Lifestyle

There’s a jazz renaissance happening in Los Angeles. Why now?

Published

1 month ago

January 28, 2026

There’s a jazz renaissance happening in Los Angeles. Why now?

From top to bottom: Bobby Hutcherson, Dexter Gordon, Esperanza Spalding, Abbey Lincoln, Herbie Hancock and Charles Mingus.

(Getty Images)

Backstage at the Blue Note L.A., Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter’s widow, Carolina, have come, along with me and a friend, to see Esperanza Spalding between sets one late summer Sunday. The club is new and the dressing room feels more humane than most, like a hotel banquet room. Esperanza makes an altar on the vanity and prepares the space for chanting, a prayer meeting but more unapologetic, ritualistic and communal. We make an impromptu jazz orchestra in clipped Sanskrit, and my mind wanders to the first time I heard this Lotus Sutra, when Tina Turner performed it on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” explaining that it’s how she got into her transcendent mode when she still lived with Ike in Inglewood — her means of escaping him in spirit before she ran away physically. When she finally left, she hid from Ike at Wayne Shorter’s home. With my mind on Turner, I do transcend; I feel so emboldened I could leave anything behind in peace after the session. On the way to the car, we pass Turner’s star on the Walk of Fame. Think it not strange; one perfect improvisation leads to another, jazz music is a way of life, collective improvisation is — one note calls to another, one star lights another. One runner in need of sanctuary clears another’s path, and every jazz club is half house of worship and rebellion that way.

There’s an ongoing jazz renaissance in Los Angeles, one loosely rooted in the genre’s prematurely and cyclically proclaimed death — the same way the city’s celebrities tend to become franchises in the afterlife, worth more dead than alive. Jazz haunts with debts owed to its creators, and has a knack for revivals, collectives, new venues in the old forms, and stalwart clubs revivified by benefactors and grant funding. The West Coast Blue Note to complement the one in New York’s West Village opened on Sunset Boulevard last August, enticing tourists and supper club enthusiasts. Leimert Park’s World Stage just received substantial Mellon funding. There are musicology programs, like the one at UCLA helmed by Herbie Hancock, and local hip-hop producers like Madlib (nephew of a jazz trumpeter) and the Alchemist who have been sampling and looping jazz records until they’re part of a canon beyond themselves.

Why there is renewed interest in the genre now is the question. What about the ecosystem or nervous system of Los Angeles is baiting jazz music out from its malleable shadow into a renewed prominence and even granting it rank in the clout economy? I think it has to do with the genre’s ability to orient and organize social life through collective improvisation, the fact that hip-hop, now in its 50s, is aging out of the night club and needs to highlight its proximity to jazz to reinvent aspects of its image as more subdued and inviting, less reminiscent of Diddy parties and more chanting wholesomely with elders backstage. Ultimately, the desire for a new jazz age is a wish for a new national identity as glamorous and unassailable as old Hollywood. Jazz is diplomatic yet just elitist and gatekept enough to feel like it belongs to the state and the people alike, it’s democratic with hints of classist rhetoric in some of its spheres and jazz is Black music, but that has never stopped borderline-racists from appropriating and loving it.

Jazz lore is concentrated in New York, Chicago and New Orleans, however, and even finds Paris, Antibes, Milan and Tokyo before it settles into the elements of its reputation that include L.A.-born, -raised or -influenced players and scenes. As is common for Los Angeles, the sense of exile and wasteland here makes it an overlooked frontier, a place where new worlds incubate undetected and experts are mistaken for philistines in the glare of year-round sunshine and casualness conflated with lack of rigor. L.A. and its music scenes tend to be fervently, rigorously casual — daylight blinds the spotlight as the preferred illumination for concerts and parties. And we would be right to laugh or clap back more often, retaliating against those towns that take themselves too seriously. If we had a public transportation system that didn’t induce depression, alienation and self-loathing and meaningfully breached the seemingly willful segregation covenants between neighborhoods and zones here, you could take a jazz tour of L.A. that would be heartbreaking in its range. As it is, the durability and versatility of a Los Angeles jazz consciousness depends as much on real estate as on fans and musicians; it’s as territorial and precarious as the land, which burns, trembles or courts dysfunction on a whim indiscriminate of season and somehow remains photogenic and certain of its appeal. There are awards season, fire season and season of the witch, and beneath the intersection of Kendrick and Flying Lotus, of laid-back rap and half-hippie psychedelia, jazz is each season’s encrypted soundtrack, it scores our city.

