The Slow Journey of Truth
Eventually, the truth comes out, but that doesn’t always drive decisions.
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It can take a long time for the truth to come out, but it comes out eventually; it just may not always drive the decisions being made.
Kristi Noem
The United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is out, the first ouster of the President’s Cabinet in Trump’s second term. [1]
The Secretary of Homeland Security oversees the third largest Department of the U.S. government, with a workforce of 260,000 employees and 22 components including TSA, Customs and Border Protection, CISA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, FEMA, the Coast Guard, Secret Service, Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers, and the Science and Technology Directorate.
Under the Secretary's leadership, DHS is responsible for counterterrorism, cybersecurity, aviation security, border security, port security, maritime security, administration and enforcement of our immigration laws, protection of our national leaders, protection of critical infrastructure, cybersecurity, detection of and protection against chemical, biological and nuclear threats to the homeland, and response to disasters. [2]
What got her fired? You’d think it might be any of the following: [3]
The mass deportation of millions of immigrants by CBP and ICE while their rights were summarily trampled
The killings by ICE of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, while Noem attempted to justify the killings by accusing them of participating in “domestic terrorism” [4]
The defiance of court orders, including “96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases” in the U.S. District Court in Minnesota as of January. When the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota disputed the allegation, Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz “ordered his clerks to investigate the matter, and they uncovered an additional 113 orders he said ICE had violated in 77 other cases.” [5]
The $220 million taxpayer-paid media campaign, prominently featuring Noem [6]
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin tore into Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with a blistering series of criticisms to her face on Wednesday.
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee accused Noem of using billions of dollars given to DHS as a “personal slush fund” for her glitzy ad campaign, luxury jet travel, and more.
“You budgeted an astonishing $220 million for media consultant contracts so you can star in self-promoting photo shoots and lavish ad campaigns featuring the Lifestyles of Rich and Famous Cabinet Secretaries, like this one of you on horseback at Mount Rushmore, which was shot during last year’s government shutdown,” Raskin said.
The $220 million contract was given to a “company [that] is run by the husband of Noem’s chief DHS spokesperson and has personal and business ties to Noem and her aides. DHS invoked the “emergency” at the border to skirt competitive bidding rules for the taxpayer-funded campaign.” [7]
Cosplaying various DHS roles for photo ops including (as detailed by The Daily Beast describing Noem as “ICE Barbie”): [8]
Cowgirl ICE Barbie
Lego ICE Barbie
ICE Agent ICE Barbie
Ocean Rescue ICE Barbie
Pilot ICE Barbie
Off-Roading ICE Barbie
Fire Fighter ICE Barbie
Combat Ready ICE Barbie
Trigger Happy ICE Barbie
This doesn’t even count that Noem bragged in her 2024 memoir about killing her 14-month puppy named Cricket, something of which U.S Representative Jared Moskowitz reminded Noem during her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, wearing a large blue “Justice for Cricket” pin [9]
The truth? It was probably the embarrassment of the President - choosing to state in a Congressional hearing that Trump agreed with the no-bid $220 million media contract. This from MS NOW: [10]
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., grilled Noem in the hearing Tuesday about a $220 million border security ad blitz that she featured prominently in. Noem said Trump green-lit the campaign.
Not so, according to Kennedy, who told reporters Trump was “mad as a murder hornet” when the two men spoke after the hearing.
“I heard the secretary say that she went to the president and said, ‘I propose to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on television advertisements in which I am the star, and the president thought that was a swell idea,’” Kennedy said. “From my perspective, her version of the truth and the president’s version of the truth are decidedly different.”
Indeed, Trump wasn’t happy with Noem’s answer, the White House official and person familiar with the decision told MS NOW.
Dan Crenshaw
Four-term U.S. Representative from Texas Dan Crenshaw lost his Republican primary by 15 points this past Tuesday. Crenshaw is a national security hawk and a Trump supporter, but his true crime was telling truths about his fellow Republican colleagues and the events surrounding the 2020 election, which Trump lost.
This from the Texas Tribune about what led to Crenshaw’s GOP ouster: [11]
He’s had a target on his back for years from some of the most hardline conservatives in Congress, including in the House Freedom Caucus, for calling out their legislative tactics and referring to some members of his party as “grifters.”
