The truth may be out there — but you won’t find it on the newly rolled-out website whitehouse.gov/aliens (or just aliens.gov, if you’re in a hurry). Earlier this month, the White House quietly launched a new webpage, one purporting to reveal the long-hidden “truth” about the secret infiltration of our society by aliens. The aliens in question aren’t extraterrestrial; they’re immigrants.
Visually, the new webpage riffs on The X-Files, and the message is a perverted inversion of John Carpenter’s anti-capitalist They Live!, in which aliens hide among humans, controlling society from the shadows. Frankly, the premise is not unlike the television show V, either the 1983 original or the remake. Clearly, President Donald Trump’s team is playing the hits, rolling out the tired conspiracy theories they’ve fallen back on time and again, and hoping the science fiction veneer will appeal to the crowd from 4chan, The Joe Rogan Experience, and other dark corners of the internet. If the website were not targeting real, living human beings, the ploy would seem so obvious as to be laughable.
Sci-fi set dressing aside, the new site is a tool, albeit an unwieldy one, that has been employed to a purpose. Recall that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act delivered an unprecedented budget increase to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, making it, according to NPR’s Bill Chappell, the “highest funded U.S. law enforcement agency.” Despite the unseriousness of the new White House website, the intent cannot be doubted. The language used on the site evokes a mood of sinister conspiracies, a contagion that infiltrates and poisons its host. That the diction is heavy-handed only makes the intent easier to recognize. Whichever intern plugged prompts into some Large Language Model word processor to spit out the text gracing the face of the new website was working hard to make the site is as chilling as anything written by R. L. Stine. (Is that reference out of date? Or perhaps too clunky? Stine writes horror books for children, so I mean to suggest that the White House communications team is capable of frightening only the most gullible of literate Americans.)
“They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences,” the site reads, implying that immigrant children are somehow inhuman. No matter one’s stance on the issue of the U.S. immigration system, the use of official national resources to dehumanize or vilify any group of people is immoral and disgusting in the extreme. Our national government should not use its resources to encourage Americans to fear their neighbors and coworkers.
Even the term “illegal alien” is dehumanizing and insulting. Thankfully, that kind of language has fallen out of popular usage, at least in most professional spaces, but an insistence on using outdated and offensive language is one way the formerly frightened racists in our midst recognize each other. Their dog whistles are getting louder, though.
No group of people is uniform. Whether one judges by astrological sign, geographic location, eye color, skin color, blood type, age, ethnicity — no one is just like everyone else in any given category. Similarly, is there any idea more patriotically American than the belief that everyone deserves to be judged on their own merits? Should not those ideals extend to everyone, not just those who have official citizenship?
Everyone of good conscience should vocally oppose any attempts to dehumanize their fellow human beings, regardless of their citizenship status, place of birth, or ethnicity. Also resist the urge to shrug off hamfisted attempts at fearmongering as merely silly. The delivery may be laughable, but the intent is deadly dangerous.
To that end, allow me to state my position plainly: The United States is a better place because of its immigrants. Memphis is a better place because of its immigrants. I have been taught by immigrants, danced with immigrants, and my life is immeasurably improved by their presence in it. That should go without saying, but these days, I feel better making sure I have it on the record.
Jesse Davis is a former Flyer staffer; he writes a monthly Books feature for Memphis Magazine. His opinions, such as they are, wish the right-wing bozos would get hip to the fact that authoritarian ideology is the villain in almost all of science fiction. Read a book, losers.
