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July 3, 2020 - The Charlie Kirk Show
35:57
Governor Kristi Noem | PROOF That Lockdowns Don't Work

Ahead of Independence Day, Charlie joins South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem at Mt. Rushmore National Park to discuss her epic feat of leadership that kept South Dakota open during the Chinese Virus Pandemic. She also addresses the Democrat...

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Defending Mount Rushmore 00:15:22
Thank you for listening to this Podcast 1 production.
Now available on Apple Podcasts, Podcast 1, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.
Hey, everybody.
Boy, do we have a treat for you on this show today?
Exclusive, in-depth, unedited interview with the governor of South Dakota, the governor who's hosting the Prize of the United States at Mount Rushmore.
The airing of this episode today.
The governor who never shut down her state at all, despite the authoritarian groupthink that was happening across our country.
And as we are seeing states lockdown right now, we need to look at confident, courageous, conservative leaders like Christine Noam.
Her state is booming.
Her state has the best economic numbers of any state in the country.
Her state has barely lost any money as a budget shortfall.
A little bit, but not a lot.
She talks about that in this episode.
She gives concrete advice on how young conservatives can fight back and what the Republican Party needs to do.
We talk about immigration.
We talk about Mount Rushmore.
We talk about Joe Biden.
We need more Republicans like Christy Noam.
Email me your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you like what you hear on this episode, please shoot a tweet or an email or a Facebook post encouraging Governor Noam because she gets so much negative out there.
She needs to hear from us, the conservative base, that we are with her and that we support her.
Thank you to our supporters that make this specific episode commercial-free.
CharlieKirk.com slash support, CharlieKirk.com slash support.
This episode, no commercials, just Charlie Kirk, Governor Christy Noam, Liberty, Freedom, America, Truth.
You guys are going to love it.
Buckle up.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
A very special guest.
You say that to everyone.
No, it's my favorite governor in the entire country.
It's probably the only governor with courage anymore.
I shouldn't say, but there's some good governors out there.
But one in particular that has really proven to be a fighter in the last couple of months.
And a friend of mine, Governor Christy Noam.
Yes.
Good to be with you, too.
It's been a little while since I've seen you.
Thank you for coming to South Dakota.
Yeah, so the media is very intense.
So I'm going to do what the media used to do with Barack Obama with you at the beginning.
Okay.
How are you doing?
Oh, yes, I'm doing good.
Thank you for asking.
That's what they always used to do with Obama.
Like, how does it feel to be president?
How does it feel to be president?
So let's just start very simple.
How are you doing?
How are you holding up?
I mean, you didn't close down your state at all.
You were public enemy number one during the virus shutdown.
How are you holding up?
We're doing good.
We really are.
The people of South Dakota are fantastic.
And remember, before I became governor, I spent eight years in D.C., which was not fun for me.
And especially being a part of Congress, the ability to come home and be a governor and set an agenda and to make decisions every day that really impact people's lives.
I think that fits my personality a little bit better.
And I'm happy here.
This is a beautiful place with wonderful people.
And although the last several months have been incredibly challenging, boy, we've stepped up and done a fairly good job.
Let's talk about it.
So you made the decision not to shut down your state.
And other governors are now doing interesting revisionist history.
I've seen it firsthand where they're like, oh, we didn't shut down the state.
Like they went through some form of shelter in place.
You trusted your citizens.
Why did you make that decision?
You know, when we first learned about COVID-19, I set up a partial EOC emergency operations center in January.
So we were talking about this a couple months before we ever had our first case in South Dakota.
Our first case came March 10th.
And at that point in time, we were prepared.
And I had gotten briefed not only by my public health officials, my Secretary of Health, but also my attorneys.
I talked to some constitutional lawyers.
I spent a lot of time with my economic development folks, finding out really the details on what my authorities were as governor, and then really self-evaluating why I ran for governor and why I was in this position at this time.
So I really, when it came to making decisions on if I was going to order businesses to close or order people to stay in their homes, I knew that I had to live with myself and that we had a nationwide crisis on our hands and that that is a perilous time because if you have leaders that overstep their role, that's when you lose your country.
