'Grotesque' X-Files-themed White House website is darker than it looks: column

A new White House webpage starts like a horror movie trailer, according to New York Times columnist M. Gessen — glowing green letters against a dark backdrop, the words "aliens" and "declassified," and the promise of a 60-year government secret about to be revealed.

Then comes the twist, Gessen wrote: the "aliens" aren't extraterrestrial. They're immigrants — "the kind hunted by ICE."

The page announces that "aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods," shopping in the same stores and attending the same classes as American children. "That's the joke," Gessen wrote. "Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll."

Gessen wrote that the page, which invites users to look up immigrants supposedly arrested on criminal charges in American cities and towns, belongs to "a subgenre of Trumpian gestures that are menacing and sophomoric at the same time." Ernesto Verdeja, a genocide-prevention expert at the University of Notre Dame, described it to the columnist as "grotesque and terrifying and juvenile."

With phrases like "They do not belong here" and "Deport them all," Gessen wrote, the page struck the columnist as "an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants."

Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, offered a different read, that the purpose is to get Americans to do nothing.

"They want a majority of the population to turn their backs," Valentino told Gessen. "That's all that's necessary."

Valentino co-founded the Early Warning Project, which assesses the risk of mass atrocities worldwide. While anti-immigrant violence in the U.S. doesn't approach the scale of what he usually studies, Gessen wrote, Valentino said the kind of dehumanizing language the Trump administration uses is "a pretty standard indicator" of risk — a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence against a group.

"It's not that it turns normal people into murderers," Valentino said. "It's that it turns them into bystanders."

According to Gessen, the page appeared as resistance to ICE operations was gaining momentum — in the courts and in the streets, from protests over conditions at Newark's Delaney Hall detention facility to a New York coalition that has trained thousands of volunteers to peacefully resist ICE. Valentino believes the webpage is intended to discourage exactly that kind of activity.

Gessen wrote that the gestures are hard to write about because the ugliness is undisguised. "And yet," the columnist wrote, "these statements, step by preposterous step, change the world we live in."