Dean Cain’s New Job: Being A Superhero For White Nationalism
Look, y’all . . .
It’s a bird!
It’s a plane!
Nope, it’s just Dean Cain crash-landing into white nationalism with an ICE badge, ready to help round up and deport all those “dangerous immigrants.”
Earlier this week, the musclebound, B-list relic who once played Superman, the fictional, undocumented alien from the planet Krypton, announced that he has officially joined ICE as a sworn officer to help round up real-life immigrants here on Earth.
Cain, a longtime conservative commentator and vocal Trump supporter, says he took the role to “support the men and women of ICE” and to “ensure the safety of Americans.”
His announcement lands at a moment when the Trump administration is escalating its hardline immigration agenda, pledging the largest mass deportations in U.S. history and deploying ICE for sweeping raids across farm fields and urban neighborhoods. The administration has also allocated $75 billion in new funding to meet a staggering target of 3,000 arrests per day.
Cain’s move isn’t just a publicity stunt. It’s a signal boost for a broader authoritarian project that cloaks racial terror in the language of law, order, and patriotism. But his descent from caped crusader to ICE agent is also a pathetic masterclass in how proximity to whiteness seduces, rewards, and ultimately devours.
The man who once played an undocumented alien sent to save humanity is now suiting up to disappear the very people his character was meant to defend. Superman wasn’t just a hero. He was a refugee. A child rocketed from a dying planet. He had no papers. No country. No proof of citizenship. He crash-landed in Kansas and was raised by white farmers who taught him that real strength means protecting the powerless. He stood for truth, justice, and radical compassion.
Dean Cain stands for none of that now.
He’s taken a symbol of hope and twisted it into state-sanctioned cosplay for an empire on a vengeance tour. There is no arc. No growth. No irony too thick to choke on. Just the steady collapse of a man who traded moral clarity for a costume and now uses the myth of Superman to help legitimize the cruelty of America’s white supremacist deportation machine.
And the hypocrisy doesn’t end there.
Dean Cain was born Dean George Tanaka. His biological father, Roger Tanaka, is of Japanese descent. Several members of his family were rounded up and incarcerated in the Minidoka internment camp during World War II, stripped of their freedom, dignity, and citizenship by a government high on racial hysteria and national paranoia. That trauma isn’t ancient history; it’s recent enough to still live in family photo albums, war records, and the bodies of survivors, yet Cain looks straight at that legacy of state-sanctioned terror and says, America is the greatest country in the world. Sign me up!
He once leaned into that heritage when it suited him by calling himself the first Asian American Superman. He proudly sported his birth name Tanaka tattooed on his ankle. When a fan on set sneered, “We wanted Superman, not Sushi Man,” Cain deflected: “For the love of God, he’s a Kryptonian. He could be green. Does it matter?”
He brushed off racism with a grin, rebranded his lineage as trivia, and framed his identity as an aside while standing atop a legacy built on internment camps, racial targeting, and generational pain. Now he’s chosen to ignore that history entirely. Worse, he’s chosen to reenact it on immigrants, many of whom are fleeing violence, war, poverty, and U.S. foreign policy disasters that made their home countries unlivable in the first place.
I want y’all to let that sink in.
A man who once bore the brunt of xenophobic slurs now stands aligned with the same machinery that caged his ancestors. What kind of spiritual rot does it take to go from the descendant of camp survivors to the volunteer of modern-day cages? What kind of man looks at his own family’s historical trauma and decides the logical next step is to enforce that trauma onto others? This isn’t just self-hatred. It’s a man begging to be cast in the role of white hero, even if it means playing a villain in real life.
But there’s a deeper psychology at work here.
Dean Cain never knew his Japanese father. He was raised by his white mother and her husband, director Christopher Cain, who adopted him and gave him the last name the world now knows. He is, in effect, a transracial adoptee who was socialized into whiteness, distanced from his Asian lineage, and rewarded for how seamlessly he could pass, blend, and perform Americanness.
Superman, whose birth name is Kal-El, was adopted, too, of course, by a white couple in Kansas who gave him the last name Kent. I guess we can call him an interplanetary adoptee who was raised in small-town Americana. Both Cain and Kal-El were displaced from their origins and taught to conform to a culture that erases difference under the guise of belonging.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s assimilation as salvation. And that’s why we should not be surprised that Cain, a biracial man with a buried past, would so fully embrace the trappings of whiteness while actively denying the history stitched into his DNA. He doesn’t just erase his Asianness, he disciplines it. He punishes it. He turns it into a cautionary tale by aligning himself with the very forces that once marked his family as a threat to the nation.
