On March 18, the official White House account on X posted two photographs of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman who was arrested earlier this month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The post described her as a “previously deported alien felon convicted of fentanyl trafficking,” and celebrated her capture as a win for the administration. In one photograph, Basora-Gonzalez is shown handcuffed and weeping in a public parking lot.  

The White House account posted about Basora-Gonzalez again yesterday—this time, rendering her capture in the animated style of the beloved Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, who co-founded the animation company Studio Ghibli. Presumably, whoever runs the account had used ChatGPT, which has been going viral this week for an update to its advanced “4o” model that enables it to transform photographs in the style of popular art, among other things. The White House did not respond directly to a request for comment, instead referring me to a post by Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr that says, in part, “The arrests will continue. The memes will continue.”

It’s worth pausing here: The internet has been flooded with AI-generated images in this exact Studio Ghibli style. Some people have used it for images of pets or family members. Others opted for a trollish register, leading ChatGPT to spit out cutesy renderings of JFK’s assassination, planes hitting the World Trade Center, and the torture at Abu Ghraib. On X, the prevalence of these images became an event unto itself, one in which the White House decided to participate by sharing a cartoon of a woman crying in handcuffs.

This is how the White House account operates now. In previous administrations (including much of Donald Trump’s first term), the account was used to post anodyne updates, highlight press releases, and share information about the administration. It was, to be fair, often painfully dull or written in the stilted language of a brand. Now the account exists to troll its political enemies and delight the MAGA faithful.

[Read: The internet is worse than a brainwashing machine]

On Wednesday, the account posted a picture of Vice President J. D. Vance shooting a tactical rifle, referring to the bullets he fired as “freedom seeds,” a term popular among gun YouTubers. When Google Maps adopted the “Gulf of America” language pushed by the administration, the White House account celebrated by sharing a video in which the words Gulf of Mexico are wiped off the globe. In February, it posted an AI-generated picture of Trump as an American monarch, wearing a crown. The image’s caption reads, “Long live the king.” After the disastrous Oval Office ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the account posted a photo of Vance staring at Zelensky with the caption “Have you said thank you once?” Although the account sometimes shares actual news, it’s frequently preoccupied by rapid-response engagement bait for MAGA diehards. Less information, more content. The intent is not to inform but to go viral.

Beyond the fact that this kind of shitposting is so obviously beneath the office, the posts are genuinely sinister. By adding a photo of an ICE arrest to a light-hearted viral trend, for instance, the White House account manages to perfectly capture the sociopathic, fascistic tone of ironic detachment and glee of the internet’s darkest corners and most malignant trolls. The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.

To be clear, the actions of the second Trump administration—the dismantling of the federal government via DOGE, the apprehension and detainment of immigrants and green-card holders with seemingly no due process—are of far more consequence than what it posts on social media. But White House posts are not random missives either: They’re official government communications from the executive branch, sent out to 1.4 million followers, to say nothing of whatever additional reach these posts receive via algorithmic recommendation and ad hoc sharing.

The account’s true obsession is immigration: @WhiteHouse has posted dozens of mugshots of immigrants arrested by ICE. Each one lists an offense they’ve been arrested for in big block letters, and usually the catchphrase “MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN” is appended. Earlier this month, after the Department of Homeland Security commented on the deportation of a Lebanese professor at Brown University—a violation of a court order temporarily protecting her from expulsion—the White House account responded by posting a photo of Trump waving goodbye from a McDonald’s drive-through window. (The picture was taken during a 2024 campaign stunt.) On Valentine’s Day, the account wrote, “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Come here illegally / And we’ll deport you.”

And in an infamous example, on February 18, the White House account posted a 41-second video of faceless men being shackled and marched onto planes. The post’s caption read, “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” (ASMR is short for “autonomous sensory meridian response,” or the titillating sensation caused by certain noises, such as whispering, tapping, or crinkling; videos of people making such noises are enormously popular across social media.) The subtext of the White House post is far from subtle and is reminiscent of something out of 4chan’s notoriously bigoted politics message board: Watching allegedly undocumented immigrants bound in chains is a pleasurable, even sensual experience. Like any trolling post, it’s meant to be simultaneously taken seriously and played off as a dumb online joke. Even those inside the Trump administration seemed taken aback by the audacity of the post. Even some MAGA supporters appeared uncomfortable by @WhiteHouse’s brazenness. “If you guys could stick with the grim shock and awe, and leave the edgy gloating to those of us who don’t work in the White House I think that would probably be better for optics,” one user wrote on X. The “ASMR” deportation video, as of this writing, has been viewed almost 104 million times on X.

