Kristi Noem

Noem in 2011.

God, guns, and freedom U.S. Politics

Starting arguments over Thanksgiving dinner

Employment Non-Discrimination Act Roy Cohn Ethics and Public Policy Center Affirmative action Affordable Care Act Kamala Harris Jon McNaughton

Persons of interest

2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination Greg Abbott Dennis Hastert James Madison Wayne Allyn Root Barack Obama v - t - e

Kristi Lynn Noem (November 30, 1971–) is the current governor of South Dakota, coming from the Republican Party. Like most Republican politicians, she is a complete reactionary whose continued electoral success will make you want to give up on humanity. She's also her state's first female governor, so... chalk this up as a victory for feminism?

A staunch supporter of the NRA to the point where her 2-year old grandchild has multiple guns, in April 2024, she tried to solidify her pro-gun credentials by bragging about the time she shot and killed her own puppy… which completely and utterly backfired because even her fellow wingnuts found the story vile. Despite NRA once upon-a-time touting its gun training program, Noem is apparently unashamed that she herself is a bad shot, raising campaign funds from a video of herself taking three shots to kill a pheasant.

In Congress

Noem entered national politics in 2010, when she defeated Democratic incumbent Stephanie Herseth to become Representative of South Dakota's one district in the House of Representatives. This was actually a hard-fought campaign as Herseth was quite popular, winning the 2008 election in a massive landslide. By aligning herself with the Tea Party Movement and saying her foe gave preferential treatment to family members as lobbyists, she managed a close victory in the context of a red wave which put the house under GOP control.

Of course, being elected as a Tea Party crackpot means you have to legislate like one. This means she opposed Obamacare, gay marriage, teaching kids climate change is real, and saying we should cut taxes while cutting funding on petty wastes of money like the EPA or Medicaid. During the Trump administration, she supported his Travel Ban.

As yet another in a long list of crackpot lawmakers, what makes Noem stand out? She became governor of her state during the Trump era, when the Republican Party became openly evil authoritarian.

As governor

She ran for Governor in 2018, somehow managing to make a South Dakota Governor race close against her Democratic opponent Billie Sutton – for reference, the last time a Democrat won this office was 1974, and the last close race for it was 1986.

COVID queen

“”South Dakota has 880,000 citizens scattered over the country’s 17th largest state, providing built-in social distancing. In theory, it should have a Covid death rate in the bottom 10, near fellow sparse states like Maine and Wyoming. Instead, there are now more than 1,900 dead — one in 470 South Dakotans — and one in eight have tested positive for Covid, the second-highest rate in the country.

—Stephen Rodrick, 16 March 2021

Her tenure is best known for the sort of COVID-related mismanagement you expect from a GOP governor. She also encouraged people to come to the Sturgis rally in spite of the pandemic with predictable results. To show how seriously she takes this, she used Coronavirus relief money from the federal government...to encourage tourism. She downplayed the efficacy of masks through the whole pandemic regardless of silly things like actual science. To defend this, she relies on pseudoscience pushers like the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

Ignoring democracy

She succesfuly overruled a state referendum legalizing marijuana by litigating it in court. Funnily enough, the judge she herself appointed overruled it! Bear in mind this amendment had the support of a solid majority of voters. But activist government is bad and conservatives are here to save you from it! On a larger scale, she pushed the "voter fraud" false narrative during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. She backed away from some of the more extreme views after the capitol riot, which she condemned, but instead began talking out of both sides of her mouth.

For more fun, compare her mental gymnastics after the events of January 6th with her open loathing of more left-wing protests.

But degenerate LGBTs are the REAL problem

She supported an anti-LGBT bill modeled after the infamous "Religious Freedom Act" Mike Pence proposed in Indiana, which was disingenuously phrased as "protecting churches from closure" during COVID despite it being far more broadly worded. She has also promoted transphobia in regards to sports teams, entering into quite the controversy over it, and signed two executive orders banning trans women from high school and college sports.

