Governor Larry Rhoden mistakenly said last week that his police-state initiative “Operation Prairie Thunder” had nabbed 174 people (human beings, fellow sentient bipeds) for drug offenses. Rhoden’s Department of Public Safety clarified yesterday that the actual number of people (human beings, God’s children, like all of us, right, Larry?) netted in the state’s new drag was 78:
In an email to [KELO-TV] Tuesday, the Department of Public Safety confirmed that 51 people were booked into jail for drugs during the saturation patrol along with 27 people ticketed for drugs and released. There were also arrests for non-drug related crimes.
Rhoden said Sept. 2 in an interview with [KELO-TV] that there were 174 drug arrests during the patrol; Tuesday’s DPS email says the department had reported 174 such arrests to the governor. “Historically,” the email states, the state’s Highway Patrol “records each individual charge as an arrest.” The department also apologized “for the confusion regarding the statistical reporting” and pledged to change in the future. It says that going forward, there will be numbers “which accurately reflect the number of unique individuals arrested in addition to the number of total charges filed” [Dan Santella, “SD DPS: 51 Booked for Drugs in ‘Prairie Thunder’ Patrol,” KELO-TV, 2025.09.09].
These 78 individuals (human beings, possessors of dignity and inalienable rights equal to our own) are innocent until proven guilty… but given the state’s cooperation with Immigration Customs and Enforcement, many of those arrested and accused may just be deported to El Salvador or Uganda without any due process.
Just to be clear, that bison is is flashing the Nazi SS symbol in its sunglasses. They can deny it all they want, but this Ice operation is more about crisis acting than about law enforcement. So they found 71 people who had some drugs on them. Notice they didn’t say how much they had on them. If they had any major amounts of drugs or anything other than cannabis they would have spread it out on the table. You could find far more drugs without Ice on any weekend of the year at any college campus. I find what Rhoden said indicated how much of a waste of time and money this whole operation was, except, of course, they provided plenty of free publicity for the Nazi movement. That was really what this was about.
Here is the Nazi SS symbol:
https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/ss-bolts
I
Thank you for bringing that to my attention Mr. Pay.