Heritage Americans™

Blood and soil nationalism (Blut und Boden) insists that a country is not merely a collection of individuals but a Volk: a mystically defined and ethnically pure group bound together by shared blood, culture, and destiny. Vice President JD Vance has called to “redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century” so that priority goes to Americans with real roots: “the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War”—people whom others in MAGA call “Heritage Americans” (trademark pending).

In other words, some Americans are just inherently more volkish than others.

By that logic, I’m the most Übervolk person I know—I can trace my ancestry back to John Rolfe and Pocahontas in a direct line, by name through each intervening generation, with historical receipts every step along the way. Conversely my wife is as shockingly unvolk as one can possibly manage and still be born on American soil (she identifies as Appalasian). I’m not entirely sure what that makes our children. Semivolk? Volk-lite? Volk-adjacent with premium bloodline DLC but running unauthorized firmware?

Schrödinger’s Volk.

It’s all bullshit of course. We’re both equally American. But it’s dangerous bullshit.

Meanwhile the Department of Homeland Security employs white-nationalist themes in recruitment materials, national parks and museums have meticulously scrubbed their exhibits of any and all references to slavery, and a post calling for the deportation of all non-whites gets 2M+ views.

There’s a distinction between rhetoric that targets what people believe and ideologies that target who they are. The first is politics—harsh, ugly, sometimes dangerous, but politics. The second is the groundwork for eliminationist violence, and it has a body count stretching back centuries through every genocide scholars have studied. I’ve written before about this distinction, about the infrastructure that precedes atrocities, and about how platform capture mainstreams the messaging.

But blood-and-soil nationalism doesn’t just cross that line. It is the line. It defines belonging by blood, not belief. It sorts human beings into those who matter and those who don’t based on ancestry they didn’t choose and can never change. And when that ideology moves from fringe message boards into official government communications, the infrastructure phase is over and the operational phase has begun.

Two days after ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good as her wife watched in horror, the Department of Homeland Security’s official Instagram account posted a recruitment ad set to “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots, a song popularized in neo-Nazi spaces whose lyrics about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat” appeared in the manifesto of a white supremacist who murdered three Black people at a Dollar General in Florida. In the days that followed, Federal accounts posted shared content from an account whose bio reads “Wake Up White Man,” and paired John Gast’s 1872 American Progress, a painting depicting white settlers advancing westward as Native Americans flee, with the caption “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” The Department of Labor posted “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”—which requires remarkably little effort to hear as an English translation of Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.

The day after Good’s murder, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem stood behind a podium bearing the slogan “One of Ours, All of Yours.”

These aren’t the work of rogue social media interns. PBS, NBC, CNN, and the Forward have all documented the pattern. Researchers across multiple institutions have reached the same conclusion: this is a coordinated propaganda campaign across multiple federal departments. As Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society, put it: the dog whistles used to come from supporters. “Now they’re being done directly by the administration.” Cynthia Miller-Idriss at American University’s Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab called it “a turning point in the propaganda campaign.” Peter Simi, a sociologist at Chapman University who has studied extremist groups since the mid-1990s, said the messaging has “gone from episodic to more consistent, and it’s gone from more gray area to more clear cut.”

And Minneapolis is where the rhetoric became operational.

On January 6, 2026, DHS announced the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out, surging over 2,000 ICE agents and 1,000 Customs and Border Patrol officers into the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan area. The stated justification was fraud in the Somali-American community. Of the roughly 3,000 people arrested, 23 were Somali. None had ties to the fraud cases under investigation. Among those detained: Oglala Sioux tribal members pulled from a homeless encampment, restaurant and airport workers, Target employees, parents waiting for their kids at the bus stop, even children. Renee Good was shot in her car. A Somali mother was detained and separated from her toddler. A federal judge found that ICE had violated nearly a hundred court orders in Minnesota since January 1st alone. Schools went remote. Businesses shuttered. The operation’s own architects couldn’t even keep their arrest lists straight—several names ICE claimed as Metro Surge arrests had actually been transferred from state custody before the operation began, one as far back as 2003.

This is what blood-and-soil nationalism looks like when it gets a budget, a badge, and a body count. Not theoretical. Not a warning about what could happen someday. Operational, in an American city, against American citizens, carried out by federal agents recruiting to the sound of neo-Nazi anthems. ICE is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the United States, with $85 billion at its disposal and a projected annual spend of roughly $30 billion—more than Poland’s military budget, enough to rank in the top fifteen military budgets on Earth. The Brennan Center calls the $170 billion total immigration enforcement allocation a “deportation-industrial complex.” And calling ICE “law enforcement” is generous. Its agents operate masked, in plainclothes, in unmarked vehicles, without visible identification, without body cameras, and without judicial warrants. They are not required to identify themselves before detaining you.

A federal judge stated plainly that “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence… We have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.”

This isn’t a law enforcement agency. It’s a masked, nameless, $30-billion state paramilitary apparatus answerable to the executive branch alone, recruiting with neo-Nazi anthems—and in January it murdered two American citizens in Minneapolis.

The gap between Vance’s “Heritage Americans” speech and an ICE agent shooting a 37-year-old American mother in her car is even shorter than I feared it was half a year ago.

The ideology doesn’t stay theoretical.

It never does.