Over a dozen airports around the country last week declined to run on their TV screens a screed from the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem, in which she declares, “Democrats in Congress refuse to fund the federal government, and because of this many of our operations are impacted and most of our TSA employees are working without pay.”
She had asked that the video be shown as passengers were passing through terminal security. As if having to be patted down, see your knapsack randomly be routed over to the bad conveyor belt and trying to figure out whether this shift wanted you to take your shoes off weren’t torture enough.
Because being in the presence, even virtual presence, of Kristi Noem defines torture already.
It wasn’t just your blue state LAXs and JFKs that nixed the propaganda, a clear violation of the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees, very much including shrewish cabinet secretaries, from engaging in political activity while acting in their official role. It was airports in Salt Lake City, Miami and Dallas that also just said no to the tirade.
Ken Jenkins, the Westchester County, New York, county executive, said the video was “inappropriate, unacceptable and inconsistent with the values we expect from our nation’s top public officials. The PSA politicizes the impacts of a federal government shutdown on TSA operations.”
What’s alarming the TSA agents themselves, who would have to watch the harangue all through their shift, is way more than their Big Boss’s whingeing. It’s the fact that if the government shutdown continues through this Friday, no paycheck is going to show up in their bank accounts. That’s on both D.C. Democrats and Republicans and the lack of government leaders in our godforsaken land who know how to bargain toward a solution.
And this month in the rolling reality TV show that is Noemland, in which she roams our nation in jeans and a leather jacket looking for bad guys to collar and bad dogs to shoot, it wasn’t just buttoned-down airport execs who had to read the secretary the riot act.
Noem and a large band of militarized federal ICE agents descended unannounced on the tiny, mostly Black Illinois town of Broadview Village and asked if the town hall might be available for a bathroom break. Other reports say she asked to see the mayor, though Noem refused to see her later.
“A video of the encounter shows Noem approaching the building with her staff as one person asks through the door, ‘Can we use your restroom?’ Someone inside can be heard responding, ‘No, you cannot!’ before Noem calmly replies, ‘OK, all right, thank you,’ and walks away,” a local Fox News affiliate reported.
The mayor was out. But she later said that since anything like normal protocol between elected officials of different jurisdictions requires the simple politeness of telling locals that you were going to show up, whereas Noem and her federal army blew into town without warning, she didn’t have a problem with the armed force being turned away from the head.
Katrina Thompson, the mayor of the town of 8,000, was raised here in Inglewood by a single mom who moved to California from the South. She’s been troubled by what she sees as the rough treatment of protesters at a nearby ICE lockup.
“Thompson sees a direct tie between the experiences of immigrants being detained or deported, and those of Black Americans who lived through Jim Crow, redlining and other facets of modern-day systemic racism,” the Chicago Sun-Times reports. “‘We’ve been here before, and what has changed? Now it’s just immigrants, but prior to this, it was Black people,’ she says.”
I live near the Rose Bowl, with its big crowds, and I’ve often invited security guards and football fans in to use the facilities when they pass by, even if unannounced.
But if Kristi Noem rang the bell?
I’m thinking, I’m thinking.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.