A video posted on X by the Department of Homeland Security included a brief flash of a character who has become associated with violent racist and neo-Nazi content online.
The clip, which was published on Thursday evening, features text that says “LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED” and “the future is bright” alongside a quick succession of vintage shots of activities, President Trump as a younger man, and famous movies including “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Predator,” and “The Breakfast Club.” About 15 seconds into the montage, “Mac Tonight” makes an appearance.
“Mac Tonight,” also known as the “Moon Man,” was used in a McDonald’s marketing and commercial campaign in the 1980’s. The character’s most prominent feature is a crescent moon-shaped head and sunglasses. A 1987 article in the Pensacola News Journal described him as a “cool guy with a lounge-lizard voice and shades worn even at night.” The campaign, which included animatronics, was meant to promote evening dining at the fast food chain. It was discontinued due, in part, to legal drama.
More recently, the “Mac Tonight” character became popular with far-right activists and neo-Nazis online. In 2019, the Anti Defamation League added “Mac Tonight” to its database of “hate symbols” that the organization said are among the “most frequently used by a variety of white supremacist groups and movements, as well as some other types of hate groups. In its entry on the character, the ADL said that internet users began to display it alongside “violent or racist rap songs” in the 2000s and that, by 2015, it was firmly “associated with alt right language and imagery, including explicit white supremacist imagery.”
The Trump administration and its allies have both taken issue with the ADL in recent weeks because the group tracked racist and extremist statements associated with the late activist Charlie Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA. After he was shot and killed last month, Kirk has become a martyr in MAGA circles and, on Wednesday, FBI Director Kash Patel dramatically cut ties with the ADL, a Jewish organization that had provided the bureau with research and data on hate groups for decades.
However, the researchers at the ADL are not the only ones who have documented the notable association between “Mac Tonight,” violently racist memes, and neo-Nazis. Earlier this year, a group of academics in Florida published an article that documented the “Moon Man” on 99 “white power music album covers.” They reported the figure often appeared “along with depictions of firearms, Nazi symbolism, and pro-Confederate images as well as anti-Semitic and anti-Black imagery and examples of political violence.” Know Your Meme also has an entry on the McDonald’s mascot noting it is frequently used in “racist parodies of various rap songs” and “often depicted as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who advocates using violence against non-white minorities.” Within hours of the video being posted by DHS, the “Eyes on the Right” account on Bluesky pointed out the “Mac Tonight” cameo.
Since Trump took office earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security’s social media output has attracted notice by mocking the targets of his mass deportation drive and publishing what CNN described as imagery that is “alarmingly nationalist — and fraught with appeals to a specifically White and Christian national identity.” The memes and racially charged content come as DHS is conducting a “Defend The Homeland” drive to recruit Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to participate in raids. While the Trump administration — including in the “Mac Tonight” video — has said its deportation push is focused on criminals, non-criminals and even U.S. citizens have been caught up in the crosshairs. On Tuesday, ICE agents made headlines with a nighttime raid where they busted down doors in a Chicago apartment building detained multiple citizens for hours and removed residents, including children, some of whom were reportedly naked, from their homes.
TPM reached out to DHS to ask why “Mac Tonight” was included in the video, how it related to the idea of “LIFE AFTER ALL CRIMINAL ALIENS ARE DEPORTED,” and whether the agency was aware of the symbol’s racist associations. We received a response from an unnamed DHS spokesperson who said, “Loving hot, tasty, McDonald’s does not make you a Nazi.”
They also included the following variation on a popular meme implying that, despite the well-documented usage of “Mac Tonight” by white supremacists, it is conspiratorial to associate the fast food restaurant campaign with racism:
In some settings the Moon Man can indeed be innocuous. The ADL’s writeup of “Mac Tonight” noted that “because of the Moon Man’s mundane and non-racist origins … care must be taken to judge a Moon Man image only in context.” However, far right meme culture often exploits these grey areas. Neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes has discussed how “irony is so important for giving a lot of cover” to extremist views.
Having some degree of plausible deniability is one reason memes and cartoon imagery have gained traction in white supremacist circles. And now, some of those same memes and images are popular on the Trump administration’s social media.
