July 3, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| And we saw the CDC officials and NIH and Fauci specifically attack me along with Elizabeth Warren and Rachel Maddow night after night. | ||
| But we also, you know, recognize too that people in my state weren't necessarily supportive either. | ||
| You know, there was times where it was hard to find a lot of encouragement, even from people who lived here, that my lieutenant governor tells the story that he would get phone calls from Even our best supporters that would say, hey, you gotta get the governor in line. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the governor of the great state of South Dakota, as well as author of the new book, Not My First Rodeo, Lessons from the Heartland. | ||
| Governor Kristi Noem, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Oh, thank you. | ||
| I'm thrilled to be here. | ||
| I appreciate the invitation. | ||
| I am glad to finally chat with you because I always tell people I have a short list, it's a very short list, I have it in front of me right now, of sane politicians. | ||
| And you're on the list, so congratulations! | ||
| Oh, it's a good day. | ||
| That's wonderful to hear. | ||
| I'll put it on my resume. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So I want to dive into a bit about the book and a bit about hot topics of the day and a bunch more. | ||
| But in the book, you kind of go into your history, your childhood, and really how it sets up a lot of your political beliefs. | ||
| So I thought we could just start there, maybe for some of the people that don't know too much about your bio. | ||
| Well, I think a lot of people would look at me writing a book and think it's a book about politics. | ||
| And it's really not. | ||
| It's about my life lived so far. | ||
| Most people heard my name for the first time during COVID and didn't know anything about me, maybe made some assumptions based on the decisions that I was making. | ||
| And I think it's important that for people to understand the decisions that I make, they have to know a little bit about me. | ||
| The way I grew up, I think, was pretty special. | ||
| There's a lot of life lessons I learned from my family, my faith, and the ranch, and I think it is Some of those lessons that helped South Dakota and myself do what we've done the last couple of years that I believe really is an inspiration to the rest of the country. | ||
| Here in South Dakota we have embraced freedom unlike any other state and it really is benefiting not only the people who live here but also our economy and our way of life. | ||
| Yeah, it really has. | ||
| I mentioned to you right before we started that, although I didn't quite get to meet you, we were separated by about five feet. | ||
| We walked past each other at Freedom Fest after you had spoke, and then I went to Mount Rushmore that very day. | ||
| It was the first time I had ever been there. | ||
| And just the spirit of America, and it was still the middle of COVID, I suppose, but just the amount of people that were out in street festivals, out and about, happy, you know, some wearing masks, some not making decisions for themselves. | ||
| It was so refreshing. | ||
| But can you go into a little bit of that growing up in the heartland and what some of that family stuff that you learned? | ||
| Maybe how that translated into some of the politics that we'll get to. | ||
| Well, my dad was a cowboy and he was tough. | ||
| All we did was work. | ||
| And if we didn't work, we were hunting. | ||
| In fact, even our family vacations were loading the horses up in the trailer and headed to the mountains for two weeks on elk hunts or Big game hunts. | ||
| And so it was a very different childhood, maybe, than typically what American kids get the chance to experience today. | ||
| But I also learned a lot from having a dad that gave us incredibly hard things to do. | ||
| You know, many times growing up, I thought, is this guy trying to kill us? | ||
| Because he just gave us challenges. | ||
| But I realized that by doing that, he made us into problem solvers. | ||
| And when we did something that was very hard that we didn't think we could accomplish, It gave us confidence to tackle the next biggest thing. | ||
| So a lot of the stories in the book are working with cattle or hunting trips or lessons learned from my mom and dad. | ||
| But they also address kind of a way of life that's kind of about the American West that I think people are still very curious about today. | ||
| And our politics were not talked about in our home. | ||
| We weren't a political family at all. | ||
| Instead, they were lived. | ||
| They were in How we lived our way of life. | ||
| In fact, I remember, I was telling somebody the other day, when South Dakota passed the law that required seatbelts, I remember being young and watching my dad take a jackknife and then cut the seatbelts out of his brand new pickup. | ||
| And I asked him why he was doing that, and he told me because the state had just passed a law that mandated it. | ||
| And it wasn't that he was against wearing his seatbelt. | ||
| He wore his seatbelt. | ||
| It was that he was against the government telling him he had to. | ||
| And it was lessons like that that really made me think about government, its role in your life, in a very different way than I think a lot of people get the chance to today when they just turn on the news and get their opinions that way. | ||
| So from a family that wasn't necessarily talking politics, but sort of living it as you describe, what possessed you to get into this crazy game known as politics of today? | ||
| You know, I would say it was a tragedy. | ||
