404 Media

2025-10-28 21:13:08

Trump Admin’s Racist Halo Memes Are ‘A New Level of Dehumanization of Immigrants’

On Monday morning, the Trump administration used a picture of Halo’s Master Chief to call for the destruction of immigrants. This administration is no stranger to appropriating pop culture for its propaganda, but something about seeing the stalwart hero of a beloved video game twisted into an anti-immigrant super soldier hit people pretty hard.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration shared AI-generated Halo memes across its social media accounts. This culminated in the official Department of Homeland Security accounts sharing an image of dudes in Spartan armor riding a Warthog under the words “DESTROY THE FLOOD JOIN.ICE.GOV.” It was this image, in particular, that got in people’s heads.

In the fiction of Halo, the Flood is a parasitic creature that infects sentient life and turns them into monsters whose only desire is to spread the parasite. They’re depicted as a brainless and fast moving wave of flesh that could not be reasoned with.

Finishing this fight. pic.twitter.com/6Ezq9NUqMq
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) October 27, 2025

Michael Senters—a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech who studies the political consequences of online culture—sent me a DM out of the blue after he saw the Warthog meme. “The Halo tweets and the reactions on Twitter are actually driving me insane,” Senters told me. This is a man who regularly subjects himself to the depths of 4chan so he can study its effect on politics. He’s a veteran of the worst online spaces the internet has to offer, but the Halo meme got to him.

Trump’s propagandists have used the aesthetics of Star Wars and Studio Ghibli to push their message. They’ve set the Pokémon theme song to footage of ICE raids under the title “Gotta Catch Em All.” They’ve layered fash-wave variations of the MGMT song “Little Dark Age” over footage pulled from arrests. We’ve seen this administration do similar things in the past, so why did the Halo meme feel worse to Senters?

“What makes this debacle with the Halo memes different from other invocations of fandom culture is twofold in my opinion. First is the fact that Microsoft has declined to push back on the use of its biggest IP,” he said. “Combined with Microsoft donating to the White House ballroom project it gives the impression that Microsoft tacitly supports this.”

Microsoft declined to comment on this story.

Other IP holders have fought the administration over memes and won. The DHS video using the Pokémon theme song is still up, Pokémon Company International said it hadn’t given the administration permission to use its song. The band MGMT got DHS to pull the video that used its song.Little Dark Age. Even comedian Theo Von was able to force DHS to take down a video that featured him without his permission. As of this writing, the Halo memes are all still up across the Trump administration’s accounts. A video posted on DHS social media accounts Tuesday played music from the Halo soundtrack over footage of a Border Patrol raid.

“Second, and far worse in my opinion is this reaches a new level of dehumanization of immigrants by referring to them as the Flood, a parasitic alien lifeform in Halo who exist solely to eradicate all other forms of life and are controlled by the Gravemind, a monstrous intelligence that lurks in the shadows,” Senters said. “Immigrants stand in for the Flood while the Gravemind stands in for the Jews, creating a perfect metaphor for the far-right that allows them to target to of their traditional enemies with exterminationist rhetoric and it's not hyperbolic to say it's exterminationist because in Halo the only way to defeat the Flood is to wipe them out entirely, otherwise they will continue to reproduce.”

The Trump administration has long invoked racist imagery, much of it pulled from America’s past, to sell its agenda. But overtly equating immigrants to a ravening horde of monsters from a video game has its closest analogue in Nazi propaganda.

“What is especially surreal is seeing niche memes pressed into the service of the most controversial and violent aspects of President Trump's agenda. A few months ago, it was the ‘Ghiblification’ of the kidnapping and detention of American residents. Now it is a picture of Master Chief and a recruitment pitch to join ICE and ‘Destroy the Flood,’ Emerson T Brooking, the director of strategy at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, told 404 Media.

“In many ways, Trump administration officials are trying to use these online motifs to smuggle concepts that would otherwise be too extreme for the American people. Most Americans do not want to ‘destroy’ legal asylum seekers. And referring to this group of people as a ‘flood’ is the sort of thing that was once the domain of white-nationalist manifestos. But tie these things together with an image of Master Chief and a Halo Warthog, and the inconceivable becomes a casual joke,” Brooking said.

