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I am neither Andy Borowitz nor The Onion. But I know when something is so weird that it’s funny.
Like Kristi Noem’s last tweet as DHS Secretary. The one where she thanked Donald Trump for appointing her to be “the Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.” Some folks would have been upset to be fired while they were in the middle of speaking publicly about their future plans in the position. But not Kristi. She’s apparently made her peace with becoming an underling to. Rubio and Hegseth.
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But that’s not the funny part.
The Tweet goes on for a really long time and convinces me Twitter needs to restore character limits, even for fancy Blue Check Cabinet Secretaries—maybe especially them. Before she’s done, we learn that she has learned that the Western Hemisphere is absolutely critical for U.S. security. Kudos to her for figuring that out.
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Noem also advises that “we have located 145,000 children. I need to know more about this. Where did she find these kids? Were they missing? Who are they? 145,000 is a lot of kids.
Maybe these are kids like Liam Ramos up in Minnesota, who her agents took into custody with his Spider-Man backpack on and his blue bunny ears hat? Maybe that’s what “located” means? That she took kids away from their schools and their friends and their families and stuck them into her people-warehouses with concentration camp-like conditions, where many kids, we read, are getting seriously ill and even requiring emergency care. Maybe “located” means traumatized for the rest of their lives? That’s definitely not the funny part.
My favorite part of the tweet is the claim that Noem “revitalized the Coast Guard.”
I’m not sure what all Kristi Noem did for the Coast Guard. I do know that she bought a new training facility for them. Oh, and as DHS Secretary, she insisted she needed more secure housing, so she booted the Commandant of the Coast Guard out of their residence and took it over for herself. It’s described as a “spacious waterfront residence” in Washington, D.C., on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. Because the Coast Guard, of course, operates on the nation’s and international waterways. As for the new training facility Noem purchased, I’m sure you can see it in your mind’s eye, a beautiful property on the water with plenty of opportunity to train sailors.
But nope, that’s not it. Kristi Noem‘s new Coast Guard facility is in Birmingham, Alabama. I live here, so I can tell you with authority that it’s landlocked. The ocean is five hours away on Mobile Bay. We do have some lovely rivers and lakes here. The new training facility isn’t located on them, either.
So why put the Coast Guard here? It doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The facility Noem purchased was a small private college, Birmingham Southern, that went bankrupt about two years ago and has been vacant since May of 2024. The campus has been on the market since then.
It was Alabama Senator Katie Britt who announced that Birmingham Southern had been selected as the site for the Coast Guard’s new training center. Britt chairs the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds DHS and the Coast Guard. “This is a huge day for Birmingham, our great state, and the U.S. Coast Guard,” said Britt. “This move will save the American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars,” added Alabama’s other Senator, Tommy Tuberville.
Al.Com reported that “ the purchase price was undisclosed.” The school, which has been empty for two years, was characterized as being in Turnkey condition.
Explaining the unusual location of the facility, Master Chief Petty Officer Phillip N. Waldron said the Coast Guard had urgent need of a new facility and that the inland location wouldn’t be a problem. “That’s one of the things that I think we had to kind of get out of the mindset of, ourselves,” he said. “When we look at the whole purpose of a training center, we didn’t necessarily need it to be on the water. What we needed [for] it was to be a place that had the adequate facilities that we can train folks to be able to go do that out on the water.”
Maybe it will work out okay when new Coast Guardsmen “do that out on the water.” After all, this is the agency that spent $2.25 million to buy 25 Chevrolet Tahoes emblazoned with the ICE logo, which someone figured out after they arrived couldn’t be used by an agency that’s so concerned about publicizing its work that agents wear masks.
Semper Paratus, as the Coast Guard’s motto says. Always ready.
Noem said in a statement after the location of the facility was announced, “This next generation of heroes deserves training centers and support facilities worthy of their mission, and that is exactly what they are going to have in Alabama.”
Go get ‘em, Shield of America
We’re in this together,
Joyce