Do people say it?

I’ve only said and seen it online, but it’s definitely in our vocabulary. Similar to some other slang like ‘crikey’ and ‘strewth’, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a regional or generational factor.

The origin is supposedly Australian.

I’m not an expert, Wikipedia might have the answer, but like Greyghoster said it’s rhyming slang, which is usually associated with Cockney culture in Britain, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it started there first.

I’m mostly just checking it doesn’t have a racial element or some other dark history that Deepseek didn’t mention.

No, in fact historical anti-American sentiment had an element of anti-racism at times. Now, Australia has an atrocious history of oppressing indigenous people (some towns even had segregation in living memory^[1]) but there have been anti-American riots in the UK, Australia and New Zealand during WWII partially caused by US military segregation: see Battle of Brisbane.

I was asking an AI for suggestions for how to refer to the impending sovereignty threat that is the dying empire of American plutocracy.

I know some corners of the internet have been calling it the Burgerreich since at least BLM. ‘Burger’ has been used online a lot as a term for USA citizens, although I’m not sure if that was a reaction to the Islamophobic (etc.) slur ‘kebab’ which became popular online almost 20 years ago.