What does it mean when fascist power arrives not in jackboots but in lip gloss and tactical sunglasses? In this essay, I explore the disturbing allure of Kristi Noem’s prison visit photo-op, where punishment is stylised, dominance is gendered, and state violence is filtered for virality.
Spectacle
This image has been troubling me: Kristi Noem, in El Salvador, front and centre before a mass of half-naked prisoners, flanked by men in sunglasses and earpieces, a DHS baseball cap perched atop carefully styled hair. It’s not just the content of the image—the carceral violence, the racial coding, the sheer theatricality—but the way it feels designed. As if punishment, once again, has found its most potent form in pageantry. It’s an image that invites circulation, not scrutiny; a spectacle of power, styled for the algorithm.
Unlike the soft-focus invocations of “authoritarian realism” that have begun to dominate liberal anxieties, this is not about a blurring of fact and fiction. Noem isn’t gesturing toward a narrative. She is the narrative. What we’re witnessing isn’t a politics of misrepresentation, but of immaculate representation: the clean lines of white femininity posed against a blurred background of brown male bodies. This is not propaganda disguised as realism. It is the return of the state as glamour, the iron fist in high-definition.
Foucault taught us to pay attention to how bodies are ordered, disciplined, and displayed. Here, the prisoners’ bodies are not hidden—they’re presented, catalogued, offered up as proof of control. The cage becomes a stage, and Noem stands at its lip, not with a script, but with a smirk. Debord, writing decades before Instagram, knew that the spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relationship mediated by them. This image, circulated across social media, picked up by news outlets, reposted by admirers, doesn’t just display power. It creates it.
But what distinguishes this from prior iterations of American fascistic imagery is the gendered affect. Noem isn’t just exercising control; she’s playing with it. There is, unmistakably, a titillating charge. She is styled, poised, just casual enough to look ‘unbothered’. This is the fascism of the influencer age: thirst-trap governance, where the optics of discipline are softened by aesthetics, and the cruelty becomes consumable.
The prisoners blur. Noem sharpens. That is the grammar of the spectacle now.
There’s a temptation to dismiss the image as merely grotesque, another moment of far-right posturing destined to disappear beneath the digital churn. But to do so would be to miss the function of such images in the political economy of the second Trump administration. They are not incidental. They are structural.
The American far right has long understood the importance of iconography1. From Reagan’s horseback pageantry to Trump’s gilded interiors, power has been aestheticised, made visible, desirable, consumable. What is new in the Noem photograph is the seamlessness with which carceral violence has been integrated into the optics of personal branding. The image doesn’t argue. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t justify. It shows. And what it shows is a woman who knows exactly how to compose herself in front of the machinery of the state.
Where older forms of fascist imagery demanded uniformity, the mass rally, the outstretched arm, the choreographed fervour, this new form is individuated. It centres on her, the subject who dominates not through command, but through presence. Noem does not gesture to the prisoners. She does not point. She barely engages with them at all. Their containment, their dehumanisation, is already complete. They are there to frame her, to accentuate her polish, her posture, her poise. It is the fascism of affect, in which the state’s monopoly on violence is made not just visible but seductive.
The image, then, is not a policy argument. It is an atmospheric weapon. It invites admiration and revulsion in equal measure, and in doing so, it confirms its own power. What we are witnessing is not the collapse of liberal norms, but their deliberate supersession by a new grammar of visibility. If the liberal democratic image was the handshake, the press conference, the town hall—then the image of this emergent order is the female executive standing before the cage, perfectly styled, her facial expression calibrated somewhere between amusement and indifference.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault charts the movement from spectacular punishment to the internalisation of surveillance and control. But what if the spectacle returns, not as the scaffold, but as the aesthetic of control? What if, in the age of social media governance, the spectacle becomes not the exception, but the rule, the primary way the state presents itself to its citizens? Debord reminds us that in the spectacle, representation displaces reality. But what we have now is a reversal of that formulation: the real—cages, prisons, detainees—becomes valuable only insofar as it serves the image.
This is not 20th Century fascism; it is an aspirational fascism. Noem is not selling a policy; she is selling a feeling. Safety. Order. Beauty. And above all, certainty. The prisoners—shorn, tattooed, silenced—represent the inverse. The unwanted. The disorderly. The frightening. She does not need to say what they’ve done. Their presence in the cage is explanation enough. The image does not rely on law; it conjures legitimacy through containment.
There is also, undeniably, a racial dimension. The prisoners are predominantly brown men. The body of the white woman, carefully made up, framed by men in uniform, is positioned as the civilising force. This is the colonial gaze updated for the domestic frontier: the frontier now being the border, the prison, the city. In earlier centuries, such women appeared in paintings beside missionary husbands or British officers. Here, she arrives as both priest and enforcer.
