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In recent months, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has used its social media platforms to promote its vision of an ideal country. In between posts celebrating mass deportations and defending ICE, the department has taken on the role of curator, posting a series of artworks that appear to communicate an idealized, Eurocentric concept of the American dream. The department’s artistic choices haven’t been subtle, but none can compare to the overt messaging of its most recent art choice. On July 23, DHS posted a painting titled American Progress, alongside the caption, A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending. The 1873 painting by John Gast shows a group of white pioneers traveling west, forcing a group of Indigenous people out of frame. The irony of the DHS post and caption, according to Martha Sandweiss, Princeton professor and historian of the U.S., is that American Progress does not show Americans defending a homeland: “What we actually see here are American settlers invading a homeland, Sandweiss says. Of course, that’s the homeland of the Native people that we see fleeing into the darkness, and, metaphorically, into extinction. [Screenshot: Department of Homeland Security/X.com] Gast’s painting has long been used as an embodiment of the concept of Manifest Destiny, a belief held by many during the nineteenth century (and beyond) that the United States was destined by divine right to control the entire territory from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. For decades, this dogma was used to explain and legitimize the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of Native Americans. The DHS’s choice to highlight American Progress shows that its art choices have become an intentionally provocative flashpoint in an ideologically divided United States. And, Sandweiss says, it represents a whitewashing of the past that might signal a desire to exclude non-white Americans in the present. The fraught history of John Gasts American Progress Gasts work on American Progress began in 1872, when he was commissioned to make a work for George Crofutt, an American publisher of several different guides promoting westward expansion. The image shows settlers traveling by stagecoach, conestoga wagon, and railroads, guided by a giant allegorical female figure of America, who holds a schoolbook in one hand and places a telegraph wire in the other. While these figures are glowing in a bright light, the fleeing Indigenous people are shrouded in darkness. [Image: United States Library of Congress] On the one hand, [Crofutt] needs a set of ideas that his readers will readily respond to and are, in a sense, already familiar with,” Sandweiss says. “In addition, he’s using the picture as a kind of propaganda. He’s picturing an imaginary scene that he hopes will resonate with people who might want to buy his travel guides and travel west themselves. American Progress ultimately appeared in the monthly publication Crofutt’s Western World. The image’s description, as written by Crofutt, is full of racist tropes that align with the Manifest Destiny ideal of bringing “civilization” to an “uncivilized” place and people. An advertisement for prints of American Progress, offered as subscription bonuses for Crofutt’s Western World magazine. Ca. 1873. [Image: United States Library of Congress] “This rich and wonderful countrythe progress of which at the present time, is the wonder of the old worldwas, until recently, inhabited exclusively by the [lurking] savage and wild beasts of prey,” Crofutt writes. Crofutt goes on to describe how the painting associates American settlers with the transformative power of technology, like transcontinental rail lines, trans-Atlantic trade (pictured in the top right of the image), and new telegraph wires. On her head, the symbolic female figure of America wears what Crofutt calls the “Star of Empire. In contrast, he writes, the lefthand side of the image “declares darkness, waste and confusion.” The Indigenous people in the image are visually grouped with fleeing wild animals like a herd of bison and a black bear, all shown, per Crofutt, “as they flee from the presence of the wondrous vision.” “It doesn’t reflect reality in any way” According to Sandweiss, it’s no coincidence that American Progress shows trains in conjunction with the displacement of Native peoples. By 1872, it had been three years since the completion of the first transcontinental rail line, and several other lines were already underway. In the coming decades, Indigenous people would be forcibly located away from these routes. Absolutely, when the large reservations were created in the late 1860s, it was in part to move Native peoples away from the prospective railway lines so that they would not pose a threat to either the railroad companies or the settlers that the railroads would bring west,” Sandweiss explains. American Progress, Sandweiss says, is an idealized version of the American settler story. Encoded in the image is the idea that white Europeans were the sole people living in the American West, while, in actuality, the region was primarily settled by people of Spanish origin who arrived from Mexico. It doesn’t reflect reality in any way,” she says. “It doesn’t reflect the multiple sources from which non-Native people came into the West. It doesn’t depict the more complex racial identity of people who came into the West, which, by 1872 is including more free people, is including people coming north from Mexico, and it doesn’t convey the role of women and families in the settlement of the Western landscape. The press office of California Governor Gavin Newsom also reposted the painting with the response, This painting is housed at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. The museum heavily features Native American history and intentionally embraces a more honest, inclusive understanding of Western historya concept the Trump administration fails to understand. This painting is housed at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. The museum heavily features Native American history and intentionally embraces a more honest, inclusive understanding of Western history a concept the Trump administration fails to understand. https://t.co/fctWTKRlb7— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) July 23, 2025 Whitewashing of the past leads t whitewashing of the present Many American schoolchildren will be familiar with American Progress because, for decades, textbooks have used it as a visual explanation of the Manifest Destiny concept. The images themes of divine conquering, the spread of technology, the superiority of European settlers, and patriarchal structure capture the complex dynamics at play within this belief system. For the DHS to post this painting through an uncritical lens, Sandweiss says, signals a broader ignorance of American history on the part of the current administration; an ignorance that she sees reflected in the administrations efforts to alter the historical information shared by agencies like the Smithsonian and the National Park Service. If you overly simplify the pastif you pretend that the only important people in the story were white menyou not only distort the past and dishonor the many other kinds of people who were part of American society at that moment, you also suggest that there’s not a space for different kinds of people in the present, Sandweiss says. Whitewashing the past makes it easier to whitewash the present, and pretend that people who are not like the people we see in this painting have never had a part in the American nation.