| We'd lost my dad in an accident on our farm when he was 49 years old. | ||
| I was 22 at the time. | ||
| I was married. | ||
| I'd gotten married when I was 20, but I was still going to college and it just turned our whole lives upside down. | ||
| He, he was kind of Superman. | ||
| You know, he, we had a very large farming operation and ranching operation, probably one of the largest in the state. | ||
| Many other businesses. | ||
| And when he was gone, we had no idea how we were going to keep the operation going. | ||
| In fact, I became the general manager at 22 and, you know, had a lot of people working for us, relying on us, trying not to lose our family business, when I got a letter in the mail from the IRS that said we owed death taxes. | ||
| And I hadn't heard of death taxes before that. | ||
| But all of a sudden, because we had this tragedy, And our whole lives have been turned upside down. | ||
| Now we owed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the federal government in taxes, and it made me angry. | ||
| So that's what got me involved, is I just started showing up at meetings. | ||
| I was passionate about tax reform. | ||
| At that time, our senator from South Dakota was Tom Daschle. | ||
| He was the U.S. | ||
| Senate Majority Leader at the time. | ||
| And I showed up at all of his meetings and started talking policy. | ||
| Remembering that my dad always told us growing up, Kristi, we don't complain about things, we fix them. | ||
| But it took me 10 years to pay off those taxes, so during that time I was pretty passionate about getting rid of that unfair Tax that hits a family at a time of tragedy. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So as you mentioned earlier, what sort of put you on the map nationally was the COVID situation and that you didn't go for lockdowns and you fought the system and all of that. | ||
| As you may know, I lived in California for most of COVID. | ||
| I now live in the free state of Florida. | ||
| And as I keep telling my audience, it's like living in another country. | ||
| I genuinely feel that I left one country. | ||
| And move to another, which is the beauty of federalism. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about those first couple of weeks of COVID, the pressure you were under and how you made your decisions, you know, who you were taking advice from, et cetera? | ||
| Well, I would say it was immense pressure. | ||
| You know, we were told right away before the virus even came to the state of South Dakota, that I would have over 300,000 people die From this virus that was coming and that I needed to do something about it to slow down the spread and protect people who were vulnerable. | ||
| So I think I did what every other governor did. | ||
| Talked to a lot of health officials and experts, studied the virus, learned from other states when they were first affected. | ||
| What I did differently was I believe I spent a lot more time with my general counsel, a lot of time with constitutional attorneys. | ||
| I really wanted to understand what my job was as governor. | ||
| And what my job wasn't, what authority I did not have, because I just believe that when leaders overstep their authority, especially in a time of crisis like that, that that's really when we break the foundation of this country. | ||
| I knew for a fact I did not want to be the governor who did that. | ||
| So South Dakota did end up being the only state that never once closed a business or mandated anything, while other states were closing beaches and closing businesses and stopping Big meetings and gatherings, South Dakota did something very different. | ||
| In fact, I was shocked and surprised how people were rolling over and giving up their freedoms in many states. | ||
| So we went on the offense. | ||
| You know, we ran a national advertising campaign right away in 2020, inviting everybody to come to South Dakota. | ||
| Well, while your state's locked down, come and spend time here, be free. | ||
| And hundreds of thousands of people came. | ||
| They came and Spent some time here and then many of those people went back home, packed up their families and moved here. | ||
| So it's been an incredible testimony to what happened in that pandemic. | ||
| I think the very day that crazy video of the cop chasing down the guy in Malibu on the beach. | ||
| Remember that viral video? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I remember that day and I lived not too far from there. | ||
| I saw you on Fox saying, you know, we're going to stay open. | ||
| And really thinking, man, this is what's happening in America right now. | ||
| It's just many, many different countries. | ||
| So were you talking to other governors also? | ||
| I mean, you know, some like DeSantis obviously were doing something a lot closer to what you were doing, but you know, Gavin Newsom, who was my governor in Cali, was obviously doing something very different. | ||
| Hochul up in, or at the time it was Cuomo in New York, but now Hochul has continued a lot of that stuff. | ||
| Well, we talked a lot. | ||
| Not so much with the Democrat governors. | ||
| You know, there would be different conference calls through the National Governors Association that were hosted and facilitated, but I learned quickly that those weren't beneficial, that we weren't getting any new information from them, and that we needed to prioritize where my time was being spent. | ||
| We did have conference calls with governors who were keeping their states open, and, you know, we just organized that ourselves. | ||
| We were all Republicans, but we had weekly, sometimes bi-weekly phone calls with learning what we could learn about the virus from each other. | ||
| It was a governor's only call. | ||
