On Tuesday afternoon, the official White House X account posted a video showing men in Seattle shackled by the wrists and ankles about to be boarded onto a plane for deportation.

The 40-second clip’s soundtrack is sparse, with no dialog or music — just the sounds of the plane engine and the jangle of handcuffs and chains first laid out by an officer from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, then attached to the immigrants, whose faces are not filmed.

The White House gave the video a macabre caption: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”

ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, is the pleasurable tingling some people experience in response to certain stimuli, often sound. There are millions of social media videos dedicated to the genre.

For the Trump administration, that pleasure is derived from the sounds of human bondage and racist exclusion.

To me, the sound was a clarion call: the thundering of a fascist machine that demands people of conscience stand up to gum up its works, that the clink of those chains should be silenced with blockages and blockades.

What we need now is not to follow Democratic Party officials — who have long since advocated harsher border rule and shown a willingness to serve Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Instead, we have to to follow the lead of grassroots and front-line immigrant organizers who have been doing the work of opposing far-right nationalism long before this moment of renewed Trumpian reaction.

A Fascist Troll Is Still Fascism

When the White House’s video posted, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, offered his own comment: “Haha wow,” alongside two emojis: a troll and a medal.

The White House account was of course trolling — it reposted Musk’s comment too — and provoking outraged responses like this are part of their goal. There’s no contradiction, though, in an act being trollish and unambiguously serious in its fascist intent and effect.