A roll call of local jazz heroes raised here: There are Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy in Watts, coming of age together. There’s Dexter Gordon, son of a Black doctor who treated Duke Ellington whenever he was in L.A. One Christmas, Ellington and Dexter’s dad had plans to meet at the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue, then the city’s primary jazz mecca, a West Coast version of Manhattan’s 52nd Street, lined with venues and shops carrying an attitude that matched the textures of the music. Dr. Gordon didn’t show; he died that night of a heart attack. Dexter went from sheltered son of a doctor to brooding child hipster who left home early to tour with big bands. There is the It Club, owned by a Black gangster and visited by everyone from Miles to Coltrane to Monk, who recorded an album there. There’s Hampton Hawes, born in L.A. the same year as Dolphy, imprisoned for heroin possession after serving in Japan and eventually pardoned by Kennedy. His style on the piano carries the relaxed tension of a man for whom syncretism comes naturally, East and West, sun and sorrow. Then, there’s Abbey Lincoln, escaping to Los Angeles to pursue theater and film alongside music. There’s Dial Records, founded by Glendale-born Ross Russell, which recorded Charlie Parker and Django Reinhardt. There’s vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, trumpeter Don Cherry, and Ornette Coleman, who came through L.A. and worked as an elevator operator while developing bands with locals like Bobby Bradford. I interviewed Bradford a couple months back and he emphasized how modest their band-building had been. Conversations during day jobs at department stores led to woodsheds and studio recordings.

American Jazz musician Ornette Coleman (1930 - 2015) plays saxophone at the University of Illinois, Chicago, May 1982.

Portrait of American blues singer, Ella Fitzgerald.

There was less glamour in the way of the making of an avant-garde in L.A., less of a hip reputation at stake, so that these bands ended up innovating more than those in New York in some cases. Horace Tapscott built a whole hyperlocal arkestra exemplary of this freedom. And there’s Chet Baker’s sound, there’s Ella Fitzgerald returning to Beverly Hills, Miles in Malibu, who also delivered his final performance at the Hollywood Bowl. L.A. eventually became a refuge for those who became too famous or comfortable elsewhere, as it still is now. But most of the jazz world ended up moving in the other direction, fleeing to New York and Paris and never looking back as if chasing elite romance, and this was as valid an impulse as chasing the sun. Decades passed, some L.A.-reared jazzmen died young or in middle age, and then the exodus yielded a return, not always physical, but in the spirit of relentlessly laid-back improvisers who refuse to feel inferior to their East Coast counterparts.

In the belly of a whale at a jazz venue in Little Tokyo, early 2014, I gathered with Fred Moten, Kima Jones and others to memorialize Amiri Baraka a week or so after his death. I was visiting from New York at the time, Fred lived here then and taught at UC Riverside, and I emailed the owner of the Blue Whale explaining that we should be on the East Coast at Baraka’s funeral but because we were here, we had to do something to celebrate him, it was urgent. The owner, Joon Lee, responded in kind and gave us a Monday night to improvise our grief; we read Baraka’s poems to one another and told stories. It’s what he might have done if stranded in Los Angeles on the week of his death, or what he would have joined us to do, and had, while alive. A few years later, having moved back to L.A., I went to Blue Whale to see Jason Moran with his band, and it felt close to being back at the Village Vanguard hearing them, close to a real night out. In 2021 Blue Whale closed after the year in the dark we’d all had, leaving jazz in the city barren and institutionally driven. Clubs nationwide were folding, but in L.A., if one or two music venues went under, it meant monopoly by Goldenvoice-owned spaces and well-intentioned hipster havens like Zebulon, gentrifying both neighborhoods and music.

