The pathetic underachievers fuelling Trump's cruelty |
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20 years ago Kristi Noem, who now heads the Department of Homeland Security and controls the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, decided to kill her dog Cricket. She did so because Cricket had ruined a pheasant hunt in South Dakota, where Noem lived, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”.
On the way home from the failed pheasant hunt, Cricket compounded her failure as a hunting dog by attacking some chickens on a farm, forcing Noem to pay for the damage. At one moment, the over-excited Cricket “whipped around” and might even have nipped Noem herself. She described Cricket’s behaviour as being like that of “a trained assassin”, while looking “the picture of pure joy”.
“I hated that dog,” wrote Noem of the frisky but unsuspecting Cricket, whom she condemned as “untrainable”, a danger to others and “less than worthless… as a hunting dog”. She added that it was not a pleasant job terminating Cricket’s short 14-month life in a nearby gravel pit, but doing so brought to Noem’s mind another animal against whom she had a grievance.
This was a male goat apparently kept as something of a pet on the Noem farm, but whom Noem remembers being “nasty and mean,” smelling “disgusting” and liking to chase the Noem children, knock them over and make their clothes dirty. After disposing of Cricket, Noem dragged the goat to the gravel pit and shot him. The goat, however, jumped at the last moment so was only wounded, forcing Noem to go back to her truck to get fresh ammunition. Shortly afterwards, Noem’s daughter Kennedy arrived on the school bus and asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”
Noem gives a graphic account of how and why she shot Cricket and the unnamed goat in her autobiography – Not Going Back: the Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward – which was published when she was governor of South Dakota in 2024. The shootings are related with some relish, apparently in order to convince readers and potential voters of her ability to take “difficult, messy and ugly decision(s)”.
Her admission provoked public outrage, but may have helped persuade the Trump White House to put her in overall charge of ICE, the cutting edge of the government assault on migrant communities and anybody else who gets in their way.
ICE raids have come to resemble pogroms in Tsarist Russia, with armed and masked ICE agents in the role of Cossacks dragging victims from cars and smashing down doors without legal warrant. Repression is applauded and defended by Noem in........