(The Federalist) News broke Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump picked South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, a key cabinet post for the incoming administration.
Conservatives are unhappy about the possibility — and rightly so. Noem is a terrible choice for any post in the Trump administration.
Trump won in part because he stood against the transgender agenda and pushed back against gender-confused boys competing in girls’ sports. Noem backed down from protecting girls in her state when the trans lobby came calling, then lied about it, then whined about conservative “cancel culture” when she was called out. She’s a coward and liar, and should be the last in line for a big cabinet post.
Noem was also one of the first governors in 2020 to accept Somali and other refugees without proper vetting, hardly a choice that recommends her to head up DHS. And, for what it’s worth, she awkwardly lied about having met North Korean dictator King Jong Un and about canceling a scheduled meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
All that said, the debate over whether Noem or someone else should run DHS is missing the forest for the trees. No one should run DHS because the entire department should be abolished. Trump rightly pledged to abolish the Department of Education in part because it’s been a failure. Well, not only has the Department of Homeland Security been a failure, it’s been worse than a failure. DHS was created after 9/11 for the explicit purpose of making Americans safe from foreign terrorist attacks, but it has turned out to be an instrument of domestic tyranny, a giant panopticon of surveillance trained on American citizens that serves no purpose except to censor, spy, and propagandize the very people it was meant to protect.
In hindsight, it should have been obvious that the wrong response to 9/11 was the creation of a vast surveillance and security apparatus, for the simple reason that it would eventually be turned on American citizens, as indeed it has been. All the technology, programs, and personnel dedicated to detecting and interdicting jihadist terror plots would instead go toward policing speech and surveilling law-abiding Americans.
