Noemland insecurity

The Department of Homeland Security is not a campaign ad. It is not a cable-news green room with a bigger budget, or a vanity social media propaganda app.

It is a 260,000-employee nerve center responsible for border enforcement, counterterrorism, cybersecurity, FEMA coordination, and disaster response. It is where managerial errors echo in real time.

And yet, in Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s second term, DHS has become the latest example of a governing philosophy that prizes loyalty over competence.

Kristi Noem’s tenure as secretary started out turbulent and only got worse. Immigration enforcement operations drew national scrutiny. In one widely criticized episode, victims killed in a fatal encounter with ICE agents were characterized as “domestic terrorists” before facts were established — a rhetorical leap that undercut credibility (a vanishing commodity in this administration) at a moment demanding precision.

As Noem flailed, the department entered a partial shutdown amid congressional dissatisfaction with its strategic direction, and its own inspector general accused DHS leadership of obstructing oversight work — an extraordinary charge for an agency entrusted with safeguarding constitutional order. 

At the same time, morale plummeted as enforcement priorities appeared increasingly driven by headline numbers rather than targeted, sustainable strategy.

Noem was removed earlier this week. It should have been a moment for recalibration — a pivot toward technocratic steadiness, toward a leader with deep experience in national security management or emergency coordination.

Instead, the felon-in-chief signaled his intention to nominate Sen. Markwayne Mullin.

Mullin’s résumé includes small-business ownership and a Senate seat. What it does not include is executive leadership in counterterrorism architecture, intelligence coordination, border command structures, cybersecurity infrastructure, or disaster logistics — the core machinery of DHS.

Hell, his résumé doesn't even include a bachelor's degree. 

The through-line is allegiance, not administrative qualifications.

Presidents are entitled to appoint leaders who share their policy views. That is democratic governance. But when blind loyalty becomes the primary credential for overseeing complex security institutions, the cost is self-inflicted vulnerability and avoidable national risk.

DHS is not built for improvisation. It requires fluency in interagency coordination, statutory limits, operational chain-of-command discipline, and crisis logistics. It demands respect for oversight, not friction with it. It demands credibility with career professionals who keep the system running long after political cycles end.

When leadership is selected for loyalty first and fluency second, agencies deform. Career staff learn that posture outweighs performance. Oversight becomes adversarial. Messaging drifts ahead of evidence. Mistakes are defended instead of corrected.

Homeland security can't and shouldn't function on personal devotion.

Noem’s malfeasance exposed the limits of appointing political allies to manage sprawling security institutions. Doubling down with another figure whose principal qualification is proximity to presidential power suggests the lesson absorbed was not “we need deeper expertise,” but “we need tighter loyalty.”

That is a dangerous substitution.

Border security, cyber defense, counterterrorism, disaster response — these are systems that either operate with disciplined competence or fail under pressure. The American public doesn't benefit from theatrical resolve. It benefits from steady, qualified leadership.

Loyalty may be useful in politics, but it's not a homeland security strategy.

The less things change...

"The real power in America is held by a fast-emerging new Oligarchy of pimps and preachers who see no need for Democracy or fairness or even trees, except maybe the ones in their own yards, and they don't mind admitting it. They worship money and power and death. Their ideal solution to all the nation's problems would be another 100 Year War."

– Hunter S. Thompson, 2003
"Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

Racist is as racist does

There is a particular kind of cowardice that wears a necktie and speaks in complete sentences. It smells like caution, sounds like reason, and survives by never quite touching the thing it claims to condemn. Senator Jerry Moran’s response to Donald Trump’s racist AI video sits squarely in that tradition—clean, polite, and morally insufficient.

Yes, he called it racist. Yes, he said it shouldn’t have been posted. And yes, by modern Republican standards, this apparently qualifies as bravery. But let’s not confuse naming the fire with putting it out.

Moran’s statement reads like a man scolding a broken office printer. The video “should not have been posted.” An unfortunate error. A lapse in judgment. As if the President of the United States accidentally leaned on the wrong button and out popped a piece of digital minstrel propaganda depicting the first black presidential family as animals.

Oops. These things happen. Let’s all move along.

This is nonsense.

What Trump (a convicted felon, let's not forget) posted was not a gaffe. It was not clumsy humor. It was not a meme gone awry. It was a deliberate deployment of one of the oldest racist tropes in Western political history, now turbocharged by AI and blasted out from the most powerful bully pulpit on Earth. That matters. History matters. Power matters.

And when a sitting U.S. senator responds to that act with a gentle verbal wrist-tap while continuing to support the man who did it, we are no longer talking about intentions. We are talking about effects.

Here’s the part too many people want to dodge: supporting a racist and supporting racist actions is functionally indistinguishable from being racist. Not in the abstract. Not in the philosophical sense. In the real world—the only one that counts.

You can condemn the act in a press release and still enable the actor. You can say “this is not who we are” while voting, fundraising, caucusing, and aligning yourself with the very machinery that keeps producing this behavior. At that point, the condemnation is decorative. It exists to soothe consciences, not to change outcomes.

And spare me the moral-equivalence defense. The “both sides mock presidents” routine is the last refuge of people who know the line has been crossed but can’t bring themselves to say so plainly. Yes, presidents have been mocked. Cruelly. Stupidly. Sometimes viciously. That is not the same thing as the President himself distributing racist imagery rooted in centuries of dehumanization. Anyone pretending otherwise is not confused—they are protecting something.

Moran’s response tries to occupy a safe middle space that no longer exists. The ground has collapsed. You are either willing to impose consequences on racist behavior (and let's face it, other tyranical and anti-democracy behavior) from the presidency, or you are willing to live with it. There is no third option labeled “respectable disapproval.”

The old saying holds because it’s brutally accurate: racist is as racist does. And in politics, enabler is as enabler enables. When leaders draw lines and then refuse to defend them, those lines become decorations—useful for press coverage, meaningless for justice.

Senator Moran wants credit for saying the right words. History will measure something else entirely: whether he was willing to act as if those words meant anything at all.