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E-Commerce
WhatsApp has taken down 6.8 million accounts that were linked to criminal scam centers targeting people online around the world, its parent company Meta said this week. The account deletions, which Meta said took place over the first six months of the year, arrive as part of wider company efforts to crack down on scams. In a Tuesday announcement, Meta said it was also rolling out new tools on WhatsApp to help people spot scams, including a new safety overview that the platform will show when someone who is not in a users contacts adds them to a group, as well as ongoing test alerts to pause before responding. Scams are becoming all too common and increasingly sophisticated in today’s digital world with too-good-to-be-true offers and unsolicited messages attempting to steal consumers’ information or money filling our phones, social media and other corners of the internet each day. Meta noted that some of the most prolific sources of scams are criminal scam centers, which often span from forced labor operated by organized crime and warned that such efforts often target people on many platforms at once, in attempts to evade detection. That means that a scam campaign may start with messages over text or a dating app, for example, and then move to social media and payment platforms, the California-based company said. Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram, pointed to recent scam efforts that it said attempted to use its own apps as well as TikTok, Telegram and AI-generated messages made using ChatGPT to offer payments for fake likes, enlist people into a pyramid scheme and/or lure others into cryptocurrency investments. Meta linked these scams to a criminal scam center in Cambodia and said it disrupted the campaign in partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
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E-Commerce
Samsung is one of many companies that have been pushing for employees to return to the office fulltime. However, now the brand is taking RTO efforts in the U.S. one step further with a tool that tracks attendance for a group in its semiconductor business. In an internal email, seen by Business Insider, Samsung informed employees about the new compliance tracking tool. “This tool will provide each Manager with visibility to the number of days & time in building metrics for each team member,” the email said. It continued, “This will ensure that team members are fulfilling their expectation regarding in office work – however that is defined with their business leader – as well as guarding against instances of lunch/coffee badging.” In 2023 the brand embraced a global hybrid work model, rolling out 500 new jobs. While the specifics varied, the majority of the postings (58.3%) included the ability to work from home at least part of the work week. The brand also gave employees in the company’s corporate offices in South Korea one Friday off a month.However, last April, after posting lower than expected sales, the brand asked its corporate executives to begin working six days a week in order to “inject a sense of crisis” into its workforce. Considering that performance of our major units, including Samsung Electronics Co., fell short of expectations in 2023, we are introducing the six-day work week for executives to inject a sense of crisis and make all-out efforts to overcome this crisis, a Samsung Group executive told the Korea Economic Daily. This May, Samsung asked employees to begin returning to the office full time. The following month, it updated employees on the RTO initiative. “We are already experiencing increased foot traffic daily, with more cars in the parking lot and hungry mouths in our cafeterias on Fridays, to name just a few signs,” Samsung said in an email viewed by BI. At the time, Samsung also noted that it was developing a tool to track attendance. Employee tracking might sound offbeat, but workplace surveillance is on the rise. According to a recent ExpressVPN survey, 74% of U.S. employers now use online tracking tools to monitor work activities. That includes real-time screen tracking (59%) and web browsing logs (62%). Likewise, 61% use AI-powered analytics to measure productivity and around 67% collect biometric data to monitor things like behavior and attendance. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s popular among employees or feels all that ethical. While most companies (three out of four) use biometric surveillance, only 22% of employees know theyre being monitored, according to the same report. Likewise, 17% of employees said theyd be very likely to resign over workplace surveillance. Another 32% said they’d strongly consider it. It’s unclear how Samsung’s new tracking tool will work, how closely employees will be monitored, and how many employees will be impacted. Fast Company reached out to the brand but did not hear back by the time of publication. Samsung told employees they will find out more about the tracking system soon. “Additional information regarding the new tool will be made available to Managers this month,” the email to employees said.
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E-Commerce
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