The Beast

Slouching Toward Chicago: Kristi Noem and the Rough Beast of Fascism

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” — W.B. Yeats

By the time Kristi Noem stepped into Broadview, flanked by federal agents and a press team eager for optics, the air was already thick with chemical fog. Snipers on the roofs. Grocery stores shuttered. Protesters scattered. A city council member detained for asking questions. And somewhere in the chaos, Yeats’s rough beast stirred.

In The Second Coming, Yeats envisioned a world unmoored—where “the centre cannot hold” and “anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Chicago, in the wake of Operation Midway Blitz, feels eerily familiar. The ICE’s raids, the gassing of school zones, the detention of citizens, the militarization of neighborhoods, and communities under siege and in rebellion. All of it reads like a script from a darker gyre of history — the onset of fascism.

Noem’s visit was a declaration that Trumpian power can descend unannounced, unaccountable, and unrepentant. That the “ceremony of innocence” Yeats mourned has been replaced by a pageant of authoritarian power —complete with barricades, surveillance towers, and a governor acting powerless to stop it.

Noem didn’t slouch. She rode into the city in an armored SUV accompanied by an army of ICE thugs, many former Proud Boys, and contracted bounty hunters. But the symbolism remains: a figurehead of a new order, one that cloaks repression in patriotism and calls it divine. “God will bless us,” she said, as families were separated and neighborhoods choked on gas.

This is not Bethlehem. It’s Chicago. And the beast is not mythic—it is methodical, masked, bureaucratic, and heavily armed.

Chicagoans know resistance. From Haymarket Square to the Rainbow Coalition, from La Villita to Uptown, this city has long stood against the tide. But we must name the beast. We must recognize when fascists “come round at last” and resist them in whichever way we can.