New Orleans South Dakota is a great state with wonderful people, beautiful scenery, Mount Rushmore, and more that can allow the state and its people to hold their heads up with pride. It’s wrong to judge this great state by its former governor Kristi Noem and the humiliation she brings to Dakotans, especially now that she is the director of Homeland Security in the Trump administration.
She had no experience or qualifications for her current job, but that’s not unusual for a high-level Trump appointee where loyalty is the critical part of any appointee’s resume. Noem qualified fully on that score, having campaigned to be on his ticket originally by suggesting he should be added to Mount Rushmore and other obsequious acts. Her efforts went to naught partially when she repeated stories about killing her dogs and other acts of just plain cruelty.
Now, she seems confused about whether her role in government is really to guarantee the nation’s security or be a 24/7 Trump cheerleader. She shows up in places like El Salvador prisons with a MAGA hat looking like she is at some sort of camera shoot where she’s hoping to have a chance at riding in the front as the queen of the rodeo. Tragically, the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agency is under her watch, which allows her lack of fellow-feeling and indifference to the harm inflicted on others to flourish.
Besides the air of incompetence she radiates, there’s just something deeply disturbing about Noem. I couldn’t avoid having something to say about her after reading some of her quotes to a rightwing podcaster recently where she was reacting to the fact that one of the world’s superstar musicians and entertainers, Bad Bunny, has been selected by the National Football League to do the highly coveted half-time show. The pod person asked her what she thought about this, as the Washington Post reported,
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem …sharply criticized the NFL … and said ICE would have a presence at the Super Bowl. Speaking on right-wing commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast, she said ICE will be “all over the place,” and people should not attend unless they are “law-abiding Americans who love this country.” Johnson suggested the NFL had booked Bad Bunny for the halftime show to “send a message” to Trump and asked Noem if she had a message for the league. “They suck, and we’ll win and God will bless us,” Noem said. “We’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day, and they won’t be able to sleep at night because they don’t know what they believe, and they’re so weak. We’ll fix it.”
That bile-filled screed falls somewhere between hate speech and just plain crazy talk. Is this really someone who represents the United States at the highest level of our government? That’s simply embarrassing.
It’s also wrong. Many Super Bowl attendees, given the price of the tickets and the gala parties over the weekend, are definitely rich, corporate types, who are hardly law-abiding, possibly not American, and scarcely know what country they live in, much less are willing to shower it with love. As for the NFL, hardly a favorite of mine, her message is simply gonzo.
“They suck…” Is that how top officials talk now? Maybe she thought she was touring one of their locker rooms. “…we’ll win and God will bless us.” How demented is that? Does she think she’s in some kind of contest with the NFL? That would probably he as much a surprise to its billionaire owners as it would be to God to think that her actions would be a blessed event. In fact, it almost sounds sacrilegious. It doesn’t get better from her after that. She wishes on her new enemies the curse of sleepless nights. She pretends any beliefs not her own, don’t exist. She says they are weak, a schoolyard taunt, and then “we’ll fix it.” How preposterous! She has no intentions of fixing anything.
With a titular leader like Noem, it’s no wonder that ICE and its agents seem out of control and untethered by the rule of law and at war against American cities and their populations, and see immigrants not as people, but closer to the dogs that Noem shoots heartlessly. Someone, call a doctor. There’s something simply not right about this sister, and she’s putting us all in danger.