Fascinating and horrid. It seems like the photo op was also staged to show off the tattooed guys, as I understand supposedly that's what they were searching for, ppl with certain tattoos that marked gang membership? (That was the story anyway I think?) The whole thing makes me sick. Am watching from Canada and hoping we can keep our sovereignty and sanity and that you can survive and overcome. Good luck to you.
Naturally. There's another dynamic typical of this kind of eroticization of domination happening there, as she parades just out of reach of the subjugated males who are denied precisely the kind of gratification someone like her embodies. As I see it, it's evoking the same fear weaponized against black men in the classic racist narratives of slavery.
Excellent observation! I would add that part of the "kick" for fascists is that the sexy dom fascist female has neutered the oversexed dark Others. This is in line with the way black men, in the racist imagination, are cast in the role of supersexual "buck" -- who is at once a projection of the uptight white male's envy for the black man's supposed sexual prowess, a fear and loathing of the racist's own strangled sexuality, and the projection of this fear and loathing onto the black man. The buck is recast as the mortal enemy of white female "purity" and the racist is recast as the defender of that purity against the enemy.
That fleshes out my point perfectly. Note that pretty much any time MAGAs go off about immigrants they invoke the specter of rape. It's been a central component in supremacist ideology pretty much forever. For further corroboration, and because I was pretty sure I'd find what I was looking for, I googled the infamous "14 words" and got this:
"The primary slogan in the Fourteen Words is,
We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."
That was pretty much expected.
Here's the kicker:
"Followed by the secondary slogan,
Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth." (I would add, as breeders for all those white children.)
Among other things, this serves as the framework for the tradwife movement. The more racy-porny side is pretty much the flip-side of that coin.
-->"Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth"
Wow, I was not even aware of that part! There is nothing subtle about it!
--> (I would add, as breeders for all those white children.)
Yes. This is the first component of making sure that only (or predominantly) white children are bred.
The second component is making damn sure none of those white women breed with non-whites. ("Breed." Good Lord, how everything is turned to the lowest, crudest aspects of existence with these people! In this case, it's the human female assessed as mere livestock.)
It's no surprise that in the post-Reconstruction era, these types used to flip out so much about "miscegenation." And they're still doing it now, just with slightly different language.
When white women have children with non-white males, the result - according to the racists - is "muddying" of the white race. And if one of these half-white daughters has children with another non-white male, the grandkids are now only 25% "white." (The horror, the horror!)
This gradually diminishing percentage of "whiteness" over generations is exactly the enraged paranoia expressed in the "14 words." Left out entirely are other notions about what culture actually is. Who's the proper inheritor of our civilization, an educated mixed-race person with a deep knowledge of Western Civilization, U.S. history, and the U.S. Constitution, or a semi-literate white MAGA who knows nothing -- nothing accurate, that is -- about any of these areas?
Apparently the people we deported weren't terrifying enough for the cameras, since the shirtless men in the video were Salvadorans, some of them members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, with "MS' tattoos.
Tren de Aragua, the gang Trump claims we're at "war" with, doesn't have any "official" tattoos, but that hasn't stopped ICE from accusing anyone with a tattoo of belonging.
It’s all performance. MAGA knows that it can fool many people to believe in the superficial propaganda it thrives on. It works for those who don’t question or think. The fact that 60+ % of Catholics who go to weekly mass voted for Trump shows this. Jesus said those ‘who do these things for the least of us, do them unto me’. The homeless, the sick, the hungry, those in prison’ the unloved unwanted immigrant. This is in Mathew.
As a survivor of family incest sexual assault and of a family that had sadistic behavior, I speak for all survivors bombarded by this crap. Thank you for your in depth analysis of trump's administration and its manipulation of media.
Susan! Yes- the normalization of rape at the highest levels of govt., triggered my daughter, a victim of sadistic sexual assault, for weeks after the election. My heart goes out to you.
Thank you for your thorough analysis. She is dressed very unprofessionally. As a fed government employee on an international trip, she should be dressed in business attire. Instead, with her clothing she perpetuates the cave man mentality of this regime that all the guards and security detail around her will save her in the event of a prison riot. She’s a star of the Trump porn machine. Gross.
Important analysis of how women are used in trump administration. Get attention, show off a certain idealized form of feminine beauty, get it much admired, passed around, give the “big balls” kind of guys a thrill. So disgusting and horrifying. Now so predictable
Weirdly enough, to me, the most striking (and telling) shot in your essay is the one taken "just before" she made her video. It's a still from a movie set. Noem (the "talent") working out the blocking with her director and the nearly Busby Berkely arrangement of a stylized "prison cell" with the men on the artfully constructed platforms raising to the ceiling to hold them on display "just so". Roll 'em...
