Having made anonymity a hallmark, they virtually always appear masked, sometimes sporting neck gaiters with skulls on them, when they’re not wearing what GQ has called “Dropshipped Normcore,” “a kind of algorithmically-influenced, masculine mish-mash of the kind of high-crowned baseball hats, tight graphic T-shirts, open plaid button-ups, slim stretch denim jeans or cargo pants, and anonymous walking sneakers or trail shoes.” The author and illustrator Molly Crabapple has called them a “Temu death squad.” It’s no surprise that masked ICE agents slipping on (real) ice have provoked such intense hilarity that Homeland Security officials apparently instructed FEMA workers to avoid using the term “ice” in recent winter storm warnings, to avoid having their posts “being turned into internet fodder.” In an echo that might sound familiar today, Hitler and other Reich officials also took their own stabs at humor to make themselves more popular: a New York Times article from 1940, with the unfortunate headline “Hitler’s Fun,” says that a recent speech by the dictator was full of “merry quips,” adding, “He was very jovial about the thousands and thousands of bombs he promised to drop on England nightly for every hundred the British raiders scatter over Germany.” The Nazis, for instance, tried to at first stem the tide of parody songs, as the Times reported, before eventually thinking the better of it: “Goebbels evidently has decided on second thought that this sort of activity was a safety valve that would be dangerous to remove.” Similarly, JD Vance has not only pretended to love being called a couch-fucker, but, on Halloween, dressed as one of the memes of himself that has circulated online.
Author: Anna Merlan
Published at: 2026-02-02 21:49:32
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