| Also learning what other people were doing, what measures they were taking, what they were recommending. | ||
| But we also made sure that that call only stayed for the governors that kept their states open. | ||
| And every week, less and less governors were on the call. | ||
| It was kind of interesting how candid we were, you know, we'd get on that call and, and somebody would say, Hey guys, I got to let you know this is my last phone call I'll be on. | ||
| My entire team is telling me that I've got to shut down businesses because the spread's getting too bad. | ||
| So I'm just here to let you know that tomorrow I'm putting out a press release and closing the state and I won't be on these calls anymore. | ||
| And we would say OK. | ||
| And then there was less and less. | ||
| So there was times where it got down to 12 of us and then a week later there was eight of us and then there was less of us and down until I was the only one left. | ||
| So it was, it was interesting times, but I also, many of those Republican governors maybe didn't have the situation that I had either. | ||
| You know, I had an incredible executive team that when I made a decision, they said, okay, that's the decision. | ||
| And they did it. | ||
| And, and my hospital administrators were very involved. | ||
| We talked many times a day. | ||
| When we made decisions, it was based on science. | ||
| It was not based on what was playing on the news. | ||
| That was very helpful. | ||
| They were common sense, reasonable people who wanted to take care of each other and the state partnered with them in ways that I don't think happened in other states. | ||
| Our National Guard and other entities were heavily involved in helping them build up capacity and staffing. | ||
| Very innovative in how we approached it that I think allowed us to do what we did. | ||
| What kind of pushback were you getting behind the scenes, even if you had support in the state? | ||
| I would imagine there had to be some calls from maybe people at the NIH or CDC or just whatever, legal people, whatever, just saying, hey, you can stay open, but we're coming for you, basically, one way or another. | ||
| Yeah, I think we got push, I mean, we got pushback from every angle, everywhere. | ||
| And even the national media made it worse because they just specifically targeted me. | ||
| There would be hotspots all over the country, but all they talked about at night on the news was South Dakota and our meatpacking plant, or the Sturgis Motorcycle Bike Rally, or this irresponsible event we were going to be hosting at Mount Rushmore. | ||
| You know, they specifically went after me in a way that we'd never seen before. | ||
| And we saw the CDC officials and NIH and Fauci specifically attack me along with Elizabeth Warren and Rachel Maddow night after night. | ||
| But we also, you know, recognize too that people in my state weren't necessarily supportive either. | ||
| There was times where it was hard to find a lot of encouragement, even from people who lived here. | ||
| My lieutenant governor tells the story that he would get phone calls from even our best supporters that would say, hey, you've got to get the governor in line. | ||
| This is going to kill her politically, and she's got to start falling in line with these other governors. | ||
| To his credit and to my executive team, they said she is firm in her decision. | ||
| She has already decided this. | ||
| She doesn't have the authority, therefore she's not gonna overstep, and we are in line with her. | ||
| And that made it a wonderful thing for me, because many times those contentious phone calls they were taking, they didn't necessarily always tell me about. | ||
| They knew where I was, and we were a team taking care of people together. | ||
| Did you ever have a moment where you almost cracked and said, okay, I'm gonna have to do some lockdowns or some version of something? | ||
| Did the pressure ever get to that point where you got close? | ||
| You know, I don't think I ever got close, although it was hard. | ||
| There were days that I would say, you know, I hung up a phone or got off a Zoom call where I thought, man, I don't know how much longer I can do this. | ||
| You know, my family was pretty remarkable. | ||
| I have a son that's now 20, but he was 18 at the time that sat by my desk for 18 hours a day and just sat there. | ||
| And I think it was to remind me that Somebody was going to love me no matter what. | ||
| And then when I got off a phone call that was contentious because I spent a lot of time managing other leaders, I spent a lot of time having conference calls with mayors, with city council members, with county commissioners. | ||
| Once I made a decision, I spent a ton of time communicating with them about why I was making the decision I was making. | ||
| But when I would hang up with a phone call that obviously was contentious or stressful in a way. | ||
| He would say, Mom, let's go shoot baskets for five minutes. | ||
| And so we'd go outside and shoot baskets for five or ten minutes and get a little bit of a break. | ||
| And then I'd go back to work or let's go play cards. | ||
| But he was good at giving me some perspective. | ||
| And I think my whole family being here with me made a world of difference. | ||
| I mean, they really supported me and reminded me that here in South Dakota, just because the National Leaders are making very different decisions. | ||
| Didn't mean that that was going to be South Dakota's path. | ||
| What I appreciated the most was that President Trump let me do my job. | ||
| If Joe Biden had been in the White House during this time, I know for a fact he would have come after us and really been punitive against the state of South Dakota and done all he could to destroy me. | ||
