South Park, formerly the edgelord-iest of edgelord TV, continues to barrel through parodies of the current conservative Zeitgeist. The second episode of the season, which aired on August 6, took on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, ICE, “manosphere” podcasts, and introduced the show’s version of Vice-President J.D. Vance. Unfortunately, we have yet to meet Vance’s couch, but there’s still time. Now Kristi Noem has weighed in on her depiction. Would you believe she’s not flattered?
What actually happened on this week’s South Park?
This week followed up on the previous episode’s conundrum: Who is Eric Cartman when the entire world has gone reactionary? This time, Cartman’s identity crisis is brought on by a classmate, Clyde, starting a Ben Shapiro–like podcast to owns the libs. Their fellow students are outraged by Clyde’s phony, hokey provocations against Jewish people and women, leaving Cartman feeling left out. He then starts his own podcast, to his mother’s chagrin, on which he can debate “young college girls” who “are totally unprepared, so I can just destroy them and also edit out all the ones that actually argue back well.” Jubilee, your response is needed.
Meanwhile, Mr. Mackey gets fired from his job as school counselor at South Park Elementary because all counselors are being replaced by the Bible, and ends up joining ICE to “make his nut.” Noem shows up to lead his ICE raids and is portrayed as a constant puppy-shooter — a reference to her book in which she describes killing a 14-month-old dog named Cricket. She’s also animated with a constantly drooping face that must be regularly stapled back up by a team.
And how does Vance get involved?
Due to Mackey’s success deporting people, he goes to the White House, where he meets Trump and a teeny-tiny J.D. Vance, making his debut on the series. South Park’s Vance is a tiny little man tasked with rubbing baby oil on Satan’s “asshole.” The episode ends when Noem’s face droops so low that it detaches from her body and runs free in Trump’s personal Fantasy Island, Mar-a-Lago, at which point ICE has to go find it and get it back. Now we wait and see if Trump wants to defend Vance and Noem on Truth Social. He does love posting about TV.
What did Kristi Noem say?
On Glenn Beck’s podcast (remember him?), Noem called Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s take on her “lazy” and a sign of extremism. “It’s so lazy to make fun of women for how they look,” she said on the August 7 episode. “Only the liberals and the extremists do that. If they want to criticize my job, go ahead and do that, but clearly they can’t. They just picked something petty like that.” For the record, they also criticized her job and character, what with the ICE raid on heaven and incessant dog murder. And arguably, the jokes about her appearance are really more about her actions; Noem was depicted as a plastic-surgery victim rather than a mere uggo. But if these nuances went over her head, it might be because, as she told Beck, she didn’t personally watch the episode.
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