Thanks Jeff for exploring this. I have been struck by the Noem cosplay specifically, MAGA cruelty generally and its significance to the movement. The performative aspects of MAGA seem to be so much more important than basic competence. Fascinating they made the guys take off their shirts for the shoot.
It’s like when Don Jr found people in Greenland to wear MAGA hats or when trump pays people to stand behind him during rallies. They have to fake their lives and make a nasty Cheeto licking cult look good. But Noem told those guys to take off their shirts and they were like “Hell Yes and what else.” This was cruel! The entire orange juice sucking bunch has not one empathetic, sympathetic, compassionate bone in their body.
This paragraph speaks truth to power: "You know, of course, that Trump claims that they’re all gang members; and you know also, I suspect, that many aren’t; and most of all you know, I hope, that regardless of their innocence or guilt sending them to a foreign prison described as “notorious” by both critics on MSNBC and fans on Fox News, absent any due process, likely in defiance of a court order, is the work of a regime, not an administration; a fascist authority, not the rule of law."
"The trap is: name it, and then you’re the pervert, the one makes something perfectly ordinary—a White House video (fetish porn), a video of a cabinet secretary (Lara Croft with shirtless caged men)—weird. Which is why we have to identify the whole apparatus of the trap, not just the bait."
The juxtaposition of Noem and the overcrowded cages of prisoners disturbed me greatly. But I didn't know why exactly - other than the messaging that Noem is "tough" and not just to her late canine - until I read your analysis. Thanks, I think.
Thanks for this, Jeff—right on the $$. It reminds me of watching Zero Dark Thirty and the transformation Jessica Chastain goes through—I reviewed it back in 2013: “Maya is no longer the reticent by-the-book agent; she is now a feisty, redheaded Ahab whose whale is bin Laden (known by the snappy acronym “OBL”)./ There’s no discussion of OBL’s strategic value, or of any end game other than let’s kill this bastard. And who’s going to stand in the way of a hot chick with a bad case of bloodlust? What red-blooded patriot isn’t going to say, “Uh, yes, please. Do you mind if I watch?”
How much time did Gnome spend on hair/makeup and elevating her bustline? Getting the sweat pants to cling just so?
My guess is that either the inmates (are they even the ones from the US?) were made to remove their shirts for the promo photo; or more likely, the tats were all added by AI. Someone with knowledge of AI and gang iconography should take a look at that please! It just looks very fake. It's too uniform somehow.
Love the comparisons to film imagery and the erotics of Fascism. This is all Fascist pornography, Viagra for tyrants.
Lastly, I'm amazed that no one has brought up comparisons to the images from Abu Ghraib! Those practices/images were also highly fetishized by BDSM imagery. The human mind has many pathways but many times winds up in the same debased places.
The crass bling, the overt sexualization, and the grandiosity of the Gnome prison prick tease is part of the ongoing manic mood elevation that accompanies the rampant sociopathy of MAGA. The mania is under-appreciated as a driving force that energizes them. The exposure of incompetence and arrogant stupidity via Signalgate, and the electoral loss in PA have caused a rapid deflation of postured esteem; they have responded with a mixture of panic and unreality that is as stunning as it is pathetic. Their fevered denial is in exponential proportion to their humiliation and deflation. It is both comical and dangerous.
I would add that the grotesque is part of the fascist aesthetic. Pushing certain features well past a norm speaks to power: huge boobs, swollen faces and lips due to filler, cascading hair, all indicate that one can trample on the boundaries ordinary people respect as beauty. The sublime as an extreme experience always points to pain. The grotesque gives pain disguised as the beautiful and tortures the viewer as an act of dominance.
From the Wikipedia plot synopsis of Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time:
Luciente's utopia is only one possible future; alternate futures are a possibility, and the novel shows us one example: a future consumerist, hyper-capitalist, environmentally sick and strictly classist, racist, and gender-stratified society in which a wealthy elite, known as the "richies" live on space platforms, sustaining themselves by dominating and exploiting the majority of the population through total control of knowledge and technology, personal control extending to physical "farming" of bodies (harvesting organs regularly) and the surgical control of moods through the use of psychotropic drugs. Women in this intensely violent, misogynistic and homophobic world of what is now known as "New New York" are valued and "grown" solely for appearance and sexuality, and plastic surgery that gives women grotesquely exaggerated sexual features is commonplace.