| And President Trump let me do my job as governor. | ||
| And for that, I'll always be grateful. | ||
| Are you shocked or were you shocked that during all of this, the same people who were calling Trump Hitler every day and all the horrible things that they would call him, that he was basically kicking the power back to the states. | ||
| So taking less power for himself, less power to the federal government. | ||
| And they were angry at him for that. | ||
| The guy who they said was the worst of the worst. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly it. | ||
| And what I found was Uh, even at the local level, many mayors and city council members, they wanted me to make the tough decision so they didn't have to. | ||
| Um, and, and it was, so that's the exact opposite of president Trump. | ||
| It wasn't that he wasn't willing to make tough decisions. | ||
| He was very clear on what his recommendations were, but then he let us do our job. | ||
| And, and that's what I kept saying to the mayors and the city councilman is listen, this is not my authority to do this. | ||
| Um, you can make different decisions, but I want you to know that I'm going to be here holding you accountable as well. | ||
| If you shut down your city and we have 100 cases there and then two weeks from now you open it back up because people can't take it anymore and you have 500 cases, I'm going to blow you up. | ||
| I'm going to call a press conference and say you locked people in their homes and only let them out when it got worse. | ||
| So I said, I consistently was reminding people, why don't you shut off your TV? | ||
| Let's talk over the data and the facts of this virus and then just I'll call you in the morning. | ||
| I know you're nervous. | ||
| I know you're anxious. | ||
| I know you're uncertain. | ||
| So let's just take a night and I'll call you in the morning and let's talk again. | ||
| And a lot of what happened during the pandemic was that kind of communication that I think was to our benefit. | ||
| I would be remiss if I didn't back up for a second and ask you about your basketball skills. | ||
| Do you have any skills out there? | ||
| They needed some tuning up. | ||
| So I, they were not horrible in high school. | ||
| I did play basketball, but, uh, Yeah, that 6'5 son of mine can school me every day on the basketball court. | ||
| So speaking of sports, actually, we got a good transition there. | ||
| One of the other things you've been leading on is actually keeping boys and girls in separate sports leagues, and it's okay, and it's not based in bigotry or anything else. | ||
| Are you shocked that this even got to your desk and that you had to kind of lead on this thing? | ||
| Because everyone's talking about it now, but you were really doing this, it's almost two years ago at this point. | ||
| Well, you know, I started this fight probably five years ago. | ||
| You know, people don't remember this, but when I was in Congress, the federal government came down and told South Dakota that we could no longer have girls' events and boys' events in the sport of rodeo, which, you know, a lot of people don't pay attention to rodeo, so it never made national news. | ||
| But to South Dakota, that was a really big deal. | ||
| It's our state sport. | ||
| And they told us that it was too discriminatory to have a girls' event and a boys' event and that we had to eliminate all gender references in that sport statewide. | ||
| And I fought them. | ||
| I fought them alone. | ||
| Nobody really cared at that time about this issue, or they thought it was too politically dangerous to really wade into, but ended up winning that argument at that time. | ||
| So this is something I'd been a part of fighting for many, many years. | ||
| When it came to protecting girls' sports now that it's a national issue, I wanted the strongest bill in the nation in the state of South Dakota because I know that this is a basic fairness issue. | ||
| This is about only girls playing in girls' sports so they have an opportunity to be successful and to succeed, maybe win a scholarship, go on and play professionally if that opportunity presents itself, and that biological males should not be playing in their same events. | ||
| But it's interesting to me to watch the kind of attacks that have come. | ||
| Just because, you know, it serves a political agenda. | ||
| For us in South Dakota, I know that as soon as we passed a bill that was going to be put into statute, it would be challenged in court. | ||
| And I did not want to pass a flawed bill that made us vulnerable to having it overturned and setting up incredible precedent that would leave us in a situation where I wouldn't be able to enforce Uh, this rule in our state and be in a situation where we would always have to have boys playing in girls sports. | ||
| So I'm proud of the bill we passed. | ||
| It was something I authored and the legislature supported. | ||
| And now South Dakota is the state that has the most, um, strongest and court challenged, um, you know, will withstand a court challenged the best in the nation. | ||
| Are there court cases about that right now? | ||
| I mean, just in the last couple weeks, one of the things we've covered here is that the federal government wants to come after states that pass bills like this and potentially withhold school lunches from kids in states that do things like this. | ||
| So you're going to punish the kids who have nothing to do with this. | ||
| I mean, it's typical of everything going on with this government. | ||
| Yeah, you're exactly right. | ||
