A video published on X by the Ministry of Internal Security included a brief flash of a character who joined forces with racist and neonazi violent online content.
The clip, which was published Thursday evening, presents a text which says “life after all criminal foreigners is expelled” and “the future is brilliant” alongside a rapid succession of vintage activity plans, President Trump as a younger man and famous films, in particular “Ferris Bueller”, “Predator” and “The Breakfast Club”. About 15 seconds in the assembly, “Mac Tonight” appears.
“Mac Tonight”, also known as “Moon Man”, was used in a marketing and commercial campaign of McDonald’s in the 1980s. The most important characteristic of the character is a moon -shaped head and moon -shaped sunglasses. A 1987 article in Pensacola News Journal described it as a “cool guy with a lounge-libe voice and nuances carried even at night”. The campaign, which included animatronics, was to promote evening meals in the fast food chain. It was interrupted due, in part, of the legal drama.
More recently, the character “Mac Tonight” has become popular with far -right activists and online neonazis. In 2019, the Anti-Diffamation League added “Mac Tonight” to its “hate symbols” database which, according to the organization, are among the “most frequently used by a variety of white supremacist groups and Internet users, as well as certain types of hate groups. Imaging, including explicit white supremacist images. »»
The Trump administration and its allies have both disputed the ADL in recent weeks, because the group has followed racist and extremists associated with the Group of the deceased activist Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA. After being shot dead last month, Kirk became a martyr in Maga circles and, Wednesday, the director of the FBI, Kash Patel, radically reduced the links with the ADL, a Jewish organization which provided the research and data on the groups of hate for decades.
However, ADL researchers are not the only ones to have documented the notable association between “Mac Tonight”, the memes violent racist and the neonazis. Earlier this year, a group of academics in Florida published an article that documented the “Moon Man” on 99 “White Power Music Covers”. They pointed out that the figure often seemed to be “as well as representations of firearms, Nazi symbolism and pro-conferdered images as well as anti-Semitic and anti-black images and examples of political violence”. Know Your same also has an entry on McDonald’s mascot, noting that it is frequently used in “racist parodies of various rap songs” and “often represented as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, who advocates using violence against non -white minorities”. In the hours following the publication of the video by DHS, the “Eyes on Right” account on Bluesky underlined the “Mac Tonight” cameo.
Since Trump took office earlier this year, the production of social media from the Ministry of Internal Security aroused an opinion by making fun of the target of his mass expulsion campaign and by publishing what CNN has described as images which are “alarming nationalists – and responsible for calls for a specifically white and Christian national identity”. The memes and racly loaded content occurred while the DHS leads a “homeland defense” to recruit immigration and customs agents to participate in the raids. While the Trump administration – including in the video “Mac Tonight” – said that its expulsion thrust was focused on criminals, non -criminals and even American citizens were taken in the reticle. On Tuesday, ICE agents made the headlines with a night raid where they broke out doors in a building of Chicago apartments owned several citizens for hours and have removed residents, including children, some of whom were naked, from their homes.
TPM contacted DHS to ask why “Mac Tonight” was included in the video, how it is linked to the idea of ”life after all criminal foreigners” and if the agency was aware of the racist associations of the symbol. We received a response from an unnamed spokesperson of the DHS who said: “Like hot, tasty, McDonald’s does not make you a Nazi.”
They also included the following variation on a popular meme involving that, despite the well -documented use of “Mac Tonight” by white supremacists, he conspirator of associating the fast food campaign with racism:
In some contexts, the man of the moon can indeed be harmless. The writing of “Mac Tonight” of the ADL noted that “because of the banal and non -racist origins of the man of the moon … We must take care to judge an image of the man of the moon only in the context.” However, the culture of memes of the far right often uses these gray areas. The neonazi influencer Nick Fuentes explained how “irony is so important to give a lot of coverage” to extremist opinions.
Having a certain degree of plausible denial is one of the reasons why the same cartoons have gained ground in white supremacist circles. And now, some of these same memes and images are popular on the social media of the Trump administration.