Columns in the Houston Chronicle and the Wall Street Journal this week lamented Crenshaw’s loss, arguing that his true sin was a willingness to tell base voters hard truths, including that Trump lost the 2020 election and speaking out against the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Crenshaw acknowledged that the “telling the truth thing” is viewed as “a real crime” among some voters. But he heaped most of the blame for his loss on what he said were baseless attacks over his alleged insider trading and stance on red flag laws — leaving Crenshaw, in his eyes, to fend off talking points that twisted the truth.
”It’s not like anyone was going to the polls saying, ‘I don’t like that you said that. I disagree with it.’ Because at least then, they would be debating with me on something that I actually said,” Crenshaw told The Texas Tribune. “I could deal with that. … But that’s never what came up in people’s minds and out of their mouths.”
Toth and right-wing host Tucker Carlson had criticized Crenshaw for allegedly profiting on insider trading through the stock market. Crenshaw hasn’t made any stock trades since March 2023, and said in the entirety of his congressional career, he made under $50,000 on the stock market.
A consistent reminder that today’s Republican party is no longer a place where truth comes out. However, the truth always finds its way to us, however slowly.
The Truth About January 6
There is finally a plaque honoring the police officers and others “who bravely protected and defended” the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection of January 6, 2021. The Washington Post was first to report that “a memorial plaque recognizing the service of law enforcement that day is finally on display in the very building they defended from a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters intent on overturning his 2020 election loss,” and that it was done at 4 am with “no announcement, no ceremony, no news cameras.” [12]
I’ve written about January 6 in a couple of previous posts [13][14], and there’s a few things to remember about the January 6 insurrection:
Nearly 1,600 people were charged for their activities on and leading up to January 6, and some of them were quite violent. [15]
President Trump, in his first week, pardoned and commuted the sentences for all of the convicted January 6 defendants. [16]
President Trump was indicted for leading the conspiracy to prevent the peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2021, as he "did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States-that is, the right to vote, and to have one's vote counted." [17]
Congress passed a law in 2022 requiring that a plaque be installed on the Capitol steps and was to be installed no later than March 2023. The plaque was placed on the Senate side of the hallway three years late because that chamber voted unanimously in January to install it after House Speaker Mike Johnson had delayed putting it up. [18]
Here is some background from NPR News about why it took so long to erect the commemorative plaque: [19]
Congress passed a law in 2022 that set out instructions for the honorific plaque listing the names of officers "who responded to the violence that occurred." It gave a one-year deadline for installation, but the plaque never went up.
Democrats who were angry about the missing plaque installed replicas of it outside their offices and called on the GOP leadership to erect it or explain why it was missing.
After more than a year of silence — and a lawsuit from two officers who fought at the Capitol that day — [House Speaker Mike] Johnson's office put out a statement on Jan. 5, the night before the fifth anniversary of the attack, that said the statute authorizing the plaque was "not implementable" and the proposed alternatives also "do not comply."
[North Carolina U.S. Senator Thom] Tillis went to the Senate floor later that week and passed a resolution, with no objections from any other senators, to place the plaque on the Senate side.
Narratives
The book I’m reading or movie I’m watching
The Man in the High Castle (by Philip K. Dick)
From Amazon: [20]
In this Hugo Award–winning alternative history classic—the basis for the Amazon Original series—the United States lost World War II and was subsequently divided between the Germans in the East and the Japanese in the West.
It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In this dystopian world, we meet characters like Frank Frink, a dealer of counterfeit Americana who is himself hiding his Jewish ancestry; Nobusuke Tagomi, the Japanese trade minister in San Francisco, unsure of his standing within the bureaucracy and Japan’s with Germany; and Juliana Frink, Frank’s ex-wife, who may be more important than she realizes.
These seemingly disparate characters gradually realize their connections to each other just as they start questioning the very nature of their reality. And it seems as though the answers might lie with Hawthorne Abendsen, a mysterious and reclusive author, whose best-selling novel describes a world in which the US won the War… The Man in the High Castle is Dick at his best, a masterpiece of philosophical science fiction giving readers a harrowing vision of the world that almost was.
