The TSA video blaming Democrats for the shutdown? This authoritarian baggage needs checked.

A screen capture of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem's TSA message blaming Democrats for the government shutdown.

Air travel was already bad enough.

But now comes Kristi Noem with a 30-second video blaming the current government shutdown on the Democrats, adding an Orwellian overtone to our collective trial by air travel. Many airports — including Eisenhower in Wichita and Kansas City International — have refused to play the video at TSA checkpoints, with most citing policies which forbid the display of political messages.

Other airports, such as Charleston International, are looping the video.

The fact there is any debate over the video is a win for Noem, who directs the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, which includes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A former governor of South Dakota, Noem transformed herself with a dental upgrade and hair extensions to resemble other women in Trump’s MAGA orbit, and now stars in many of ICE’s action videos of immigration raids.

There’s nothing wrong with dental work and new hair, and a person’s appearance isn’t generally relevant to their job performance. But in Noem’s case, her appearance seems integral to the job. Same with Secretary of Defense (and no, not war) Pete Hegseth. Both had few qualifications and little experience for their cabinet-level jobs, but they look good on camera, in an uncanny valley kind of way.

In other administrations, the Homeland Security secretary would have been broadly mocked and possibly threatened with the Hatch Act for engaging in political activity. But not now.

In the “public service announcement” video, Noem says it is “TSA’s top priority to make sure that you have the most pleasant and efficient airport experience as possible while we keep you safe.”

Then she launches into it.

“However, Democrats in Congress refused to fund the federal government and because of this, many of our operations are impacted and most of our TSA employees are working without pay.”

This is overtly partisan and dead wrong.

The government shutdown, now almost three weeks long, is the result of Congress failing to fund the government. The House has passed a continuing resolution that would provide funding through Nov. 21, but the Senate has failed to reach the 60-vote threshold to approve a temporary spending bill. The sticking point for Democrats is the end of Affordable Care Act tax credits in the Republican spending bill, which would deny tens of millions of Americans health care.

“We will do all we can to avoid delays that will impact your travel,” Noem says in the video. “Our hope is that Democrats will soon recognize the importance of opening the government.”

While Noem’s video has gotten the most attention recently, other agencies are also plunging into partisanship. The official White House website, for example, has an incomprehensible shutdown clock (you’re left guessing whether the digits are days, hours, or seconds) that blames Democrats. Even more disturbing are partisan auto-generated emails sent from the official accounts of furloughed federal workers.

The top-down erosion of neutrality in the U.S. civil service is an alarm bell of a faltering democracy. Instead of serving the people, such partisanship serves the party — or the man — in power. And the Noem TSA video is uncomfortably close to the tactics employed by strongmen through the ages.

It is propaganda.

“Everything melted into the mist,” Winston Smith reflects in “1984,” the dystopian novel to which all other fictional dystopias are compared. “Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing.”

We are not in 1984 yet, but since Trump’s second inauguration nine months ago we have inched ever closer to it. We now have crossed into burgeoning authoritarianism, where the politics of the leader must necessarily be the politics of a formerly nonpartisan civil service.

You can see it in Noem’s tasteless and disingenuous videos and in a hundred other acts committed weekly, from the landing of helicopters on the roofs of apartment buildings to terrorize residents during an ICE raid to the summary execution by government munitions of boats of “narco-terrorists” at sea.

What the Trump administration is offering, with its “war” on presumed drug traffickers, is the kind of violence that once seemed unthinkable for the United States. Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, was indicted by the International Criminal Court, and condemned by the United States, for the thousands killed on his orders for suspicion of dealing in narcotics. Now Trump’s administration appears to be practicing the kind of extra-judicial killings that put Duterte in the dock at the Hague.

With domestic immigration enforcement, ordinary residents — especially in Chicago and other blue cities — are being subjected to harassment, interrogation, and arrest by federal agents in tactical gear wearing balaclavas and other coverings to hide their faces. Some of those detained are American citizens, based on no other suspicion than the color of their skin.

George Orwell, who was writing during and after the rise of fascism in Europe, was keenly aware of his moment in time.

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it,” Orwell wrote shortly after the end of the second world war. “It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.”

It is simply a question, Orwell argues, of which side to take and what approach to follow.

