Kristi Noem jolted me from political complacency
Ever since Stew and I moved twenty years ago to a small ranch about a thousand miles south from the U.S. border, our reaction to political news from home has gradually morphed from outrage to resignation, or even worse, complacency.
The absurd has become ho-hum. Plans to be build a knock-off of the Arc de Triomphe in Washington bigger than the one one in Paris? Where are they going put it?
Amputate the East Wing of the White House and replace it with a ballroom that can hold a thousand guests? Be sure we have enough caterers!
Send a hospital ship to Greenland, a possession of Denmark, a country that has a health care system probably better than the U.S.? Who the hell asked for such emergency assistance anyway?
And what’s the rationale of the ongoing billion-dollar-a-day bombing campaign to pulverize Iran? I’ll have to get back to you with the war plans du jour.
To protect my mental health I have recently slipped into the lazy habit—odd for a person who used to work in a newspaper—of skimming the news sections of the media and even skipping the opinion columns. Tom Friedman or Maureen Who? So much blah, blah. What more is there to say about Trump?
Instead I confess that, more often than I care to admit, I find myself browsing Facebook for ridiculous video clips of an elephant giving birth to twins—one of them apparently an albino—or volunteers in Florida who rescue sea turtles tangled in fishing nets or barnacles.
Once in a while guilt makes me swear off such time-wasters and go on a “news diet”—a popular fad nowadays—to reset my brain, but I relapse two or three weeks later.
Then came Kristi Noem, until recently the front-line, perfectly coiffed Grand Inquisitor in charge of Trump’s campaign to deport anywhere from one, three, or twenty million immigrants, or who knows how many.
I initially dismissed Noem as a vapid ignoramus who couldn’t define “due process” during a congressional hearing and often changed outfits for publicity shots as if she were hosting the Oscars instead of seriously running an agency capable of ruining tens of thousands of people’s lives.
My favorite promo had Noem in a bulletproof vest, wielding a menacing military rifle inadvertently pointed at the head of the guy next to her. She ultimately was fired for lying about the expenditure of hundreds of million dollars on such advertising stunts, and ordering a luxury jet, supposedly for deportations, but oddly, also equipped with a queen-size bed.
What finally got under my skin, perhaps because I’m an immigrant myself, was her constant lying and demonizing of immigrants as the “worst of the worst”: roving gangs of criminals, drug dealers, pedophiles and generally monstrous beings that threatened public safety. In fact, one estimate found that only five percent of the immigrants arrested during recent sweeps had been convicted of a violent crime, a far cry from the millions of criminals Trump promised to deport.
Where we live in Mexico, practically every young man we know—beginning with our gardener Félix, two of his brothers and a nephew—has been to the U.S., sometimes for years, working to support their families back home. Not to molest children, traffic drugs or rape the local women, but to work in brutal jobs for as long as seventy hours a week, that largely profit their American employers.
Slanderous arguments began to crumble during the immigration sweeps of Minneapolis, which turned to be a free-for-all where federal immigration agents were reported smashing people’s doors, along with dozens of car windshields, and behaving so much as an invading army that left two protestors—both U.S. citizens—shot dead.
Yet Noem’s excesses did a favor to the immigrant community. The chaos in Minneapolis led to the reassignment of Greg Bovino, from “commander in charge” of the immigration troops in that city, to a backwater post in California.
Noem was bounced to a what sounds like the sinecure of “Special Envoy to the Shield of America,” an outfit one hopes is headquartered in a galaxy far away.
And most importantly it has shaken people like myself from the political complacency that feeds Trump’s authoritarian schemes. Support for his draconian immigration policies—one of the centerpieces of his campaign for reelection—has seriously eroded. That’s good news.
El Rancho Santa Clara 
I cannot even begin to express my disgust about Noem but entire administration! All of their BS directed at hardworking immigrants makes me furious!B
Yahoo Mail: Search, Organize, Conquer
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Noem has been exiled to the outer rings of Saturn, where she belongs. Hope you are doing well.