| You know, there isn't court challenges right now, although if we had done flawed bills, then they would have used that opportunity to undermine them and set up precedent. | ||
| But yes, what's interesting is the Biden administration has come to South Dakota and said, listen, you either let boys play in girls' sports or we're going to withhold school lunches, which I think is the craziest thing I've ever heard. | ||
| I mean, not only does this administration not care about solving our baby formula issue, but then they go and threaten to take away food from children. | ||
| To create an unfair situation for women. | ||
| So they're going after women, children, and babies. | ||
| And it's hard for me to believe that anybody supports the Democrat party anymore after what Joe Biden is doing. | ||
| It's, it's amazing to me that to have this kind of a left extremist agenda, that they would go after women and children and literally threaten taking away, taking away food in their schools. | ||
| You mentioned Tom Daschle before, who was a Democrat. | ||
| When you had a guy like him, who you obviously had some disagreements with when you were younger, of course, but I don't think he was like a crazy, crazy lefty the way they seem to be now. | ||
| Do you have a sense of how that shifted, maybe how it shifted in your state? | ||
| I think everyone can sort of see it at a national level at this point. | ||
| No, I would say that at the time he was serving, he would have been a more moderate Democrat. | ||
| And South Dakota elects a lot of Democrats to federal level. | ||
| I tend to think of South Dakota as a very conservative state, and that's just not necessarily true when we elect officials to Washington, D.C. | ||
| You know, Tom was what people probably would call more of a blue dog Democrat. | ||
| You know, maybe cooperated with Republicans a little bit more. | ||
| It did catch up with him, some of his votes and his way of life. | ||
| But when I ran for Congress, I ran against a Democrat that had a very high approval rating in the state of South Dakota. | ||
| It was a very tough race, one of the top five races in the nation at that time. | ||
| And even my last race, running for governor here in South Dakota, I only won that race by three points. | ||
| And it was to a Democrat who embraced Bernie Sanders policies. | ||
| So, you know, I think a lot of people see the conservative things that are going on in South Dakota and think, wow, well, that's easy to do in a red state like that. | ||
| Well, we're, we're getting more and more red all the time, but, but there's been a lot of Democrats that have been elected in South Dakota and they got elected by being more populist rather than The extreme far left that we see in the country right now. | ||
| Do you see a parallel between South Dakota and Florida in that, you know, DeSantis, who's now crushing it here, and you guys have many of the same policies, you know, he only won by 30,000 votes, and it turns out that the guy he beat, he became a meth addict. | ||
| Or maybe was a math addict at the time, I don't even know. | ||
| But the point being that you guys both won pretty close races, and the country could look very, very different if South Dakota and Florida had turned blue. | ||
| I mean, it radically would. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| You know, Ron and I got elected to Congress the same year. | ||
| We served for eight years together in the House and both ran for governor at the same time. | ||
| We both have very different states, but we do have higher than average elderly populations. | ||
| So that all got taken into account when we were making our decisions as well, recognizing we had a higher ratio of our population that would be vulnerable. | ||
| But at the end of the day, I think we made the decisions that were best for our people. | ||
| We still made very different decisions. | ||
| You know, he had some closures at different times, different mandates. | ||
| But I do think that every governor, it's easy for people to pass judgment on them from the outside two or three years later. | ||
| I will say that for every single governor, it was a difficult time. | ||
| Every decision was hard. | ||
| So you've been ahead on a couple things. | ||
| We talked about COVID, obviously, and some of the gender stuff. | ||
| One of the other things you've been talking about is food security. | ||
| And for my audience, obviously doesn't watch much mainstream media, but they are paying attention to what's going on online. | ||
| I mean, every day there are new headlines. | ||
| about meat producing fields and all of these things that are on fire. | ||
| Factories seem to be burning up, that our food security really seems to be threatened right now. | ||
| There was this weird thing in Kansas with 2,000 cattle dying out of nowhere, supposedly from heat. | ||
| What is going on here? | ||
| Well, I've been talking about food security as a national security issue for 15 years. | ||
| I served on a committee In the state. | ||
| Of course, I am a farmer and a rancher. | ||
| That's how I've made my living my entire life until I got involved in government and politics. | ||
| But beyond that, I served on a committee that oversaw the federal farm programs in the state. | ||
| But I recognized that America has always embraced a food policy of having it be diversified in the country so that one person doesn't control our food supply that many different farmers and small businesses do and processors, but that also We have had a cheap food policy. | ||
| We wanted every single family in this country to be able to afford to put food on the table for their families. | ||
| And I've been drawing attention for 15 years to the fact that we are losing both of those battles that we have. | ||
