About six weeks ago, I was in the passenger seat of a car with a driver observing ICE activity in Shakopee, Minnesota. Shakopee was under siege as Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security agents were pulling over school girls and delivery men with impunity while claiming they were going after the “worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants.
Apparently, our observing pissed off an ICE guy who U-turned his SUV and drove straight at us before swerving and pulling up next to us with maybe six inches to spare. The agent cursed and shouted we had no right to shadow him. (Not true.) We pulled away. ICE tailgated us for miles to the point the driver called 911 for help. It was not over until we pulled into the Shakopee Police station parking lot.
And I thought of Nick Tilsen.
Five years ago, I was in South Dakota reporting on then Governor Kristi Noem’s response to the Covid crisis. Noem viewed the pandemic less as a health crisis and more of a political opportunity. Indoor water parks were open in Rapid City, and you could sit six inches away from a 300-pound man in a Deadwood bar.
Noem’s political philosophy was essentially “fuck the haters.” She derided masks, declared the state open for business, and shot a video of herself shooting a pheasant while declaring “less Covid, more hunting.”
Donald Trump loved it. In the summer of 2020, Noem hosted the president at Mount Rushmore for a Fourth of July fireworks celebration where she presented him with a bust of Rushmore’s presidents reimagined to include Trump.
Trump’s visit didn’t sit well with Tilsen, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and a Native American activist. (Noem’s authoritarian policies eventually led her to be banned from the land of South Dakota’s seven reservations.)
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“It’s right after George Floyd,” Tilsen told me. “And we’re in the midst of a pandemic, where indigenous Black and brown people are dying at disproportionate levels. And this president and governor, in the middle of all this shit, want to come to the heart of the Black Hills, to a place that has a deep history of injustice and racism, to spew bullshit.”
Tilsen and other activists organised a peaceful protest. He notified local police where and when his group was going to demonstrate. Tilsen thought they had reached an understanding, but on the morning of Trump’s speech he saw that Noem had called in the National Guard. At first, the Guard just watched, but then the police declared the gathering of 200 protesters unlawful. That’s when the Guard moved in. Mayhem ensued.
“They were not even trained,” Tilsen told me. “They weren’t using their shields for protection, but bashing them around like weapons. I’ve never been at a protest where they are actually swinging their shields.”
In the resulting melee, Tilsen grabbed one of the shields to prevent it from smashing his head. The protesters retreated, and Tilsen wrote “Land Back” on the shield. He was then arrested, held for three and a half days and charged with four felonies. (The charges were eventually dropped).
“I was sitting there and going, ‘Holy shit, they were ready for this,’” said Tilsen. “This was Kristi Noem saying, ‘I told you I’d have the guts to call out the National Guard on these Indians.’ She’d been wanting to, and this was the right opportunity.”
Poorly trained enforcers terrorising American citizens. Truncheons and tear gas over sound policy. Bootlicking and bowing to curry the president’s favour.
Tell me if you’ve heard this song recently.
Kristi Noem’s past was prologue. People knew. And it didn’t matter.
Kristi Noem was canned as head of the Department of Homeland Security in March after a pair of congressional hearings where even Republicans denounced her reign. For me, her DHS tenure was like watching a horrific car accident in a nightmare. You know the driver is drunk. You know the truck is crossing the center line. You know what’s coming is fatal, but you can’t get out of the way.
Almost every misstep, scandal, and idiotic moment in Noem’s tenure running ICE had a predecessor during her two terms as South Dakota governor, and I don’t just mean the similarities between the National Guard attack on protesters at Rushmore and ICE’s violence in Minnesota that led to two deaths.
I mean every single thing.
Corey Lewandowski? He was already there. The two marrieds — alas, to other people — met on a fishing trip hosted by Republican donor Foster Friess in 2019 and soon Lewandowski was showing up at Cabinet lunches urging department heads in the 46th-most-populous state to make their own national television appearances for Noem. Her staff insisted he had no formal role in her administration, an early twist on Lewandowski serving as The Hand to Noem at DHS as a 90-day-a-year, part-time employee.
