There’s desperation in the air at the Department of Homeland Security.
That’s my reading of a new report from The New York Times that 21-year-old Peyton Rollins, who worked as a social media manager at the Labor Department as the agency pushed out posts echoing white supremacist rhetoric, will now help run social media accounts for DHS. (The Times said it had reviewed screenshots of an updated DHS staff directory, which MS NOW has not seen.)
It’s a fitting development, really, given that DHS’ social media accounts have already become megaphones for racist propaganda — a trend I wrote about last year that has only ramped up since then. One could also argue it reeks of desperation for the department to essentially promote someone who has spread bigoted propaganda to handle a major part of its public messaging, just as opposition to Donald Trump’s racist anti-immigrant crackdown continues to mount.
DHS, of course, has downplayed the demonstrable links between its posts and ones promoted by avowed white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and it has sometimes tried to hide its cruel posts mocking immigrants behind a veil of sadistic humor.
Amid these denials, I’ve been reading a lot of writings from historian Elaine Frantz, whose work focuses heavily on propaganda deployed by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, including the use of humor, tactful deflection and other strategies to obscure their menacing ways or valorize themselves in the eyes of the public.
One of the most important things I’ve read of late is a 2011 contribution from Frantz to The Journal of Southern History, titled “Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse” — an article that’s best described as an explainer on the ways that Klan members, pro-Klan politicians and even sympathetic voices in prominent outlets such as The New York Times played a role in downplaying and placating the Klan and its overt racism. Frantz, for example, writes of the Times: In April 1868 the Times printed, without comment or framing, a letter from a southern correspondent who claimed that there was no Klan in South Carolina; rather, it was “banter and practical joking, conducted by that style of persons at the expense of those overnervous parties who are constitutionally sensational.” By mid-May, as the first burst of Klan coverage was on the wane, the Times mused, “There is no doubt what ever that a great part of the uproar we had a short time ago about the Kuklux Klan, was without cause.” It strikes me that the nation seems to find itself in a similar scenario today, wherein political leaders are drawing shamelessly from the well of racism to achieve their quests for power and influence. Rollins’ new gig at DHS is evidence enough of that. The question will be whether enough of the American public will see through such efforts to manipulate the masses through bigotry.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
