Drew Harwell

That has been adopted by the neo-fascist group, the Proud Boys, as well as other white nationalist organizations.

And this one was also, again, accompanied with a link to sign up to ICE.

It's, you know, a little bit concerning.

So this coat that he has, that is not standard issue for U.S.

Border Patrol.

Trust me, I did my research.

That is a custom coat.

A custom coat that happens to look a lot like...

the overcoats that the Nazi SS officers wore during World War II.

you know, among liberals online over-diagnosis of, you know, allegedly white nationalist references, like you see often people, you know, counting the number of letters in a given message, and if it adds up to 14, which is a number associated with the Nazis, then they're saying this is a coded white nationalist appeal.

And, you know, I think some of that goes...

a bit too far.

Welcome back to another episode of Decoding Nazi Dog Whistles from the Trump Administration.

But what I would say here is, you know, one is just the volume of coincidences that would need to be happening for none of this to be intentional.

But perhaps even more fundamentally, like you don't even need the illusion to recognize that what is being promoted here by official government agencies is a very exclusivist vision of American identity.

Like the first post that I quoted, one homeland, one people, one heritage.

Even if there is no illusion there, even if the writer of that was somehow ignorant of the Hitler slogan, on the surface of it, to say that America has only one heritage seems to me to imply that there's only one ethnicity in the United States that is truly American, because obviously...

you know, the African-American experience, black people in the United States have a distinct heritage from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in New England who have a distinct heritage from, you know, Asian-American immigrants who came here after 1960.

And so, you know, I think that there's just kind of a surface level thing here, you know, which you also see in tweets such as another ICE recruitment tweet that said, defend your culture.

You're not defending immigration law, upholding the rule of law, but you're, by doing that, protecting your culture from immigrants who implicitly are poisoning that culture.