Governor Kristi Noem is using anonymous complaints to her Joe-McCarthy hotline to persecute university faculty and staff in her war against imaginary liberal indoctrination. Now she is refusing to share with the public the complaints she is using as the basis of this McCarthyite campaign:
On June 22, 2023, KELOLAND News reached out with a formal open records request, asking that the Governor’s Office provide records of all messages received by the tip-line and records of any response issued by the Office of the Governor to those who have called.
KELOLAND clarified in the request that we are not seeking identifying information of those who have called the hotline and that such information may be redacted or removed prior to being sent.
On July 10, the Governor’s Office denied our records request.
The denial cited South Dakota statute 1-27-1.5(12), which exempts access to “Correspondence, memoranda, calendars or logs of appointments, working papers, and records of telephone calls of public officials or employees,” and also 1-27-1.5(22), exempting “Records which, if disclosed, would constitute an unreasonable release of personal information” [Jacob Newton, “Noem’s Office Denies Access to Whistleblower Tip Line,” KELO-TV, 2023.07.10].
I get the impression from Newton’s next line, his closing line, that KELO-TV may be ready to take the Governor to court:
In 2022, the Virginia Governor’s Office was forced via lawsuit to turn over similar records from a now-defunct email tip-line set up for the public to report “inherently divisive practices” in schools in the state [Newton, 2023.07.10].
Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin settled a lawsuit with media outlets by handing over some emails from his online anti-divisive topics complaint system after shutting the project down in September 2022 for apparent lack of input about actual divisive topics. Youngkin lost another lawsuit by watchdog group American Oversight challenging his use of the “working papers” exemption to Virginia open records laws.
Governor Noem’s citation of South Dakota’s open-records exemption for correspondence and calls of public officials or employees might shield her staff’s responses to tipline submissions, but it would cover the submissions themselves that come from regular citizens. The clause on releasing personal information might prohibit telling us who’s crying “Campus Commies!” but it would not allow the state to exclude releasing the actual text of calls with names and other identifying information redacted.
And if Governor Noem really is rooting out unjust ideological influences on our campi, she ought to share that information with the public so we can determine if she is acting on real threats that ought to concern all conscientious citizens or if she is just fielding ideologically biased gripes that should not translate into public policy for higher education.
Drop the pretense, Governor Noem: share the calls to the McCarthy hotline. If she won’t, KELO-TV< then lawyer up and make her disclose those calls.
For all we know, she’s fabricating the tips herself.
She is exhibiting the utmost in closed government operations that so many (most) of her voters and who voted for trump the former potus (if one could lower him/herself to call him that) and Gene McCarthy style (similar to US House leader Kevin McCarty) , is she not? What could be otherwise expected when the race for governor between a “snow queen” and “Looks good on a horse” -when the voters had a choice between a real (but partially paralyzed opponent from a bronc rearing over backward in the chute) who had actual experience in governing and legislating and South Dakota voters chose thew “show horse over the workhorse-regretfully. Years later we in this state put u with her ineptitude and lackadaisical approach to governing as her ‘partime job”as she covets bining in the trumpist trail of ignorance and BS.
Where do y’all live? The Phillipines?
You fellows are just busy bodies wanting to look in people’s drawers.
Desk drawers, I mean. Most of you have a different position on the likes of Mr. Deutsch and looking in drawers. grudznick thinks both involve MYOB.
Paranoid much, grudznarc?
I just don’t want all of grudznick’s tip calls to be printed in that Sioux Falls newspaper, Mr. P.h
They always get things wrong.
Grudznick
They will only print that which you sent. So if they got it wrong, you had it wrong 1st.
Noem resembles Regina George, the alpha female in the “Plastics” in the film “Mean Girls.” Discuss.
I know Mean Girls by harvey, you can go shave your back hair now.
Didn’t the phlegm fatale governor do this same tactic when she decided to alleviate the state prison system of its warden and long-time personnel? It’s all a pretense to her tyranny.
When it comes to indoctrination of SD’s students, I say indoctrinate the hell out of them. The more indoctrinating we can kick into their little ears, the better. They’ll figure it out.
Oh, boy…. if/when the blowed-out whistles are exposed, a certain source may make polite society blush…. not sorryÜ
Pic or it didn’t happen.
Jake, please don’t disparage the honest and deeply good man Gene McCarthy. It was senator Joseph McCarthy who had no sense of decency at the last.
Kristi Lynn is a clueless, thoughtless twit who writes and says untenable “stuff” while she’s on a benzos toot, then shields herself with a South Dakota statute. KELO-TV and Newton should gut her like a carp, but it wouldn’t make any difference in this Greatest State in the USA! USA! USA!
Robbinsdale Radical; oops, sorry, my big mistake-thanks for correction! I agree with you on Gene McCarthy!