And yet there is something uniquely American at play: the image does not simply rest on violence, it relies on style. This is the fascism of good lighting. It is not brutalist; it is boutique. The power it projects is not just sovereign but saleable. The state, in this configuration, is less a Leviathan than a lifestyle brand. And that brand promises to clean up your streets, protect your children, and look very good doing it.
Lineage
The photograph of Noem echoes a lineage of women who have occupied power adjacent to violence. The comparison most readily reached for is Margaret Thatcher, though the similarity is superficial. Thatcher never flirted with the aesthetics of power, hers was a performance of its moral righteousness. Even at her most punitive (and she was frequently punitive), she did not aestheticise the state’s violence. She rationalised it. Her handbag, the coiffed hair, the pearls, these were signals of class and control, not of sexuality. Her power was to be feared, not fantasised about.
In Noem’s case, the calculus is different. She does not suppress her desirability; she plays with it. There is no discomfort in being looked at. On the contrary: the image invites the gaze. This places her closer, aesthetically, to Sarah Palin, whose 2008 vice-presidential run turned the former beauty queen and small-town mayor into a pin-up of reactionary affect. But where Palin weaponised her winks and boots in defence of folksy anti-elitism, Noem’s presentation is more calculated, more managerial, more disciplined. If Palin was the populist PTA president with a rifle, Noem is the CEO of a privatised security regime. She doesn’t promise to ‘drain the swamp’; she promises to streamline the gulag.
There is precedent, too, in the women of European far-right movements—Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni—who have worked to launder fascistic politics through softened optics. But what distinguishes the American strain is its capacity for reinvention through the circuits of visual culture. Noem’s image is not constructed through the press conference or the party congress, it is built in the scroll, the share, the clip, the caption. It is designed not for legacy media but for the meme ecosystem, where the meaning of an image is determined less by context than by affect. And the affect here is cold, confident, composed.
The press, predictably, performed its usual triangulation. Liberal outlets reacted with horror, The New York Times referred to the visit as “provocative,” MSNBC hosted segments about “authoritarian imagery”while right-wing influencers shared the image with emojis and fire gifs, praising her “strength” and “style.” What mattered was not what she said, it’s unclear if she said much at all, but how she looked. Her function was to appear. To pose. To assert, without having to articulate.
This is the great shift in how reactionary politics functions in the United States today: it is not ideological argument that matters most, but vibes. To borrow from Mark Fisher, we are no longer in the realm of capitalist realism, where the system is accepted as inevitable. We are in the realm of authoritarian sensualism, where domination is stylised, pleasure is extracted from punishment, and the circulation of images does more political work than the passage of legislation.
Noem’s photograph is troubling not because it surprises us, but because it doesn’t. It feels inevitable. Familiar. Even curated. The algorithm already knew how we would respond. The image is primed for friction, left and right will read into it precisely what they are meant to. It is content, and content is king.
Drift
What this reveals, most damningly, is the aesthetic illiteracy of contemporary liberalism. The liberal press continues to respond to images like Noem’s with the same old toolkit: op-eds, concerned think-pieces, thinly veiled historical analogies. But the spectacle does not fear critique; it feeds on it. Every outrage tweet, every ‘have we learned nothing from history?’ editorial only amplifies the image. The liberal response is forever playing catch-up to a politics that understands its power lies not in being believed, but in being seen.
In this sense, the spectacle does not displace reality so much as flatten it. The prison is real. The prisoners are real. The violence is real. But once photographed—once rendered into image—their suffering becomes just another pixelated prompt for engagement. ‘Is this fascism?’ one post asks. Another replies with ‘mommy energy’. There is no space for reflection, only response. No capacity for solidarity, only spectacle.
And what of resistance? It is not that resistance is impossible, but that it is made illegible. The spectacle demands polarity, either adoration or disgust. It cannot accommodate ambiguity, analysis, or grief. It consumes nuance and produces only attention. What is troubling about Noem’s image is not that it shocks us, but that it does not. It fits seamlessly into a political aesthetic that we have already, tacitly, accepted.
This is where the image does its most profound work: in training us to see violence as order, cruelty as competence, domination as beauty. And in that, it prepares us for what is to come. The second Trump administration will not look like the first. It will be less chaotic, more disciplined, and far more focused on the production of images. American Fascism will not arrive in tanks. It will arrive in tailored shirts, at golden hour, framed by the bars of a foreign prison, smiling softly, and saying nothing at all.
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Footnotes
- As does Putin’s Russia. ↩︎
