In the video, two brown-skinned men — shot mostly from their torsos down, the camera rising briefly to reveal glimpses of faces and a tattooed neck — stand handcuffed in front of an airplane. They are marched up the jetway, before receding into a warm blur. Two words stand out below the haze, painted in bright green lettering on the side of what looks like a truck: “BORDER PATROL.” The clip is set to a half-hearted “slowed + reverb” remix of Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” the 1998 pop-rock hit that still soundtracks graduations and last calls at bars. A sunrise lights the scene from behind, as if to underscore the point: it’s morning in America, except for those the state has declared to be its enemies.

There is something totemic about this video, which was posted to the White House’s official social media accounts in March. To the naked cruelty we’ve come to expect, it adds a boast about a more abstract power the Trump administration thinks it has: the ability to cancel and reverse meaning, to curdle an adult-alternative karaoke anthem into a smirking nativist taunt. (“The song is about joy and possibilities and hope, and they have missed the point entirely,” Semisonic said in a statement soon after the video was posted. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt doubled down, arguing that the song’s most memorable line, “You don’t have to go home / But you can’t stay here,” is an apt summation of U.S. immigration policy under Trump.) Even more audacious is the audiovisual language the video speaks. This is the language of content, of stale memes and other disposable internet-culture junk. The video’s combination of chirpy sadism and edgelord torpor reflects back the past fifteen years or so of digital remix cultures — from vaporwave’s slo-mo pop songs to more esoteric recent trends like “corecore,” in which users mash up aggressive and alienating clips and set them to brooding soundtracks. The continuity is synchronic, not just historical: the “Closing Time” video melts into the rest of the feed with disconcerting ease, sliding between morning-routine rundowns, A.I. gibberish, and grainy screenshots of “Am I the Asshole?” Reddit posts.

What does this video — along with the growing number of other assorted grotesqueries, like a White House-circulated A.I. image of a handcuffed and crying woman, rendered in a clumsy imitation of Hayao Miyazaki’s animation style — want from us? The deportation clip was not made out of a journalistic duty to expose hidden abuses. It is not even a trophy meant for private viewing among sadists. On the most basic level, it is a gloating image that wants to spread and multiply, not entirely unlike the torture pictures taken by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison. Of course, as Peter C. Baker recently observed, the Bush administration did not want the public to see those pictures. The Trump administration, on the other hand, seems to want to inundate us with images of the atrocities it commits, even when the worst horrors — the abuse and neglect many of the detained will face when they are renditioned without due process to CECOT, the Salvadoran prison where the incarcerated cannot receive visitors or go outside or use utensils to eat food — lie just offscreen, a blank the viewer is invited to fill in.

Maybe the deportation video is less like the Abu Ghraib photos and more like that other deadly turn-of-the-millennium image genre, the supposed “proof” of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Like Colin Powell’s grainy spy photos, these clips rub our noses in the supposed evidence that there is a threat that must be removed with savage force — although in this case, the only thing being proven is that somewhere in the U.S. there are men with tattoos. The implication is that what we are seeing is the government detaining a Venezuelan gang member, not, say, a legal resident who had fled to the U.S. to escape gang violence. The message is twofold: to the believers and the concerned, There is a threat and we will deal with it; to the outraged and the terrorized, Deal with it. These images say all this not through the functionary slog of a PowerPoint, as with the nonexistent WMDs, but with a battery of filters, edits, and references. You might call it agit-slop.

Except agitprop is meant to agitate people. The most curious feature of the deportation video is its atmosphere of warm-toned chill. It is as numbing in form as it is shocking in content. At the level of style, the “Closing Time” video rhymes with another clip, once inescapable and now all but forgotten, of a man skateboarding at golden hour with “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac lolling along in the background. That original video, posted to TikTok in 2020 by Nathan Apodaca and written about everywhere from The New Yorker to People, was once held up as an exemplary piece of vibe-heavy media, where free-floating, low-intensity emotion reigns and narrative recedes. Another edit, also posted to the White House’s social media, goes further in this direction, presenting itself as a deportation-themed ASMR experience: more close shots of partial bodies being bound and hauled as the mic picks up supposedly soothing environmental sounds — the whir of an engine, the jingle of chains, the clank of cuffed feet ascending the stairs to the plane. ASMR is a phenomenon often reported to feel like sound tickling your nervous system directly, bypassing conscious thought: sensation without sense.

These videos testify to the Trump team’s ability to execute hollow and creepy approximations of the mainstream culture that run parallel to their own insular one, like Christian versions of popular songs. On one level this is hardly new: cast your mind back several lifetimes ago, to when Joe Biden’s team posted something about a debt cancellation initiative being, in the language of another since-memory-holed video, “very demure,” or to when, in what now seems like a hangnail on history, the Kamala Harris campaign bet big on self-branding as “brat.” While those memes scanned as clumsy youth outreach, more P.R. than policy, the deportation videos signal a heady new mixture of aesthetics and politics. They help us see that the same quality of languid abstraction, of weak feeling unmoored from thought, that came to characterize so much media in the imperial years of the platform era is now the state’s official authoritarian style. 

This style is part of a broader conjuncture in right-wing aesthetics. Susan Sontag once wrote that “fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.” The surrender today’s fascist culture celebrates often looks less like capitulation before an overwhelming power and more like a slow downward droop, a backward list. Its vision of mindlessness looks less like lockstep conformity and more like dissociative vibing. It looks at turns like self-infantilization — the lobotomized prose of today’s right-wing alt-lit, a general fixation on childhood and grade-school gender roles, a need for safe spaces insulated from liberalism particles — and like K-holed apathy: both the lowest A.I. slop and the most aspirationally avant-garde works collapse into brain-dead détournement, far-flung images and quotations drained of life and ground into a soylent-like slurry to be shoveled indifferently into the gaping maw of the viewer, reader, absorber.

Ethnic cleansing ordered with a lazy smirk; questions about human rights deflected with a mute shrug; people kidnapped and filmed in abstracting close-up, blurred through a tissue of relaxing sound. The stultifying quality of the videos doesn’t just reflect the callousness of the politics — it is that callousness, distilled and refined. The feelings of low-grade alienation, even hopelessness, that many internet users have reported after viewing vibe-heavy content find their ultimate expression here. The deportation video’s woozy atmosphere is nothing more and nothing less than a weaponized form of this desensitized malaise. It wants above all to produce not outrage but fatigue.

Still, this style of enforced indifference betrays the right’s desire to be insulated from the effects of its bloodlust. The ambient smear of right-wing art expresses a wish for a warm cocoon protecting the viewer from the carnage he longs for. Inside this bubble, real violence can only register in gauzy slo-mo, in lens flares and reverb washes. It’s no silver lining, but it may be useful to recall that this is actually an aesthetics of weakness, not of unbreakable strength. The high style of the platform era may turn out to be the late style of U.S. empire, daze and glaze softening the impact of implosion until it is impossible to ignore. Every new beginning, it has been said, comes from some other beginning’s end. It is a promise and a threat.