THE TROOPS: Secretary Noem does it again!

FRIDAY, JUNE 13, 2025

Blue America's troops gone wild: Yesterday, in the City of Angels, Kristi Noem did it again.

At the start of a press event, she made her latest (extremely) strange remark. Here's the transcript of what she was saying when the cameras swiveled around to a different part of the room:

NOEM (6/12/25): ...The Department of Homeland Security and the officers and the agencies and the departments and the military people that are working on this operation will continue to sustain and increase our operations in this city. We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor had placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city.

So I want to say thank you to every single person that has been able to do this. Also, I want to talk specifically to the rioters and to the politicians in Los Angeles.

[PAUSES]

I also want to talk specifically about how many of our agents have been doxxed for doing their duty. How they have been targeted and how their families have been put in jeopardy and that we're not going to allow that any more as well, that those individuals who are purposely endangering our ICE agents and our law enforcement officers and their families will be prosecuted for what they are doing as far as perpetuating violence on them.

As a general matter, people who purposely endanger law enforcement officers should be stopped from doing that. That said, we start with the remarkable statement we've highlighted above.

Noem has said and done a wide assortment of strange things in her current post. "Suck it," she thoughtfully wrote on May 22, commenting on a lawsuit against her department which had been dismissed. 

Los Angeles is really "a city of criminals," she pathetically stated last week.

Cricket is gone, but this person remains! Yesterday, she made this amazing remark:

We [ICE] are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor had placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city.

Secretary Noem to the rescue! Her federal agency will stay in L.A. "to liberate it from the leadership" its mayor, and the governor of its state, have placed upon that realm.

Also, no socialists allowed! For the record, that wasn't a clumsy offhand remark. That was actually part of the secretary's prepared text.

As presented, the quoted remark doesn't quite parse, but Noem may have been distracted at that point. By the time of that remark, voices could be heard from elsewhere in the room. 

She briefly paused, at the indicated point, as a brief bit of turmoil played out. We now switch our attention to Senator Padilla (D-CA), an impressive person whose personal history reminds us of a very important point:

Talent emerges from all locales! The leading authority speaks:

Alex Padilla

Alejandro Padilla (born March 22, 1973) is an American politician serving as the senior United States senator from California, a seat he has held since 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, Padilla served as the 30th secretary of state of California from 2015 to 2021 and was a member of the California State Senate and the Los Angeles City Council.

[...]

Padilla is one of three children of Santos and Lupe Padilla, both of whom moved from Mexico, specifically Jalisco and Chihuahua, before meeting and marrying in Los Angeles, where he was born. He grew up in Pacoima, Los Angeles, and graduated from San Fernando High School in the northeast San Fernando Valley. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1994. 

After graduation, Padilla moved back to Pacoima and briefly worked as an engineer for Hughes Aircraft, where he wrote software for satellite systems.

Padilla is a former member of the governing board of MIT...

His father worked as a short-order cook, his mother as a housekeeper. Their son emerged with an engineering degree from MIT, reminding us of the remarkable fact that talent can emerge from anywhere on the dial.

(In the case of President Lincoln, it emerged, in an inexplicable way, from the nation's backcountry, In the case of the Presidents Roosevelt, it emerged from the nation's highest salons.)

People swear by the character of Senator Padilla. We'd be strongly inclined to assume that those people have it right.

That said, it seems to us that he submitted to a bit of imperfect judgment yesterday. 

In this morning's news report, the New York Times offers an instant summary.  We'll highlight an important word which has been widely disappeared:

Calif. Senator Forcibly Removed and Handcuffed After Interrupting Noem

Senator Alex Padilla, Democrat of California, was forcibly removed on Thursday from a news conference being held by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, and handcuffed after he interrupted Ms. Noem at a federal building in West Los Angeles.

“Sir! Sir! Hands off!” Mr. Padilla, 52, shouted as federal agents tried to muscle him out of the room inside a government office building about 15 miles west of downtown Los Angeles where Ms. Noem was speaking. “I am Senator Alex Padilla. I have a question for the secretary.”

[...]

In the tense hyperpartisanship of the moment, the episode quickly swelled into a cause célèbre for both parties...

The key word is "interrupted." That word appears in the first paragraph of the Times report, but also in the headline.

Yesterday, the corporate stars of Blue America disappeared that word. If you're a denizen of Blue America, you should be very unhappy about the way these less than fully impressive people, along with their less than fully impressive predecessors, have served your interests over the past (let's say) 33 years.

People swear by Senator Padilla's character; we don't doubt that assessment. But in our view, he displayed a bit of imperfect judgment during yesterday event.

In our view, so did Nicolle Wallace and the standard assortment of Blue American corporate hacks on MSNBC's succession of programs. Instantly, they started feeding us cable news viewers the kind of porridge which leaves us well-fed and glad. 