This photo is worse than anything I've ever seen in any historical archive of mass dehumanization because it isn't even masquerading as a “record”. Its a loud and proud vanity photo opp. The puppy murderer has escalated.
This is really sick stuff. Eroticism aimed at the imprisoned men, “look what you can’t have” and for the viewer”are you noticing my fine white top? The arc of my fine breasts? Hard to pull your eyes away from that, right? Looking better than the prisoners in their white shirts. Mmm. Better yet let’s have them take their shirts off. Don’t get any ideas. Check out my boots. Yeah. Tough bitch right here. A hint of violence. You know you want that.” All subliminal. And I’m the pervert for naming it. The barbarity of the sexual tease. BDSM cosplayed by a government official.
Annietime... Not perverse at all. Or, we suffer from the same perversion! I agree that the not-so-subtle subtext is engorged (so to speak) with sexual inference on many levels. Exposing her curves, the Botticelli tresses, tight pants, quasi-military get-up... And all surrounded by these hulking half-naked violent men, possibly getting a whiff of her perfume, getting teased while being exploited. I'd say Twisti Gnome wins the Abu Ghraib Dehumanization Award for this year. As a side note, I hope the administration was able to find Twisti at the prison and bring her home.
Yes this was my immediate reaction but seeing the chests being bared as staged is just such a lack of humanity. If there had been female prisoners with tattoos would they have asked to bare chests ??
Fascinating and horrid. It seems like the photo op was also staged to show off the tattooed guys, as I understand supposedly that's what they were searching for, ppl with certain tattoos that marked gang membership? (That was the story anyway I think?) The whole thing makes me sick. Am watching from Canada and hoping we can keep our sovereignty and sanity and that you can survive and overcome. Good luck to you.
Naturally. There's another dynamic typical of this kind of eroticization of domination happening there, as she parades just out of reach of the subjugated males who are denied precisely the kind of gratification someone like her embodies. As I see it, it's evoking the same fear weaponized against black men in the classic racist narratives of slavery.
Excellent observation! I would add that part of the "kick" for fascists is that the sexy dom fascist female has neutered the oversexed dark Others. This is in line with the way black men, in the racist imagination, are cast in the role of supersexual "buck" -- who is at once a projection of the uptight white male's envy for the black man's supposed sexual prowess, a fear and loathing of the racist's own strangled sexuality, and the projection of this fear and loathing onto the black man. The buck is recast as the mortal enemy of white female "purity" and the racist is recast as the defender of that purity against the enemy.
That fleshes out my point perfectly. Note that pretty much any time MAGAs go off about immigrants they invoke the specter of rape. It's been a central component in supremacist ideology pretty much forever. For further corroboration, and because I was pretty sure I'd find what I was looking for, I googled the infamous "14 words" and got this:
"The primary slogan in the Fourteen Words is,
We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."
That was pretty much expected.
Here's the kicker:
"Followed by the secondary slogan,
Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth." (I would add, as breeders for all those white children.)
Among other things, this serves as the framework for the tradwife movement. The more racy-porny side is pretty much the flip-side of that coin.
-->"Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth"
Wow, I was not even aware of that part! There is nothing subtle about it!
--> (I would add, as breeders for all those white children.)
Yes. This is the first component of making sure that only (or predominantly) white children are bred.
The second component is making damn sure none of those white women breed with non-whites. ("Breed." Good Lord, how everything is turned to the lowest, crudest aspects of existence with these people! In this case, it's the human female assessed as mere livestock.)
It's no surprise that in the post-Reconstruction era, these types used to flip out so much about "miscegenation." And they're still doing it now, just with slightly different language.
When white women have children with non-white males, the result - according to the racists - is "muddying" of the white race. And if one of these half-white daughters has children with another non-white male, the grandkids are now only 25% "white." (The horror, the horror!)
This gradually diminishing percentage of "whiteness" over generations is exactly the enraged paranoia expressed in the "14 words." Left out entirely are other notions about what culture actually is. Who's the proper inheritor of our civilization, an educated mixed-race person with a deep knowledge of Western Civilization, U.S. history, and the U.S. Constitution, or a semi-literate white MAGA who knows nothing -- nothing accurate, that is -- about any of these areas?
Well observed and well stated. Padraic
This. You have identified the dynamic I was trying to pinpoint. The whole thing is shameful and horrid
Facts
Has rule #34 been invoked yet?