At Zebulon I can see a Black jazz performance and be one of three Black people in the audience. At World’s Stage you can see local acts with a Black crowd but fewer out-of-town groups are invited because it’s exceedingly expensive to fly a band out and lodge them for days for shows. At Catalina’s, an older crowd with less current tastes convenes. At Hollywood Bowl, you have to be ready for an Event, not just a concert or show and not quite a festival. At Sam First, you’re so far into the Westside it feels conniving and like a tech monster might hold you hostage until you give up all your data. At the new Blue Note, you’ll see blockbuster acts in the jazz world but be rushed out to make room for the next set’s crowd as if on a ride called jazz at an amusement park. The wayward party “Jazz Is Dead” has turned the hype of that phrase into a brand that angers so many of the genre’s elders and angels, to sell jazz’s death and displacement back to you as big concerts with legends like Stanley Cowell, Azymuth and Sun Ra’s Arkestra.

The true renaissance is annexed to hidden places and in our collective will to excavate them: house and private parties, venues that go under the radar and book jazz avant-gardists sans fanfare, archival interest in jazz migration to and from Los Angeles, and the fact that more young people want to find ways to hear jazz music in defiance of how they’re told to access it — in backyards and nontraditional venues. The venues are like decoys, real estate ventures that would find a way no matter the acts or genre, it turns out. I cannot be visited by the ghost of Tina Turner by way of Herbie Hancock, Esperanza and the Lotus Sutra while scrolling, and nothing in the live sets will be identical to what’s on their albums even if they play the same songs in name. What’s really making a comeback with unlimited momentum is our collective will toward experiences that can only happen live, which is what makes jazz important beyond any institutional, cultural or regional capture. In a city that feels rigid with concern about its own image projection, jazz is the only music that demands we abandon script.

American jazz musician Don Cherry (1936 - 1995) plays a pocket trumpet in New York, New York, June 8, 1991.

Lifestyle

DTLA has a new theater — inside a fake electrical box

Published

22 minutes ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

DTLA has a new theater — inside a fake electrical box

By day, you’d be forgiven for walking past the newest theater in downtown L.A.

It isn’t hidden in an alley or obscured via a nameless door. No, this performance space is essentially a theater in disguise, as it’s designed to look like an electrical box — a fabrication so real that when artist S.C. Mero was installing it in the Arts District, police stopped her, concerned she was ripping out its copper wire. (There is no copper wire inside this wooden nook.)

Open the door to the theater, and discover a place of urban enchantment, where a red velvet door and crimson wallpaper beckon guests to come closer and sit inside. That is, if they can fit.

With a mirror on its side and a clock in its back, Mero’s creation, about 6 feet tall and 3 feet deep yet smaller on its interior, looks something akin to an intimate, private boudoir — the sort of dressing room that wouldn’t be out of place in one of Broadway’s historic downtown theaters. That’s by design, says Mero, who cites the ornately romanticized vibe and color palette of the Los Angeles Theatre as prime inspiration. Mero, a longtime street artist whose guerrilla art regularly dots the downtown landscape, likes to inject whimsy into her work: a drainage pipe that gives birth, a ball pit for rats or the transformation of a dilapidated building into a “castle.” But there’s just as often some hidden social commentary.

With her Electrical Box Theatre, situated across from the historic American Hotel and sausage restaurant and bar Wurstküche, Mero set out to create an impromptu performance space for the sort of experimental artists who no longer have an outlet in downtown’s galleries or more refined stages. The American Hotel, for instance, subject of 2018 documentary “Tales of the American” and once home to the anything-goes punk rock ethos of Al’s Bar, still stands, but it isn’t lost on Mero that most of the neighborhood’s artist platforms today are softer around the edges.

Ethan Marks inside S.C. Mero’s theater inside a fake electrical box. The guerrilla art piece is near the American Hotel.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

“A lot of galleries are for what can sell,” Mero says. “Usually that’s paintings and wall art.”

She dreamed, however, of an anti-establishment place that could feel inviting and erase boundaries between audience and perfomer. “People may be intimidated to get up on a stage or at a coffee shop, but here it’s right on street level.”

It’s already working as intended, says Mero. I visited the box early last week when Mero invited a pair of experimental musicians to perform. Shortly after trumpeter Ethan Marks took to the sidewalk, one of the American Hotel’s current residents leaned out his window and began vocally and jovially mimicking the fragmented and angular notes coming from the instrument. In this moment, “the box,” as Mero casually refers to it, became a true communal stage, a participatory call-and-response pulpit for the neighborhood.

