If you pay attention to such things, you may have heard reports that the President asked now-former FBI director James Comey to swear a loyalty oath to him. It’s far from the most sordid report to emerge from the Trump White House, but recent developments have given us cause to wonder: Could that oath have been “Hail Hydra?”
Against the backdrop of Marvel’s controversial (to say the least) ‘Secret Empire’ storyline, which sees the newly villainous Captain America openly align himself with Hydra as the fascist group stages a global coup, something… interesting has happened with the hail-hydra.com website. If you head over to that site, you’ll find it redirects to the White House website. But it doesn’t just lead to the WhiteHouse.gov homepage. Instead, the redirect drops you directly onto President Trump’s profile in the “Administration” section of the site. Is someone trying to tell us something?
As detailed by Graeme McMillan over at The Hollywood Reporter, the hail-hydra.com URL was first registered by an individual in a town called Nobby Beach in Queensland, Australia several years ago. But while the site itself dates to 2014, the redirect is more recent, with the most recent update to the site having come on April 16. Some quick digging through the Internet Archive reveals that the site has indulged similar jokes in the past, as it instead redirected to then-candidate Ted Cruz’s website through much of the 2016 Presidential campaign.
First introduced by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1965, Hydra is a Nazi offshoot and terrorist organization that has been affiliated with several of Captain America’s more Nazi-flavored villains and has served as a prominent antagonist to both the Sentinel of Liberty and SHIELD, among others. The group achieved a newfound prominence in both Marvel’s comics and their cinematic universe ever in the wake of the game changing reveal that they had long since infiltrated SHIELD in 2014’s ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ (which famously featured characters whispering “Hail Hydra” as a greeting). Since then, Hydra has also played a major role on ‘Agents of SHIELD’ and in Nick Spencer’s ongoing ‘Captain America’ storyline.
And to our anonymous Australian webmaster, we salute you!
