The social media accounts of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the White House shared a meme and an excerpt from a song produced and popularized by a secretive white nationalist group, according to posts and archival material reviewed by Hatewatch.
On Jan. 9, multiple accounts run by DHS communications staff shared an image with the caption “We’ll have our home again” on Facebook and X (the website formerly known as Twitter). The image included the phrase and a picture of a man in a cowboy hat riding through a snowy field as a military plane flies overhead, as well as a link to apply to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
On Instagram, the DHS post includes an excerpt from the chorus of the song itself, also called “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” that is attributed to a group called the Pine Tree Riots. The post appeared on both the White House and DHS Instagram feeds.
DHS and other agencies have used imagery associated with the white nationalist movement and other parts of the extreme right to promote and recruit for ICE, as Hatewatch previously reported. In October, DHS tweeted a video featuring the “Moon Man” — a character used in a series of marketing campaigns for McDonald’s that white nationalists and neo-Nazis co-opted in the mid-2010s.
In another post, DHS shared an image of Uncle Sam at a crossroads, with the caption “Which way, American man?” The phrase echoes the title of an influential white nationalist book called Which Way Western Man?, which was published by the neo-Nazi National Alliance in 1978.
The song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” was released by the Pine Tree Riots on YouTube, Spotify and other streaming platforms in 2020. Other songs that the group has produced include one with the lyrics, “Well, another Charlottesville wouldn’t do us any harm,” an apparent reference to the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Klansmen, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads and other white supremacists clashed with protesters, and one extremist murdered an antiracist activist.
Open Measures, an organization that monitors social media activity, found over 450 posts sharing the song on the social media app Telegram since 2020. Nearly all the posts, the group said on Bluesky, came from white supremacist channels.
Pine Tree Riots is a little-known a cappella group affiliated with the Mannerbund, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has previously listed as a white nationalist group. The Mannerbund — named after the German word Männerbund, meaning an “alliance of men” — is a self-described “fraternity for right-wing men” or “pro-White fraternal order.” Its founders, who operate under the pseudonyms “Nam” and “Apache,” appear to have launched the Mannerbund in late 2019, according to posts from their now-deleted website. In blog and social media posts, as well as podcast appearances, Nam and other affiliates of the Mannerbund described the group as modeled after social clubs, such as the Elks or the Freemasons.
“A pro-White fraternal order is not an excuse to march in the street tomorrow or go flyering on the weekends. To be clear, these activities are not necessarily off-limits indefinitely. But they are not the meat of this idea,” Nam wrote in a 2019 blog post on the now-deleted Mannerbund website. “The bond that we’re creating is the seed of an eventual government.”
‘We’ll Have Our Home Again’
Though affiliates of the Mannerbund have described the group as “not a public facing organization,” the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” earned it some attention within the white nationalist movement and broader far right.
The Pine Tree Riots name references a 1772 uprising where American colonists rebelled against directives that restricted a certain type of white pine timber to the British crown.
Nam, one of the cofounders of the Mannerbund, attributed the song’s lyrics to one of his group’s members in a guest appearance on an April 2020 episode of the white nationalist podcast Full Haus.
“It’s a song that a bunch of guys in the Mannerbund sang together. Written by one of our brothers in the Bund,” Nam said on the podcast. Matthew Gebert, the cohost of Full Haus, worked as a Department of State employee until his security clearance was revoked following the publication of a Hatewatch piece that identified him as a white nationalist activist and leader in 2019.
“It was a very powerful moment hearing the song for the first time and singing together. The second I heard it, I grabbed my phone and recorded the next rendition of the song,” Nam said.
Nam debuted a version of “We’ll Have Our Home Again” on that podcast episode.
