“Standing on conservative beliefs is more than rhetoric for me. Whether cutting taxes, supporting foster homes or ensuring you do not need a COVID-19 passport, it’s time conservatives stand together as we fight for the values that created America — not the values of failed Communist regimes.” — Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD)
Call him a plum crazy ideologue, but nobody throws a ruby-red Republican shindig like South Carolina’s Jeff Duncan. For the past nine years, the state’s US representative (3rd District) has hosted the annual Faith & Freedom BBQ, the rowdy go-to fundraising platform for Duncan’s handily won five campaigns. With few holds barred.
Held in the ultraconservative Upstate region in late August, F&F has been headlined by such party luminaries as senators Joni Ernst, Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham, then vice president Mike Pence, and former South Carolina governor and Trump’s first UN ambassador Nikki Haley.
Republican Party royalty are, of course, welcomed and worshipped with true Bible Belt gusto. But while most F&F galas feature the already famous, this year’s headliner will be a GOP up-and-comer.
Kristi Noem hails from distant South Dakota, where in 2018 she was elected governor after serving four terms in the US House. Champion for some of the most radical trends and ends in all American conservatism, Noem in July declared her administration would not increase messaging promoting coronavirus vaccinations - this despite South Dakota’s sub-average full-vaccination rate (47%) and sharp rise in confirmed cases of the Delta variant.
This heartless, passive-aggressive stance on vaccination is not unique to Noem; but she’s been particularly masterful in crafting the issue as a referendum on individual rights versus a greater good.
As recently as July, Noem was questioning the “grit” and “instinct” of Republican governors allowing for wiggle room should their states’ infection rates trigger a third wave — a brazen, yet so far successful move to outflank the competition at the certain but unnecessary sacrifice of more South Dakotans.
It speaks volumes that a rigid science denier is not only the centerpiece of a prominent Republican gathering, but a viable presidential candidate for 2024. (Noem has made multiple and impressive appearances at all the right GOP stops, gently deflecting, yet hardly dismissing, questions about a future beyond her current job.)
As with anyone even remotely interested in her party’s nomination sans Trump, Noem is in a necessarily theatrical if not logistical holding pattern. Still the sheer possibility of her possibility is further evidence of a party — with or without Trump — willing to put lives at risk in exchange for electoral votes.
Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2021
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