Trump’s propagandists are extremely online and tuned to what’s trending on social media. The reason Halo is being used to push violence against immigrants is that Microsoft announced a remake of the original game last week. The bigger news was that, for the first time, the Master Chief would appear on Playstation. In a joke post on X, Gamestop declared this the official end of the console war, a term that refers to the decades long feud between fans of different video game consoles.

The official White House X account retweeted the joke post with an image of Trump as Master Chief. Another White House aligned social media gave Trump credit for ending the console war. Angry Joe, a popular gaming YouTuber, riled up other gamers online by posting “FUCK ICE! And FUCK DONALD TRUMP!” in response to the "Destroy the Flood” meme. The composer of the original games, Marty O’Donnell, reminded everyone that he’s running for Congress and promised to “destroy the flood” if elected. Other people from the original development team told Game File that seeing Master Chief used this way sickened them.

Independent journalist Alyssa Mercante managed to get a response from the White House press team about the Halo memes. “Yet another war ended under President Trump's watch—only one leader is fully committed to giving power to the players, and that leader is Donald J. Trump. That’s why he’s hugely popular with the American people and American Gamers,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai told Mercante in an email.

“It is really not enough to describe the comms teams of the second Trump administration as ‘terminally online.’ The White House just marked the end of the console wars; DHS is posting deep fried Halo memes. We are somewhere else entirely,” Brooking said.

Halo co-creator says ICE’s Halo-themed recruitment ad “makes me sick”

Another Halo maker says ad "ought to offend every Halo fan, regardless of political orientation." ALSO: A developer whose game just launched on Xbox slams Microsoft’s silence

^{Stephen Totilo (Game File)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 14:27:40

ICE Is Using a University Building as a Deportation Office and the University Says It Can't Do Anything About It

A university in Milwaukee is stuck with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as its tenant after the agency refused to leave a building the university intended to renovate into an architectural and civil engineering classroom building. Instead, the building is being used as an office for ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the main part of ICE performing Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

The situation has created a nightmare for administrators at the Milwaukee School of Engineering and a morally untenable situation for many students. ICE is quite literally running deportation operations out of a university-owned building, and, according to the university, it can’t do anything about it. 404 Media obtained a recording of a meeting between students and university administrators which discussed ICE’s ongoing use of the building.

In 2023, an alum of the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) sold a building at 310 E. Knapp St. to the school for a massive discount, with the intention of the building being renovated and turned into an academic facility. At the time, ICE was a tenant of the building but was in the process of building a new office elsewhere in Milwaukee. Its lease was set to expire in April, but ICE, through the General Services Administration (GSA) which handles real estate for the federal government, unilaterally extended the lease through April of next year and has the option to remain in the building through 2028, the university says. The university says there is nothing it can legally do to evict ICE. Concerned students say the situation is untenable and immoral—the university is now collecting rent directly from the government, and ICE is processing undocumented immigrants from the office.

“Can you see how it might look like MSOE is helping facilitate their mass deportation effort?” a student asked university administrators at a meeting about the building last week, according to audio obtained by 404 Media. “It feels like the federal government’s goals and objectives of mass deportation right now outweigh the academic use of that building for MSOE,” another said.

“We inherited those tenants, we didn’t invite them to be in that building, we inherited that building, their lease, and their timing of their new building being built out,” Seandra Mitchell, MSOE’s VP of Student Affairs and Campus Inclusion said in the audio. “They’re still building that building, so that’s why they’re still there.”

The situation highlights an extreme example of a phenomenon playing out all over the country: While much of the federal government contracts (and is at the moment shut down altogether), ICE is rapidly expanding. This means it is building our new offices and facilities and keeping old ones longer than was originally planned. ICE is seeking significant office space not just in Milwaukee but in more than a dozen other cities.

