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Every week since January 2025 has felt like a year, but the past three months have been especially brutal. It is very hard to remember and absorb the fact that the bombing of Iran only began a few days ago.
Several events have been happening almost simultaneously:
The first casualties, on February 28, were mostly children in the southern city of Minab. 160 young girls at a local school and some staff members were wiped out. Al Jazeera reports that this was more than likely a deliberate attack.
On March 2, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief Kristi Noem began several days of testimony at her first congressional hearing since the murders of Alex Pretti and René Good in Minneapolis. Blinking furiously and apparently unable to do more than try to barrel through with cookie-cutter statements about how DHS did everything it could to follow the law, Noem, without her protective gear of large hats and sunglasses, tried to maintain her composure as she was grilled over and over by several very hostile questioners. There are several moments to choose from but perhaps the most devastating, for Noem, was when Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett asked her about Liam Ramos, the six-year-old who had been kidnapped with his father in Minneapolis and imprisoned in Texas until set free after public outrage and a judge’s court order. Noem began with the words “I would disagree with the judge on some of the points,” but was cut off when Crockett asked her bluntly, “Do you have a law degree?” (She does not.)
The Noem hearings were devoured on social media, with many clips playing on feeds everywhere. Lawmakers on all sides took the opportunity to eviscerate the now former head of DHS. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota directly asked Noem if she would apologise for having referred to Pretti and Good as domestic terrorists: she did not.
Over the course of a few days, Noem was flamed over everything in her past, including the infamous incident (proudly recounted in her memoir) when she shot her 14-month-old dog Cricket, her possible sexual relationship with her “special adviser” Corey Lewandowski, and the fact that she spent $220 million on an ad campaign created by a firm formed 11 days before she handed it the contract. That last detail may have been what triggered her firing — Donald Trump has told Reuters that he never signed off on it, even though she said otherwise during the hearing.
On March 4, the Senate blocked a resolution that would have restricted Trump’s ability to continue with military action against Iran.
On Thursday, March 5, Trump, perhaps weary of watching the bonfire on his television screen, abruptly fired Noem, giving her a face-saving position of “Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas.” This appears to be a made up title, much like “Shah of Iran.”
On March 5, the House also blocked a resolution much like the one that failed in the Senate.
Things have never changed so rapidly in the U.S as in the current moment, and we all wonder what we might wake up to every morning. All we can predict is that every day will be unpredictable, and that’s not because we have an unstable president. Liberals and progressives in particular like to deliver homemade diagnoses of Trump, pinning the instability of current events on what they read as his character. But Trump has never been the problem and nothing he is doing is in any way new: he is merely exploiting the apparatus that existed long before he even thought of becoming president. To give just one example: in 2020, Michelle Obama delivered an anguished mini-speech about the “babies in cages” detained by Trump. But those cages (chain-link enclosures) were built by her husband Barack Obama, who is still known as the Deporter in Chief.
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The Noem hearings gave lawmakers the opportunity to demonstrate to their constituents that they were anti-ICE and would be on the side of justice, but it’s highly unlikely that any of them would have been so publicly furious with her if they had not heard from the public. As Ken Klippenstein points out, public activism is responsible for the changes in attitudes on ICE and immigration that we see in the corridors of power. I would add that this is also true of other issues, like Gaza. Even Gavin Newsom, a gutless, smarmy politician who only follows the winds of public opinion, has recently come out and called Israel an apartheid state — this,just a couple of months after he mused that events in Gaza could not be referred to as a genocide. As with ICE, this change of opinion in such a craven individual is proof that public opinion — now more pro-Palestine than ever — is having an effect.
I wrote recently that there is cause for hope in the fact that voters everywhere are no longer willing to give Democrats or conventional left parties the benefit of the doubt. Like emboldened domestic abuse survivors, they can no longer be emotionally blackmailed into voting blue, no matter who. And yet, we should still be cautious and not allow the drama — and the glorious tea — of the Noem hearings to lull us into believing that change is here. My friend G. texted me, “I worry that in America the focus on ICE and the brutality of ICE tactics and the martyrdom of those who opposed it will become a kind of moral theatre that masks less robust lefty policy.” I think they are exactly right, and this concern should extend to the world outside the U.S as well.
We have lawmakers willing to speak up about people being shot to death on our streets, but also able to rationalise the killing of thousands in other nations.
Until we make it clear that we see and understand the links between events here and “elsewhere” and that we will not stand for war in our names, nothing will change and we will end up stuck in a perpetual cycle of violence followed by condemnation. War is everywhere.
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See also:
The Left and the Language of Domestic Violence
A Better Son Or Daughter: Donald Trump, amnesia, and a capitalist fable
Nathan J. Robinson, The Iran War Is Unfathomably Depraved
Image: Thomas Cole, “Destruction,” 1836
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