When you have them take more authorities than what they're granted by the oath that they've taken, that's when you lose your liberties and freedoms.
And I knew that in South Dakota we weren't going to take that path.
It's refreshing to hear a leader that actually goes through the decision-making process of why am I here and what can I do.
So you actually didn't have the constitutional authority to tell people the shelter.
You don't have the constitutional authority and none of these governors do or to close businesses.
You know, frankly, they can all be sued for a taking of their business because they don't have the authority legally to shut them down.
So I went through all of those discussions and also realized that I had never seen a situation where people were so gripped by fear and that what we really needed was information in people's hands and give them the opportunity to make the best decision for their family.
So I talked a lot about personal responsibility.
I talked a lot about the flexibility that they were going to have to make the decisions that they were comfortable with.
And I had to do it every day.
I think we did 60 press conferences in a row every day.
Some days we did two because we had new information.
We had more things I wanted to share with them.
But I think that communication, but also recognizing that they were wanting me to make decisions that they should be making and then using it as an opportunity to remind them of our values and what makes us special here in South Dakota really made the difference.
So you used the press conferences as an opportunity not just to give case updates, but you actually explained what liberty is and personal responsibility is, something that so many leaders, I just think, ran away from that conversation.
Well, I did.
And also once I got off of those press conferences, I spent hours on the phone with mayors and with county commissioners who were freaking out and scared and wanted me to be making the decisions that they were to be making in their local communities.
South Dakota is so diverse and this country is so diverse that a blanket approach to an entire state wasn't appropriate in any shape or form.
And that they really could look at their community and make a decision on how to bring people to the table to take care of folks.
So we had some communities here that I feel like didn't handle the situation as well, but we had some rock stars that pulled together task forces and if they had a hotspot, went in and addressed it, took care of those people, did more testing that really showed how a community can cooperate and not have to put in these draconian measures that really take away people's freedoms.
So you actually it's interesting people are saying, well, we have to reopen.
That really wasn't a phenomenon for you, right?
You've been open for 10 years.
Yeah, we never closed down.
So that's what we talked about when we were going to have a discussion on telling people that they needed to get back out and needed to start attending activities and doing things.
I couldn't say reopening our state because we'd never closed.
We talked about going back to normal.
A lot of people talk about a new normal.
I liked the old normal, so I don't say that.
I don't say that.
We just say back to normal.
And I think South Dakota is largely back to normal.
And it's amazing to me.
We're 11 weeks out about from when people truly went back to normal in South Dakota, and we've only seen our cases go down.
We only have 65 people in the hospital today.
At this point, the CDC and the models that Dr. Fauci told us to follow, we would have 10,000 people in the hospital because of COVID-19, and we have 65.
So I even did a press conference on how wrong the models were.
Well, let's talk about that.
So they said 10,000.
In a state of 800,000 people.
Yes, we'd have 10,000 in the hospital that we needed to build capacity into our health care system to take care of that many patients with COVID-19.
So we prepared for that.
I asked people to stay home as much as they could originally.
I said just social distance when you can, but make decisions that work for you.
And then we built in capacity to take care of our peak if it would come.
But today, which is about just a couple of weeks after when our peak would have been, we should have had 10,000 in the hospital.
We have 65.
So, how does your state compare to other states that did shut down?
Is it I think we're far outperforming them.
Really?
Yes, absolutely.
We have less people in the hospital.
We have a low death rate in the nation.
And I didn't focus on infections.
I was pretty clear with South Dakota that people were going to get this virus.
Yeah.
But the people that needed health care when they got the virus was who we needed to protect.
So if you were vulnerable, if you were elderly, if you had a health care condition that made you more susceptible, that we would take care of you.
But I said people will get infected, and that will be something that will work this virus through our state.
But what we needed to do was prepare and then make the decisions that work for you.
You probably, and the science will show this in the next couple months, you probably had South Dakota develop some form of herd immunity or at least be able to develop antibodies.
And I'm sure we're going to see that in the coming months because when you just shelter in place, you have essentially typically the way we have viruses hit flat is you have young people in particular that are able to develop that system.
Are you encouraging schools to open in the fall?
Yes, our schools will open.