Clown, Lars Adams, 38, peers out of S.C. Mero's theater inside a fake electrical box.

A few days prior, a rideshare driver noticed a crowd and pulled over to read his poetry. He told Mero it was his first time. The unscripted occurrence, she says, was “one of the best moments I’ve ever experienced in making art.”

“That’s literally what this space is,” Mero says. “It’s for people to try something new or to experiment.”

Marks jumped at the chance to perform for free inside the theater, his brassy freewheeling equally complementing and contrasting the sounds of the intersection. “I was delighted,” he says, when Mero told him about the stage. “There’s so much unexpectedness to it that as an improviser, it really keeps you in the moment.”

A downtown resident for more than a decade, Mero has become something of an advocate for the neighborhood. The area arguably hasn’t returned to its pre-pandemic heights, as many office floors sit empty and a string of high-profile restaurant closures struck the community. Mero’s own gallery at the corner of Spring and Seventh streets shuttered in 2024. Downtown also saw its perception take a hit last year when ICE descended on the city center and national media incorrectly portrayed the hood as a hub of chaos.

Artist, S.C. Mero poses for a portrait in her newest art project, "Electrical Box Theatre"

“A lot has changed in the 13 years when I first got down here,” Mero says. “Everybody felt like it was magic, like we were going to be part of this renaissance and L.A. was going to have this epicenter again. Then it descended. A lot of my friends left. But I still see the same beauty in it. The architecture. The history. Downtown is the most populous neighborhood in all of L.A. because it belongs to everybody. It’s everybody’s downtown, whether they love it or not. And I feel we are part of history.”

Art today in downtown ranges from high-end galleries such as Hauser & Wirth to the graffiti-covered towers of Oceanwide Plaza. Gritty spaces, such as Superchief Gallery, have been vocal about struggles to stay afloat. Mero’s art, meanwhile, remains a source of optimism throughout downtown’s streets.

At Pershing Square, for instance, sits her “Spike Cafe,” a mini tropical hideaway atop a parking garage sign where umbrellas and finger food props have become a prettier nesting spot for pigeons. Seen potentially as a vision for beautification, a contrast, for instance, from the nature intrusive barbs that aim to deter wildlife, “Spike Cafe” has become a statement of harmony.

Elsewhere, on the corner of Broadway and Fourth streets, Mero has commandeered a once historic building that’s been burned and left to rot. Mero, in collaboration with fellow street artist Wild Life, has turned the blighted space into a fantastical haven with a knight, a dragon and more — a decaying castle from a bygone era.

“A lot of times people are like, ‘I can’t believe you get away with that!’ But most people haven’t tried to do it, you know?” Mero says. “It can be moved easily. It’s not impeding on anyone. I don’t feel I do anything bad. Not having a permit is just a technicality. I believe what I’m doing is right.”

Musician Jeonghyeon Joo, 31, plays the haegeum outside of S.C. Mero's latest art project, a theater in a faux electrical box.

After initially posting her electrical box on her social media, Mero says she almost instantly received more than 20 requests to perform at the venue. Two combination locks keep it closed, and Mero will give out the code to those she trusts. “Some people want to come and play their accordion. Another is a tour guide,” Mero says.

Ultimately, it’s an idea, she says, that she’s had for about a decade. “Everything has to come together, right? You have to have enough funds to buy the supplies, and then the skills to to have it come together.”

And while it isn’t designed to be forever, it is bolted to the sidewalk. As for why now was the right time to unleash it, Mero is direct: “I needed the space,” she says.

There are concerns. Perhaps, Mero speculates, someone will change the lock combination, knocking her out of her own creation. And the more attention brought to the box via media interviews means more scrutiny may be placed on it, risking its confiscation by city authorities.

As a street artist, however, Mero has had to embrace impermanence, although she acknowledges it can be a bummer when a piece disappears in a day or two. And unlike a gallerist, she feels an obligation to tweak her work once it’s out in the world. Though her “Spike Cafe” is about a year old, she says she has to “continue to babysit it,” as pigeons aren’t exactly known for their tidiness.