“And the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity,” he said.

Any writer of some salt will know what Orwell is talking about.

Put pen to paper or fingers to keys and sooner or later you’ll come to the jarring choice of either to scrub your beliefs from your work or let them inform it. Scrubbing pays better, if the scrub benefits the wealthy and doesn’t anger the powerful, but getting your hands dirty is more satisfying. Well, as long as you don’t write schlock and don’t do violence to fact. This is true for essays and even truer for poetry and fiction, and it helps some of us sleep at night.

What will help me to sleep tonight is describing Noem’s video as propaganda. You may have stumbled a bit the first time I used the word, because of its powerful connotations, but now is the time to use powerful words properly.

The Noem video is party propaganda.

Be troubled that your government has shredded some of the last of the norms that defined American democracy and is now engaged in demonizing the opposition party in official government communication.

And it’s not just the other party that is being labeled as the enemy, it’s anyone who engages in dissent or is part of an imagined left-wing conspiracy. A recent National Security Memorandum, ostensibly to counter political violence, prioritizes investigations of a broad swath of culture, including those who hold beliefs that are “anti-American, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.” Also suspect is “extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

This executive memorandum, signed shortly after the Charlie Kirk shooting, is a blank check for the Trump administration to criminalize free speech it finds irksome. The overly broad language suggests that any opinion that is inconsistent with Trump-defined patriotism and spirituality is synonymous with domestic terror.

Much of what has been discussed here was anticipated by Timothy Snyder’s 2017 book, “On Tyranny.” In it Snyder gives 20 lessons to resist tyranny, and I find myself returning to those lessons as the second Trump era unfolds.

Of particular interest:

Lesson No. 5, Remember Professional Ethics.

“If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.”

The Trump administration is not the Nazi regime, and we do not yet know what it will be remembered for, but the lesson is apt. By insisting on professional ethics, especially the nonpartisan tradition of civil service, we might slow the collapse of democracy. Will we be able to repair the structural damage to the nation? If we don’t, we’ll soon have another, lesser form of government.

A word is in order here about the origins of the word “propaganda,” which did not have its negative connotation until after the death camps and other horrors of World War II were exposed. The Soviet Cold War-era techniques of falsehood and misdirection cemented the modern concept in our minds. But it was the American Edward Bernays, often called the “father of modern public relations,” who advanced the term in his 1928 book.

Previously, the word had been mostly used to describe the propagation of a particular faith, but Bernays introduced us to lessons learned by World War I’s Creel Commission in promoting the war at home and abroad. Later, Bernays helped American tobacco companies sell cigarettes to women (a previously untapped market) and assisted the CIA in overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Guatemala.

“The intelligent and conscious manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society,” Bernays wrote. “Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of this country.”

Despite the bland language, what Bernays suggested in this and other books was a roadmap to manage public opinion on behalf of governments and business. I’ve written about Bernays before, but his theories are inescapable in modern politics. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, he believed it was necessary for public relations to appeal not to the rational mind, but the sometimes dark corners of our unconscious.

Bernays relied on newspapers and radio to spread his messages. Today, the work is increasingly done through videos and social media. The RAND Corp., the public policy thinktank, has given a name to the kind of rapid-fire partial truths and outright deceits pioneered in 2008 by Russia: the “Firehose of Falsehood.” This has now come to dominate American politics as well, and more than ever professional fact checkers — journalists and scholars and dedicated civil servants at our nations’ airport — are needed to counter the damage.

Journalists have long been the target for many of the Trump administration’s attacks, but what happened Oct. 15 is the clearest sign yet that truth is under attack: Reporters for dozens of outlets left the Pentagon after having their accreditation revoked for refusing new rules that would limit their newsgathering. Under Hegseth’s policy, the journalists would have had to agree to only use authorized information provided to them by officials. Even Fox News left. It was the first time since the Pentagon opened in 1943 that no major news sources were accredited.

The Noem TSA videos are playing in just a few airports now.

But what about next time? Perhaps during the next shutdown a few more will give in, just a bit more propaganda wrapped in patriotism. And what about the shutdown after that? The videos will seem just a normal part of life, like the ever-present visage of Big Brother in “1984.”