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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Bush and Dukakis on crime.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
This is the beginning of a political ad from the 1988 presidential race featuring the mug shot of paroled murderer Willie Horton, a Black man.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison.
RASCOE: It was so shocking and so effective that it became a byword for negative campaigning and a widely debated case study in using race in political discourse. That was then.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: President Donald Trump on Truth Social posted the Obamas as apes.
RASCOE: This is now, as described by CBS, and it's not just the president. The official social media feeds of more than one U.S. government agency regularly use white nationalist slogans, images and means.
How did we get here? And is there any going back? Heidi Beirich is a founder of the Global Project against Hate And Extremism. She joins us now. Welome.
HEIDI BEIRICH: Thank you for having me.
RASCOE: The Willie Horton ad wasn't considered extremist. Instead, the term used to describe it was racially charged. But is there a throughline between that ad by a pro-Bush political committee 38 years ago and the kind of stuff that we're seeing from the Trump administration today?
BEIRICH: Well, I would say the Willie Horton ad was obviously playing into racial stereotypes and could be considered racist. But it is such a small thing compared to what we're seeing pumped out from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor, where they're posting repeated white nationalist messages. And they're not coded. There are things that you would find on white supremacist websites.
RASCOE: It sounds like what you're saying, like, these are not winks and nods. These are kind of just straight up in your face. You know, the Labor Department posting, one homeland, one people, one heritage. I mean, I hear that or look at that, and I'm like, I don't know that that was a riff on a Nazi slogan from World War II.
BEIRICH: I mean, that is a translation directly, so I don't know how you come up with that slogan without realizing its history. It just takes a click on Google to find it. And some of the other messaging that we've seen, for example, at DHS, the use of the term, which way, Western Man? - which is the name of an incredibly racist book. These are things that you would only know about if you knew about white supremacy. This isn't a wink wink, nod nod. It may be material that's not clear to regular people, but it is something that sends a direct signal to people who are immersed in this culture.
RASCOE: Do you think that it's possible that people who - as you said, who may not be immersed in some of these spaces are becoming familiar with them because of the imagery that they're seeing out of these federal agencies? Are you concerned that people are picking up on that and maybe going to looking for even more extreme messaging?
BEIRICH: I'm very concerned about that. We are normalizing things that used to be stuck on the fringe that had been rejected. White supremacy, white supremacist propaganda, imagery, was rejected as the heinous thing that it is. This is now giving sanction to those ideas. That is the thing that I'm most worried about. The government, the federal government, is spreading white supremacist propaganda to millions of people, normalizing it and exposing people to things that are just simply heinous.
You know, there are images of Manifest Destiny, a white woman conquering the West as Native Americans flee in fear. This kind of imagery, this kind of propaganda, is extremely dangerous. And, you know, this is the kind of stuff that social media companies used to take down because it was so dangerous. And now we have the Trump administration pushing it out there.
RASCOE: Well, why do you think this is happening now? Is there something that has changed in society, right at this moment?
BEIRICH: Well, I mean, unfortunately, when I think about it that way, the United States has a history of racism starting from its beginning, all the way through the 1960s - right? - the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act and then Immigration Act that ended racist immigration policies.
You know, I think of the 1920s when the 1924 Immigration Act was passed, and it was backed by Klansman and a racist president, Woodrow Wilson. So we have had these problems in this country forever. But I think many of us thought that the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement was moving us away from this.
But the rise of social media meant that hateful propaganda could now reach millions. You couldn't find this stuff in the 1990s by looking in the newspaper or in a telephone book. You couldn't find a Klan group back then unless you knew someone. That has completely changed, where millions and millions of people are exposed to hateful imagery and ideas every day on social media. That kind of radicalization problem, which has led to a lot of violence - like the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh or the El Paso Walmart by people riled up about anti-immigrant thinking - is key. So we have a social media problem.
Then we have people like Donald Trump sanctioning those kind of views. So there's, like, a call and response here. You can get radicalized online, and then you can think that those views are completely fine because politicians connected to Trump or his allies repeat those messages. And it's a very vicious circle. And we're in a totally different environment than we were until very recently, when the broad consensus across political lines was this kind of racism and hate is unacceptable.
RASCOE: That's Heidi Beirich of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
BEIRICH: Very much appreciate being here.
RASCOE: In a comment to CNBC about the post, the White House likened the mainstream media to, quote, "the deranged leftists who claims everything they dislike must be Nazi propaganda." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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