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The Memes Will Continue: When a Government Doctors a Photo and Calls It Humor

Manipulation Breakdowns · 6 min read · By D0

A Calm Face, Rewritten

On January 23, 2026, three activists were arrested in St. Paul, Minnesota, after disrupting a service at Cities Church. Their target: Pastor David Easterwood, who also serves as the acting field director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minnesota. The protesters, led by civil rights attorney and former Twin Cities NAACP president Nekima Levy Armstrong, argued that running a church while running immigration raids creates a fundamental moral conflict.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted a photo of Armstrong’s arrest on X. In the image, Armstrong looks directly ahead — composed, steady, expressionless. Anyone who has followed her career would recognize the posture.

Then the White House posted a different version.

What Was Altered

The White House version darkened Armstrong’s skin tone. It rearranged her facial features. It added tears streaming down her face. It transformed a calm, composed woman into a picture of hysteria and distress.

The New York Times ran both versions through Resemble.AI’s detection software, which confirmed the manipulation. The Times then reproduced nearly identical alterations using Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok — demonstrating that the tools to fabricate this kind of image are now trivially accessible.

When NBC News asked the White House about the alteration, a senior official confirmed it and called the image a “meme.” Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr posted on X: “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”

The Tactics

1. Visual Manipulation

This is the most literal form of manipulation there is — altering a photograph to misrepresent reality. The original image exists. It was posted by Noem herself. The White House took that image, changed what it showed, and published the altered version from an official government account.

This isn’t ambiguous. It’s not a question of interpretation or spin. A photograph was doctored.

2. Emotional Reframing

The alteration had a specific purpose: replace composure with collapse. Armstrong was calm. The altered image made her appear to be sobbing. The intent is to reframe the subject — from a woman acting on conviction to a woman overwhelmed by consequence.

This inverts the emotional narrative. Instead of a composed attorney standing on principle, you see a distraught person who appears to regret her actions. The image does what the arrest itself couldn’t: make her look broken.

As Armstrong put it: “They had tears coming out of my eyes and made me look hysterical.”

3. Racial Caricature

Darkening a Black woman’s skin in an official government image is not a creative choice. It’s a technique with a long and documented history.

Armstrong herself drew the connection: the exaggerated features and darkened skin reminded her of Jim Crow-era propaganda, when racist caricatures depicted Black people with distorted, exaggerated features to dehumanize them. She called it “diabolical.”

She’s right. This particular alteration doesn’t just misrepresent one person. It reaches into a visual vocabulary of racial degradation that predates photography itself.

4. The “Just a Meme” Shield

This is perhaps the most important tactic in the sequence. When confronted with evidence of the alteration, the White House didn’t deny it. They didn’t apologize. They reclassified it.

By calling a doctored government image a “meme,” the administration achieved several things simultaneously:

  • Trivialized the act. Memes are jokes. You don’t investigate a joke. You don’t hold press conferences about a joke.
  • Shifted the burden. Anyone who objects is now “overreacting to a meme” — humorless, fragile, unable to take a joke.
  • Established precedent. If this is a meme, then any future government image manipulation is also a meme. The category absorbs everything.

Armstrong saw through it: “This wasn’t just a meme. This was a way of characterizing me as a Black woman.”

5. Context Erasure

The altered image circulated without the context that produced it. Here’s what was missing from the frame:

  • Why the protest happened: A government immigration enforcement official serving simultaneously as a church pastor — a conflict that raises legitimate questions about the separation of church and enforcement.
  • Who Armstrong is: A civil rights attorney, law professor, former NAACP president. Not a random agitator — a person with decades of advocacy.
  • What actually happened: A peaceful protest inside a church, followed by arrest. Not violence. Not destruction.

The image erases all of this. You see a crying woman in custody. That’s the whole story the image tells. Everything else requires you to look further — and most people scrolling through a feed won’t.

6. Authority Amplification

When a random account posts a manipulated image, it’s trolling. When the White House posts it, it’s something else entirely.

The image carries the implicit authority of the institution publishing it. An altered photo from an official government account doesn’t register the same way as one from an anonymous account. It benefits from a presumption of legitimacy that most viewers don’t consciously question.

This is influence through institutional position — the manipulation is amplified by the credibility of the source.

What the Influence Tactics Score Reveals

Running this sequence through a manipulation detection framework, the composite factors are pronounced:

  • Emotional Manipulation: Very high. A fabricated emotional state was literally painted onto a person’s face.
  • Missing Information: Very high. The context for the protest, Armstrong’s identity, and the nature of the demonstration were all absent from the altered image.
  • Tribal Division: High. The image reinforces an us-vs-them frame — law enforcement vs. lawbreakers — while stripping out the moral complexity.
  • Source Credibility Exploitation: High. The image was published by an official government account, leveraging institutional trust.

The Larger Pattern

This isn’t an isolated incident. Throughout Trump’s second term, administration officials have routinely posted memes and AI-generated images across government social media accounts. The line between “official communication” and “content creation” has been deliberately blurred — and that blurring serves a purpose.

When government communications become indistinguishable from shitposts, two things happen. First, manipulation becomes harder to identify — if everything is a meme, nothing is propaganda. Second, accountability evaporates — you can’t hold someone accountable for a joke.

“The memes will continue” isn’t just a dismissal. It’s a policy statement.

What to Watch For

When you encounter an image that:

  • Shows a public figure in an emotional state that seems inconsistent with their known demeanor
  • Comes from an official account but looks more like content than communication
  • Gets dismissed as “just a meme” or “just a joke” when questioned
  • Strips away all context that would explain why the person was there in the first place
  • Darkens, distorts, or exaggerates physical features in ways that echo historical dehumanization

…pause before you scroll. The image may have been built to make you feel something about someone that isn’t real.

This article is part of Decipon’s “Manipulation Breakdown” series, where we analyze real-world examples of influence tactics using the Decipon Influence Tactics Score methodology. Decipon doesn’t tell you what’s true — it shows you how content is trying to influence you.

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