Apparently the people we deported weren't terrifying enough for the cameras, since the shirtless men in the video were Salvadorans, some of them members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, with "MS' tattoos.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kristi-noem-visits-el-salvador-prison-holding-deported-venezuelans/
Tren de Aragua, the gang Trump claims we're at "war" with, doesn't have any "official" tattoos, but that hasn't stopped ICE from accusing anyone with a tattoo of belonging.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/trump-el-salvador-venezulea-deportation-prison-cecot-bukele/
of course, once again its the performance...the Venezuelans weren't scary enough.
I think it was Colonel Gadaffi that had a brigade of women guards always at his side.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcT13XIOlifnJyKFyM0OCxXpyB7KVHOM4iSUm9aY-_2RRg&s
The article tells you all you need to know about trump and his co hort of assistant cockroach villainous sycophants. America has really lost the plot.
The embarrassment of this administration is unending.
Will you take on tons of American political refugees? We'll be the nice ones! The Nazi's will stay in 'Merika.
I know lots of good people. Will take you if we can but the rules are strict! And can't guarantee you a doctor.
It’s all performance. MAGA knows that it can fool many people to believe in the superficial propaganda it thrives on. It works for those who don’t question or think. The fact that 60+ % of Catholics who go to weekly mass voted for Trump shows this. Jesus said those ‘who do these things for the least of us, do them unto me’. The homeless, the sick, the hungry, those in prison’ the unloved unwanted immigrant. This is in Mathew.
As a survivor of family incest sexual assault and of a family that had sadistic behavior, I speak for all survivors bombarded by this crap. Thank you for your in depth analysis of trump's administration and its manipulation of media.
Susan! Yes- the normalization of rape at the highest levels of govt., triggered my daughter, a victim of sadistic sexual assault, for weeks after the election. My heart goes out to you.
Thank you for your thorough analysis. She is dressed very unprofessionally. As a fed government employee on an international trip, she should be dressed in business attire. Instead, with her clothing she perpetuates the cave man mentality of this regime that all the guards and security detail around her will save her in the event of a prison riot. She’s a star of the Trump porn machine. Gross.
Important analysis of how women are used in trump administration. Get attention, show off a certain idealized form of feminine beauty, get it much admired, passed around, give the “big balls” kind of guys a thrill. So disgusting and horrifying. Now so predictable
Weirdly enough, to me, the most striking (and telling) shot in your essay is the one taken "just before" she made her video. It's a still from a movie set. Noem (the "talent") working out the blocking with her director and the nearly Busby Berkely arrangement of a stylized "prison cell" with the men on the artfully constructed platforms raising to the ceiling to hold them on display "just so". Roll 'em...
Thanks Jeff for exploring this. I have been struck by the Noem cosplay specifically, MAGA cruelty generally and its significance to the movement. The performative aspects of MAGA seem to be so much more important than basic competence. Fascinating they made the guys take off their shirts for the shoot.
It’s like when Don Jr found people in Greenland to wear MAGA hats or when trump pays people to stand behind him during rallies. They have to fake their lives and make a nasty Cheeto licking cult look good. But Noem told those guys to take off their shirts and they were like “Hell Yes and what else.” This was cruel! The entire orange juice sucking bunch has not one empathetic, sympathetic, compassionate bone in their body.
This paragraph speaks truth to power: "You know, of course, that Trump claims that they’re all gang members; and you know also, I suspect, that many aren’t; and most of all you know, I hope, that regardless of their innocence or guilt sending them to a foreign prison described as “notorious” by both critics on MSNBC and fans on Fox News, absent any due process, likely in defiance of a court order, is the work of a regime, not an administration; a fascist authority, not the rule of law."
Shades of Abu Ghraib . . .
Yes. That’s exactly the feel I got from it.
"The trap is: name it, and then you’re the pervert, the one makes something perfectly ordinary—a White House video (fetish porn), a video of a cabinet secretary (Lara Croft with shirtless caged men)—weird. Which is why we have to identify the whole apparatus of the trap, not just the bait."
absolute genius, absolute truth. thanks Jeff.
The juxtaposition of Noem and the overcrowded cages of prisoners disturbed me greatly. But I didn't know why exactly - other than the messaging that Noem is "tough" and not just to her late canine - until I read your analysis. Thanks, I think.
