"Late last year, the White House's social-media team lauded ICE's torrential deportation efforts with a string of memes seemingly engineered to go viral. In one video posted to Instagram, the song "all-american bitch," by Olivia Rodrigo, provides a soundtrack to a montage of deportees being forced onto buses and planes; in another, Sabrina Carpenter's "Juno" plays as ICE agents accost people in the streets, the lyric "Have you ever tried this one?" repeating each time a new person is detained."
"Another video uses the satirical song "Big Boys," from a "Saturday Night Live" skit featuring SZA, as agents handcuff people in parking lots. A line from the song-"It's cuffing season"-flashes in all caps across the screen. Rodrigo, Carpenter, and SZA have denounced the videos as "hateful," "evil," and "peak dark," respectively. (In response to Carpenter, the White House doctored a video promoting her own "S.N.L." appearance to make it seem as if she"
"Unlike other cases of Trump using musicians' songs, against their will, at rallies or in campaign materials-Beyoncé, Adele, and Jack White, among them-these videos are not one-off inanities or easily ignorable promotional assets. Instead, they are part of a hundred-million-dollar "wartime recruitment" effort, according to an internal document obtained by the Washington Post, aimed at hiring thousands more deportation officers in the new year,"
The White House social-media team posted meme videos that spotlight ICE deportation operations and pair raid footage with pop songs. Featured tracks included works by Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and a satirical SZA skit; the musicians denounced the videos. The White House also doctored a clip involving Carpenter. An internal document outlines a hundred-million-dollar "wartime recruitment" campaign to hire thousands of deportation officers. The campaign uses pop music and meme formats to present ICE as valorous defenders and to appeal to younger demographics by making detainment footage appear vivid, trollish, and recruitment-oriented.
Read at The New Yorker
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