You know, we lost track when our schools were not in session of about 20 to 30 percent of our kids.
So that means their parents, their guardians didn't check in, they didn't do any homework.
We don't know how they're doing.
So we think it's beneficial to have kids in the building, just to have those teachers and administrators, you know, knowing where they are, how they're doing, and to see if we can assist those families.
So, yes, our students will come back.
We're giving some flexibility to the local districts based on what that looks like.
Some of them have different types of facilities, different locations.
So it'll look a little different in each district, but they will be back in their buildings.
So I come from the state of Illinois originally, Turning Point USA is headquartered in Arizona.
Both states have decided to not embrace liberty and freedom.
Republican governor in one state, Democrat governor in the other state.
And both are actually experiencing huge budget shortfalls.
So they were going to the federal government with their hands out and they're saying, please bail us out.
Please bail us out because we had no choice.
And we all pay a lot in federal income taxes.
How's South Dakota doing fiscally?
Yeah, we're doing pretty good.
I think we're outperforming every other state.
And I think it's because we let our business owners make decisions that allowed them to keep bringing revenue in and to take care of their employees and allow them the opportunity to put food on the table.
So, you know, I think I had the hardest hit month was a 0.3% decline in revenue.
Now, remember, in South Dakota, the only funds that we bring in to make sure that we're paying our state government bills is a sales tax.
We don't have an income tax, personal organization.
We don't have the bulk and shale.
We don't.
We don't have that either.
We have Mount Rushmore.
We don't have oil.
And we don't have any other tax that might be there.
The property taxes all stay local.
So we fund our state off of sales tax largely.
And we saw a 0.3% decrease for a month.
But now it's rebounded quite well.
So we looked at about a $4 million shortfall.
That's it.
Which I think is phenomenal.
We expected it to be greater than that.
Illinois is looking at like a $40 billion shortage.
I know.
So we do have costs that we incurred because of COVID-19.
The federal government did send us some money, but we're going to use that to really aggressively help our small businesses and to develop.
I told my team I wanted them to use whatever revenues that were here, that we needed to use those to prepare South Dakota to be successful for the next 20 years.
I don't want them looking short term, but that we need to be looking long-term to how can we use this to facilitate better efficiencies and to make our state more stable and grow the next 20 years.
So how's South Dakota doing on employment numbers?
Oh, great.
Yeah, we have our people are going back to work.
You know, we saw quite a few people unemployed right away, but we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation.
And we still have, it's higher than normal, obviously.
But I think we're rebounding quicker than everybody else as well.
And what's interesting about what happened here was that tourism is our number two industry in South Dakota.
They relied a lot on H-2B visa workers to come in during the tourism season.
We're seeing young kids get jobs that haven't had it before that are working, families that are doing things together that never have before to run the family business.
I think it's reinvigorated a cooperation.
And I talked a lot about strong families throughout this, too, that we've recognized the importance of families spending time together and working together.
And that's what's happening in South Dakota.
And I think they're recognizing that going back to this tradition of family values and work is really what we want to keep.
It's so refreshing to hear that.
So you're saying that the American workers are filling the jobs that H2B.
They really are.
We've had more people step up.
And some of our elderly folks that have always done certain jobs, you know, they're still out there doing some of that.
But those that have chosen to stay home have been filled by younger workers that maybe they were busy running around doing a dozen different activities before, where when those stopped, they started filling in other areas.
And it really inspired them to the value of work.
Well, I have to say that's a point in the category of the president's recent immigration policy saying that Americans can step up and do these jobs.
And they're liking it.
It's not that this is a hardship.
They are enjoying this.
They're recognizing the value of serving each other.
And that's really one of the things we don't talk about enough.
We were created to serve people.
And here in South Dakota, I think people are renewing their belief in the value of that.
Totally.
I completely, I see that.
I mean, being here, it's I'm back in my country again, seriously, where I go to New York or L.A. and it's some sort of dystopian nightmare.
So the president's coming here very soon.
And we're releasing this episode.
I'm sure people are going to be listening to it after he speaks, but we are releasing it before he comes here to South Dakota.
Renewing Faith in Service 00:02:49
He'll be visiting Mount Rushmore.