“The single most resonant and carefully imagined book of Dick’s career.”—New York Times
There was a nice discussion with MS NOW’s Ali Velshi [21][22] about Dick’s novel with author Jonathan Lethem, who curated four of Dick’s novels from the 1960s for the Library of America. [23]
GIF Game
Notes and Sources
[1] Lisa Desjardins and Kyle Midura, “Trump fires Noem amid controversies over her leadership at DHS,” PBS News, March 5, 2026, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/trump-fires-noem-amid-controversies-over-her-leadership-at-dhs
[2] “Secretary of Homeland Security,” U.S. Department of Homeland Security, retrieved March 7, 2026, https://www.dhs.gov/topics/secretary-homeland-security
[3] Hayes Brown, “How Kristi Noem got herself fired,” MS NOW, March 5, 2026, https://www.ms.now/opinion/kristi-noem-fired-trump-dhs-secretary
[4] Hayes Brown, “The courts have had it with ICE’s lawlessness,” MS NOW, March 5, 2026, https://www.ms.now/opinion/kristi-noem-ice-federal-judge-warning
[5] Julianne McShane, “Kristi Noem refuses to apologize for accusing Good, Pretti of domestic terrorism,” MS NOW, March 4, 2026, https://www.ms.now/news/kristi-noem-house-testimony
[6] Sarah Ewall-Wice, “ICE Barbie Blasted by Lawmaker as Horseback Grifter to Her Face,” The Daily Beast, March 4, 2026, https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-barbie-blasted-by-lawmaker-as-horseback-grifter-to-her-face/
[7] Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski,” Firm Tied to Kristi Noem Secretly Got Money From $220 Million DHS Ad Contracts,” ProPublica, November 14, 2025, https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-dhs-ad-campaign-strategy-group
[8] Vic Verbalaitis, “All of ICE Barbie’s Most Heinous Cosplay Outfits,” The Daily Beast, March 5, 2026, https://www.thedailybeast.com/all-of-ice-barbie-kristi-noems-most-heinous-outfits/
[9] Rachael O’Connor, “Democratic Congressman References Kristi Noem Dog Shooting on Lapel Pin,” Newsweek, March 5, 2026, https://www.newsweek.com/democrat-jared-moskowitz-kristi-noem-dog-shooting-pin-11624055
[10] Clarissa-Jan Lim, Laura Barrón-López, and Jake Traylor, “Kristi Noem out as Homeland Security secretary,” MS NOW, March 5, 2026, https://www.ms.now/news/kristi-noem-out-as-homeland-security-secretary
[11] Gabby Birenbaum, “Rep. Dan Crenshaw says culture of misinformation fueled his primary loss: “The truth didn’t matter,” Texas Tribune, March 6, 2026, https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/06/dan-crenshaw-primary-loss-steve-toth-texas-2nd-congressional-district/
[12] Olivia George, “Long-delayed Jan. 6 plaque honoring police installed in Capitol at 4 a.m.,” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/07/capitol-j6-police-plaque-installed/
[13] Mic Farris, “January 6 and January 7,” January 11, 2026, https://www.micfarris.com/articles/january-6-and-january-7
[14] Mic Farris, “Unjustice,” January 26, 2025, https://www.micfarris.com/articles/unjustice
[15] “The Jan. 6 attack: The cases behind the biggest criminal investigation in U.S. history,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, January 20, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-the-arrested-and-their-stories.
[16] “Granting Pardons and Commutation of Sentences for Certain Offenses Relating to the Event At or Near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” January 20, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/granting-pardons-and-commutation-of-sentences-for-certain-offenses-relating-to-the-events-at-or-near-the-united-states-capitol-on-january-6-2021/
[17] United States v. Trump, 1:23-cr-00257, (D.D.C.), Document 1, August 1, 2023, https://www.justice.gov/storage/US_v_Trump_23_cr_257.pdf
[18] “Jan. 6 plaque honoring police officers is now displayed at the Capitol after a 3-year delay,” NPR News, March 7, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/03/07/nx-s1-5741158/january-6-plaque-honoring-police-officers-displayed-us-capitol
[19] Ibid.
[20] Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, 1962, https://www.amazon.com/Man-High-Castle-Philip-Dick/dp/0547572484
[21] “Velshi,” MS NOW, retrieved March 7, 2026, https://www.ms.now/velshi
[22] “Velshi Banned Book Club: ‘The Man in the High Castle’ by Philip K. Dick,” YouTube, March 7, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzKgEY0xjsc
[23] Jonathan Lethem (ed.), “Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s,” Library of America, https://www.loa.org/books/252-four-novels-of-the-1960s/
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