Members of Congress are demanding answers from Meta after it ran advertisements by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that they say included imagery and music intended to appeal to white nationalists and neo-Nazis.

In a letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Reps. Becca Balint, D-Vt., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., questioned how the social media company approved an ad campaign from the Department of Homeland Security featuring the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which is popular in neo-Nazi spaces. The lawmakers urged Meta to cease running the ad campaign on its social media platforms and asked whether the company would commit to ending its digital advertising partnership with DHS.

The Intercept was among the first to report ICE’s use of the song in a paid post recruiting for the agency, which published shortly after an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis. In their letter, the members of Congress cite The Intercept’s reporting.

The lawmakers also questioned imagery contained in the ads that extremism researchers said echoes far-right “reclamation” narratives long associated with racist violence and accelerationist ideology.

“Businesses are not on the sideline at this moment and it is important they also know how they are contributing to what is happening in Minnesota and across the country,” said Balint. “A lack of change is not neutrality but complicity.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Homeland Security, which has not responded to the congressional letter, defended its recruitment messaging in a statement to The Intercept.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin rejected comparisons between the ads and extremist propaganda, arguing that criticism of the campaign amounted to an attack on patriotic expression.

“By Reps. Becca Balint and Pramila Jayapal’s standards, every American who posts patriotic imagery on the Fourth of July should be cancelled and labeled a Nazi,” McLaughlin said. “Not everything you dislike is ‘Nazi propaganda.’ DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on our historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”

McLaughlin also accused critics of “manufacturing outrage” and said the controversy had contributed to a rise in assaults against ICE personnel. “It’s because of garbage like this we’re seeing a 1,300% increase in assaults against our brave men and women of ICE,” she said.

Related

Judge Censored an ICE Agent’s Face Over “Threats.” His Info Was a Google Search Away.

McLaughlin did not provide evidence to support the claim. Similar assertions by the Trump administration about sharp increases in assaults against immigration agents are not reflected in publicly available data.

The most controversial ad in the campaign was a paid DHS recruitment post that published less than two days after the fatal shooting in Minneapolis. It paired immigration enforcement footage with the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots. Popular in neo-Nazi online spaces, the song includes lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat.” In the ad, it played as a cowboy rode a horse with a B-2 Spirit bomber flying overhead.

After publicly rebuking allegations that the song had neo-Nazi ties, DHS later removed the recruitment post from its official Instagram account, according to a review of the page and reporting by other outlets. The department did not announce the deletion or respond to questions about why it was taken down. DHS did not address the song’s documented circulation in white nationalist spaces or its appearance in the manifesto of a 2023 mass shooter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project has separately documented the song’s origins and circulation within organized white nationalist networks. The song was written and performed by Pine Tree Riots, a group affiliated with the Männerbund, which the SPLC has previously identified as a white nationalist organization. Hatewatch also found that the song has circulated widely in extremist online spaces and appeared in recruitment efforts by far-right groups.

Balint and Jayapal framed the controversy as bigger than a single post. They accuse Meta of profiting from a large-scale digital recruitment campaign relying on themes that would stand out to white nationalists. They questioned what safeguards existed to prevent extremist-linked content from appearing in government advertising, and whether recent changes to Meta’s hate-speech policies allowed the company to run the ads.

The letter details the scale of the recruitment push. According to the lawmakers, DHS spent more than $2.8 million on recruitment ads across Facebook and Instagram between March and December of last year, and paid Meta an additional $500,000 beginning in August. During the first three weeks of last fall’s government shutdown, ICE spent $4.5 million on paid media campaigns, the lawmakers write. The letter also cites reporting showing DHS spent more than $1 million over a 90-day period on “self-deportation” ads targeted at users interested in Latin music, Spanish as a second language, and Mexican cuisine.

Balint and Jayapal argue that such spending has been made possible by an influx of funding for ICE. A decade ago, ICE’s annual budget totaled less than $6 billion. Under new federal appropriations enacted last year, the agency has roughly $85 billion at its disposal, making it the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States. According to analysts cited by lawmakers, its budget is bigger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined.

The lawmakers pointed to what they described as a deterioration in internal oversight and hiring standards, including waived age limits, large signing bonuses, and reports of recruits being rushed into the field without adequate training. They argued that the combination of rapid expansion, aggressive recruitment, and weak platform safeguards poses risks to public safety.