The Democrats want to get rid of Mount Rushmore.
In fact, they sent out a tweet, which is now deleted, where they said Mount Rushmore is a symbol of white supremacy.
Do you think Mount Rushmore is coming down anytime soon?
No, it won't while I'm governor, I know for sure.
But it's a national monument, so it really does matter who's leading this country as to what we protect and what we value.
And, you know, the Democrats have lost their minds.
What they're saying and what they're doing is unbelievable to me.
I didn't dream that we would be in this position, and we need people to stand up and really call them out for what they're doing.
This is a deliberate attack on the people who founded this country with a purpose to remove the principles that we stand on each day.
They want to rewrite our history so they can reset the political agenda.
Yes.
And we need to call them out on that.
And we need to do it daily and aggressively and recognize this is the fight that we were put here for of our generation.
It really is.
And that this is why we're in the positions that we're in.
And every single person has an opportunity, whether you're at the gas station, a grocery store, go into church.
Ask the people next to you what they think of the situation that's going on.
Use it as an opportunity to educate them.
I think for so many years, we did talking points and used one-liners on social media, and we didn't educate people about why we need to value what we value in this country.
And we're a world driven by emotions.
There's got to be some more thought put into really what we say and what we do.
Not enough logic and thinking and history.
So the New York Times published an op-ed editorial, whatever they call it today.
It's basically the whatever the most radical opinion is in the country that is contributing to the downfall of America.
You can find it in the op-ed section of the New York Times where they say, yes, even Mount Rushmore.
That was amazing to me because that truly shows that this isn't a fringe group that's talking about this.
I got mocked just a couple of weeks ago for saying that we would defend Mount Rushmore by my local press here.
They said there's not even any threats to Mount Rushmore.
Well, just a word.
The New York Times.
Yes, the New York Times, absolutely.
We had that conversation with one of our local papers recently, the paper of record.
But this is clearly an attack on Mount Rushmore and everything that it stands for.
And nobody believes that those four men didn't make mistakes.
Nobody's saying that.
But what we're saying is what they did do and what they gave us for our country and what it gives us is incredibly important.
It needs to be remembered.
And they tell a story every day by being on that mountain.
Mocked for Protecting History 00:04:49
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt.
For those people that don't know, what is the history of Mount Rushmore?
Calvin Coolidge played a role, right?
Well, Calvin Coolidge was here in South Dakota.
He spent his summer here in South Dakota.
In fact, the State Game Lodge in Custer State Park was built for him.
And the Rapid City High School was used as his offices.
Every day he would go into Rapid City, but spent the entire summer here.
And Gutz and Borglum was going to carve the mountain but did not have enough money and wanted to do this carving of Mount Rushmore and dropped a wreath from an airplane to Coolidge when he was here at the State Game Lodge explaining what he wanted to do and talking about it and asking him to come see the mountain.
And he did.
And ultimately, that was the vision that was planted in Coolidge's heart to advocate for getting the funds and the federal funds necessary to complete the project.
So it was a remarkable story.
And I think that it was the vision of the people here to really complete it and know that it would be something that would be here forever.
That's when America, I think we need to get back to this, used to do really big ambitions.
You used to do big things.
Yeah.
You look at what we've done in the past by the monuments, the dams, the infrastructure, the things that we've done.
You know, we talk about Teddy Roosevelt and his, you know, his vision for the West.
And we are the West.
And what he means, the man in the arena poem is something I'm going to reference tomorrow in the little speech that I get the chance to give.
And that those people need to be valued.
But that was something that he stood on.
And he recognized is that we should be in the arena fighting these fights because it's important.
I look at the four men on Mount Rushmore, and each one of them plays a different role that we can all learn something from.
Washington was, and it's interesting because Washington's most prominently displayed, right?
And it's not that it's the most important, but it's obvious that he's the front facing, which is the founder of the country and the man who could have been a king.
The only one unanimously elected, and everyone agreed needed to lead our country.
And he could have served infinite amount of terms.
Absolutely.
And could have been king, like you referenced.
And he set the precedent of two terms.
FDR decided to disobey that precedent.
