Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lashed out at the animated comedy South Park, telling interviewer Glenn Beck that while she didn't watch their latest episode satirizing her, she nonetheless heard of the "lazy" and "petty" jabs at her appearance.
The latest South Park episode mocks Noem's role in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids amid the Trump administration's ongoing immigration raids that have terrorized immigrant families and faced widespread condemnation from human rights groups.
In the storyline, Mr. Mackey loses his job as an elementary school counselor and joins ICE, where the show lampoons the agency’s recruitment and training. Noem is portrayed ordering a raid on a “Dora the Explorer Live!” show and even participating in a raid at Heaven’s gates.
She is repeatedly shown shooting and killing dogs—including Krypto from the new Superman film and a service animal—and appears in an ICE recruitment video defending her decision to kill her own puppy, a reference to her memoir’s admission that she shot her dog Cricket for being “untrainable.”
A recurring visual gag depicts Noem’s face sagging or falling off entirely, only to be quickly repaired with “botox” by a makeup crew, which she told Beck is typical behavior from "leftists and extremists:"
“It never ends. But it’s so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look. It’s always the liberals and extremists [who] do that."
"If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly they can’t. They just pick something petty like that.”
You can hear what Noem said in the video below.
Noem's comments are notably hypocritical considering her boss, President Donald Trump, has a long history of misogynistic commentary about women's appearances, perhaps most infamously when he, referring to then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, said she had "blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever" during the 2015 Republican presidential debate.
In 2014, he told a female reporter it would be "politically correct" to say that looks "don't matter," and suggested that "you wouldn't have your job if you weren't beautiful."
And of course when he recently threatened to strip comedian Rosie O'Donnell of her citizenship, critics were reminded of the time he told the aforementioned Kelly that he thinks "only" of O'Donnell when he's used language like “fat pigs,” “dogs,” “slobs” and “disgusting animals” to describe some women.
And how could we forget the fact that Noem—and Trump's border czar Tom Homan—have defended racial profiling and given ICE agents orders to detain people, many of them Latino migrants, based on their appearances?
The mockery was swift.
Noem's complaint came just days after South Park mocked Homeland Security for using a screenshot from the show as part of its ICE recruitment efforts.
The show joked, "Wait, so we ARE relevant?" in a post on X, a nod to the White House, which, via spokesperson Taylor Rogers, dismissed the show as one that "hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention."
Rogers remarks were themselves a response to the show's recent season premiere, which shows Trump in bed with Satan and later depicts him tearing off his clothes in the desert to reveal a tiny talking penis.
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