The Trump administration says it’s posting ‘banger memes’ — here’s why that’s a problem for Jews
Nazi memes have gone from being a cause for cancellation to a great way to ‘own the libs’
Billboards of actress Sydney Sweeney are seen outside of an American Eagle store; the ads are also posted on social media platforms. Photo by Getty Images
By Mira Fox August 25, 2025
Pepsi ran a strange commercial in 2017. In it, Kendall Jenner walks out in the middle of a modeling gig to join a passing protest — against what, we don’t know. Grabbing a Pepsi, she strides up to a cop at a protest and hands it to him. Everyone cheers.
The backlash was quick. “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi,” tweeted Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter, Bernice. Pepsi tried, briefly, to defend the ad, but they ended up pulling it after just 24 hours, and issuing a statement saying they had “missed the mark.”
That kind of apology, however lukewarm, is nearly unimaginable today.
Instead, when accusations of white supremacist dogwhistles greeted an American Eagle ad campaign with Sydney Sweeney — the actress of Euphoria and White Lotus fame who has become a sex symbol — the campaign remained live. The only acknowledgement of the controversy was a brief statement posted to Instagram, where the ads remain live.
“‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans,” the brand said. “Her jeans, her story.”
The controversy, according to an analysis from The New York Times, was actually driven largely by right-wing commentators, who referenced outrage over the ad and, in doing so, created it. JD Vance made fun of liberals for calling people Nazis “for thinking Sydney Sweeney is beautiful.” “Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women. I’m sure that will poll well,” Ted Cruz tweeted.
As users are commenting on the ads: “The woke era is over.”
Refusal to back down
Perhaps American Eagle was emboldened to stand behind its problematic ad campaign in part because the government itself is openly posting Nazi references.
On the Department of Homeland Security’s Instagram page, posts mix bible verses and white supremacist dog whistles, resulting in memes that are offensive on multiple fronts.
One features an image of Uncle Sam captioned “Which way, American man?” seemingly a reference to the 1978 book Which Way, Western Man? Written by white supremacist William Gayley Simpson and published by a neo-Nazi group, it promotes conspiracy theories about Jewish control, praises Hitler and urges antisemitic violence. (The image in the DHS meme was apparently made by a different, still living, white nationalist.)
Another post, of a painting by John Gast titled “American Progress,” drew complaints for showing an all-white vision of America. But the caption the DHS appended to the post drew even more ire. Some eagle-eyed social media patrollers took the 14-word length of the caption as a reference to a famous white supremacist slogan known as “the 14 words,” and the capitalization of two Hs in it as shorthand for “Heil Hitler,” which is often abbreviated online to “HH” to avoid triggering moderation.
Responding to the accusations that the posts promote white supremacy and Nazi ideology, a spokesperson for the Trump administration said “The White House posts banger memes,” and made fun of the people asking.
Perhaps that double-H capitalization could have been a coincidence, but when the government thinks it’s funny — a banger meme — to post Nazi references, it seems plausible that they have done so on purpose. More than that, no matter how the DHS posts or denim ads were meant, white supremacists online, who are used to communicating via codes and veiled references, can read the DHS posts and the American Eagle campaign as encouragement.
In a previous era, that risk would have been enough for DHS, or American Eagle, to take their posts down.
Coolness gets conservative
The fact that these posts, whether of Sweeney or of a white supremacist Uncle Sam, have remained up is a sign of a major cultural shift.
Once it was cool, even sexy, to be sensitive — everyone advertised on dating apps that they were in therapy. Everyone was watching and praising Ted Lasso, which was less a comedy than a lesson on a softer, kinder masculinity. Even when Republicans were dominating the government, progressive, left-leaning ideas were driving culture, whether on TV or in the sexual marketplace.
Now, cool is a kind of trolling, edgelord humor. Vulgarity and offensiveness are valuable; subtlety and artistry are not. Our cultural titans are less Jon Stewart and more Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate, the manosphere podcaster accused of human trafficking. If the buzzword of the dying cultural era is “woke,” the new zeitgeist’s buzzword is “based” — not caring what other people think, and flouting conventional wisdom. In practice, it is regularly used as a response to someone sharing a conspiracy theory. Think: Someone posts a meme about how Jews control the government. Someone else replies: “Based.”
Of course, eras rise and fall. But in the quest to have the edgiest — and thus best, funniest, most popular — content, the boundaries have expanded so much that outright Nazi content is simply seen as funny, a way to provoke a reaction or a laugh.
That has real consequences. Of course, it normalizes Nazi ideas and imagery. But when the government uses winking coded language and does not even dignify accusations with a denial, the very idea of caring about spreading hate is delegitimized.
The underlying message is that concern about dangerous conspiracy theories, or racism, or misogyny or antisemitism is lame. And when caring about hatred becomes lame, we’re in trouble.
