A new vision for the United States is being forced into place — one rooted not in liberty or justice, but in subjugation and the quiet normalization and acceptance of fascism. You can see it in the memes, the slogans, and the curated nostalgia flooding social media accounts aligned with the Trump administration. You can see it in the way frontier and 1950s iconographies have returned not as history but as aspiration. And you can see it in the current administration’s campaign to control what young people learn about history, colonization, slavery, genocide, and the violent foundations of this country.
This revival is not about remembering the past or indulging in a trendy, nostalgic aesthetic. It’s about promoting and embracing a version of “America” built on authoritarianism and white supremacy. It’s a version that elevates conquest, cruelty, and dominance as virtue and heritage over liberty and justice. It’s a digital-age rebranding of Manifest Destiny — the idea that the United States was ordained to expand across the North American continent, seizing land, displacing and eradicating Indigenous people in the name of progress — now crafted to make subjugation look like patriotism and to turn historical distortion into accepted truth.
That is why an incident like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s defense of the Medals of Honor awarded to the soldiers who carried out the Wounded Knee Massacre is dangerous. And that incident was far from an isolated example of the Trump administration actively embracing and defending the violent legacy of Manifest Destiny and the belief systems that justified genocide and land theft.
Indeed the official social media account of the Department of Homeland Security posted the painting American Progress by John Gast on X — a scene that portrays westward expansion as a noble mission, with a floating white woman carrying “civilization” toward the frontier, while settlers, soldiers, trains, and telegraph lines push Indigenous people and buffalo into darkness and out of the frame — alongside the text, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Examples like these are evidence of a larger project that uses nostalgia as a political weapon and mythmaking as a tool to justify violence.
This narrative shapes policy, fuels immigration enforcement, and drives efforts to suppress education about Thanksgiving and the realities of colonization. It transforms federal agencies, social media, and public institutions into extensions of a worldview that treats Indigenous people as obstacles, the “Indian Problem” that the U.S. must still eradicate.
Across campaign-aligned pages, far right networks, and the administration’s own digital channels, westward expansion has been recast as an aspirational identity. The genocide, land theft, forced removals, and destruction of Indigenous nations that built the frontier are erased, and what remains is a cinematic mythology built for political use.
This reframing is not limited to fringe accounts. Federal agencies have circulated frontier-themed memes meant to promote everything from joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to pro-natalism. When institutions tied to national security adopt the language of “restoring the frontier” and “taking back the country,” they lay the groundwork for violent policies that demand reclaiming and recreating an imagined past at any cost.
The nostalgia is intentional because it shapes how people feel before they decide what to believe. Once that groundwork is laid, the defense of injustice and violent authoritarianism, like Hegseth’s insistence that Wounded Knee soldiers “deserved” their medals or violent ICE raids at daycare centers and workplaces, no longer shocks. It becomes an extension of the myth of American Exceptionalism wrapped in patriotism. As it becomes more normalized, injustice becomes inevitable, and inevitability becomes destiny.
The administration’s modern Manifest Destiny stretches into the operations of federal agencies tasked with policing borders and communities. ICE has become one of the most powerful tools in this new frontier project, targeting Indigenous people under the guise of national restoration.
Navajo and Tohono O’odham leaders said the recent detentions mirror older federal efforts to control Indigenous movement and identity. They pointed to cases where Navajo citizens carrying state IDs and Certificates of Indian Blood were still detained or questioned by ICE, and where Tohono O’odham citizens were told that their ties to their own homelands did not matter because officials only recognized the border. These incidents reflect a long-standing pattern of dismissing tribal documents, Indigenous mobility, and Indigenous identity as invalid. In Iowa, a member of the Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community was nearly turned over to federal immigration agents after the Polk County Jail issued an ICE detainer meant for someone else. As Iowa Public Radio reported, police told the 24-year-old woman’s family that she would be removed to a country she had never lived in. She avoided deportation only because the jail finally acknowledged the detainer was filed in error.
These cases reveal a pattern rather than isolated mistakes. The American Immigration Council recently warned that the Supreme Court’s refusal to limit racial profiling in immigration enforcement has given officers even more room to target people based on appearance alone. This puts Indigenous people at particular risk, since tribal identification, Native languages, and even clear proof of citizenship are often ignored or treated as suspect by federal agents. The result is a system where Indigenous identity itself becomes grounds for questioning, detention, or removal, no matter how much documentation a person carries.
