DHS Posts Video That includes Music In style With Nazi Creators

The U.S. Division of Homeland Safety posted a weird new video to social media platforms on Thursday that includes footage of federal brokers arresting protesters in Portland, Oregon. The video makes use of a music that grew to become very talked-about amongst Nazis and white supremacists on the tail finish of President Donald Trump’s first time period, in what seems to be a canine whistle to far-right extremists.

DHS captioned the video, “Finish of the Darkish Age, starting of the Golden Age,” on websites like X and Instagram, together with a hyperlink to the ICE recruitment web site. The video was additionally posted to Bluesky, the social media platform that many federal businesses joined one week in the past to troll its extra liberal userbase.

Finish of the Darkish Age, starting of the Golden Age.https://t.co/nZkBEj3GGi pic.twitter.com/6TRdCB6Tw2

— Homeland Safety (@DHSgov) October 23, 2025

The music within the video, MGMT’s “Little Darkish Age,” was launched in 2018, although it’s been slowed right down to an absurd diploma. And whereas nothing within the music suggests sympathy with far-right ideology (fairly the alternative, in truth), the music was adopted by far-right content material creators in late 2020 to pair with Nazi and white supremacist imagery.

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a British assume tank that tracks world extremism on-line, revealed a study in 2021 that famous how widespread the music was with Nazis. One instance used within the report reveals how the music was paired on TikTok with a slideshow of George Lincoln Rockwell, the founding father of the American Nazi Celebration, who was killed in 1967.

However the report additionally explains how widespread the music has been to advertise esoteric Nazism, that includes memes and fictional characters with far-right symbols just like the Sonnenrad or Black Sun. The truth that the music can be slowed down in a really exaggerated method within the DHS video is one other hallmark of the far-right movies that went viral within the early 2020s.

Once more, nothing concerning the music is smart as a ballad for the far-right, as you may see from a number of the lyrics, which appear to be criticizing police violence:

Policemen swear to God, love seeping from their weapons
I do know my mates and I might most likely flip and run
Should you get away from bed, come discover us heading for the bridge
Convey a stone, all the craze, my little darkish age

The Guardian described the far-right’s affinity for the music in an article from 2024: “Definitely, its adoption doesn’t say a lot on your common neo-Nazi’s capability to know English. Little Darkish Age’s lyrics are, pretty clearly, an excoriation of Trump-era America and racist police violence.”

Gizmodo reached out to DHS for remark, and the company was characteristically indignant about our questions.

“Simply since you don’t like one thing doesn’t make it Nazi propaganda—that is backside barrel ‘journalism.’ MGMT’s ‘Little Darkish Age’ is wildly widespread on each side of the political spectrum. Go exterior, contact grass, and get a grip,” learn an unsigned e mail, attributed to a “DHS spokesperson.”

The company additionally despatched a hyperlink to a 2022 article in Spin concerning the music and highlighted a quote from MGMT co-founder Ben Goldwasser that reads, “Quite a lot of instances, there isn’t any deeper that means.” DHS didn’t reply to a follow-up query about who might have created the video.

That sort of response from DHS is to be anticipated, in fact. The far-right usually operates in a world of believable deniability. However since President Trump returned to workplace in January, DHS has posted plenty of fascist content clearly meant to sign to Individuals simply how excessive the company has grow to be.

Again in August, Border Patrol, which is a part of DHS, posted a video to Instagram and Fb with the antisemitic lyrics “Jew me” and “kike me,” which solely gained widespread consideration final week. Border Patrol eliminated the video and reuploaded it with new music, however by no means defined why it was posted within the first place. The company simply despatched a press release much like that of a petulant child.

However individuals on social media know what the music “Little Darkish Age” can imply. One right-wing political commentator on X even had the concept back in July, writing, “DHS ought to drop slightly darkish age edit simply to fuck with individuals.” And lots of far-right accounts on X clearly understood the message that was meant by posting a video with that music.

“Dhs is posting little darkish age edits. Loopy timeline on our fingers,” wrote one account that encompasses a profile image of an anime character sporting a Nazi hat.

One other extremist account quote-tweeted the DHS video with, “Good job @DHS! You caught as much as had been we the place 4 years in the past!” That account included an add of another video, which options Adolf Hitler together with the textual content “12 years not a slave,” and a screenshot from the livestreamed rampage of white supremacist terrorist Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

It’s not simply the music that DHS has chosen that implies the company is aware of what it’s doing. The imagery in Homeland Safety’s “Little Darkish Age” edit is fairly haunting, using footage from the protests at an ICE facility in Portland and a glitchy aesthetic that’s so frequent amongst so-called fashwave creators. (Sure, the fash stands for fascist.) The video options an “antifa” emblem that’s usurped by the DHS emblem, in addition to clips of brokers sporting fuel masks whereas arresting individuals amid a haze of smoke.

Clearly, while you begin speaking about obscure corners of the far-right web whereas utilizing phrases like fashwave it will possibly sound slightly foolish. These are simply web memes, in any case. However there’s a visible language that has developed on-line among the many far-right. And whereas DHS can insist they didn’t intend for it to be interpreted as Nazi propaganda, there are many literal Nazis on-line who imagine in any other case.