The images below are from the Trump Labor Dept. and they ARE A UP FRONT message to America….
A social-media ad campaign from the Department of Labor is going viral for featuring a dozen or more images of young, blond, white men with strong jawlines and cleft chins, in blue-collared workmen’s shirts and jeans—such great jeans. These strapping young men, with their blank, inscrutable, artificially generated stares, smolder in front of the symbols of the bygone American Dream: white-steeple churches, construction cranes, oil rigs, and the Statue of Liberty, all shaded in the piss-yellow that is a hallmark of AI-generated imagery.
But it’s not the use of AI that’s giving everyone pause, of course. It’s that these pictures, released by the Department of Labor social-media accounts and bearing the department’s seal, are uncomfortably reminiscent of posters from the 1930s. To be more specific: the ‘Heroic Realism’ of Nazi propaganda posters and the similarly stylized patriotic posters later produced in the United States.
Why is this style being used now, and what are these images for? Only a few of the images explicitly say. But their purpose is explained in the accompanying captions: They’re promoting the department’s work on Project Firewall, meant to restore “pathways to the American Dream by ensuring American Jobs go to American Workers.”
Project Firewall is an enforcement initiative targeting H-1B fraud and abuse; it was launched last month in tandem with the presidential proclamation restricting the entry of certain immigrant workers and requiring employers to pay $100,000 fees for every worker they want to hire on an H-1B visa. The order caused confusion and chaos among foreign employees. The administration says Project Firewall will be the “MOST AGGRESSIVE” effort to investigate employers and hold them accountable for visa problems. And although the aim is supposedly to protect American workers, it’s not hard to understand why critics think it will amount to a witch hunt for companies hiring too many brown people.
The visual campaign behind the generic blond Übermenschen posts appears to go back to at least July when it was originally using phrases like “Blue Collar Boom” to promote the DOL’s apprenticeship program. That, at least, made some sense. The tenor and content of the newer images, by contrast, are at odds with the reality of the job market the current campaign is based around. The alleged fraud and abuse Project Firewall is apparently combating predominantly occurs in the tech and information sector, not manual labor or blue-collar jobs as shown in the gallery of idealized white patriots.
But the nuances of the job markets here aren’t really the issue. The issue is the use of this propaganda itself. DOL first tested it out with an artificially generated image of Trump himself, in the style later deployed in the recruitment images. The superimposed text says “AMERICA IS HOT!” and the caption refers to the American economy as “the HOTTEST in the world!” Trump is smirking and pointing with his arm outstretched in a pose evocative of many images of authoritarians of the past….
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