Exactly who is running the White House X account is an object of fascination for close observers. Some accounts fantasize that Trump’s college-age son, Barron, is running it. Those outside of Trump fandom have insisted that it is being run by edgelords—one post referred to the operator as an “incel reddit user.” One Bluesky user described the account as “lowkey goebbelsmaxxing,” a reference to the Nazi propagandist. (The White House did not respond to a request to identify who writes the account’s posts.) What all the speculation suggests is that at least someone with access to the account is intimately familiar with far-right internet spaces and culture, specifically Groypers, a term for the loose online movement that has succeeded the alt-right. Earlier this year, the writer John Ganz argued that “Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right.” He and others have suggested that the culture is present in the offices of Republican representatives in Washington, D.C., including in the White House. (A Trump staffer was fired in the first administration for associating with white nationalists; he’s now back, in a role at the State Department.) Although the identities of whoever is running the account are, at present, unknown, what’s clear is that their output appears to delight prominent extremists online. The message coming from the account, to borrow language from one far-right X user, is clear: The posters are in control.

[Read: X is a white-supremacist site]

And the posters have goals. The first is to engage and supply their loyal audiences with constant memes and content. The second is perhaps more strategic. The account’s blatant humiliation of immigrants who it alleges have heinous criminal records is intentional. The goal is to goad their opponents into defending people accused of indefensible crimes. The primary accusation from the MAGA faithful toward people who are outraged about the White House’s Studio Ghibli post or the ASMR video is that the left is more concerned with defending fentanyl dealers and immigrants accused of rape and robbery than they are about the safety of the country. “Disappointing that folks are more upset about this meme than they are about the fentanyl crisis,” Dorr said in the same post that the White House pointed me to. But this is a false binary; in all cases, the chief objections are to the dehumanization and glee on display and the worrying lack of due process.

The White House is after something more than just shock value. It’s propaganda, and Trump’s allies are learning the playbook. This week, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video on X from a prison in El Salvador where deported immigrants are being held. Behind Noem are dozens of men in one jail cell, many shirtless with tattoos; their heads have all been shaved during intake. The prisoners are props, a backdrop for Noem’s message of intimidation to undocumented immigrants: “If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.” Like the ASMR post or the Ghibli cartoon, the implication is that these deportees are utterly undeserving of any shred of human dignity. There are many other examples, such as FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent posts, one of which features him walking around in camouflage, set to rock music, as FBI agents blow open doors with explosives. Taken together, the posts offer a bracing but useful insight into how the administration sees itself, and the message of casual cruelty and overwhelming force it wants to project to the rest of the world.

That this administration should fully embrace the tactics and aesthetics of online far-right extremists and technological tools like generative AI to further its message makes perfect sense. These are reliable ways to increase engagement, gain attention, and illustrate a precise vision of the future they want to usher in. Even so, the account is chilling. Those who’ve spent enough time in the online spaces that have clearly influenced this administration—or at least whoever runs its social accounts—know how this goes. This is a game of accelerationism and nihilism, using tools and platforms that excel at depersonalizing, thus rendering empathy for others ever more difficult. That this sociopathic posting style is coming out of this administration—that it has been so thoroughly mainstreamed by the right—suggests that the cultural architecture of the internet has changed. There is still a fever swamp, but now the White House sits on top of it.

When the National Archives and Records Administration released previously unseen documents relating to the assassination of John F. Kennedy last week, the world learned something interesting. It was not anything new about who killed the president, but rather how long it takes anti-Semites to pretend to read some 63,000 pages about his murder before going back to saying that the Jews did it. The answer: less than 24 hours.

Last Tuesday, following an executive order from President Donald Trump, the documents became publicly available. By Wednesday, anti-establishment influencers had figured out who did the deed. “So who killed JFK?” asked one user on X. “The jews,” retorted Stew Peters, a far-right extremist and Holocaust denier with 808,000 followers, who has claimed that Jews sank the Titanic and that “the Constitution is being replaced with the Talmud.” (He has also hosted now–FBI Director Kash Patel six times on his online show.)

[Read: What the JFK file dump actually revealed]

More savvy sorts avoided explicitly impugning Jews for Kennedy’s killing and instead attempted to pin his death on the Jewish state. “It’s PROVEN there was Israeli involvement,” declared the manosphere podcaster Myron Gaines, who subsequently did a six-hour stream for his hundreds of thousands of followers in which he blamed Jewish people and Israel for multiple American catastrophes, including the 9/11 attacks. “We’ve definitely seen enough in the documents to indicate that Israel was involved in some way,” the pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll told his 1.2 million followers on X, just a day after the files were released.

James Li, a correspondent on the popular anti-establishment podcast Breaking Points, winkingly claimed that the truly incriminating material was still being concealed “in Tel Aviv.” Other second-tier talkers attempted to ride this viral trend to greater notoriety, paying Elon Musk’s platform to promote their anti-Jewish fulminations to more users. “Why did Israel kill JFK? Why do they control America? Why do they want world domination? Why do they worship Satan?” read one representative promoted post.

In reality, the newly declassified documents have little to say about Israel at all, let alone Israeli complicity in the assassination. There is a very straightforward reason for this: Israel was not complicit. We know this not just from American investigations, but from previously private Israeli records.