Kip Kussman, associate vice president of student affairs at MSOE, told students that “the issue on 310 Knapp St. is complex. It’s also tied to a lease, which we have very little information on as a confidential document. I don’t know if we’re going to get you answers that are going to make you satisfied. And I regret that, I wish I could change that. We have minimal control of a complex governmental system and we’re doing our absolute best.”

Last week, the school put out a statement saying that when it acquired the building in 2023, the federal government told it that it intended to vacate the building within several months. “Based on that understanding, MSOE’s long-term plan was to renovate the facility for academic use following the termination of GSA’s tenancy,” the school said in the statement. “However, after the acquisition, the GSA elected to continue its occupancy beyond the original lease term while federal agencies determine their next steps. Under the terms of the inherited lease and federal authority allowing the government to require continued occupancy, MSOE is obligated to accommodate the tenant during this period.”

It added that “Federal law allows the government to continue occupancy in the premises past the current lease term,” and said it has no authority over who is in the building and what it is used for.

ICE’s website lists 310 E. Knapp Street as part of its “Chicago Field Office” and part of its Enforcement and Removal Operations team. The facility has holding cells for people that ICE detains but is not supposed to hold people overnight. An analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice found that on one day in June, 22 people were being held in the Knapp Street office. Also in June, ICE changed its rules about how long people can be held in facilities like the Knapp St. office to extend their possible detention time in these facilities for up to 72 hours (up from 12). A spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union Wisconsin told 404 Media that “It's unclear if they're going to stay there for the rest of their lease until April 2026 because ICE is also converting a building on Milwaukee’s Northwest side to be the new field office,” and that ICE is seeking a large amount of additional office space across the city, including for “law enforcement operations”. “We still don't exactly know what ICE plans to do with that amount of additional office space in these cities on top of their detention and field office spaces,” the spokesperson said.

GSA declined to comment. ICE did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for MSOE told 404 Media that “Under the terms of the inherited lease and federal authority allowing the government to require continued occupancy, MSOE is obligated to accommodate the tenant during this period.”

In 2023, Kendall Bruenig, the MSOE alum who sold the building to the university at a steep discount, said he was looking forward to the building being turned into a place of leaning: “I owe my current success to my degree from MSOE, so I am honored to support the university and help other MSOE grads to start successful careers,” he said.

ICE is expanding its footprint in Milwaukee. Beyond that, details are hard to come by.

The expansion comes as ICE begins to make use of an unprecedented infusion of funds from Congress.

^{, Journal Sentinel (Journal Sentinel)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 18:15:53

a16z Is Funding a 'Speedrun' to AI-Generated Hell on Earth

What if your coworkers were AI? What if AI agents, not humans, monitored security camera feeds? What if you had an AI tech recruiter to find motivated candidates, or an entirely autonomous recruiting firm? What if UPS, but AI, or finance, but DeepMind?

Does that sound like absolute hell on Earth? Well, too bad, because the giant Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is giving companies up to $1 million each to develop every single one of these ideas as part of its Speedrun program.

Speedrun is an accelerator program startups can apply to in order to receive funding from a16z as well as a “fast‐paced, 12-week startup program that guides founders through every critical stage of their growth,” according to Speedrun’s site. “It kicks off with an orientation to introduce the cohort, then dives into rapid product development—helping founders think through MVP while addressing key topics like customer acquisition and design partnerships.”

The program covers brand building, customer acquisition and launch, fundraising, team building, and more. The selected startups and founders meet each other, and receive the curriculum via workshops and keynote sections from “luminary speakers” such as Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Figma co-founder Dylan Field, a16z’s namesakes Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and others.

Silicon Valley incubators and accelerators are common, but I’ve rarely seen such an unappetizing buffet of bad ideas as Speedrun’s AI-centric 2025 cohort.

