'Homeland Security' Is Now Officially America's Gestapo

On another note, why was Kristi Noem carrying around $3000 in cash, folks?

Courtesy of Business Insider

I always knew that that name, “Homeland Security,” would lead to no good. As a marketing and communications professional, the first time I heard the joining of those two words shortly after 9/11, I wondered how long it would take before an unqualified, corrupt fascist would take over that position and use it in the way I saw Vladimir Putin using his police forces in Russia, where I was living at the time.

Police brutality and oppression at the behest of Putin began roughly around 2008. By 2008, the Bush regime was collapsing, and Barack Obama was heralding in an America that, I imagined, had survived its closest call with fascism. Lurking in the shadows, however, were the Koch Brothers and other right-wing oligarchs, and they created the Tea Party. The Tea Party gave rise to Trump. By the time he took office, the Department of Homeland Security was entrenched and more intent on its survival than fulfilling the orange calamity’s wacky and often illegal whims. When Trump was exiled to Florida, most figured it was for good. Oh how goddamn wrong — and weak — we were.

Unable to do a lot of what they want to do because of the existence of the other two branches of government, even though the Republican-led Congress is missing in action, the coup is being carried out by using Trump and the autopen. The executive orders have become the “rule by diktat” of the Stalin era. All emphasis of Trump 2.0 is being placed not on the sound functioning of the government bureaucracy and its many departments, but on a mere handful of departments that are permitted by law to carry guns, enact violence in the name of imagined justice, arrest people and incarcerate them indefinitely — and as we see not in on the soil of the United States but in other countries.

The amorphous Department of Homeland Security leads this charge, whose mission and shape seem ever changing and expanding like a piece of glass being blown. Adding the might and “right” to Kristi Noem’s fascist assault on the American people and immigrants is the FBI. Imagine the power, and the room for abuse as we are seeing, that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, the TSA, and the FBI, has now to do whatever the hell they want to f*** up anyone and anything. And, as we see in their meetings with Congress, they are unfazed by the Legislative Branch’s power of oversight because they know the head of the executive branch, a president immune to all criminal acts thanks to SCOTUS, has their back.

Do you see the recipe that this is for turning us into Germany, autumn 1934 (this is when President Paul von Hindenberg died and Hitler declared himself “Führer”)? Democratic senators reprimanded Kristi Noem the other day for spending more money than she has been allotted. Noem was completely unfazed because she knows that the powers running the U.S. government, which do not include Donald Trump, will not let her run out of money. Congress approved the money Noem is freely spending for a lot of different things, but South Dakota Barbie — and she does look like one of those cosplay Barbie’s don’t back off anyone before you call me a misogynist — is spending turning illegal immigrants into non-humans similar to what Nazi Germany did to Jews.

Last week, ICE agents arrested the mayor of Newark, NJ, and then put out a doctored video as justification for the arrest and physical harassment of Black members of Congress. ICE is now pursuing the matter further and has threatened that those sitting members of Congress could be arrested soon. Folks, do you see what I am getting at?

Oh, and finally, does it seem strange that South Dakota Barbie is walking around with a $50,000 watch on her wrist (while inspecting our nation’s first concentration camp) and carrying $3000 in cash in her purse, which was stolen from a DC restaurant? One of the justifications the Trump administration has given that “proved” Abrego Garcia was MS13 was that when arrested, he had $1,100 cash on him. If carrying cash around makes someone a gang member, what does it make Kristi Noem?