls for people to defend their culture. It posted an image of the painting “American Progress” by John Gast.

The painting celebrates manifest destiny and shows white Americans chasing down indigenous people. Painted in 1872, it came at a time when the U.S. Army was forcibly removing the last resisting indigenous people from their ancestral lands across the West and killing many of them.

In other words, it’s a celebration of one of the most racist chapters in U.S. history.

As MSNBC opinion columnist Zeeshan Aleem wrote, “The agency is promoting the idea that America’s most authentic heritage can be traced back to its history of ethnic cleansing, racist social hierarchies and racial domination.”

Literal Neo-Nazis

The Homeland Security tweet about the painting states, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” It matches the energy extremist Ann Coulter brought last month when she tweeted that the United States “didn’t kill enough Indians.”

Twitter’s artificial intelligence, Grok, was asked if it’s coincidence that Homeland Security’s Tweet contains 14 words, which is code for two slogans that rally white supremacists, and includes the letter “H” twice, capitalized both times, as in “Heil Hitler.”

Grok had this to say: “DHS has denied similar past accusations as coincidences, but the precision here makes pure chance unlikely — I’d estimate under 30% probability. Scrutiny is warranted.”

In case you’re wondering, the two racist slogans, when combined, state: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children… because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth.”

Then on Monday, Homeland Security tweeted, “Which way, America man?” It was an apparent reference to the 1978 book “Which way, Western Man?” The book was written by white nationalist William Gayley Simpson. Here’s a quote from the book:

“Let me preface what I am about to say by declaring frankly that I am prepared to accept violence on the part of our people. The Jews’ hold on our throat is not going to be relaxed until we break their grip. Hitler felt that he had to take to the streets. All normal approach to his people was barred. Today, we are confronted with much the same situation here.”

These are literally Neo-Nazis. If you support what they’re doing, what does that make you?

‘Unapologetically’ white colonizers

It isn’t realistic to expect history to meet our moral standards, Aleem wrote. But, he wrote, “so much of the iconography of the right entails looking backward at American history and finding nothing to object to.”

That’s because the Trump Administration aims to reinstate an overtly racist society. If you scroll through Homeland Security’s Twitter feed, you’ll find lots of photos of white people as the good guys and almost exclusively brown and black people as the bad guys.

You’ll also see additional historical paintings. When the Washington Post published an article about artists and their families being unhappy with their work being used in such a context, Homeland Security tweeted back at the newspaper:

“This administration is unapologetically proud of American history and American heritage. Get used to it.”

I had hoped some Republicans in this state — like former Bernalillo County Sheriff Darren White, who is running for mayor of Albuquerque — would be on the right side of history in this moment. But White, like so many others, has instead aligned himself with the racist authoritarians. 

I know Republicans in the N.M. Legislature who have the capacity to be better than this. But they aren’t, at least not publicly.

Preying on men who feel marginalized

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the racist architect of all of this, knows how to get people to do what he wants.

“It’s your turn to be the main character,” he tweeted on Aug. 3 in recruiting people to work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

He’s speaking to white men who feel marginalized. He’s offering a mission to folks like the internet trolls who are bombing Star Wars TV show ratings on Rotten Tomatoes because those shows are led by people of color. When you visit ICE’s hiring website, you’re asked to “choose your mission.”

Miller wants to return to the days when white people held all the main roles on television and in real life, when people of color were the throwaway characters who died first.

This is undeniably a rough time for boys and men in the United States, especially white ones. In response, the Trump Administration is manipulating people like self-proclaimed incels into leaning into racism and fascism.

While we do need to address this crisis, empowering our men to be lawless, racist thugs is not the way.

You’re being recruited to chase down grandpas and gardeners, to separate children from their parents, to send people who fled persecution back to their deaths.

All because you can’t find a job? Or can’t get laid? That’s why Miller thinks he can get you to do his bidding. He’s preying on you.

It’s pathetic. Don’t fall for it.

A better way

My culture, New Mexico’s culture, is multi-racial. It has fluid borders in part because, historically, the flow of the river changed from year to year.

Our culture celebrates the white people who live and work here, of course — but others too, including the indigenous folks who were here before the rest of us and the Spaniards who lived here before the United States existed.

We salute the immigrants who have come to our state throughout our history and continue to come from every corner of the world because of our agriculture, universities, military bases and national laboratories.

My culture celebrates all the people, including the Navajo code talkers, who helped defeat the Nazis in World War II. It also honors the Pueblo revolt of 1680, when our indigenous ancestors fought back against their European oppressors.

We cheer for expansions of voting rights and civil rights. We recognize that the land we’re on was stolen from others. We work, imperfectly but with purpose, to try to right past wrongs and find ways forward together.

We’ll fight this racist purge

It would be a lie to portray New Mexico’s racial history as rainbows and unicorns. In fact, we have what we call the tri-cultural myth, perpetuated in the salute to our state flag and elsewhere, of “perfect friendship among united cultures.”

But New Mexico has a stronger history of working to learn from our mistakes and make amends than most of the United States.

Our Spanish ancestors did less harm to the indigenous people they encountered than their British and American counterparts. As a result, many Native tribes retain possession of at least parts of their ancestral homelands in New Mexico. That isn’t true across most of the continent.

And while the story of the Zia Symbol becoming New Mexico’s state flag begins with a theft, it is also a tale of good intentions. That’s more than we can say about the United States’ history of forced removal and killing that our federal government is celebrating — and that it’s repeating — in 2025.

As leaders in places like Albuquerque and New Mexico State University demonstrate, our state will fight this racist purge. We won’t bow before these Neo-Nazis.