| We have more and more foreign countries buying up our processing systems. | ||
| They're buying up our fertilizer companies, our chemical companies, our processing facilities. | ||
| Not only is China manipulating their currency, but stealing our IP, building up their military. | ||
| They're also buying our land. | ||
| They own a lot of our food supply chain system. | ||
| And when another country controls our food, that is when they control us. | ||
| So they're not dummies. | ||
| And I think that these higher costs are already forcing families to make decisions on what they can buy and what they can feed their families. | ||
| And when we get another country that truly does control the entire supply system, That's when America gets scary. | ||
| You know, I think a virus was a situation where the entire country was nervous. | ||
| I would say Wait till there's no food on the grocery store shelves, and that's really when you start to see our way of life being threatened. | ||
| So what do we do? | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| I mean, Biden said it himself a couple of months ago, food shortages. | ||
| You know, I think it was that The Economist or one of the major magazines, the food shortages are coming. | ||
| World Economic Forum worrying about it, talking about it. | ||
| Bill Gates is now the largest farm land owner in the United States. | ||
| I mean, what do you do as a governor of a state? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Well, first of all, I have to be honest and talk about it. | ||
| This administration's not talking about solving the problem. | ||
| In fact, they're facilitating foreign countries coming in and buying up our systems and our land. | ||
| So the administration being honest and recognizing it as a real challenge and solving it would be important. | ||
| Cutting regulations to allow more of our American businesses to buy back these facilities, to be in production agriculture, to grow our own food is important. | ||
| Right now they're attacking our farmers and ranchers and they're Penalizing them and putting heavy regulations on them that don't allow people to work on their land, don't allow their children to participate in the business at all. | ||
| And in South Dakota here, we've been aggressive in cutting back regulations. | ||
| We've also been aggressive in building our own processing plants. | ||
| I've given millions and millions of grants to people who want to build a meatpacking plant or expand a facility that would put value-added food on the table for families here so that we control our own destiny. | ||
| And that many, many of these producers can control their own supply chain to get it right to the customer. | ||
| We're bypassing a lot of these big corporations that own the systems, that are stealing the profits away from those that are actually growing the food, and making sure we're putting that control back in the hands of the consumer who needs to put that food on the table. | ||
| What do you make of this administration when it comes to everything we've talked about here? | ||
| Do you believe that it's ineptitude, or do you think that this is intentional, everything that's happening right now? | ||
| Well, you know, there's been a year and a half here where I thought, you know, this guy's like the George Costanza of government. | ||
| Every instinct he makes is just wrong. | ||
| And if he would wake up in the morning, yes, he should. | ||
| But I believe now that much of this is intentional. | ||
| There's no way that somebody is making decisions like this that truly loves America. | ||
| He is crippling our country. | ||
| And you can't possibly be making these kinds of decisions and have it just be a mistake. | ||
| So there's an agenda here to control people and it's been in place for a period of time. | ||
| I'm not going to say it's coming straight out of Joe Biden. | ||
| I think most of the time he's not even aware of what's going on necessarily, but he's being controlled by people who definitely do not want a republic to continue in this country. | ||
| I would have never thought three or four years ago that we'd have the conversations we're having today, that a country could change as fast as America has. | ||
| I knew when I served in Congress that I served with members that were socialists, that embraced the policies and their ways of life, but they never would have admitted it publicly. | ||
| And now look what's happened. | ||
| They're openly holding press conferences and embracing socialist and Marxist platforms and programs for the United States of America. | ||
| So if people who think that Well, you know, this is just another episode like we saw in the 70s. | ||
| You know, yes, we've been through challenging times in the past. | ||
| Some of them, traits are familiar. | ||
| Some of the riots and the violence, you know, we can remember in our history where we've seen that before. | ||
| But this is different because they are trying to remake America and they're getting more traction than they've ever gotten before. | ||
| Speaking of that, did you guys have any of the crazy riots that we saw everywhere? | ||
| I mean, it was usually in blue states and in blue cities, but did you have any of that during the summer of tolerance or violence, depending on which way you look at it? | ||
| Well, we had one event that was planned, a protest in our largest city that was planned, and I pre-staged my National Guard to several different cities that night, and also my law enforcement officers And then just told those, I set up emergency operations centers in each of these cities too and coordinated everything with the local law enforcement and mayors in those towns. | ||