Serving three, getting elected to a fourth, dying in the fourth.
Truman becomes, and then eventually they put in an amendment.
And then you see Lincoln, who, and it's very interesting because Lincoln, I believe, is on the other side.
Almost they're looking tangential to each other, where you saw the country at a crossroads.
So you can almost see that physically represented.
And Lincoln put us in an even greater direction, you could say.
And then you see Jefferson, who's kind of uniquely put right behind Washington.
And I think that's interesting because a lot of ways Jefferson was the philosophical author of the country, and it's represented in there.
And then you kind of see neatly tucked there is Roosevelt, right?
Not to de-emphasize him, but in some ways to show that we're all following in the footsteps of these giants and Roosevelt being the most recent.
See, that sort of archetypical analysis is totally lost on the left.
Oh, absolutely.
Well, and also Lincoln was a very unpopular president.
I mean, he didn't think he would get reelected.
And so that is something that I think we can learn something from each of these men and the way that they led and the challenges that they faced and even apply it to our most recent presidential election.
Yes.
That there was presidents in the past that were unpopular.
Look at the amazing, phenomenal things that they accomplished and how they changed our country for the better.
Yes.
And that is what we need to be focusing on in these presidential elections is what will these individuals be doing for our country that will give us the opportunity to have a more fair, a law-abiding and value-driven country.
Yes.
And so I want to ask you about the 2020 election.
But before I forget this thought, you're actually going as far to say we're going to try to put up new statues in the state of South Carolina.
I don't know if we could talk about this publicly.
Well, we have at the state capitol in Pier, South Dakota, the rotunda was built originally to have four statues on the four corners of the rotunda outside displayed facing north, south, east, and west.
And my vision is to raise the funds so that we could put the four presidents that are represented on Mount Rushmore, put their statues and monuments on our Capitol rotunda so that while the rest of the country is tearing down monuments, that South Dakota is putting them up and not just putting them up, we're putting them on our Capitol building proudly, showing what these men meant to our country and that we still value the gift that they gave us.
So when they're taking down Lincoln in Boston, they're taking him to Washington and Portland.
Statues for the Capitol Rotunda 00:04:24
You're like, send them to the city.
They're taking down Roosevelt National History Museum.
Send them to South Dakota.
It'll save me some money.
That'd be fantastic.
That is such a simple anecdote of any Republican governor watching this.
Why do you not have the courage that Christy Nomez?
I can say that.
You can smile.
So that's all I have to say.
Well, and for, you know, you have to remember, I was raised by a cowboy that was pretty intense.
So, you know, when you're raised on a ranch and every day your parents give you impossible things to do.
And challenge you.
I think you just learn to solve your own problems and to focus on what really is important.
I had somebody tell me quite a while ago: they said, Governor, do you want to feel good or do you want to do good?
And so, every time I'm making a decision, that still runs through my head: that I don't ever want to be a governor that does things that just feel good.
I want to do good.
Everything we do needs to do good.
And I'm not interested in what this job gets me.
I think that I care about my kids and my grandkids.
And what kind of an America are they going to grow up in?
Do you think that part of that clear-eyed perspective you have is because you were in Congress for eight years, because you kind of saw the flash and the pizzazz of politics?
Do you think that was instructive?
Yeah, I think that Congress was incredibly discouraging to me.
I'll talk about that because I completely agree.
Yeah, I was never served in Congress.
Well, the only reason I ran for Congress was because I was so frustrated by what President Obama was doing.
He was changing our way of life.
And I was also raised by a dad who always said, You don't complain about things, you fix them.
And I got super convicted of the fact that I was constantly complaining about what was going on in this country.
And people were asking me to run, and I was refusing to.
So finally, I just decided to run.
And if I lost, everybody would leave me alone.
And I could say I tried.
And if I won, it was going to be a miracle because it was one of the top five races in the nation.
And the gal I was going to run against had a 70% approval rating.
So it was.
In the Republican primary?
No, she was a Democrat.
Wow.
We were represented by a blue dog Democrat.
Really?
Yeah.
So when I. Were you in politics before?
I was in the legislature.
But in the legislature, it's a 40-day session.
