Kristi Noem’s campaign team is inflating the Presidential campaigner’s sloppy blurt of a recycled Reagan-era slogan into a major fundraising theme. On Friday morning, Team Noem sent out this fundraising e-mail claiming that “Over the last few weeks, Governor Noem has started a big push to get prayer back in our schools”:
The words “last few weeks”, “started”, and “new” indicate that the campaign team is not referring to the Governor’s 2019 signing of Senate Bill 55, the Christofascist astroturf that forces public schools to indoctrinate students in Christianity. The text indicates that those of us looking for signs of this “big push”—and if it really is a big push, we shouldn’t have to look very hard—need not look back to 2019 or 2020 or even to the 2021 Legislative Session, which ended in March, well before the “last few weeks”. Pore over “the last few weeks” of Noem’s campaign speeches, and you’ll find big pushes against critical race theory and for pimping out our National Guard and launching bottle rockets, but she has mentioned putting prayer in school exactly once, in a seemingly improvised one-liner in her campaign speech to a bunch of theocrats in Des Moines last weekend (the same speech in which Noem said she hates America). Noem did mention school prayer in her CPAC speech in Dallas on July 11, but she only said, “We prayed in school when I went to school,” without proceeding to say she is working to restore the happy Christian nationalist regime she imagines she grew up in.
Politifact agrees that Noem mouth has run ahead of the facts on this imaginary push for school prayer:
When Noem told the crowd, “In South Dakota, I’m putting prayer back in our schools,” she was met with applause from attendants.
But when PolitiFact emailed Ian Fury, Noem’s communication’s director, to inquire what legislation or policy she was referring to that would bring prayer into public schools, he did not provide a clear example.
“Stay tuned for the Governor’s plans,” Fury wrote in an email.
Fury provided a similar response to a request for comment from KOTA, a television station in Rapid City, South Dakota.
No plan has been produced, though. In a phone call with PolitiFact, Fury said he didn’t have an approximate date of when more information about the governor’s plans would come out.
“I don’t have anything more to share with you on those plans at this time,” he said, when asked if those plans would be in the form of an executive order or a request to the South Dakota Legislature.
…Though Noem’s statement could be interpreted as sharing her agenda in the next legislative session, telling a crowd of Christians that “I’m putting prayer back in our schools” is misleading. No specific policy exists, nor does any specific proposal or a timeline for producing one [Natalie Dunlap, “Kristi Noem ‘Putting Prayer Back’ in Schools? No Evidence of That,” Politifact, 2021.07.22].
If “putting prayer back in our schools” really were a “big push” the Administration had been working on “over the last few weeks,” Team Noem would be able and eager to give journalists specific examples of that pious work. Instead all they have is one line in one speech that they are using to shake money out of nervous and nostalgic donors’ purses.
They didn’t have school sponsored prayer in the public schools when she attended them. More lies for the gullible.
A student in school now can say a prayer whenever they feel like it as long as it is not school sponsored or disruptive to other students. Noem, like drumpf, lies all the time and knows her followers don’t care.
Let’s just say Noem’s speechifying depends on winging-it, and once she wings it, it’s true in her mind. Whether it’s true in reality doesn’t matter to her. She’s the sort of Christian, and there are a lot of them, who think you can lie, because, face it, there is a hell of a lot of lying in the Bible, and these are the “good people” doing the lying. I think St. Augustine figured out a way to lie and not be sinful, but maybe it was someone else. Maybe that was God. So Noem can’t be accused of lying if she, like George Constanza, thinks it’s true, or if she thinks good can come from her lying.
At any rate, Noem is no St Augustine, so I think it’s more she got caught up in some speechifying to a crowd of people who expect to be lied to. I mean you can’t still be a Trumpster unless you are a gullible fool. So, yeah, now she has to try to think up post facto what the hell she meant, which means now she has to draft up some damn bill to turn her lie, which she thinks isn’t a lie (remember the George Constanza absolution applies here).
My mom advised me never to lie because I wasn’t good at it. The same should apply to Noem.
I’m teaching my children not to fear police, the Bible, or Christians.
The Bible is such a fascinating document sent through time, long into the future, by folks long ago gone from the earth (their particular sentient composition, anyway).
John Dale I agree with you about teaching my children not to fear cops. We did such a good job one of our kids became a cop. the Bible? Possible work of fiction but nothing to really fear
But you can’t trust a lot of so-called Christians. A lot of them don’t practice what they preach.
I wonder how many of the the insurrectionists on Jan. 6 called themselves Christians?
Noem’s second term will be a larger waste of our tax paying dollars than her first term. We would basically reelect her to CAMPAIGN NON-STOP and if she’s elected or picked for higher office in 2024 she’ll say ADIOUS to South Dakota and leave halfway before her 2nd term is completed. It could be successfully argued that Stephanie Herseth has more heart for South Dakota than many of our previous politicians, including Noem, because Herseth came back to raise her family and work in South Dakota.
You should fear cops. They aren’t out there to protect and serve anyone other than themselves. Fear alleged kristians even more.
Less discussion of race (measurable fact) and more discussion of religion (belief). That seems on-message for the post-factual GOP. Suppress the discussion of what this nation is for a discussion of what the “haves” want us to believe this nation to be. Fortune cookies versus facts.
All of this is counter to what public education ought to be. All of this sells our students, our future and theirs, short.
I don’t fear cops, but am really tired of hearing that there are so many “good ones”. If that is the case, clean up your ranks and stop fearing the the bad ones. Until that happens, I am quite skeptical of them all.
Throw ideas at the wall and see which one’s stick.
If PolitiFact is asking for clarification, that’s an indication of public interest in an idea.
Trump did it, continually.
Trump lied so much, it was expected of him.
Gov. Noem lies so much, it’s becoming expected of her.
*I sure as hell taught my kids to fear the cops and the same will happen with grandkids.
And, this was before George Floyd and the street protests that showed America how we liberals feel about police bullying and overtly bigoted processes of legal implementation.
Back on topic with prayer in schools, forget the prayers and STUDY. Prayers, cheating, and lying may get you into political office and even make you rich, but you have had to sell all the respect that one can earn the conventional way.
Well I don’t fear cops either unless they’ve been to the ball game, We had a group of five cops sitting in front of us and they all had at least seven beers and then left.
Just another unrealistic slogan like “Mexico will pay for the wall.” Yet it will undoubtedly generate campaign donations.