| But that evening in Sioux Falls, which is our largest city, I said, as soon as we, they throw the first water bottle, we're going in. | ||
| And, and so we did, uh, this crowd of thousands of people, uh, you know, built throughout the night, moved throughout the city. | ||
| And when it started to get violent, we immediately moved in and shut it down. | ||
| And said we weren't going to stand. | ||
| Peaceful protests, we will allow. | ||
| That's our constitutional right. | ||
| But as soon as one thing happens that turns it into something very different, South Dakota wouldn't stand for it. | ||
| So it was remarkable what happened in South Dakota because we didn't have issues after that period. | ||
| People knew where we stood. | ||
| They knew we protected law and order. | ||
| And even it was kind of amazing because they had spread out so far in the city, You know, having enough help was incredibly important. | ||
| We saw citizens come out. | ||
| They were armed to help protect the downtown streets. | ||
| We had motorcycle groups come out and say, we've got these blocks. | ||
| The National Guard can move down to an area where there's more of a threat. | ||
| And it was amazing to watch people partner with our law enforcement and with our Guard members to keep everybody safe. | ||
| Are you telling me that people who law-abidingly own weapons for their own self-defense sometimes do good things? | ||
| Because that's not the meme out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, they did incredible things during that period of time. | ||
| It was remarkable to see. | ||
| Even when President Trump came to Mount Rushmore, we had protests throughout the Black Hills, because at that time, across the country, people were tearing down monuments. | ||
| They were tearing down statutes. | ||
| And in here, South Dakota dared to have a celebration in honor of the leaders on Mount Rushmore and President Trump and our freedom. | ||
| And, you know, organized protesters, those seeking violence, showed up and tried to destroy the monument, tried to create problems that evening for the President. | ||
| And we had hundreds and hundreds of civilians. | ||
| And again, a lot of these motorcycle groups came in, rolled into these small towns and kept law and order for us so that we could have a peaceful event where we really did get to focus on America. | ||
| I'm sure you hear it probably every day of your life, but I had never been to Mount Rushmore until, you know, a year or two ago when I went. | ||
| I mean, it is truly, I've been to every monument and every, you know, important place in the United States. | ||
| It is the most breathtaking, absolutely incredible. | ||
| It's mind-boggling that this thing was even made. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And at the time it was made, the incredible efforts that had to be done And, you know, what's interesting is just the need to protect it at this day and age, too. | ||
| You know, we have still security up there making sure it's protected from protesters who try to dump red paint down the faces or try to set off explosives to send a message that's anti-American. | ||
| So it is a special treasure for us. | ||
| You know, people always get South and North Dakota confused, and I'm constantly saying to them, North Dakota got all the oil. | ||
| South Dakota got Mount Rushmore, and we're okay with that. | ||
| So let's just go through a couple of the other hot-button issues that you've been talking about. | ||
| Obviously, as we're taping this, we're holding it for a couple days, so it is possible that this Roe v. Wade decision, because the Supreme Court is making all these decisions this week that are being released, it may have been already announced. | ||
| But it sounds like Roe v. Wade is going to be reversed, according to this leaked briefing that we heard about a couple months ago. | ||
| Obviously, you're pro-life. | ||
| What do you think the policy of South Dakota is going to be going forward. | ||
| Will there be any room on that related to some of these extreme cases, et cetera, et cetera? | ||
| Well, right now in South Dakota, there are no abortions being performed in our state, which is something I'm very proud of. | ||
| You know, I ran for governor saying I wanted to be the most pro-life governor in the country. | ||
| Every action we've taken, every bill we've passed has been protecting every single innocent life. | ||
| And, you know, this decision, will be monumental in the country. | ||
| South Dakota has a trigger law in place, so as soon as that decision comes forward, abortions will be illegal in the state of South Dakota, except for in protection of the life of the mother. | ||
| I have already told my legislature that we may have a need for a special session to see what we can do to really partner and help care for mothers that are in a situation where they have a baby that may need health care, that found themselves in a crisis situation, or facilitate better adoption situations to connect people better. | ||
| Make sure that these children have the opportunity to grow up in a home where they're loved and cherished | ||
| and can be successful for many years to come. | ||
| So with that trigger law is important, but there also may be a need to make sure that we clarify | ||
| that the mothers aren't the ones that should be punished in this situation, that it is those who perform | ||
| the abortions and knowingly break the law doing it that need to be punished. | ||
| Are you getting any traction on some of those programs, whether it's adoption or figuring out other ways | ||
| Because to me, that's where conservatives, I think, can really make some headway with some of the disaffected liberals. | ||