The Indian Law Resource Center has also sounded the alarm, noting that many of those targeted for removal are Indigenous migrants whose nations long predate the borders being used against them. The center points to the planned deportation of more than 600 Guatemalan children, at least 90 percent of whom are Maya, stressing that these children are Indigenous people with rights under both U.S. and international law.
These cases reveal a deeper reality. The same systems that once worked to erase Indigenous nations within the United States are now being used to remove Indigenous children and families from beyond its borders. It reflects the same thinking that once justified westward expansion. The ideology did not disappear; it simply learned to present itself in new ways.
The administration’s revival of Manifest Destiny builds on this ongoing pattern of targeting Indigenous peoples, shifting it into the realm of imagery and narrative using a nostalgic blend of frontier myth and mid-century Americana to normalize subjugation and erase accountability. When that narrative takes root, it becomes easier to dismiss harm, ignore injustice, and discredit those who speak against it. This same narrative machinery is at work to shape how people in the U.S. understand Thanksgiving.
For many households, the holiday is a time to gather with loved ones, share a meal, watch football, and express gratitude. Many Native people celebrate in these ways too, because feasting is Indigenous, and we also enjoy good food and football. Yet the holiday carries a heavier weight for our communities. It marks the beginning of a violent era of colonization set in motion when European settlers arrived on these lands.
For generations, Thanksgiving has been offered as a simple tale of peace between settlers and Native peoples, a comforting story that reassures the country of its own goodness. This “friendly” version of Thanksgiving serves the broader strategies of historical revisionism used to justify settler colonialism by distorting, minimizing, or erasing the violence, exploitation, and resistance at the heart of this nation’s formation. These myths reinforce settler identity and national pride, encouraging people to avoid uncomfortable truths and discouraging any critical engagement with our shared, complicated history.
Even so, Native communities have never stopped pushing back against the sanitized Thanksgiving narrative.
In Plymouth, the National Day of Mourning has gathered hundreds of participants each year since 1970 to confront the Thanksgiving myth at its origin point. On Alcatraz Island, the Indigenous Peoples Sunrise Gathering honors resistance, survival, and sovereignty. Across Native nations, youth-led teach-ins, community fasts, and cultural events counter the national narrative with history, presence, and truth.
These gatherings do more than disrupt the myth. They expose the fragility of American exceptionalism and the power of Indigenous memory, survival, and resistance.
The struggle over history, from Wounded Knee to Thanksgiving to ICE detentions, is not a debate about the past. It is a struggle over who defines America and whose humanity matters. A nation that cannot face its own history cannot repair its present. A country that denies genocide cannot claim justice. A society that clings to myth will repeat the violence it refuses to see.
Telling the truth about the United States, the beauty and the brutality, the promises kept and the promises broken, is not destroying the country. Insisting on telling the truth asserts that we are capable of more than myth and refuse to accept a future shaped by denial, distortion, and the quiet normalization of authoritarianism. Honesty is the path that lets us reconcile with our complicated histories, repair the harm that continues, and choose a different way forward.
When we confront our history with honesty instead of lies, we create the possibility of a country where life, liberty, and justice are not privileges for the few but shared, inalienable rights for all. That is the measure of a nation brave enough to face itself. That is the only way the United States can ever live up to its own reputation as the land of the free, not as a slogan, but as a lived reality.
Johnnie Jae (Otoe-Missouria and Choctaw) is a writer, speaker, and founder of Red POP! News and the late A Tribe Called Geek. Known for her journalism, mental health advocacy, and digital activism, she is dedicated to amplifying Native voices through storytelling, media, and art. You can find her in the Bluesky and Instagram.
Truthout is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues. Since our founding in 2001, we have anchored our work in principles of accuracy, transparency, and independence from the influence of corporate and political forces. Truthout works to spark action by revealing systemic social, racial, economic and environmental injustice and providing a platform for progressive and transformative ideas, through in-depth investigative reporting and critical analysis. With a powerful, independent voice, we spur transformations in consciousness and inspire both policy change and direct action.