In October 2020, a YouTube channel called Pine Tree Riots posted another version of the song with the caption, “Every people deserves a Homeland.” The same group uploaded the song to Spotify, though it has since been removed. Over a month later, Nam shared the song on Mannerbund’s website with a photo of the group’s flag — a black-and-white tree on a red background — flying in the woods. Someone with access to a now-deleted Telegram channel associated with the Mannerbund also shared the song on that platform, along with a video edit that featured footage from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
The lyrics to “We’ll Have Our Home Again” don’t mention race specifically, though the lyrics evoke images of the same blood-and-soil nationalism popular with white nationalists, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. “In our towns we’re foreigners now, our names are spat and cursed,” reads one verse.
After DHS shared the song on its social media accounts, an X account called pine_tree_riots responded to commentators who described the post as a “dog whistle.”
The account wrote, “its not really a ‘dog whistle’ lmao, its all pretty explicitly laid out in the lyrics.” It added, “the other song that was sung that night and got cleaned up and released was probably slightly more direct, but still.”
Since the release of “We’ll Have Our Home Again” in 2020, other extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, have played or sung it at rallies or events. On Telegram, according to research that Open Measures provided to Hatewatch, prominent white supremacist groups, such as Patriotic Alternative in the United Kingdom, used the song in recruitment posts.
“Jewish owned levers of power (media, banks, Hollywood, political parties, activist groups, agencies, big tech etc) propagandize fascism and national socialism as evil, because they push for White unity. Racial unity, specifically White unity is what Jews fear most in this world,” wrote “The Western Chauvinist” in a July 27, 2021, post sharing the song on Telegram, according to the archive that Open Measures provided.
A whites-only fraternity
Mannerbund’s social media accounts and leaders portray the group as explicitly whites-only. Mannerbund chapters have shared photos with Nazi imagery, as well as collaborations with other prominent white nationalist activists and groups.
In a 2020 podcast episode of Nordic Frontier with members of the Nordic Resistance Movement, a neo-Nazi organization with ties to acts of extreme racist violence, Nam described the Mannerbund as a group “for white men.” He referred to himself as “the national leader of the organization.” People whom Nam referred to as “lodge leaders or lodge governors” reportedly handled local operations, including “maintaining security and doing their vetting and scheduling events.”
On its website, which was registered in 2019 but has since been deleted, Mannerbund hosted a series of podcasts featuring figures across the white nationalist movement, as well as blogs. While nearly all these contributors used pseudonyms, the group appeared to have strong ties to some figures within the organized white nationalist movement that have been identified.
Matthew Gebert, the former Department of State employee whom the SPLC identified as a white nationalist activist in 2019, introduced Nam and the Mannerbund on his podcast, Full Haus, in April 2020. In the same episode, Michael McKevitt, a U.S. Army veteran whom the SPLC identified as Gebert’s cohost on Full Haus in 2020, encouraged listeners who were “interested in the Mannerbund seriously” to reach out to him.
“I will give you the information that you need to know when you need to know it, and we will get you involved in whatever level is deemed appropriate based on your area and your reputation,” McKevitt said.
Another affiliate of Gebert’s show appears to have ties to the Mannerbund. “Sam,” a longtime collaborator of Gebert’s who has cohosted multiple podcasts with him, hosted episodes of a podcast called Mannerbund Dispatch in 2024 and 2025.
While Sam described the group as “not a public facing organization,” some Mannerbund chapters have shared photos indicating that they have collaborated with other groups. In June 2024, Mannerbund shared a post from a Folkish Active Club, a loose network of neo-Nazi groups, saying they “met up with members” of the network. The photo appears to be at a gravesite in Lexington, Kentucky.
A Telegram account associated with Mannerbund shared links to DHS posts on X and Instagram that referenced “We’ll Have Our Home Again” on Jan. 9. The same account has posted photos of apparent members of the group at meetups in New England.
Image at top: U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and White House social media accounts made posts on Jan. 9, 2026, sharing a meme and excerpt from “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” a song produced and popularized by Pine Tree Riots, a secretive white nationalist group. (Photo illustration by the SPLC; source images from X and iStock)