Noem: You Can Come to South Dakota, But You're Not Allowed to Change It

[TexasTowelie]

by Cory Allen Heidelberger


I sometimes get tired of responding to every stupid thing Kristi Noem says. We know she’s being coached by Corey Lewandowski to provoke controversy to get attention, just as he coached the last guy in the White House to do to cover his policy incompetence and win attention and an office that he did not deserve. Every time I point out the utter cruelty, vanity, selfishness, or otherwise flat-out wrongness of something our Governor says, she and her inner circle chortle again that taking flak means they are over the target—the target being ignorant white apartheidists who want a cowgirl President poster on their wall.

But as with the last guy in the White House, when someone powerful says something powerfully stupid, the community has to notice and respond. When a politician introduces unhealthy ideas into the body politic, critics must respond as that body’s immune system, producing arguments like antibodies to beat back the threat.

At a Chamber of Commerce event in Brandon yesterday, where people sat close together and wore very few masks, Governor Noem said she recognizes the concern some people have that the new people she’s trying to bring to South Dakota might bring unwanted changes to our community. As Joe Sneve reports, Noem said she “believes the newcomers are coming because they like SD and don’t want it to change.” Directly quoting the Governor, Sneve says she told the crowd, “You can come be with South Dakota, you just can’t change us.”

We hear here Noem’s confirmation of the keenly partisan, apartheidist nature of her economic development policy. She isn’t throwing wide the doors of the state to offer economic opportunity to all who are willing to drive their covered wagons here and stake their claims. She only wants people who reaffirm her vision of South Dakota: cowgirly small-minders who praise the Lord, pass the ammunition, and bully anyone who dares not conform. South Dakota is not your land to make better; South Dakota has been made perfect by the white man, who changed South Dakota a lot from the land once held by the red man, but never mind that, because historical logical consistency is not what we’re after. South Dakota will not welcome any further change. We’ll take new followers, but not new leaders or new ideas, which are key to new businesses and new wealth, but never mind that, because economic development is not what we’re after.

-snip-

Governor Kristi Noem intends to keep South Dakota the way it is forever… because, in her unmitigated selfishness, she cannot envision herself adapting to social circumstances different from those that made her a Snow Queen. She cannot imagine the world being anything different from the world she inherited. She cannot conceive of co-existing with people who don’t look and talk and act like her. She cannot confront difference and diversity as anything other than a rebuke to her policies, her beliefs, and her identity. She must protect her fragile ego by surrounding herself with similar people whose homogeneity she can hold up like a mirror to say, “See? Everyone else is just like me, so I must be right and good and gosh-darned pretty!”

Read more: https://dakotafreepress.com/2021/04/28/noem-you-can-come-to-south-dakota-but-youre-not-allowed-to-change-it/