It's very part of the business.
Go back to work.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We were paid like $4,000 a year to go do that.
But so when I got in, nobody gave me a chance to win.
So when I got there, I was shocked at how broken it was.
I recognized, you know, in the South Dakota legislature, you have a bill that's going to get a hearing.
If it passes through committee, in three days, it'll be on the floor.
Every bill that passes the floor immediately goes to the other House for a committee hearing.
If it dies, it goes away.
In Congress, I could have a bill, and I may never get a hearing for 20 years.
The only way you can get a bill heard in a committee hearing is if the chairman likes you.
If he decides, oh, this is important enough, I'll talk about it.
If it passes through committee, there's no guarantee that it's ever going to get to the floor.
The only way it's voted on on the floor is if you can get the majority leader to decide it's important enough to put it on the floor and talk to the Speaker and have them put it as a part of their agenda.
Even if you pass it through the House, no guarantee the Senate was ever going to pick up that piece of legislation.
And I won, one member from South Dakota out of 435, I recognized I am here away from everything that I love to be one person in a broken system when, and I'm spinning my wheels.
And I got the chance to do some big things.
You know, I got the chance to do tax reform with President Trump.
We had the chance to do several different farm bills and environmental things that I wanted fixed.
But thank God I got the chance to do tax reform because that's really why I went.
But I recognize as governor, as a governor, you can come back, you can set an agenda, you can make decisions, you can implement them.
And the opportunity there and then to be home was so much better than being in Congress and that I could push policy much more effectively than I could in that broken system.
Yes.
And so the posturing in D.C. is what got old.
It's exhausting.
The speeches, the press conferences, the wanting to be heard, and I get it.
I mean, people there would say, well, you did it too.
An Attack on Our Soul 00:07:22
Yeah, you talk about the issues that are important.
But I knew if I stayed there, I was going to get bitter.
And I was either going to not care and like it too much, I was going to start to buy into it, or I was going to become a bitter and angry person, and I decided to make a change.
And now you're serving a state.
And I think part of the issue is that we have senators that should be elected by the state legislatures, not by the people directly.
And I know it sounds counterintuitive.
People say, why wouldn't you want the people to do it?
Well, they elect the state legislatures because I think the rise of a populist senator has just totally contributed to the downfall of our country.
So, Governor, also, can you speak to this?
A lot of young people listen to this podcast, especially young women.
And right now, we are in a cultural crisis in our country.
This is not a policy debate.
This is not something in a committee.
You recognize this.
You've gone straight into the culture battle.
You said, We're going to put up statues.
We're going to defend Mount Rushmore.
What you did during the virus lockdown fight was incredible.
Can you speak to how you're able to deal with the incoming?
Because so many young people listening to this are losing their jobs.
They're being bullied online.
They're calling the worst things you could possibly be called.
We just had an event recently in Rapid City where a young Native American girl came up and she's like, I'm getting kicked out of every social circle and family circle because I wear this shirt and it was a Trump shirt.
Oh, wow.
And they will disown you in some of those cases.
Yeah, they will.
And so, can you speak to that?
Because you've experienced incredible incoming as a conservative female governor.
Figure out what protects your heart and your soul and your mind.
For me, there's a very limited amount of time I can spend on social media without it affecting me.
So I can read posts.
I can't read comments on my posts.
Because as much as people think you get a thick skin, if you say I'm going to get a thick skin, it will change you.
And what we need are people that are still impacted daily by people's stories.
So don't get a thick skin, but you also have to be careful what you put into your mind because it will change you.
And I also don't watch the news at night.
In the morning, my staff will send me what I need to know.
I'll watch some news in the morning, but at night, I totally recommend this.
I just can't.
I can't do it because it'll make me stay awake at night.
I'll become disturbed.
It'll make me upset.
And I just have to surround myself with people who really do value me and recognize that if you're not on Team Christie and you're not here to give me honest answers and honest feedback, that it's not going to be valuable to me making wise decisions.
So for those that are really feeling impacted by the criticism that you're getting, the last thing I would say, and I've shared this, I think, at a couple of your turning point conferences before, is that we live in a world that is addicted to being offended.