But Mero hopes the box has a life of its own, and considers it a conversation between her, local artists and downtown itself. “I still think we’re part of something special,” Mero says of living and working downtown.

And, at least for now, it’s the neighborhood with arguably the city’s most unique performance venue.

Lifestyle

A glimpse of Iran, through the eyes of its artists and journalists

Published

11 hours ago

March 3, 2026

Press Room

A glimpse of Iran, through the eyes of its artists and journalists

Understanding one of the world’s oldest civilizations can’t be achieved through a single film or book. But recent works of literature, journalism, music and film by Iranians are a powerful starting point. Clockwise from top left: The Seed of the Sacred Fig, For The Sun After Long Nights, Cutting Through Rocks, It Was Just an Accident, Martyr!, and Kayhan Kalhor.

NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR

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NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR

Few Americans have had the opportunity to visit or explore Iran, an ethnically diverse nation of over 90 million people which has been effectively shut off from the United States since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Now, with a U.S. and Israeli-led war on Iran underway, the ideas, feelings and opinions of Iranians may feel less accessible. However, some recent books, films and music made by artists and journalists in Iran and from the Iranian diaspora can help illuminate this ancient culture and its contemporary politics.

These suggestions are just a starting point, of course — with an emphasis on recent works made by Iranians themselves, rather than by outsiders looking in.

Books

For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising, by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy

There are quite a few excellent titles that deconstruct the history of Iran from ancient times through the rule of the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Iranian Revolution. But there are far fewer books that help us understand the Iran of 2026 and the people who live there now. One standout is the National Book Award-nominated For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising by journalists Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, which chronicles — almost in real time — the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that began in 2022, during which Jamalpour was working secretly as a journalist in Tehran. In 2024-25, Jamalpour (who is now living in exile in the U.S.) and I spent a year together at the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace fellowship for journalists; her insights into contemporary Iran are among the best.

Gold, by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori

If Americans are familiar with Persian poetry at all, it may well be through popular “translations” of the 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi done by the late American poet Coleman Barks, who neither read nor spoke the Persian language and detached the works of Molana (“our master”), as Iranians call him, of references to Islam. (Instead, Barks “interpreted” preexisting English translations.)

In 2022, Iranian-American poet, performance artist and singer Haleh Liza Gafori offered the first volume of a corrective, in the form of fresh Rumi translations that are at once accessible, deeply contemplative and immediate. A second volume, Water, followed last year.

Martyr!: A Novel, by Kaveh Akbar

This 2024 debut novel by Kaveh Akbar, the poetry editor at The Nation, is an unflinching tour-de-force bursting with wit and insight into the complications of diaspora, the nature of identity in a post-War on Terror world and the inter-generational impact of the 1979 Revolution on Iranians. The protagonist, the Iran-born but American-raised Cyrus Shams, has struggled with addiction, depression and insomnia his whole life, and is trying his best to make sense of a world at the “intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness.” As with so many other of the titles here, fiction and fact are woven together: the story centers around the true story of the U.S. downing an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war.

The Stationery Shop: A Novel, by Marjan Kamali

Marjan Kamali’s 2019 love story is the wistful tale of a young woman named Roya and an idealistic activist named Bahman, who meet cute in a Tehran store in the 1950s, but whose planned marriage falls apart due to turmoil both familial and political, as Iran’s democratically elected government falls in a U.S.-British lead coup that ends with the installation of the Shah. Roya flees to the U.S. for a fresh start, but the two reunite in 2013, wondering: what if life had spun out in a different direction?

Movies

Coup 53

This 2019 documentary directed by Iranian film maker Taghi Amirani and co-written by Walter Murch recounts Operation Ajax, in which the CIA and Britain’s MI6 engineered the removal of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, and installed a friendly ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in his place. (The Shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution.) As Fresh Air critic John Powers noted in his review, “What emerges first is the backstory of the coup, which like so much in the modern Middle East is predicated on oil. Shortly after the black gold was discovered in early 20th century Iran, a British oil company now known as BP locked up a sweetheart deal for its exploitation. Iran not only got a mere 16% of the oil money before British taxes, but the books were kept by the British — and the Iranians weren’t allowed to see them.”