During her governor years, Lewandowski and Noem were spotted conferring at inexplicably diverse places, including a Louisiana fundraiser and a vizsla-breeding business in Roscoe, South Dakota. (For those keeping score at home: Vizlas 1, Cricket 0.) This prophesied an Argentina trip for the duo last year where Noem rhapsodised about riding her first Arabian horse and the time in L.A. where Lewandowski watched from the wings as the Feds tackled United States Senator Alex Padilla for asking Noem a question about ICE invading the city.
Noem’s physical transformation was already in motion as her visage went from regular human to, well, something else. As governor, Noem foreshadowed future DHS cosplay — remember her El Salvador prison visit resplendent in white shirt, baseball cap, and $50,000 Rolex. She transformed herself into the ultimate badass cowgirl — her parents’ place in Watertown was more farm than ranch — riding into the rodeo ring with one hand on the reins and the other holding a giant American flag.
The event that ejected Noem from DHS was an alleged $220 million ad campaign where she stressed border policy while, uh, riding a horse across The Plains and near Mount Rushmore, 450 miles from Saskatchewan, the nearest border.
“Break our laws, we’ll punish you,” said Noem in cowboy hat.
The ads were cringe, but the real twist was when it was alleged the unnamed political consulting firm in charge of production was the Strategy Group, run by Ben Yoho, the husband of DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin.
The mixture of image making and inside dealing was always there in Pierre, South Dakota, the state capitol, and, I kid you not, it involved the same exact people. Noem spent $8.5 million on a series of commercials featuring a hard hat-wearing Noem and a faux welder Noem that theoretically were about bringing business to South Dakota, but seemed more about her raising her public profile. The firm used to produce the commercials? Yes, Ben Yoho’s Strategy Group. (Yoho and McLaughlin were not married at the time.) Noem was accused of tilting the bid process to insure Strategy Group would be chosen. The cherry on top was a rival firm accusing Strategy Group of stealing their idea for the campaign.
Then there was Noem’s bizarre video endorsement of Texas Smiles, a dentistry that did some work on her mouth.
“I want when people look at me to hear the words that I say and not be distracted by something that I’m wearing or how I look or even my appearance,” said Noem without irony. “I want them to focus on my thoughts and ideas and what we can do to really make this country better.”
(Everyone agreed her teeth looked great.)
Noem even had excessive plane spending as governor, billing the government for traveling on state aircraft to and from her daughter’s wedding and various political events. Sure, there was no Hilton-quality bedroom like her DHS plane featured, even though the jet was ostensibly for deportation transportation, but excess has to start somewhere. One day you’re flying a turbo prop to Watertown, the next you’re firing a military pilot for forgetting your blanky.
This winter, Renee Good and Alex Pretti were both shot and killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Noem immediately labeled them domestic terrorists. (A belief she refused to back down from in her recent disastrous congressional hearings.) Sadly, this, too, could have been predicted if anyone remembered Noem’s South Dakota policies.
In 2019, Noem introduced an anti-riot-boosting law that would make it a felony for anyone to aid or abet a protester in any way. The bill was clearly targeted at Native Americans and others protesting the proposed Keystone pipeline that was being revived during Trump’s first term. Noem was hoping to avoid the headlines that lit up the nation in 2016 with the pipeline protests up north on the Standing Rock reservation that encompasses both South Dakota and North Dakota.
“Her whole thing is about shutting us down,” Nick Tilsen told me. “She’d be happy if we didn’t vote, didn’t speak.”
Or breathe.
I’D ARGUE THAT NO RECENT AMERICAN official’s failure was more preordained as Noem’s implosion last week in a sulphuric cloud of cruelty, excess, and incompetence. I wrote about it. A lot of great South Dakota journalists, especially Tom Lawrence at the South Dakota Standard, wrote about it. Alarm bells rang repeatedly.
And no one gave a fuck.
Sadly, this, too, was foreshadowed. I talked with former Republican strategist Tim Miller back in 2020. I wondered why no one in Trumpworld was concerned with the fact that South Dakota was in the top 10 for deaths per capita during the pandemic, largely because of Noem’s hands-off policies including letting the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally go off without any restrictions resulting in a super-spreader crisis.
“Look, she had one of the worst responses to coronavirus in the entire world,” Miller told me. “And she’s wearing that as a positive! The MAGA crowd does not give a fuck about that. As long as Noem is making the right people angry, they’re happy, they don’t care about failures. She’s got the MAGA look.”
Not any more.
From Rolling Stone US