| There's so many disaffected liberals right now, so many people that don't want eight-month abortions, seven-month abortions, all the crazy stuff coming out of California, but they view something like, oh, no abortions and now no government help as just too far. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I agree. | ||
| We don't spend nearly enough time talking about taking care of mothers in crisis. | ||
| We just don't. | ||
| And we should, because that's really the challenge that most of these young women are in and they're scared of is, you know, it's one thing to tell me, I got to have this baby. | ||
| How do I get to a doctor? | ||
| How do I feed it when it's here? | ||
| How do I care for it? | ||
| And then what? | ||
| So when I became governor, I made it a, one of my major issues is to facilitate adoption and foster care services. | ||
| We've dramatically increased the amount of foster families in our state. | ||
| I made it a priority to say that in every major speech I would talk about foster care and adoption. | ||
| And we've seen that be facilitated in many, many ways and grow throughout the state. | ||
| And encourage these foster families to keep these children in their homes and to adopt them. | ||
| So, we also as a state passed a law that would help pay for the home studies that are required of adoptions. | ||
| And to help with a financial burden of bringing a child into their home permanently. | ||
| So I have in my family, my brothers adopted three children. | ||
| My sisters adopted a son. | ||
| You know, we're very familiar with adoption. | ||
| I grew up with a foster brother. | ||
| And so it's something I'm passionate about. | ||
| And I think it's an opportunity for all of us to start recognizing that we're in these positions to take care of people, to serve people, and that a lot of this A pro-life discussion is about making sure that those mothers have an opportunity to have a quality of life and to make sure their babies are in a safe home. | ||
| So let's just do one more hot-button issue before I let you go. | ||
| We sort of talked about guns for just a second a moment ago, but you're obviously a big defender of the Second Amendment. | ||
| We have all of this legislation trying to be passed or half-passed right now in wake of the Uvalde shooting. | ||
| I guess, well, broadly, what is your position on the Second Amendment? | ||
| I guess that's obvious. | ||
| But what do you think is gonna happen as the federal government seems to want to encroach more on the states related to gun rights? | ||
| Well, the very first bill that I signed as governor was Constitutional Carry. | ||
| It had been vetoed by the previous governor a couple of times, and I was passionate about this constitutional right, so we had a big ceremony in the rotunda and celebrated this bill finally becoming law in the state of South Dakota. | ||
| And since then, we've passed quite a few different bills and pieces of legislation that make it clear that if you want to exercise your Second Amendment rights in South Dakota, please do. | ||
| In fact, this last year, I removed all fees for concealed carry permits, any permit that would be required, and said the state of South Dakota would even pay for a person's federal background check. | ||
| So there would be zero cost to exercising your Second Amendment rights here. | ||
| I think it's important we lead by example. | ||
| And the discussion on violence and tragedies that happens in this country is heartbreaking to see. | ||
| I think what we need to remember, though, is that this is a constitutionally protected right. | ||
| And it is a right that guarantees all the other Bill of Rights. | ||
| It is the militia The citizen militia that fought for our freedom in this country during the Revolutionary War did so with their own weapons. | ||
| With the weapons that they had to feed their families, to hunt deer and squirrel, they used those to fight for their freedom. | ||
| And they wanted it enshrined in our Bill of Rights that we always have the opportunity for each individual in this country to be able to defend themselves with their own weapons. | ||
| And it wasn't from other people in their community, it was from a corrupt government. | ||
| And that is what I think is imperative, is that we remain focused on the reason that the Second Amendment exists, talk about the history, and ensure that we keep that protection in place. | ||
| It is unclear to me whether the government is inept, corrupt, or malicious at this point. | ||
| I would say all of the above. | ||
| It might be all three. | ||
| And of course, Governor, I cannot let you go without asking the most important question. | ||
| You knew it was coming. | ||
| Are you running in 2024? | ||
| Come on, no evasive answers. | ||
| I thought you were asking me what I had for breakfast this morning. | ||
| You know, I have no plans to. | ||
| I am running for re-election this year and I have to get, ask the people of South Dakota if they'll trust me to work with them for the next four years. | ||
| I'm hopeful they will. | ||
| And I also think 2024, There'll be a lot of people running for president at that point in time. | ||
| I think anybody who wants to run for president that gets up every single day and that's their number one desire, maybe that's not the kind of president that we want. | ||
| It might be time for this country to have someone who steps up because they feel a duty to protect this country and our freedom. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| Governor Christine Ohm, thank you very much. | ||
| Great to visit with you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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