YouTube

Cutting Through Rocks

Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s film Cutting Through Rocks is up for an Oscar this season after premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. This inspiring documentary follows Sara Shahverdi — a divorced, childless motorcyclist — as she campaigns to become the first woman elected to the city council of her remote village, and who dreams of teaching girls to ride and to end child marriage.

YouTube

It Was Just an Accident

The latest film from acclaimed director Jafar Panahi — who has officially been banned from making films in Iran — is 2025’s It Was Just an Accident. Panahi, who has been jailed multiple times for his work and was recently sentenced again in absentia, has said in interviews that his inspiration for this brutal – and shockingly funny – thriller was people he met while in prison: an auto mechanic named Vahid finds himself face-to-face with the man who he is fairly certain was his torturer in jail, and eventually assembles other victims to try to confirm his suspicions. Fresh Air critic Justin Chang called It Was Just an Accident “a blast of pure anti-authoritarian rage.”

YouTube

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

This 2024 thriller — shot in secret by director Mohammad Rasoulof — centers on a family whose father, Iman, is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran. But it soon becomes clear that his job has nothing to do with actually investigating. Iman, his wife, and two daughters come to suspect each other in our age of mass surveillance, as the city streets below erupt into the real-life Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

YouTube

Music

Kayhan Kalhor

One of the primary ambassadors of Persian classical music has been the composer and kamancheh (an Iranian bowed-instrument) virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor. Although music, like poetry, has been central to Iranian culture for centuries, all kinds of music were initially banned after the 1979 revolution. Since then, however, Iranian classical musicians have ridden many looping cycles of official condemnation, grudging tolerance, censorship and attempts at co-option by the regime.

Despite those difficulties, Kalhor has built a thriving career both inside Iran and abroad, including winning a Grammy Award as part of the Silkroad Ensemble and earning three nominations as a solo artist. Back in 2012, I invited him to our Tiny Desk to perform solo. “Didn’t know I could have goosebumps for 12 minutes straight,” a YouTube commenter recently wrote; I couldn’t put it any better.

YouTube

Saeid Shanbehzadeh

Among Iran’s 92 million people, about 40% of come from various ethnic minorities, including Azeris, Kurds and Armenians among many others. One of the most fascinating communities is the Afro-Iranians in the Iranian south, many of whose ancestors were brought to Iran as enslaved people from east Africa. Multi-instrumentalist and dancer Saeid Shanbehzadeh, who traces his ancestry to Zanzibar, celebrates that heritage with his band, and specializes in the Iranian bagpipe and percussion.

YouTube

The underground metal scene

Despite ongoing restrictions on music — including the continued ban on female singers performing in mixed-gender public settings — Iran is home to a thriving underground scene for metal and punk. Though it’s fictional, Farbod Ardebelli’s 2020 short drama Forbidden to See Us Scream in Tehran — which was secretly filmed in Tehran, with the director giving instructions remotely from the U.S. via WhatsApp — gives a flavor of that real-life scene and the dangers those artists face.

YouTube

Lifestyle

Sen. Thom Tillis Rips Kristi Noem, Compares ICE Killings To Dog She Killed

Published

12 hours ago

March 3, 2026

Press Room

Sen. Thom Tillis Rips Kristi Noem, Compares ICE Killings To Dog She Killed

Sen. Tillis To Kristi Noem
ICE Killings Are Like Dog You Killed

Published
March 3, 2026
6:20 PM PST

Fireworks on Capitol Hill … Sen. Thom Tillis ripped into DHS Secretary Kristi Noem during a congressional hearing … comparing American citizens killed by immigration agents to a dog she killed.

Check out the video … the Republican Senator from North Carolina says Noem has shown terrible leadership and decision-making as Trump‘s DHS Secretary.

012426_minneapolis_shooting_across_street_cnn_kal_v2

Tillis says the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE and Border Patrol remind him of a passage from Noem’s book … where she recalls killing a dog she brought on a hunting trip.

Noem said the 14-month-old dog, Cricket, was misbehaving … so she led the dog to a gravel pit and shot her.

X/@DHSgov

Sen. Tillis told her straight up … “Those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment. Not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis. We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership. And you’ve demonstrated anything but that.”