“It is important that we scrutinize how that funding is being used, particularly if it is being used to attract certain demographics for hiring while pushing others to the periphery, or out of our society,” Balint said.

The letter asks Meta to disclose the scope and duration of its advertising agreement with DHS, provide any communications related to the recruitment ads, and explain what restrictions apply to paid government content under its policies.

Meta’s Community Standards prohibit content that promotes dehumanizing speech, harmful stereotypes, or calls for exclusion or segregation targeting people based on protected characteristics, including race, ethnicity, national origin, and immigration status.

The policies also state that Meta removes content historically linked to intimidation or offline violence and applies heightened scrutiny during periods of increased tension or recent violence involving targeted groups. The members of Congress questioned whether those standards were enforced consistently for paid government advertising tied to DHS recruitment.

“There are a whole host of safeguards that should be considered,” Balint said. “But at a minimum, they need to abide by their own community guidelines.”

Related

Deportation, Inc.

Balint said the inquiry is ongoing and could expand beyond the recruitment campaign itself. “I am certainly going to continue looking into how private groups are profiting off of or contributing to the untenable dynamic with ICE that is putting our communities at risk,” she said.

Since the recruitment campaign became the subject of public scrutiny, DHS and ICE have not made additional posts using the same song, imagery, or music across their official social media accounts.

The post Lawmakers Call on Meta to Stop Running ICE Ad Featuring Neo-Nazi Anthem appeared first on The Intercept.

Today’s links

• All laws are local: And no law knows how evitable it is.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Whisky PC; Anitfeatures; Silicon Roundabout; Steampunk Etch-A-Sketch; MLMs as mirror-world organizers.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.
• Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

All laws are local (permalink)

About halfway through Thomas Piketty’s 2013 barnstorming Capital in the 21st Century, Piketty tosses off a little insight that skewered me on the spot and never let me go: the notion that any societal condition that endures beyond a generation becomes “eternal” in the popular consciousness:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

Piketty was referring to “primogeniture,” the ancient practice of automatically passing the family fortune onto the eldest son (or, if no son was available, the eldest nephew). Primogeniture did important work by keeping dynastic fortunes intact, rather than dividing them up among all children of some baron or lord or other guillotineable monster.

Primogeniture persisted until the age of colonization, when Europe’s “great powers” stole the rest of the world. In that moment, the size of Europe’s great fortunes expanded by orders of magnitude. This vast increase in the wealth of Europe’s most murderous, remorseless looters made primogeniture obsolete. There was so much blood-soaked money available to the nobility that every son could found a “great house.”

After a couple generations’ worth of this, the colonies were exhausted. There were no more lands to conquer, which meant that every son could no longer expect to found his own fortune. But for these chinless masters of the universe, a world where every son of every rich man wouldn’t get his own dynasty was incomprehensible. To do otherwise was literally unimaginable. It was unnatural.

For Piketty, this explained World War I: the world’s chinless inbred monsters embarking upon an orgy of bloodletting to relieve one another of the lands – and peoples – they’d claimed as their property in order to carry on the “eternal” tradition of every son starting his own fortune.

It’s a very important idea, and a provocative explanation for one of the 20th Century’s defining events. That’s why it struck me so hard when I first read it, but the reason it stuck with me for the decade-plus since I encountered that it is a vital observation about the human condition: as a species, we forget so much. Something that was commonplace a generation ago becomes unimaginable today, and vice versa.

Even people who lived through those years forget who they were and what they took for granted in those days. Think, for example, of all those evangelicals who would vote for Satan himself if he promised to hang any woman who obtained an abortion; the same evangelicals who, just a few decades ago, viewed anti-abortionism as a politically suspect form of crypto-papacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Perhaps the reason Piketty’s primogeniture-based explanation for WWI struck me so forcefully and durably is that I imbibed a prodigious amount of science fiction as a boy, including the aphorism that “all laws are local, and no law knows how local it is”:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-a-cosmopolitan-literature-for-the-cosmopolitan-web/

In other words, things that seem eternal and innate to the human condition to you are apt to have been invented ten minutes before you started to notice the world around you and might seem utterly alien to your children. As Douglas Adams put it:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams

This notion is much on my mind right now because the world is (to me, at least) unassailably in a state of change, and everything is up for grabs. Europe went from 15 years behind on its climate goals to ten years ahead of schedule after the supply of Russian gas dried up and Europeans found themselves shivering in the dark. The massive leap in EU solar means that the (seemingly) all-powerful fossil fuel lobby has absolutely, comprehensively eaten shit, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/23/our-friend-the-electron/#to-every-man-his-castle

Indeed, this happened so fast that many people (including many Europeans) haven’t even noticed that it happened. Back in December, when I was at CCC in Hamburg, I talked to a bunch of European activists, close watchers of the Commission and the Parliament, who were completely convinced that Europe would never spurn the fossil fuel sector – despite the fact that it had already happened.