He’s not just playing cop. He’s performing absolution by trying to earn a permanent place in the empire by helping police its borders, its memory, and its myths.
Dean Cain isn’t protecting Americans. He’s protecting a myth by propping up a regime that uses nostalgia and nationalism to disguise cruelty. And like so many nonwhite faces that get platformed by white supremacy, he’s being rewarded not in spite of his background, but because of it. Because it’s useful. Because nothing makes state violence go down smoother than when the person swinging the baton doesn’t look like Bull Connor.
This is why Cain’s move is so much more than a stunt. It’s a betrayal of history. Of memory. Of every refugee child separated from their parent. Of every ancestor who was forced into a camp, a cage, a checkpoint. And he does it not reluctantly, but proudly. Smirking through Fox News interviews, rebranding himself as some kind of patriot warrior.
What’s even more absurd is that Cain is starring in a delusional production tailor-made for aging white men who can’t let go of their fetish for brute strength and authoritarian fantasy. Hulk Hogan may have just died, but the insecurity he symbolized lives on, puffed-up chests, trembling egos, and a desperate need to feel dominant in a world that’s moving past them. Cain is just the next warm body in the costume.
Cain isn’t the only one chasing this fantasy. Donald Trump has long been obsessed with cosplaying Superman. In fact, after being discharged from the hospital with COVID-19 in 2020, he allegedly floated the idea of opening his shirt to reveal a Superman logo beneath it as he emerged for the cameras looking like a bloated, wheezing caricature of strength waddling into delusion. The image never materialized, but the fantasy has stuck. He leveraged the myth recently when the White House posted an AI-generated image of Trump as Superman, complete with cape and slogan, drawing sharp mockery and political backlash.
Dean Cain’s decision to join ICE is also part of a broader pattern in which white conservatism, and its diversity props, keep hijacking pop culture symbols to whitewash authoritarianism. We saw it with the Punisher skull, which cops and vigilantes now slap on their gear like a threat. We saw it with Captain America, whose shield got paraded through the Capitol on January 6th by insurrectionists claiming to be patriots. And now we’re watching as Superman, the ultimate refugee, is turned into a brand ambassador for deportation squads.
For men like Trump and Cain, Superman isn’t just a character. It’s a myth they believe belongs to them. It’s an identity to be appropriated, stripped of nuance, and turned into a fetish for white masculinity and American supremacy.
This is myth manipulation in service of a police state. A culture of cosplay where white men past their prime reenact fantasies of power they no longer possess in real life. It’s what happens when a society trades actual values for cinematic shorthand and when being seen as heroic matters more than actually doing anything heroic.
Cain, of course, has been flirting with this lane for years. He’s become a staple of conservative talk shows, gun conventions, and MAGA-fueled conferences. His X feed reads like a script from Fox News after dark. He’s used his faded celebrity to prop up talking points about “cancel culture,” “woke mobs,” and the sanctity of law enforcement. The man has been auditioning for the role of Right-Wing Action Figure for a decade now. Joining ICE just closes the loop.
And if you think this is just about one C-list actor trying to stay relevant, think again.
This is about the psychological machinery of fascism. About how empires maintain control not just through violence, but through narrative. America doesn’t just build prisons, it builds myths. It tells stories about cowboys, soldiers, cops, and caped crusaders who save the day. It sells us the idea that brutality is necessary, that it’s noble, that it’s for our own good. And when those stories start to fray and people begin to question the reality behind the costumes, America reaches back into its pop culture toy chest and pulls out another symbol to polish and repurpose.
Dean Cain is just the latest tool in that project.
The fact that he’s being praised for this move, celebrated by conservative outlets, and cheered by anti-immigrant trolls should tell you everything you need to know about the moral compass of this country. Cain isn’t being asked to reflect on his heritage. He isn’t being asked to reckon with the trauma his own family endured. He’s being rewarded for ignoring it. For aligning himself with power instead of justice. For turning Superman into a shield, not for the oppressed, but for the oppressor.
This country has always loved a redemption arc for the wrong people. It has always turned villains into heroes and heroes into enemies. It lionizes the colonizer, erases the resistance fighter, and elevates the turncoat. Dean Cain is a man who came from a lineage of pain, who had every reason to empathize with the displaced and the detained, and who instead chose the uniform, the script, and the spotlight.
And yet there’s something so perfectly American about all of this. In the empire’s storybook, even Superman can become the villain as long as he serves the right master.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.
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