Banned from tribal lands (due to racist remarks)

In 2024, Noem — seemingly without any hard evidence whatsoever — accused Native American tribes in South Dakota of directly profiting from Mexican drug cartels, and this (according to her) was the reason "why (tribal leaders) attack me every day". Noem also made disparaging remarks of indigenous parents, claiming that their children had "no hope". Noem's relationship with indigenous South Dakota during her governorship was rocky at best, with contention over issues like COVID-19 checkpoints and the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The rhetorical escalation of this into unfounded racist rhetoric was clearly designed to attract the attention of the well-known racist Donald Trump, whose vice presidential candidate spot she was angling for.

United States tribal lands have some degree of sovereignty from the state government. Therefore, due to this blatant racism, by May 21 2024, all 9 of South Dakota's tribes (of whose reservations cover about 12 percent of the state's land) officially banned Noem from their lands.

Moving up?

She has been hyped as a rising star in the GOP, which should tell you a lot about the GOP. Noem was being considered as a new running mate for Trump's run in 2024 (after Pence was declared a RINO for not magically making Trump president in 2020), and was invited to speak at CPAC. It has been speculated she would run for senate in order to primary John Thune (according to some people, even he's a RINO(!!) now) in 2022, but she said no despite Trump's insistence. There was a lot of early speculation that she would run for president in 2024, but she declined because she knew she wouldn't win.

Puppy murderer

In April 2024, media outlets obtained a copy of a book by Noem, No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, scheduled to be published the following month. Included in the book was a tale about an ill-fated 14 month old female puppy named Cricket, purportedly to illustrate how she was willing to do anything "difficult, messy, and ugly" if it simply needed to be done. According to the book, Cricket was an excitable puppy, so excitable that instead of helping pheasant hunts, she ruined them. Cricket also attacked and killed several of a neighboring family's chickens in one incident, in which she was described by Noem in the book as behaving like a "trained assassin". Declaring in the book that Cricket was "untrainable" and "less than worthless... as a hunting dog", and that she "hated that dog", Noem led Cricket to a gravel pit and shot and killed her.

Not finished yet, the book goes on to describe how she also killed a male goat that had (according to Noem) gotten "nasty and mean" and smelled "disgusting, musky, rancid". Unsurprisingly, when she told the story to her daughter, she was completely shocked and disgusted.

Needless to say, the story drastically changed the race for her from going to one of Trump’s top picks for running mates to not even being considered for the race anymore. The story was widely criticized and shocked everyone across the political spectrum. Even conservatives were appalled by the story. In a tweet, Meghan McCain slammed Noem for "murder(ing) a puppy who was 'acting up' — which is obviously cruel and insane." The Lincoln Project quickly released a video showcasing scenes of dogs looking lovable but acting rambunctiously. The ad advised that "when those tough moments" regarding a dog's behavior "come, you have options. Shooting your dog in the face should not be one of them." The Twitter troll Catturd, who in real life lives in a "ranch in the middle of nowhere" in Florida, was also furious with Noem, stating that "there's nothing you can say to justify shooting an 18-month-old puppy in the face and killing it. NOTHING! I don't give AF what it did." Which is ironic coming from a guy who also killed his dog, albeit accidentally. Noem's puppy killing was even appalling to noxious reactionaries like Laura Loomer, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump Jr. The only wingnut who tried to defend Noem was Michael Knowles, because apparently it's possible to murder an animal in a blind rage "humanely" and only farmers would understand, and even he realized how badly she'd fucked up.

A professional hunting dog trainer named Dan Lussen told Rolling Stone that a 14 month old dog was still a "baby that doesn't know any better", and described Cricket's issues as "a lack of guidance by the owner, or training by the owner, or discipline of the owner".

Mitt Romney more-or-less copped to admitting that what he did to his dog was bad, but not as bad as what Kristi Noem did, saying in reference to her, "I didn’t shoot my dog."

Despite the bipartisan horrified reaction, in a May 5 2024 appearance on Face the Nation, Noem doubled down on another passage in the book where she suggested that Joe Biden's bite-prone dog Commander should have been shot and killed for his misbehavior, too.