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Linda and I are doing the No Kings rallies, writing our representatives scolding letters but mostly waiting on time to cure my nation’s flirtation with fascism. The building of vast concentration camps is a very bad sign of my current governments plans for people like me. We’ll see.
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I admire your enthusiasm and optimism, despite being disgusted and frustrated with the current political situation. We had a little over a hundred people at the No Kings event here, impressive considering there are not many Americans here, and I’m sure some of them are Republicans. I keep reminding myself that Trump won the popular vote by only ONE percent (about 70 million who voted against him), plus his approval rating is down to 36 percent and dropping daily because of inflation and the war in Iran. He’s lost all the recent special elections, even in the congressional district that encompasses Mar-a-Loco. Republicans are losing their lunch over their likely loss of their paper-thin majority in the House. If you have some spare change, you might want to send it to ActBlue, a national group that distributes money to various candidates. Your contribution (or mine) won’t steer the election, but it makes you feel less helpless.
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We had about 3000 at a No Kings rally in Kent, Ohio yesterday. It was in an area where you can drink in the street, it was like an old-time concert from the 70s. The Democrats need to get out their base next November, winning the Senate would be a plum for all liberals. I suspect the House is a given, the Senate is in reach. My old friend Sherod Brown is running hard for Senate; I always send him cash. When I was doing union work, he would stay at our meetings until there was nothing left to discuss. He was in the House and the Senate for decades; he is still about as wealthy as your average teacher or steelworker. Honest is always earned over a lifetime of work. Yes, I send him money for his campaigns.
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I’m not going to start listing all the destructive things Trump has done, including his immigration policy. They were predictable and have been well publicised. But one thing today is worth noting. It seems certain that Putin has been aiding the Iranians in attacking Gulf states and (particularly) US military forces. Trump has eased sanctions on Russian oil. The childish imbecile is rewarding the Russians for helping kill US forces and incentivising him to continue doing so.
You’re quite right though. As grim as it all is, this isn’t the time for political apathy. There might not be a lot individuals can do, but it all adds up. For my part, I don’t have anything to do with folk who continued to support Trump past his defeat in 2020. Frankly, I’m disappointed that there are so many of them and who some of them were. Some, I suppose, are just high on Trump Kool Aid. But for the most part, they are simply unpleasant human beings. I guess there’s considerable overlap there, too. But all scum bags.
How’s your friend in Kyiv.
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Your PM did the right thing, along most European leaders (hurrah Spain!), for refusing to participate in this monumental fiasco. The collateral damage is incalculable—including lifting the boycott on Russian oil and world oil prices going up, which means Russia is making money out of this fiasco. Plus all the damage to oil and gas production facilities that will need to be rebuilt after this is over. But still, Trump’s approval rating remains in the mid-thirties, dismal but amazing considering how many people he has managed to piss off. Can’t figure that out. Even Irish Catholics gave up on the pope after a while.
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Trum
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Trump built a coalition of conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, billionaires and nutjobs. What’s the word for a grouping like that? I figure ‘Deplorables’ is as good a word as any. Together, they amounted to a winning team. That type of person was never recruited to ‘the cause’ based on reason or fact. So the idea that they’ll easily be prised away based on hard evidence, no matter how irrefutable it is, no matter how well presented, is just fanciful.
I watched a friend of a friend (a proper conspiracy theorist) spend a year calling Trump the Orange Buddha and promoting him on the basis he was anti war, and there’s be no more wars etc. She’s currently lavishing praise on him for invading Iran. These people are just like that. The Grand Wizard of Patzcuaro and Braindead from Boston are lost causes too, I would suggest. You good thinking folk just need to make sure that, going forward, there are more sane folk at the polling stations than there are loons.
(Please delete my erroneous four letter word above! 😂)
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