Stupidity is a badge of honor': How Kristi Noem follows in the 'grand tradition of Sarah Palin'
Story by Adam Lynch
• 1h•
2 min read
Salon Senior writer Amanda Marcotte says President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement adores a “bimbo."
“In the world of MAGA, stupidity is a badge of honor for both sexes, but the heads of women need to be thoroughly empty,” Marcotte
writes. “Book learning, in MAGA-land, is for lesbians and cat ladies. Intelligence gets in the way of the true duties of MAGA womanhood: keeping up your highly artificial appearance and, crucially, defending the man you serve with your whole heart and soul.”
As example, Marcotte said look to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem proudly proclaiming ignorance of the meaning behind habeas corpus. “‘Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to,’ Noem said through her
unnervingly Botox-inflated lips.”
Was Noem,
who got a college degree through online courses, has taken the “role of the proud MAGA bimbo, in the grand tradition of figures like
Sarah Palin," Marcotte writes. "The MAGA bimbo isn't just ignorant. She's contemptuous of people who actually know what they're talking about, especially if those facts-laden human beings are fellow women.”
Where the 20th-century version of the "bimbo" is a dim and mostly good-hearted woman, the MAGA movement makes the bimbo a nasty figure, “as cruel as she is dumb.” The modern right-wing man wants an attack dog, “someone who will charge in to fight your battles, unconstrained by intellectual concerns.”
“Ignorance is bliss,” said Marcotte, “at least for bigots.”
The origins of this bimbo devolution lies in reality TV like ‘The Apprentice,’ and ‘Real Housewives’, “where petty and cruel behavior is rewarded over human decency.”
Noem shapes herself around the stereotype of the wine-throwing real housewife, pairing “expensive clothes and plastic surgery with displays of breathtaking sadism, all performed as if she is literally too stupid to know better.”
“That's how we get pictures of Noem in full makeup with a $60,000 Rolex parading around in front of half-naked men in a torture prison, like
she's a real-life "Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S." Or wearing various uniforms with full makeup and a blowout to conduct raids, earning the nickname 'ICE Barbie.'"
“The bimbo can only act on impulse, never information. In this MAGA narrative, it's liberals who are the meanies for asking more of a woman viewed as mentally incapable of handling it,” Marcotte wrote.