In November 2013, Israel’s national archives released a trove of documents to mark the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination, including the candid reactions of Israel’s leaders to the event. The Hebrew minutes from an Israeli cabinet meeting at the time reveal that the country’s decision makers did not know who killed the American president—and that they had their own conspiracy theories about who did.

“In my opinion, there are some dark corners that I doubt will ever be cleared,” mused the foreign minister and future prime minister Golda Meir, just eight days after Kennedy’s murder. She suggested to her colleagues that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been a communist agent of the Cuban leader Fidel Castro. “If there’s a clandestine group of Castro sympathizers that murdered the president, and it’s organized in a way that they silence the murderer,” she said, “I would say this is as severe as Kennedy’s murder.” (Lyndon B. Johnson shared Meir’s suspicions, though he revealed this only years later.)

So where did the notion that Israel killed JFK come from? Declassified cables trace the allegation to the country’s adversaries in the Middle East. In 1963, the National Security Agency intercepted a diplomatic message sent by a Palestinian source to unknown recipients three days after the assassination, asking supporters of the Palestinian cause to “reveal the conspiracy to the supreme judgment of the world.” The plot in question? “The late President was likely to win the coming Presidency elections without supplicating the Zionist sympathy or seeking the Jews [sic] votes,” the message claimed. “Aware of the fact that their influence and power in the United States are based upon the Jews [sic] votes, the Zionists murdered the courageous President who was about to destroy that legend of theirs.”

Whether due to outside urging or their own initiative, Israel’s enemies took up this call. “The Syrian regime, always in search of new anti-Zionist arguments, has found, in the murder of President Kennedy, material for a rather unorthodox interpretation of the lamentable event,” reads a declassified cable from seven days after the assassination. “According to the Ba’thist organ, the murder [of Kennedy] must be attributed to Zionism, which is really responsible and trying to cover up the misdeed.”

To anyone remotely familiar with the history, none of this makes any sense. Kennedy was a Zionist and a steadfast supporter of the Jewish state. “We are in this country the youngest of people,” he told the Zionist Organization of America in a 1960 address. “But we are the oldest of republics. Now is our chance in this country to extend the hand of friendship to the oldest of People and the youngest of republics.” Although Kennedy periodically disagreed with Israel on policy, he also sold Israel its first major American weapons system, HAWK anti-aircraft batteries—kicking off a U.S.-Israel partnership in aerial defense that would produce today’s Iron Dome.

Like numerous American politicians before and since, and like the majority of Americans, Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy were pro-Israel not because of some international Jewish conspiracy, but for entirely non-Jewish, largely geopolitical and religious reasons. Indeed, the sympathies of the Kennedy brothers were so well known that Robert was later assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist during his 1968 presidential campaign. Perhaps all of this is why Oliver Stone, the gadfly movie director and longtime Israel critic, never mentioned the Jewish state in his award-winning conspiratorial film JFK.

Given its implausibility, the “Jews killed JFK” theory was for decades relegated to the rantings of neo-Nazis and Iranian state television. The formerly fringe falsehood didn’t find its way to sudden celebrity because it became more convincing. Rather, the online conduits through which people get their information have supercharged this sort of material.

Today, many Americans turn to TikTok, X, YouTube, and podcasts to get their news and make sense of the world. These platforms have enabled talented creators to reach wide audiences. But without quality control or standards of practice, they also tend to privilege virality over accuracy and conspiracy theorists over more careful content creators. After all, novel content is cheapest and easiest to produce if you just make it up. And that includes anti-Jewish content.

Anti-Semitism is a social prejudice like any other, directed against individual members of a group for their perceived difference—but it also functions as a conspiracy theory. In fact, it is one of the world’s oldest conspiracy theories, furnishing an all-encompassing explanation for how the world works by blaming the world’s political, economic, and social problems on a clandestine cabal of string-pulling Jews.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism]

A discourse dominated by conspiracy theories, then, is one that will be inevitably dominated by anti-Semitism. Once a person becomes convinced that an invisible hand is responsible for the world’s ills, they are just a few Google searches away from centuries of propaganda informing them that the hand belongs to an invisible Jew. The Kennedy assassination is perhaps the most salient subject for such theories in American culture—and this, combined with an online ecosystem optimized for conspiracy theories, practically guarantees the anti-Semitic agitprop we now see.

That agitprop has little to teach us about who actually killed Kennedy. But the prevalence of such unhinged ideas does tell us something disquieting about ourselves and the incentives of the digital discourse we now inhabit—revealing a threat to our republic far greater than any assassin’s bullet.

Experts praised a move towards transparency, but there are no major revelations in the documents - and some still have yet to be released.

History buffs have started to search for new clues among the thousands of documents that were previously classified.

More than 60,000 new pages are now accessible. But historians are trying to answer whether they tell us anything new.

Scholars and historians are likely to spend months sifting through records for answers about US president's killing.

The files are still being reviewed, but have not so far revealed any smoking gun about the US president's killing.

US president says files contain 'a lot of reading' about assassination that has fuelled conspiracy theories for decades.