Indeed, it may be that intimate familiarity with European politics is a liability when things change. Spend enough time observing up close how supine European politicians and their Eurocrats are and you may find yourself so reflexively conditioned to view them as spineless corporate lackeys and thus unable to notice when they finally dig up a vertebra or two.

Smart financiers are familiar with Stein’s Law: “anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.” Change happens. Eternal verities might be fifteen minutes older than you. Pink used to be the color of ferocious masculinity, whereas blue was so girly as to be practically titular:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendered_associations_of_pink_and_blue

Real talk: I have serious, debilitating chronic pain. One of the reasons I’m so prolific is that the only time I stop noticing how much I hurt is when I’m lost in work (compartmentalization is a hell of a drug, and while it’s not always healthy, it has its upsides). Ask anyone with chronic pain and they’ll tell you that treating pain eventually becomes your hobby, a bottomless well of esoteric dives into various “modalities” of pain treatment.

Thus it is that I’ve found myself on one or two psychologists’ couches, learning about different mental approaches to living with constant pain. One of the most useful pieces of advice I’ve gotten was to attend closely to how my pain changes – how it ebbs and flows. The point is that if pain changes, that means that it can change. It feels eternal, but it comes and goes. Maybe someday it will go altogether. And even if it doesn’t, it may improve. It probably will, at least for a while.

Things change.

Our current crop of cowardly, weak appeasers – in Congress, in Parliament, in the European Parliament – have, at various times (and very recently), found their spines. The factions within them that militated for the kind of bold action that might meet this moment have, from time to time, won the day. We have lived through total transformations in our politics before, and that means we might live through them again:

https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/the-fragmentation-flywheel

Sure, it’s easy and tempting to assume that our leaders will always suck as hard as they suck now. But latent in that assumption is that the leaders who presided over big, incredible transformations were exceptional people. Maybe they were and maybe they weren’t, but I’m here to tell you, ten minutes’ worth of research into the biographies of the “heroes” of our history will reveal them to have been every bit as capable of monstrousness, cowardice, cruelty and pig-ignorant bigotry as any of today’s rotating cast of fascist goons:

https://truthout.org/articles/disrupting-the-myth-of-franklin-d-roosevelt-in-the-age-of-trump-sanders-and-clinton/

The question isn’t merely “How do we elect better leaders?” It’s “How do we make our leaders follow us?” Today’s Democrats are unserious quislings who keep bringing a squirt-gun to a mass-casualty assault-rifle spree-shooting. How do we terrorize these cowards into rising to the moment? If we want Congressional Democrats to form a Nuremburg Caucus and start holding hearings on who they’re going to put in the dock when the Trump regime collapses, we’re going to have to drive them to it.

And we can! The Democrats who gave us the New Deal weren’t braver or more moral than the self-dealing millionaires in Congress today – they were more afraid of their base.

Things change.

Some years ago, I gave a speech at Consumer Reports headquarters in Poughkeepsie, trying to get them to refuse to give a passing grade to any product with DRM, on the grounds that the manufacturer could alter how that device worked at any time in the future, meaning that no matter how well a device worked now, it might turn into a pile of shit at any time in the future:

https://www.soundguys.com/the-sonos-app-death-spiral-132873/

They didn’t take me up on this suggestion, obviously. They made the (seemingly) reasonable point that people bought Consumer Reports to find out what to buy, not to be told that they shouldn’t buy anything. Every product in many key categories came with DRM, meaning that their recommendation would have had to be “just don’t buy any of it.”

But today, consumer review sites do sometimes recommend nothing:

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/

And of course, there’s some precedent here. Somewhere between the emergence of the evidence for seatbelts and the appearance of seatbelts in most makes and models of cars, there would have been a time when the answer to “which car should I buy?” was “don’t buy a car, they’re all unsafe at any speed.”