Last week, I wrote about Doublespeed, essentially a click farm that sells “synthetic influencers” to astroturf whatever product or service you want across social media, despite it being a clear violation of every social media platform's policy on inauthentic behavior. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

a16z’s Speedrun is also backing:

• Creed: An AI company “rooted in Christian Values” which produces Lenny, a “Bible-based AI buddy who's always got your back with wise words, scripture-inspired guidance, and a listening ear whenever you need it.”
• Zingroll: The “world’s largest Netflix-quality AI streaming platform,” which is another way of saying it’s a Netflix populated exclusively with AI Slop.
• Vega: which is building “AI-powered social orbits.” What does that mean? Not entirely clear, but the company has produced one of the most beautiful Mad Libs paragraphs I’ve ever seen: “We’re building the largest textual data moat on human relationships by gamifying the way people leave notes for each other. For the first time, LLMs can analyze millions of raw, human-written notes at scale and turn them into structured meaning, powering the most annotated social graph ever created.”
• Moona Health: an AI-powered Sleep care app the company says is covered by insurance. “Our AI-powered platform automates insurance claims and scheduling and analyzes sleep data – providing personalized session guidelines to therapists,” Moona says.
• Jooba: “The world’s first autonomous recruiting firm.”
• Margin: “The World’s first AI powered credit card.” Margin says “Customers earn points, with dynamic rewards that adapt to their preferences in real time.”
• First Voyage: A wellness app that gives you AI “mythological pets that turn wellness into play.”
• Axon Capital: billed as “DeepMind for Finance,” Axon says it has “pioneered brain-inspired, low-latency AI for financial markets.”

Part of the strategy for these types of accelerators and Silicon Valley venture capital firms more broadly is to place a lot of bets on a lot of startups with the knowledge that most of them are not going to make it. A million dollars is not a lot of money to a16z, especially when it only needs one of these companies to 100x its investment in order to make the whole endeavor profitable. What makes this Speedrun and the current moment we’re in with generative AI different is that a lot of AI implementations are going to be shoved down our throats before investors realize what AI is and isn’t good for.

Are Doublespeed’s AI-generated social media accounts actually going to convince people to use whatever products they’re promoting? The accounts I’ve seen lead me to believe that the answer is no, but until then, they will continue to flood social media with garbage. Is Jooba going to entirely replace HR professionals and recruiters? I don’t know, but a whole bunch of people who are trying to get a job to pay rent are going to get caught up in a dehumanizing process until we find out.

So the next time you find yourself asking why you're being inundated with AI wherever you go, remember that the answer is that someone with millions of dollars to spare paid for it on the off chance that it will yield a nice return.

Watch an AI-Generated Recruiter Make a Job Interview Even Worse

“Vertical bar pilates."

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 16:56:04

Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human

I woke up restless and kind of hungover Sunday morning at 6 am and opened Reddit. Somewhere near the top was a post called “TIL in 2002 a cave diver committed suicide by stabbing himself during a cave diving trip near Split, Croatia. Due to the nature of his death, it was initially investigated as a homicide, but it was later revealed that he had done it while lost in the underwater cave to avoid the pain of drowning.” The post linked to a Wikipedia page called “List of unusual deaths in the 21st century.” I spent the next two hours falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, clicking through all manner of horrifying and difficult-to-imagine ways to die.

A day later, I saw that Depths of Wikipedia, the incredible social media account run by Annie Rauwerda, had noted the entirely unsurprising fact that, behind the scenes, there had been robust conversation and debate by Wikipedia editors as to exactly what constitutes an “unusual” death, and that several previously listed “unusual” deaths had been deleted from the list for not being weird enough. For example: People who had been speared to death with beach umbrellas are “no longer an unusual or unique occurrence”; “hippos are extremely dangerous and very aggressive and there is nothing unusual about hippos killing people”; “mysterious circumstances doesn’t mean her death itself was unusual.” These are the types of edits and conversations that have collectively happened billions of times that make Wikipedia what it is, and which make it so human, so interesting, so useful.

recently discovered that wikipedia volunteers have a hilariously high bar for what constitutes "unusual death"
— depths of wikipedia (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-10-27T12:38:42.573Z

Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man. As others have already pointed out, Grokipedia seeks to be a right wing, anti-woke Wikipedia competitor. But to even call it a Wikipedia competitor is to give the half-assed project too much credit. It is not a Wikipedia “competitor” at all. It is a fully robotic, heartless regurgitation machine that cynically and indiscriminately sucks up the work of humanity to serve the interests, protect the ego, amplify the viewpoints, and further enrich the world’s wealthiest man. It is a totem of what Wikipedia could and would become if you were to strip all the humans out and hand it over to a robot; in that sense, Grokipedia is a useful warning because of the constant pressure and attacks by AI slop purveyors to push AI-generated content into Wikipedia. And it is only getting attention, of course, because Elon Musk does represent an actual threat to Wikipedia through his political power, wealth, and obsession with the website, as well as the fact that he owns a huge social media platform.

One needs only spend a few minutes clicking around the launch version of Grokipedia to understand that it lacks the human touch that makes Wikipedia such a valuable resource. Besides often having a conservative slant and having the general hallmarks of AI writing, Grokipedia pages are overly long, poorly and confusingly organized, have no internal linking, have no photos, and are generally not written in a way that makes any sense. There is zero insight into how any of the articles were generated, how information was obtained and ordered, any edits that were made, no version history, etc. Grokipedia is, literally, simply a single black box LLM’s version of an encyclopedia. There is a reason Wikipedia editors are called “editors” and it’s because writing a useful encyclopedia entry does not mean “putting down random facts in no discernible order.” To use an example I noticed from simply clicking around: The list of “notable people” in the Grokipedia entry for Baltimore begins with a disordered list of recent mayors, perhaps the least interesting but lowest hanging fruit type of data scraping about a place that could be done.

On even the lowest of stakes Wikipedia pages, real humans with real taste and real thoughts and real perspectives discuss and debate the types of information that should be included in any given article, in what order it should be presented, and the specific language that should be used. They do this under a framework of byzantine rules that have been battle tested and debated through millions of edit wars, virtual community meetings, talk page discussions, conference meetings, inscrutable listservs which themselves have been informed by Wikimedia’s “mission statement,” the “Wikimedia values,” its “founding principles” and policies and guidelines and tons of other stated and unstated rules, norms, processes and procedures. All of this behind-the-scenes legwork is essentially invisible to the user but is very serious business to the human editors building and protecting Wikipedia and its related projects (the high cultural barrier to entry for editors is also why it is difficult to find new editors for Wikipedia, and is something that the Wikipedia community is always discussing how they can fix without ruining the project). Any given Wikipedia page has been stress tested by actual humans who are discussing, for example, whether it’s actually that unusual to get speared to death by a beach umbrella.

Grokipedia, meanwhile, looks like what you would get if you told an LLM to go make an anti-woke encyclopedia, which is essentially exactly what Elon Musk did.

As LLMs tend to do, some pages on Grokipedia leak part of its instructions. For example, a Grokipedia page on “Spanish Wikipedia” notes “Wait, no, can’t cite Wiki,” indicating that Grokipedia has been programmed to not link to Wikipedia. That entry does cite Wikimedia pages anyway, but in the “sources,” those pages are not actually hyperlinked:

I have no doubt that Grokipedia will fail, like other attempts to “compete” with Wikipedia or build an “alternative” to Wikipedia, the likes of which no one has heard of because the attempts were all so laughable and poorly participated in that they died almost immediately. Grokipedia isn’t really a competitor at all, because it is everything that Wikipedia is not: It is not an encyclopedia, it is not transparent, it is not human, it is not a nonprofit, it is not collaborative or crowdsourced, in fact, it is not really edited at all. It is true that Wikipedia is under attack from both powerful political figures, the proliferation of AI, and related structural changes to discoverability and linking on the internet like AI summaries and knowledge panels. But Wikipedia has proven itself to be incredibly resilient because it is a project that specifically leans into the shared wisdom and collaboration of humanity, our shared weirdness and ways of processing information. That is something that an LLM will never be able to compete with.

