When Cruelty Seems Like a Joke

I felt a familiar chill reading reports last week that ICE agents in Colorado have been leaving “death cards”—Ace of Spades cards custom-printed with the words “ICE/Denver Field Office”—in the vehicles of immigrants they have detained. The gesture is theatrical and unmistakably deliberate.

It’s not just that these cards recall the actions of American GIs in Vietnam, who sometimes placed them in the mouths of dead enemy fighters or scattered them on trails to intimidate. It’s the way the symbolism works: jaunty and threatening at the same time. The point is not only to frighten, but to make cruelty feel clever, dressing violence up as a joke.

As an anthropologist who has written about military humor, I recognize this pattern immediately. I call it “frame perversion.” A “frame” is a collectively shared sense of what kind of social scene is being staged, or what emotional posture participants are expected to take. Frame perversion begins by invoking a positive, sociable, innocent, or playful frame (like a card game) and then abruptly fuses it with another frame oriented toward domination and death.

During the Vietnam War, for example, some American GIs had their metal Zippo lighters engraved with slogans that began piously, quoting Psalm 23:4: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil…” Then came the turn: “…for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the valley.” Military memes produced during the Global War on Terrorism worked the same way. One that circulated among Marines opened on a light, ironic note and then swerved into menace. “Nothing says I love my job,” reads one meme styled like a corporate motivational poster, “like tossing a grenade into a room with a smile.”

We could dismiss these as ordinary examples of humor built on contrast. But frame perversion is more disturbing than that. It appears, again and again, in the hands of people who do terrible things to other people for a living. By pairing pro-social symbolism with overt hostility, it creates a nihilistic, topsy-turvy moral universe—one in which the norms and values that hold society together are not just violated but gleefully inverted. Their destruction becomes the joke. Cruelty isn’t just permitted; it is funny. It is cool.

The Trump administration and its Department of Homeland Security have made frame perversion a signature feature of their social media presence. On Valentine’s Day 2025, the White House posted images of Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan, set against a pink backdrop and paired with a sing-song rhyme: “Roses are red / Violets are blue / Come here illegally / And we’ll deport you.” As Christmas approached later that year, the official ICEgov Instagram account shared an AI-generated image of an “ICE AIR” flight full of deportees pulled through the sky by Santa’s reindeer, captioned: “Avoid ICE AIR and go Ho Ho Home…” In each case, cheerful, familiar holiday imagery provides the setup; state violence supplies the punchline.

The frame perversion pattern reached its most chilling form in another White House post labeled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” ASMR—short for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”—usually refers to videos designed to produce calm or pleasure through soft, repetitive sounds. Here, that “soothing” frame was supplied by the hum of jet engines, the metallic rattle of chains pulled from a crate, the click of handcuffs, the quiet clink of leg shackles with each step up the gangway. These sounds are meant to relax the viewer, even as they mark the forcible end of someone’s life as they know it. Frame perversion, in this case, does not merely normalize cruelty. It invites the audience to relax pleasurably within it.

Not all frame perversion is malicious. Health care workers and first responders, forced to operate amid injury, death, and disaster, sometimes rely on a form of gallows humor to make the unbearable survivable. In those contexts, the inversion serves a defensive purpose: it helps people endure work that would otherwise break them.

The difference here could not be clearer. The frame perversion practiced by the Trump administration encourages the powerful to harm and invites the public to applaud. It functions as a kind of moral anesthetic—a prescription for cruelty that makes it easier to laugh, look away, and tune out the suffering of people whose lives are being dismantled.

Many Americans, across the political spectrum, feel something unsettling in these gestures but struggle to articulate why. We should trust that discomfort. What we are witnessing is not mere irreverence or edgy humor; it is a deliberate inversion of moral frames that trains us to experience domination as play. The first step in resisting it is to recognize the pattern and to name it. When cruelty is packaged as a joke, we must refuse the joke. Military history offers a warning. This is a dangerous game, corroding judgment and justice, and it becomes more dangerous when we fail to call it what it is.

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