They kept forgetting to mention the fact that Senator Padilla had suddenly interrupted Secretary Noem as she tried to make her (remarkable) opening statement. No, you're not supposed to do that—and Senator Padilla, who is said to be mild-mannered, seemed remarkably exercised when security tried to make him stop. 

The senator is much larger than those agents were. He kept shoving back against them and attempting to interrupt further. 

In our view, he shouldn't have done that. Lincoln also made mistakes at points along the way.

No, Virginia! Senator Padilla wasn't simply "doing his oversight" when he tried to interrupt, as Blue America's pundits quickly agreed to say. And when Wallace came on the air at 4 p.m., she repeatedly said that Noem had lied lied lied lied lied lied lied in an earlier appearance on Fox.

She dropped the L-bomb a hundred times. Meanwhile, Senator Padilla was perhaps less than fully descriptive when he made this statement, not long after he'd been shoved out of the room and roughly handcuffed:

SENATOR PADILLA (6/12/25): I came to the press conference to see what she had to say, to see if I could learn any new information, and at one point I had a question. And let me emphasize this as we've emphasized the right for people to peacefully protest and to stand up for their First Amendment rights.

I was there peacefully, and at one point I had a question, and so I began to ask a question. I was almost immediately forcibly removed from the room. I was forced to the ground, and I was handcuffed.

I was not arrested. I was not detained. I will say this—if this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question, if this is how the Department of Homeland Security responds to a senator with a question, you can only imagine what they're doing to farmworkers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California.

"At one point, I had a question," he said, two separate times. "And so I began to ask a question." 

All that is true! He omitted the fact that Noem was delivering her opening remarks when he loudly interrupted so he could ask his question.

He failed to say that he loudly interrupted the person in question. The word "interrupted" was then widely disappeared all through the rest of the day on the corporate cable news channel which services Blue America.

No, Virgina! You aren't supposed to show up at a press event and loudly interrupt. You aren't "doing your oversight" when you do that, and you may even find yourself being removed from the room.

We don't know why Senator Padilla staged that interruption. We don't know why he seemed to be so exercised as the agents in question removed him from the room

Did those agents behave correctly? This very morning, on Morning Joe, one Blue American pundit explicitly said that they did. 

(Maria Teresa Kumar: "The Secret Service were doing their job.") 

Kumar quickly pivoted to a rather tortured criticism of Noem herself. Yesterday, on the less deceptive CNN, security correspondent Josh Campbell offered an assessment in which he largely, though not completely, agreed with Kumar's initial assessment. 

Campbell is a former special agent with the FBI—and no, he isn't pro-Trump.

Kumar quickly pivoted to a criticism of Noem.  More specifically, she pivoted to the claim that "a more talented politician" would have intervened from the podium to remedy the situation. 

As always, everything's possible! In our view, that was classic tribal novelization—novelization all the way down.

Did Noem understand what was happening during this brief event? Did she know that it was Senator Padilla who was trying to interrupt?

From the available videotapes, we see no proof that she did. 

Was she lying lying lying during her subsequent appearance on Fox? Given her recent awful record, we don't doubt that she'd be willing to do so, but we see no obvious proof that she did.

Starting at 4 o'clock Eastern, we did see a succession of pundits standing in line to toe Blue America's (corporate) line. These people have served Blue America's interests very poorly during the past many years.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep—but those of us in Blue America aren't the moral and intellectual giants we've long presumed ourselves to be. We're gifted with imperfect judgment, a bit like everyone else.

Our lizard brains will want to say that our remarks just have to be wrong. Unfortunately, our lizard brains have often served us very poorly since President Trump came down the escalator in June 2015.

So have our corporate pundits! All through the Biden years, their shaky judgment helped create the world in which President Trump made his way back to the White House.

They swore there was nothing wrong at the southern border. Until they could say it no more, they swore there was nothing wrong with President Biden himself.

They swore that inflation was all in the dumb voters' heads. They spent years trying to get Trump locked up, in the (pleasing) course of which they likely helped him get elected.

(They kept saying that we voters needed to know if Candidate Trump, on one occasion, had had sex with Stormy Daniels ten years before. No, you can't get dumber than that—but our stars were willing to try.)

In our view, Senator Padilla—a good and decent, remarkable person—submitted to a bit of imperfect judgment yesterday. 

He could have let the secretary speak, then tried to raise his question at the more appropriate time. Instead, he rose to loudly interrupt. Sometimes, if not for all the imperfect judgment, there would be no judgment at all!

Blue America's corporate pundits largely took things from there. "In the tense hyperpartisanship of the moment," they invented a whole new set of ways to put their thumbs on the scale.

Noem made her latest very strange statement. We Blues took over from there!