Thanks for this, Jeff—right on the $$. It reminds me of watching Zero Dark Thirty and the transformation Jessica Chastain goes through—I reviewed it back in 2013: “Maya is no longer the reticent by-the-book agent; she is now a feisty, redheaded Ahab whose whale is bin Laden (known by the snappy acronym “OBL”)./ There’s no discussion of OBL’s strategic value, or of any end game other than let’s kill this bastard. And who’s going to stand in the way of a hot chick with a bad case of bloodlust? What red-blooded patriot isn’t going to say, “Uh, yes, please. Do you mind if I watch?”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodletters/2013/10/a-good-war-is-hard-to-find/
Oh, that's good. God, I loathed that movie.
SAME. LOATHED.
Great work here.
How much time did Gnome spend on hair/makeup and elevating her bustline? Getting the sweat pants to cling just so?
My guess is that either the inmates (are they even the ones from the US?) were made to remove their shirts for the promo photo; or more likely, the tats were all added by AI. Someone with knowledge of AI and gang iconography should take a look at that please! It just looks very fake. It's too uniform somehow.
Love the comparisons to film imagery and the erotics of Fascism. This is all Fascist pornography, Viagra for tyrants.
Lastly, I'm amazed that no one has brought up comparisons to the images from Abu Ghraib! Those practices/images were also highly fetishized by BDSM imagery. The human mind has many pathways but many times winds up in the same debased places.
The crass bling, the overt sexualization, and the grandiosity of the Gnome prison prick tease is part of the ongoing manic mood elevation that accompanies the rampant sociopathy of MAGA. The mania is under-appreciated as a driving force that energizes them. The exposure of incompetence and arrogant stupidity via Signalgate, and the electoral loss in PA have caused a rapid deflation of postured esteem; they have responded with a mixture of panic and unreality that is as stunning as it is pathetic. Their fevered denial is in exponential proportion to their humiliation and deflation. It is both comical and dangerous.
Thanks again for this deeply reflective post!
I would add that the grotesque is part of the fascist aesthetic. Pushing certain features well past a norm speaks to power: huge boobs, swollen faces and lips due to filler, cascading hair, all indicate that one can trample on the boundaries ordinary people respect as beauty. The sublime as an extreme experience always points to pain. The grotesque gives pain disguised as the beautiful and tortures the viewer as an act of dominance.
From the Wikipedia plot synopsis of Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time:
Luciente's utopia is only one possible future; alternate futures are a possibility, and the novel shows us one example: a future consumerist, hyper-capitalist, environmentally sick and strictly classist, racist, and gender-stratified society in which a wealthy elite, known as the "richies" live on space platforms, sustaining themselves by dominating and exploiting the majority of the population through total control of knowledge and technology, personal control extending to physical "farming" of bodies (harvesting organs regularly) and the surgical control of moods through the use of psychotropic drugs. Women in this intensely violent, misogynistic and homophobic world of what is now known as "New New York" are valued and "grown" solely for appearance and sexuality, and plastic surgery that gives women grotesquely exaggerated sexual features is commonplace.
Margaret Atwood in her Mad Addam series has the future using animal hybrids to grow human organs for harvest.
The GOP is all performance ‘art’ to feed the base the meat they love…other people’s misery…their pain quotidien of retribution with a malice chaser.
This photo is worse than anything I've ever seen in any historical archive of mass dehumanization because it isn't even masquerading as a “record”. Its a loud and proud vanity photo opp. The puppy murderer has escalated.
This is really sick stuff. Eroticism aimed at the imprisoned men, “look what you can’t have” and for the viewer”are you noticing my fine white top? The arc of my fine breasts? Hard to pull your eyes away from that, right? Looking better than the prisoners in their white shirts. Mmm. Better yet let’s have them take their shirts off. Don’t get any ideas. Check out my boots. Yeah. Tough bitch right here. A hint of violence. You know you want that.” All subliminal. And I’m the pervert for naming it. The barbarity of the sexual tease. BDSM cosplayed by a government official.
Annietime... Not perverse at all. Or, we suffer from the same perversion! I agree that the not-so-subtle subtext is engorged (so to speak) with sexual inference on many levels. Exposing her curves, the Botticelli tresses, tight pants, quasi-military get-up... And all surrounded by these hulking half-naked violent men, possibly getting a whiff of her perfume, getting teased while being exploited. I'd say Twisti Gnome wins the Abu Ghraib Dehumanization Award for this year. As a side note, I hope the administration was able to find Twisti at the prison and bring her home.
Yes this was my immediate reaction but seeing the chests being bared as staged is just such a lack of humanity. If there had been female prisoners with tattoos would they have asked to bare chests ??