Things change. Today, every car has a seatbelt, and they’d continue to do so, even if we did away with regulations requiring seatbelts. Driving a car without a seatbelt would be as weird and terrible as using a radium suppository:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up-your-ass/#harm-reduction

Things change. The nine-justice Supreme Court isn’t an eternal verity. It didn’t come down off a mountain on two stone tablets. It’s about ten seconds old:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1869

Tomorrow, it will be different:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

Our eternals are all ephemerals. The idea that we should tax capital gains at half the rate of wages? It was practically invented yesterday. You know who thought we should tax all income at the same rate? That noted Bolshevik, Ronald fuckin’ Reagan:

https://archive.thinkprogress.org/flashback-reagan-raised-capital-gains-taxes-to-the-same-level-as-wage-taxes-for-first-time-444438edf242/

We’re living through a time of change. Much of it is calamitous. Some of it wondrous:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

It’s so easy to slip into the habit of thinking that nothing will change, that our politicians will never fear us more than they love the money and power they get from catering to the Epstein class. I’m not denying that this is how they view the world today, but there was a time in living memory when it wasn’t true. If it changed before, it can change again:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/15/how-the-light-gets-in/#theories-of-change

Things change.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Scourge of Online Sports Betting https://prospect.org/2026/02/04/feb-2026-magazine-sports-scourge-online-betting-fanduel-draftkings/

• ICE has offices in 5 Canadian cities. Here’s what it can — and can’t — do https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/9.7073273

• RIP, Fobazi M Ettarh https://bsky.app/profile/fobettarh.bsky.social/post/3me34k3rtvc2j

• The Roots of the Youth Sports Gold Rush https://prospect.org/2026/02/05/feb-2026-magazine-youth-sports-private-equity/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago UK nurses want to supply clean blades and cutting advice to self-harmers https://web.archive.org/web/20060206205108/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2025748,00.html

#20yrsago PC built into whisky bottle https://web.archive.org/web/20060210043104/https://metku.net/index.html?sect=view&n=1&path=mods/whiskypc/index_eng

#15yrsago Startups of London’s “Silicon Roundabout” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/06/tech-startup-internet-entrepreneurs

#15yrsago Antifeatures: deliberate, expensive product features that no customer wants https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/antifeatures-at-the-free-technology-academy

#15yrsago Steampunk Etch-a-Sketch https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/erbnf/a_steampunk_etchasketch_we_made_for_a_friend_this/

#10yrsago There’s a secret “black site” in New York where terrorism suspects are tortured for years at a time https://web.archive.org/web/20160205143012/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/05/mahdi-hashi-metropolitan-correctional-center-manhattan-guantanamo-pretrial-solitary-confinement/

#10yrsago Error 53: Apple remotely bricks phones to punish customers for getting independent repairs https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple-iphone-software-update-handset-worthless-third-party-repair?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

#10yrsago Toronto City Council defies mayor, demands open, neutral municipal broadband https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2016/02/toronto-city-council-sides-with-crtc-in-rejecting-mayor-torys-support-of-bell-appeal/

#5yrsago Amazon’s brutal warehouse “megacycle” https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#megacycle

#5yrsago AT&T customer complains…via WSJ ad https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/05/la-bookseller-royalty/#go-aaron-go

#1yrago MLMs are the mirror-world version of community organizing https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/05/power-of-positive-thinking/#the-socialism-of-fools

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Salt Lake City: Enshittification at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (Tanner Humanities Center), Feb 18
  https://tanner.utah.edu/center-events/cory-doctorow/

• Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24
  https://fedimtl.ca/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

• Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
  https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/

• Why Big Tech is a Trap for Independent Creators (Stripper News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmYDyz8AMZ0

• Enshittification (Creative Nonfiction podcast)
  https://brendanomeara.com/episode-507-enshittification-author-cory-doctorow-believes-in-a-new-good-internet/

• Enshittification with Plutopia
  https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-enshittification/

Latest books (permalink)

• “Canny Valley”: A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

• “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• “Picks and Shovels”: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• “The Bezzle”: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• “The Lost Cause:” a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• “The Internet Con”: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• “Red Team Blues”: “A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• “Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• “Unauthorized Bread”: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• “Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It” (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• “The Memex Method,” Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

• “The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today’s top sources:

Currently writing: “The Post-American Internet,” a sequel to “Enshittification,” about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1005 words today, 22660 total)

• “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to AI,” a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• “The Post-American Internet,” a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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