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Kristi Noem Claims to Support Diversity of Opinion; Record of Pettiness Suggests the Contrary

Governor Kristi Noem is tweeting her support for the out-of-state influenced and fake intellectual-diversity law she signed this winter, saying that “diversity of opinion should be championed on our college campuses” and promising that she’s “enacting protections for campus speech“:

Gov. Kristi Noem, tweet, 2019.06.25.
Gov. Kristi Noem, tweet, 2019.06.25.

Governor Noem doesn’t actually support diversity of opinion or free expression. She’s replaced a prominent state board leader who supported her opponent in the 2018 primary with one of her campaign donors. She appears to be dishing similar punishment out to the entire city of Pierre for not voting for her strongly enough in 2018 by ending the Governor’s Hunt and staging another expo and concert in politically friendlier Sioux Falls. She’s chilling the speech of protestors who oppose her opinion that her donor TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline is good for South Dakota.

And most tellingly for free speech on campus, the Governor’s Office appears to have monitored and expressed displeasure over a high school student’s political expression on social media, which appears to have led to that student’s departure from Girls State, an event held on the campus of the University of South Dakota.

The Board of Regents is meeting this week to discuss diversity on campus and a lot of culture-war hogwash thrown at them by local and out-of-state white-privilegists seeking the exact opposite of diversity in South Dakota. Governor Noem’s record in six short months of petty governing shows she’s all for diversity of opinion… as long as it consists of a diverse range of people all sharing her opinion.

5 Comments

  1. Donald Pay 2019-06-26 08:45

    It’s really political correctness gone Republican. The alt-right wants the right to display Nazi and fascist symbols and carry tiki torches around. They want to be able to shout, “Jews will not replace us.” They want to bring fascists and racist to campus for hate rallies. They want to start Ku Klux Klan chapters and parade around in white robes. They want to be assured they can do this without other people demonstrating against them. In Wisconsin, the Republican Party copied a Hitler strategy to set up a special taxpayer funded righty institute to try to give an academic veneer to “conservative thought” and funnel the alt-right into Republican-led cells. Pretty sick things these Republicans are doing.

  2. Porter Lansing 2019-06-26 10:45

    Don Pay’s woke comments sum up the situation, perfectly. Furthermore, the highly non-inclusive SDGOP demanding diversity is like Oregon tree-huggers demanding free chain saw sharpening. It’s a mental disconnect and an attempted diversion and distraction from their ulterior goals.

  3. Debbo 2019-06-26 16:00

    I’m trying to think of the word Orwell used for saying the exact opposite of the truth. Doesn’t come to mind. “Newspeak?” I don’t think so. Oh well. It’s what Noem and the SDGOP do daily.

  4. mike from iowa 2019-06-26 18:32

    The term “doublespeak” originates in George Orwell’s book “1984” (Nineteen Eighty-Four). Although the term is not used in the book, it is a close relative of two of the book’s central concepts, “doublethink” and “Newspeak”. Another variant, “doubletalk”, also referring to deliberately ambiguous speech, did exist at the time Orwell wrote his book, but the usage of “doublespeak”, as well as of “doubletalk”, in the sense emphasizing ambiguity clearly postdates the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four.[4][5] Parallels have also been drawn between doublespeak and Orwell’s classic essay Politics and the English Language, which discusses the distortion of language for political purposes.[6] In it he observes that political language serves to distort and obfuscate reality. Orwell’s description of political speech is extremely similar to the contemporary definition of doublespeak:[7]

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