The Schlaflyite South Dakota Eagle Forum leader spent her life leveraging her story of growing up in Austria and seeing Nazis take over into a career of deception, claiming that Hitler’s great evil was pushing equality for women, separation of church and state, gun control, and other liberal policies she could falsely ascribe to the Nazis while mostly ignoring their real evils of anti-semitism and militarism. Werthmann’s misportrayal of history and fascism gained traction during the Obama years, when Tea-Partiers slurped up any propaganda they could get their hands on to brand President Barack Obama a socialist who would lead America into fascism.
Yet somehow when real fascism came to America with the ascent of Donald Trump and his brownshirts, when her people stormed the United States Capitol and attacked Capitol Police and Congress and the Constitution, Werthmann expressed no alarm.
The very movement Werthmann pushed now brings us the fascism on which she pretended expertise and alarm.
I wish Kitty Werthmann weren’t dead. I wish she were alive and alert so she might face the fascism her deception fueled. I wish she had another decade or two to live with her conscience and perhaps repent for the damage she has done to the nation she said she loved.
The only time I ever talked to her, I was searching for help in lobbying for saner approaches to the non-problem of adult cannabis use in SoDak. She listened to me with no comprehension, then said, “I’ll see what Representative [Roger] Hunt [Fascist-Sioux Falls] has to say about it.”
That’s all anyone needs to know about Kitty.
It sounds like Kitty was a wind-up doll, programmed to talk about one thing, not to engage in any real analysis of policy issues. The perfect Trump-fascist lobbyist!
There is nothing positive about Werthmann that I can possibly and honestly say other than Kitty was ridiculously misguided, myopic and egocentric.
I never believed her personal stories about Nazis because her behavior in our nation would indicate she had strong loyalty to their ideals and misconceptions of the world. A prominent legislator told me about the time Kitty followed her in the women’s restroom at the Capitol after a committee hearing on an abortion bill and showed the legislator that she had a pistol in her purse. The legislator thought of calling the police about the threat, but dismissed the idea as “it’s just Kitty Werthmann and we all know she’s crazy.”
I didn’t mind Kitty. She was always civil to me. I had a different impression of her. Yeah, the social issues took up most of her time, but she also engaged on other issues. We saw eye-to-eye on some local issues, like the giant hog farm and the tax-payer funded aspects of the Ramkota development. She helped us a bit on nuclear waste issues. She didn’t like Janklow much.
I’m sure Republicans in state government are getting big belly laughs, high-fiving and slapping knees about this headline today on CNN:
‘Gut-wrenching’: Woman forced to carry her dead fetus for 2 weeks due to anti-abortion laws
The same surgical procedure that is used to treat a miscarriage is also used for terminating pregnancies. New Texas anti-abortion laws have doctors nervous to perform procedures for miscarriages, forcing this woman to carry her dead fetus in her womb for two weeks.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/health/2022/07/18/woman-carried-dead-fetus-texas-anti-abortion-ban-cohen-new-day-dnt-vpx.cnn
Fake news, right? I wonder which Death Panel was in charge of that case.
Kitty and Kristi got their wish, or as Kristi puts it, “Our laws are saving lives, and resources like Life.SD.gov are helping mothers.”
Soooo helpful.
Your opinion of her is just that your opinion . She was right . The left are the real fascist.
Janet, your opinion of the left is just your opinion. You appear to use the phrase “just your opinion” to dismiss a claim as false, irrelevant, or unworthy of consideration. So, I guess you’ve just dismissed your own claim.
I am a leftist. I am not a fascist. I advocate maximal liberty within a necessarily robust social contract. Werthmann’s right demands imposition of its moral and religious code on the masses by government force. That’s fascist.