With Manifest Destiny art, DHS goes hard on ‘white makes right'

Los Angeles Times

2 days ago

Since the start of President Trump's second term, the Department of Homeland Security's social media team has published a stream of content worthy of a meme-slinging basement dweller on 4chan.
Grainy, distorted mug shots of immigrants. Links to butt-kissing Fox News stories about MAGA anything. Whiny slams against politicians who call out la migra for treating the Constitution like a pee pad. Paeans to 'heritage' and 'homeland' worthy of Goebbels. A Thomas Kinkade painting of 1950s-era white picket fence suburbia straight out of 'Leave It to Beaver,' with the caption 'Protect the Homeland.'
All of this is gag-inducing, but it has a purpose — it's revealing the racist id of this administration in real time, in case anyone was still doubtful.
In June, DHS shared a poster, originally created by the white-power scene, of a grim-faced Uncle Sam urging Americans to 'report all foreign invaders' by calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On July 14, the DHS X account featured a painting of a young white couple cradling a baby in a covered wagon on the Great Plains with the caption, 'Remember your Homeland's Heritage.'
When my colleague Hailey Branson-Potts asked about the pioneer painting and the Trump administration's trollish social media strategy, a White House spokesperson asked her to 'explain how deporting illegal aliens is racist,' adding that haters should 'stay mad.'
Now, behold the latest DHS salvo: a July 23 X post of a 19th century painting by John Gast titled 'American Progress.'
A blond white woman robed in — yep — white, with a gold star just above her forehead, floats in the center. She holds a book in her right hand and a loop of telegraph wire that her left hand trails across poles. Below her on the right side are miners, hunters, farmers, loggers, a stagecoach and trains. They rush westward, illuminated by puffy clouds and the soft glow of dawn.
The angelic woman is Columbia, the historic female personification of the United States. She seems to be guiding everyone forward, toward Native Americans — bare breasted women, headdress-bedecked warriors — who are fleeing in terror along with a herd of bison and a bear with its mouth agape. It's too late, though: Covered wagon trains and a teamster wielding a whip have already encroached on their land.
The white settlers are literally in the light-bathed side of the painting, while the Native Americans are shrouded in the dusky, murky side.
It ain't subtle, folks!
'A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending,' DHS wrote as a caption for 'American Progress' — a mantra you may soon find printed on the $20 bill, the way this administration is going.
Gast finished his painting in 1872, when the U.S. was in the last stages of conquest. The Civil War was done. White Americans were moving into the Southwest in large numbers, dispossessing the Mexican Americans who had been there for generations through the courts, squatting or outright murder. The Army was ramping up to defeat Native Americans once and for all. In the eyes of politicians, a new menace was emerging from the Pacific: mass Asian migration, especially Chinese.
Scholars have long interpreted Gast's infamous work as an allegory about Manifest Destiny — that the U.S. had a God-given right to seize as much of the American continent as it could. John L. O'Sullivan, the newspaperman who coined the term in 1845, openly tied this country's expansion to white supremacy, expressing the hope that pushing Black people into Latin America, a region 'already of mixed and confused blood,' would lead to 'the ultimate disappearance of the negro race from our borders.'
O'Sullivan also salivated at the idea of California leaving 'imbecile and distracted' Mexico and joining the U.S., adding, 'The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle.'
This is the heritage the Trump administration thinks is worth promoting.
Administration officials act shocked and offended when critics accuse them of racism, but the Trump base knows exactly what's going on.
'This is our country, and we can't let the radical left make us ashamed of our heritage,' one X user commented on the 'American Progress' post. 'Manifest Destiny was an amazing thing!'
'It's time to re-conquer the land,' another wrote.
DHS seems to be vibing with the Heritage American movement, now bleeding into the conservative mainstream from its far-right beginnings. Its adherents maintain that Americans whose ancestors have been here for generations are more deserving of this nation's riches than those whose families came over within living memory. Our values, proponents say, shouldn't be based on antiquated concepts like liberty and equality but rather, the customs and traditions established by Anglo Protestants before mass immigration forever changed this country's demographics.
In other words, if you're white, you're all right. If you're brown or anything else, you're probably not down.
Our own vice president, JD Vance, is espousing this pendejada. In a speech to the Claremont Institute earlier this month, Vance outlined his vision of what an American is.
'America is not just an idea,' Vance told the crowd. 'We're a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.'
Weird — I learned in high school that people come here not because of how Americans live, but because they have the freedom to live however they want.
'If you stop importing millions of foreigners,' the vice president continued, 'you allow social cohesion to form naturally.'
All those Southern and Eastern Europeans who came at the turn of the 20th century seem to have assimilated just fine, even as Appalachia's Scots-Irish — Vance's claimed ethnic affiliation — are, by his own admission, still a tribe apart after centuries of living here.
Trump, Vance added, is 'ensur[ing] that the people we serve have a better life in the country their grandparents built.' I guess that excludes me, since my Mexican grandparents settled here in the autumn of their lives.
The irony of elevating so-called Heritage Americans is that many in Trumpworld would seem to be excluded.
First Lady Melania Trump was born in what's now Slovenia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the child of Cuban immigrants. Vance's wife's parents came here from India. The Jewish immigrant ancestor of Trump's deportation mastermind, Stephen Miller, wouldn't be allowed in these days, after arriving at Ellis Island from czarist Russia with $8 to his name. Even Gast and O'Sullivan wouldn't count as Heritage Americans by the strictest definition, since the former was Prussian and the latter was the son of Irish and English immigrants.
But that's the evil genius of MAGA. Trump has proclaimed that he welcomes anyone, regardless of race, creed or sexual orientation (except for trans people), into his movement, as long as they're committed to owning the libs.
Americans are so myopic about their own history, if not downright ignorant, that some minorities think they're being welcomed into the Heritage Americans fold by Vance and his ilk. No wonder a record number of voters of color, especially Latinos, jumped on the Trump train in 2024.
'American Progress' might as well replace red hats as the ultimate MAGA symbol. To them, it's not a shameful artifact; it's a road map for Americans hell-bent on turning back the clock to the era of eradication.
Like I said, not a subtle message at all — if your eyes aren't shut.