There’s an undeniable sideshow aspect to American conservatism these days. This would be comical if it weren’t in charge in places like South Dakota, where Governor Kristi Noem is the current hot attraction on the conservative midway. Noem is a loyal follower of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago; over the weekend, she joined him as he unspooled at one of his wankfests in Ohio. She was often mentioned as a possible running mate. Which made it a fascinating national political story last week when she apparently embarked on a second career as a television pitchperson. From The Washington Post:

Sitting in front of a camera for a highly produced, well-lit vertical video with the kind of caption made to watch on mute while you’re scrolling through social media, a patient for SmileTexas near Houston. “I love my new family at Smile Texas! The video says it all, and I am so grateful for their help fixing my smile for me,” reads a caption for the video post, shared on several social media platforms. But the patient in the latest testimonial was Kristi L. Noem, the Republican governor of South Dakota, who is considered a potential running mate for former president Donald Trump in 2024.

This startling little bit of creative moonlighting caught many people back home by surprise. (It reminded me of the episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show where Ted Baxter finds a loophole in his contract that allows him to do commercials. Farmer Ted’s plugging of Ma and Pa’s Pork Sausages finally did him in.) Some people in South Dakota were not amused.

There’s also an effort brewing in the South Dakota Capitol to launch an inquiry into the governor’s trip.South Dakota state Sen. Reynold Nesiba (D) asked the Republican co-chairs of the legislature’s Government Operations & Audit Committee to put the issue on the next meeting agenda in July.Nesiba said he has questions about whether public funds were used for her trip to Texas. He also questioned whether the trip was an attempt to appeal to Trump, who has publicly praised allies whose appearance is straight out of “central casting.”

That’s a nice bit of Just Asking Questions from Senator Nesiba there. How pathetic would Noem have to be to fly to Texas to get her teeth fixed just so she could come up to the aesthetic standards of a guy who looks like fifty pounds of mulch in a twenty-five-pound bag soaked in bronzer and topped with a thatch the reaper missed. Have some pride here, people.

Subsequently, Noem decided to rope the Native population of South Dakota into the frenzied MAGA narrative concerning the southern border. This, as you may have deduced, did nothing to put her in the good graces of her Indigenous constituents. From South Dakota Searchlight:

Earlier this year, tribal leaders and tribally enrolled legislators criticized comments Noem made about drugs on South Dakota reservations during a speech to lawmakers about the U.S.–Mexico border. In that speech, Noem made multiple references to the ravages of fentanyl and other drugs on reservation communities, and said the drugs are coming from Mexican cartels. On Wednesday afternoon, Noem expanded on those comments during her town hall in Winner. “We’ve got some tribal leaders that I believe are personally benefitting from the cartels being here, and that’s why they attack me every day,” she said.“My next step would be to do what I can to get a tribe to participate with me to help their kids be more successful,” she said. “Because they live with 80 percent to 90 percent unemployment. Their kids don’t have any hope. They don’t have parents who show up and help them. They have a tribal council or a president who focuses on a political agenda more than they care about actually helping somebody’s life look better.”

Back at the end of January, Noem gave a speech to the state legislature in which she began to sell the narrative about the cartels and the South Dakota tribes. The speech was clearly aimed at currying favor from the former president*. There’s a long passage of caterwauling about the “invasion,” which is a clear sign that you are heading into the vast MAGA outback. Noem gussied it up by attempting to link her resistance to the “invasion” with some highfalutin references to the Founders, but the rhetoric is straight Trumpism. She spent several minutes praising Texas governor Greg Abbott’s Nullification 2.0 border program. Then Noem went into a home-state riff of her own.

We see the effects of Joe Biden’s failures at the border every day here in South Dakota. The drugs and human trafficking pouring over the border devastate our people. Make no mistake, the cartels have a presence on several of South Dakota’s tribal reservations. Murders are being committed by cartel members on the Pine Ridge reservation and in Rapid City, and a gang called the “Ghost Dancers” are affiliated with these cartels. They have been successful in recruiting tribal members to join their criminal activity. On the other side of the state, there is documented evidence of cartel activities on the Sisseton Wahpeton reservation and others.

This got Noem barred from the Oglala Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge for the second time in her tenure as governor. The tribal leadership was infuriated not only by what she alleged about the cartels’ influence on the reservation but also by what it saw as Noem’s casual disrespect for the Ghost Dance. From the AP:

Star Comes Out also addressed Noem’s remarks in the speech to lawmakers Wednesday in which she said a gang calling itself the Ghost Dancers is murdering people on the Pine Ridge Reservation and is affiliated with border-crossing cartels that use South Dakota reservations to spread drugs throughout the Midwest.

Star Comes Out said he took deep offense at her reference, saying the Ghost Dance is one of the Oglala Sioux’s “most sacred ceremonies,” “was used with blatant disrespect and is insulting to our Oyate (nation).”

In 1890, as a response to the infamous Dawes Act, the Lakota people in South Dakota turned to the Ghost Dance as a means of warding off starvation in the wake of the government’s demand that they become farmers on the semi-arid reservation land. This touched off a panic among the white citizens, causing the government to send in troops. The escalation led to the death of Sitting Bull while in custody and, on December 30, to the bloody massacre at Wounded Knee. History doesn’t need to go to Texas to show its teeth.

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Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. 

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