Agitslop
The Trump administration appropriates 250 years’ worth of American propaganda.
In 1872, George Crofutt, a publisher of travel guides advertising the American West, commissioned a painting from the German-born John Gast: an idyllic depiction of westward-bound American pioneers. Floating above them is Columbia, the female personification of the United States that inspired the following decade’s Statue of Liberty, bearing a textbook in one hand and a telegraph wire in the other. In her wake come the hallmarks of American modernization that would lend the painting its name: railroad, ships, and farmers, all illuminated by a rising sun marching inexorably westward across the sky. This is perhaps the single image most associated with manifest destiny, which held that the United States had a divine right to occupy the whole of North America — at the expense, of course, of the Native Americans who already inhabited those lands.
American Progress (1872) is just one of the propaganda images repurposed by the Department of Homeland Security for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recruitment in 2025. “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending,” reads a caption accompanying the image, posted to X. Other images shared by DHS include Thomas Kinkade’s Morning Pledge (2015), which depicts an idyllic small town complete with mid-century cars, and Morgan Weistling’s A Prayer for a New Life (2020), which shows a pioneer couple admiring their newborn infant on the frontier — as well as a large number of seemingly AI-rendered riffs on World War I and World War II military recruitment posters. So many themes are invoked simultaneously in this campaign that its message becomes almost incoherent. In fact, what unites the images shared by DHS is the history of US imperialism — its excesses now directed inward against Americans at home.
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