Those ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’ are at it again, at their home in The Swamp, where, by diktat and threat of force, our tax money is channeled. While all the rest of us in the United States work and spend our dimes, churning the economy, the money we send for the upkeep of our roads and schools, and military, seems to fall into greasy and greedy hands. Would that it could be claimed that the money is used carefully and ethically, our country would likely be far closer to a level of utopian abundance rather than what we have now.

Recently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ran an ad campaign for border security and conservative immigration policy. While there shouldn’t be an issue with our country having secure borders, it is everything else around this ad campaign that has the deep and rich stench of a bog in which the metaphorical bodies of ethicists decay.

The Head of the DHS is Kristi Noem, who starred in the commercials. In one of the commercials, she was riding a horse with Mount Rushmore in the background, and then pontificated a bit about ‘founding fathers’ and ‘American grit and cowboys and industrialists. Then she said unironically, “Anyone who searches for freedom can always find a home here.” It’s not like I am taking it out of context, because the next line is, “But that freedom is a precious thing, and we defend it vigorously.” For full honesty: the video also contained shots of construction (of the border wall, I believe), the police, and the military. While cowboys and horses are that sort of cool that seems timeless, and mountains inspire feelings of awe, the commercial isn't rotten because of what was shown.

The border security and immigration ad campaign ran to a tune of $220 million (triple what it was previously, as per Bloomberg), and (as per ProPublica) $143 million of that money went to a mysterious company called “Safe America Media LLC" that didn’t exist but for a few days before it was given the contract. This is exceptionally unusual, because usually companies bid on government contracts, yet this bidding process was bypassed due to the DHS handwaving the process away due to “a border emergency." Safe America Media is a shell corporation, and thus, who actually receives the ‘emergency’ government money (for a TV ad) is completely obfuscated from the public record.

According to the investigative journalism done by ProPublica, the real recipient is the conservative consulting firm, ‘The Strategy Group, ’ which directly helped Kristi Noem in her 2022 election. The consulting firm’s CEO is married to Kristi Noem's Chief spokesperson at the DHS, Trisha McLaughlin. Executives from the consulting firm traveled to, and hired freelancers/subcontractors to shoot the commercial at Mt. Rushmore. The evidence is captured in a photo that they took at the shoot with Kristi Noem.

It wasn’t like it was Kristi’s $220 million that she spent: it was mine, and yours, and your neighbors. Such unadulterated, unfettered and titanic corruption happening right before us all, in the same administration that has made it their public mission to “Drain the Swamp.” Recently, even the purported ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’ or DOGE, which had begun with Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, has now been quietly disbanded after costing the U.S. taxpayers more money than they saved. A report from the Partnership for Public Service showed that DOGE’s mass firings, layoffs, rehirings, and excessive lawsuits from illegally terminated employees have cost the U.S. Taxpayer over $135 billion in a single year, which is a colossal difference compared to the seemingly vile corruption of the ad campaign.

The recent ‘One Big Beautiful Bill' (as per the U.S. Senate Committee on the Budget) is expected to add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over ten years, and if some of the provisions inside it are extended by Congress to the full ten years, then the deficit will balloon to over $5 trillion. The incompetence of DOGE cost us all, as do the politicians who spend on the credit of future generations - and then there are official government contracts in the hundreds of millions handed out to shell corporations run by friends and family.

Those ‘Rich Men North of Richmond,’ and as per the words of President Trump, have not “drained the swamp” as he promised, but instead the politicians have hidden in front of monuments like Mt. Rushmore, and behind the words of great Americans who have come before. They now walk on graves not of the past, but of the American children and grandchildren of the future – to thunderous applause.

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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