This world loves to get offended every day.
And I had somebody tell me 20 years ago that people are going to throw offenses at you every day by what they say and what they do.
It's your decision if you want to bend over, pick it up, and carry it around with you.
But then at the end of the day, if you keep doing that, you're the one carrying the burden, not them.
So when they throw those offenses out, just walk by them.
Don't pick them up.
And especially in the political world for opinions, people will say things and do things to you that will be extremely offensive.
Make a choice to not be offended.
Make a choice not to be someone who gets angry or upset or emotional about it.
Just let it lay there and recognize that you don't want to carry that burden around with you.
It's well said.
So two more quick questions, and then you have to go right about hosting the president really quick.
Which the first is, what's your message to the Republican Party right now?
You're the only governor that didn't shut down.
You're more popular than ever before in your state.
I'm saying that.
I don't know if the data shows it.
I've seen some people mention some polling that shows that your popularity has actually gone up.
What's your message to the Republican Party right now?
Man, tell the truth.
Stand up.
You don't have to, you know, be offensive or angry.
Boy, tell the truth and fight.
You know, I thought 10 years ago we were fighting for our country.
This truly is an attack on the heart and soul of our nation.
And Republicans better figure out what they believe and start talking the talk and walking it out each and every day.
Because I'm very disappointed by the back and forth that I've seen.
I've seen more waffling by Republicans on policy, on opinions, on what they say.
That's alarming to me.
Scripture specifically warns us about double-minded men, that they are unstable in all their ways.
And when you see these politicians bouncing back and forth, I look at them and I say, unstable.
I cannot let them impact me or make my decisions for me because for generations and hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years, we've been specifically told that double-minded people are unstable in all their ways.
So now is the time to figure out what you believe and, boy, go to war on it because it's important.
That's awesome.
Last question.
Tell us about your analysis of the 2020 race, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, President Trump's coming here.
A lot of people are going to be asking you what your thoughts are on the upcoming race.
I think it's fair to say Trump's going to win South Dakota.
Yes, he will win South Dakota.
President Trump will win South Dakota.
There are other states where there are people that still need to remember all that he's done for this country and go through the conversations that we would be having if he wasn't president.
Think about how your life would change with Joe Biden and the White House.
Just spend a little bit of time recognizing you're going to have less money in your pocket.
You're going to have a lot more regulations that are going to be driving up the cost of your home, your cars.
You're going to have more money coming out of your paycheck.
You're going to have less opportunities for your kids to start their own businesses if you want, and you're also going to have less choices.
You will not have choices in health care where you want to get it, decisions and prescriptions, what you'll be able to do as far as opportunities to really choose what kind of lifestyle you want to live.
So this president has given us an incredible opportunity to tell that story for the next several months about what he has done for us in this country, and that's really what we need to be telling.
But he will not win unless it's all hands on deck.
Amen.
We need every single person out there.
Every Republican senator.
Every Republican senator.
And they need to get straight and get out there on the road and start talking to people.
Because as long as they waffle back and forth, they're doing a grave disservice to the public.
And they spend way too much time in the kingdom of Washington, D.C., not in the state.
You know, we, again, in this race, people focus on flaws all the time.
Let's focus on what they're doing, what they're bringing to the country.
And there's a very clear choice between Joe Biden and President Trump.
It shouldn't even be debatable.
Amen.
Well, Governor, in closing, I just want to say you've gone through a lot of criticism the last couple months.
The conservative, patriotic American base is so beyond supportive of you.
And we're thankful for you because thank goodness we had one leader that stepped up and just set the standard.
I can't tell you how many conversations I have where people are like, well, the governor of South Dakota did it.
Why can't you do it?
A Hopeful Independence Day 00:01:08
And so you raised the bar of liberty and freedom.
And if it takes one out of 50, then so be it.
Well, you know, that's not why we did it.
You know, we made these decisions because they were the right ones.
And so I'm just hopeful.
I know we're still going to have challenges in our future, but I'm hopeful that our story will be told and be remembered as one that really helped the people here be more successful.
We're going to make sure it's told.
Good.
God bless you, Governor.
Thanks for everything.
Appreciate it.
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