Drew Harwell

And they are, you know, kind of angry at the reminder of what's happening around the country.

And so they're lashing out and they're saying, you know, any company that's taking money for this kind of ad campaign, we don't want to support it.

On X especially, you'll see a lot of these very like edgelord memes, right?

These are like 4chan style kind of, you know, dark jokes about join ice.

And, you know, it shows, like, a minivan, and it's just this, like, ha-ha joke about, you know, join ICE and you can crack some skulls with your friends.

And they're really flattening this conversation around immigration into this video game battle, right?

I mean, one of the posters is from the video game Halo, and it says, destroy the flood.

And, you know, in it, basically, they're saying if you join ICE, you become this super soldier protecting Earth from this flood of aliens, literally.

And, you know, they're also making a joke of it, I think is the other thing.

DHS has been putting out a lot of deportation memes.

So has the White House.

You know, they're very common on X. You'll see them everywhere.

And some people get a little laugh out of it, but, um...

It's also pretty disturbing because they'll end up using images of real people who are being deported out of the country who may not have a criminal record but are being called the worst of the worst.

And so you see just the level of...

you know kind of bile in the discussion around these people and you know it just it just flattens this very nuanced policy issue into again this kind of good versus evil battle that they're framing like an action movie or like a funny online joke but it's really so much more complicated

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