Identity Politics is a column written by veteran journalist Susan Milligan, covering the big issues in the socio-political ether as they intersect with design, art, and other modes of visual communication.
Sometimes a red baseball cap is just a hat. And sometimes — more often than not, of late — it’s a defiant, brazen symbol that dares observers to challenge the message: Our Brand is Hate.
Donald Trump is, after all, a master brander, attaching his name to everything from real estate to fragrances, vodka, bibles, steaks and even a begging-for-air-quotes university. And the little red hat, emblazoned with the words “Make America Great Again,” has morphed into a polarizing meme, one that goes far beyond political party or nostalgia for an America that never really was, anyway.
Like a white hood, the red MAGA hat symbolizes hate of myriad groups of people. Unlike the Ku Klux Klan’s white hood, however, the MAGA hat doesn’t disguise its wearers. And that’s by design. Like some in-your-face version of Dr. Seuss’s Star-Bellied Sneetches and Plain-Bellied Sneetches, the MAGA hat defines and divides. It attaches an actual brand to hate and division.
Symbols have been used for ages to galvanize bigots and racists; alarmingly, the swastika, widely identified with fascism and hate because of its Nazi roots, has shown up on the streets of America, its wearers arguably inviting confrontation. Other designs are more underground. The Anti-Defamation League lists some lesser-known items, such as the hand symbol for “88” (which refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet, and is shorthand for “Heil Hitler”). White supremacists have also created and shared memes of a head with a bowlcut, an homage to Dylann Roof, convicted of nine murders in the racist attack on a Charleston church in 2015. But the MAGA hat is the ultimate hate brand, wearable and broadly identifiable.
“Hate doesn’t sell itself as hate. The brand is grievance, pain and blame, packaged into something you can wear, chant, or wave. That’s branding logic,” says Nick Adam, design director and associate partner at Span Studio, which renamed and rebranded Illinois’s Help Stop Hate campaign. “The MAGA hat is semiotics 101: cheap to make, impossible to miss, built for the camera. Not fashion—signal. It collapses a worldview into four words you can spot across a stadium.”
Many school districts have banned hate designs like swastikas in dress codes (New York goes further, banning hate symbols from any public facility unless it’s part of an educational or historical display.) But it’s notable that school districts in Utah, Oregon, Missouri and Florida have gone after the innocuous rainbow, banning Pride flags. And recently, Florida removed an iconic rainbow crosswalk from Miami’s Ocean Drive. The move follows a state order to remove “social, political or ideological” messages from pavements or lose state funding.
Claiming symbols and numerical configurations is one thing. But what is an already-established brand to do when a hate group decides to make it its own?
Academics call it “hatejacking” — a strategy of associating with a brand in a way that gives the group an identifying marker without having to display a recognizable hate symbol that would draw more backlash. It can start with a subtle — perhaps unintended — corporate olive branch. A writer for The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi publication, declared Papa Johns pizza the “Aryan Master Pizza,” urging followers to consume it, after the company’s founder, John Schnatter, blamed NFL anti-racism protests for his lagging pizza sales (and later used a racial slur that led to him stepping down from the board). Chick-fil-A was once embraced by the right because of the company’s stance against same-sex marriage and donations to anti-LBGTQ groups. (The shaky alliances didn’t stick: both companies distanced themselves from the right-wing groups after a public backlash.)
But sometimes, there’s no obvious reason a hate group would latch onto a brand, and it creates a massive headache for its designers and manufacturers. Clothing companies Fred Perry and Lonsdale have been embraced in the past by hate groups, and for bizarre or random reasons. The British company Lonsdale, for example, has attracted extremists because the middle initials — NDSA — are the same as the Nazi acronym. Lonsdale, for its part, rejected any association with such groups, going so far as to refuse to supply shops in any way connected to the neo-Nazi movement and collaborating with left-leaning football clubs. Fred Perry, frustrated that the right-wing extremist group the Proud Boys had claimed the clothier’s Black/Yellow/Yellow twin-tipped shirt as its own, simply stopped making them. Hugo Boss actually did produce brownshirts and black SS uniforms for the Nazis and used forced labor to make them. The company got around to apologizing for it in 2011 and seems no worse for wear for its past.
When Russian authoritarian President Vladimir Putin showed up at a 2022 rally in a pricey Loro Piana parka, the company (majority-owned by the French group LVMH) came under attack. Loro Piana publicly distanced itself from Putin, saying it had no idea when he bought the parka, and besides, they were providing blankets to Ukrainians fleeing Putin’s attacks.
After an executive for New Balance shoes spoke sympathetically about Trump’s trade policies in 2016, a pleased neo-Nazi group declared it “the official shoes of white people.” New Balance, understandably not wishing to be the 21st-century version of jack boots, issued a statement saying it does “not tolerate bigotry or hate in any form.”
How much of the hatejacking of brands — and the response — has to do with the actual product? Not so much, it seems. There was a time when driving a Tesla was a public statement that climate change is real, and electric cars are one way to address it. Now, Elon Musk, the Trump-pal owner of the firm, is driving the brand — and not in a good way. “I Bought This Before We knew Elon Was Crazy,” says a decal on the Teslas of unhappy owners.
And who could predict that a dated design of a man resting his work-shirted arm on a barrel would cause such headaches for a casual restaurant operation? But when Cracker Barrel ditched its old logo – one that invoked an image of white, rural America – for a generic design, the MAGA world exploded. Trump, too, complained, and in a “We Hear You” backtrack, a mollified Cracker Barrel went back to the (really) old design. The backlash had zero to do with country-fried steak; it was all about the version of America the design celebrated.
“We are in a moment where almost every brand is political, whether it chooses to be or not,” Adam says. “Visual brands are easily hijacked, but the real danger is when designers themselves lend craft to wolves in sheep’s clothing. The real hijack isn’t when symbols get stolen. It’s when our craft dresses up harm. When design cloaks hate, it endangers us all. When it exposes it, it protects us.” More than any hat ever could.
Read about Span’s work on Illinois’ Help Stop Hate campaign in the Daily Heller.
Susan Milligan is an award-winning veteran journalist covering politics, culture, foreign affairs, and business in Washington, DC, New York, and Eastern Europe. A former writer for the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, and US News & World Report, she was among a team of authors of the New York Times bestseller Last Lion: The Rise and Fall of Ted Kennedy. A proud Buffalo native, Milligan lives in northern Virginia.
Header graphic by Debbie Millman.
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