Wikipedia Prepares for 'Increase in Threats' to US Editors From Musk and His Allies

The Wikimedia Foundation says it will likely roll out features previously used to protect editors in authoritarian countries more widely.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-10-28 15:45:05

Rogue Goodreads Librarian Edits Site to Expose 'Censorship in Favor of Trump Fascism’

On Friday morning, Goodreads users who wanted to read reviews of the werewolf romance Mate by Ali Hazelwood were confronted by the cover of the new Eric Trump book Under Siege. One of the site's volunteer moderators had gone rogue and changed Mate’s cover, added the subtitle “Goodreads Censorship in Favor of Trump,” and altered Mate’s listing into an explanation of why. To hear them tell it, Goodreads was removing criticism of Trump’s book from the site.

“Silencing criticism of political figures—especially those associated with authoritarian movements—helps normalize and strengthen those movements,” the post that replaced Mate’s description said. “When we let powerful people’s books be protected from criticism, we give up the right to hold power accountable.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Goodreads employs a volunteer staff of “Librarians” who act as moderators for the site and have the power to make changes to the listings. One of these librarians altered the titles, pictures, and blurbs of several popular books including the Mate, the Resse Witherspoon penned thriller Gone Before Goodbye, and the Nicholas Sparks bestseller Remain. The changes were up for a few hours before Goodreads caught on and fixed the listings.

Jana | Bookstagram (@janaandbooks) on Threads
Dearest Gentle Bookthreads, It’s time for our weekly wrap up of book discourse, drama, and terrible behavior! 1 Readers noticed a strange “glitch” on Goodreads Friday morning. Several books (including Ali Hazelwood’s “Mate” and Navessa Allen’s “Lights Out”) were instead showing the cover of Eric Trump’s memoir, and this message in the blurb:
Threads

The rogue librarian claims Goodreads is censoring negative reviews of pro-Trump books. They said that Goodreads deleted negative reviews of Under Siege as they came in after its publication on October 14. “These were the honest opinions from real readers who disagreed with the book’s content,” the Librarian said in their post. “When people noticed and complained, Goodreads deleted ALL reviews of the book—positive and negative alike. This wasn’t an accident or a one-time glitch. It was a deliberate pattern.”
Goodreads screenshot.
A Goodreads spokesperson confirmed that a Librarian had altered the covers and listings for the books. “We're aware of unauthorized edits made by a volunteer librarian to several book listings. All titles affected by the unauthorized edits have been restored to their correct information, and the librarian no longer has an account on Goodreads,” the spokesperson said.

In response to questions about reviews for the Eric Trump book, the spokesperson told 404 Media that Goodreads “has systems in place to detect unusual activity on book pages and may temporarily limit ratings and reviews that don’t adhere to our reviews and community guidelines. In all cases, we enforce clear standards and remove content and/or accounts that violate these guidelines.”

On Monday, the two week old Trump book had no reviews and no ratings. By Tuesday morning, Under Siege had begun to accumulate reviews and ratings again. The Kamala Harris campaign memoir 107 Days, by contrast, has been out since September 23 and has more than 14,000 ratings and more than 2,000 reviews.

Goodreads has done this kind of thing before and its review guidelines state it will delete “unusual” reviews or “limit the ability to submit ratings.” The idea behind this is to prevent review bombing of controversial figures, but the author’s Goodreads protects tend to be conservatives. In the summer of 2024, it temporarily halted reviews of JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy after people had begun to dunk on the Vice President by leaving reviews for the book. There are many “unusual” reviews still up for Harris’ memoir, including a one star review that says “Did not read but so sick of seeing this 💩 in my suggested 🖕🖕”

This kind of one-sided protection from review bombing is at the heart of the rogue Goodreads librarian’s complaint. “When a platform removes criticism of a political book while leaving praise, or removes everything to hide that [that] criticism existed, they’re not saying neutral—they’re picking a side,” their post said. “Goodreads is owned by Amazon, one of the world’s largest companies. When major platforms decide which opinions can exist and which must disappear, they shape what people think is true or acceptable.”

Dunking on J.D. Vance’s ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ Is ‘Unusual Behavior,’ Goodreads Says

Goodreads attempts to protect Vance's "poverty porn" memoir from review-bombing, now that he's the vice presidential candidate.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}