Secretary of State Monae Johnson may be hallucinating…
In the opening paragraph of her introduction to her funny little 2026 Q1 economic report, Secretary Johnson refers to “headwinds” through which South Dakota’s economy has demonstrated its “resilience and optimism”:
Over the past several years, the national and global economy has continued to face significant uncertainty and transition. Ongoing international trade tensions, shifting tariff policies, inflationary pressures, and disruptions in agricultural and manufacturing markets continue to shape economic conversations across the country. South Dakota has not been immune to these challenges, including the recent closure of the state’s Hormel facility, which has had ripple effects on workers, families, and regional economies.
Despite these headwinds, South Dakota’s economy continues to demonstrate remarkable resilience and optimism. One of the strongest indicators of that optimism is the continued growth in business formation across our state. During the first quarter of 2026, South Dakota LLC filings approached 4,000, surpassing first-quarter totals from each of the previous six years. These numbers reflect the entrepreneurial spirit that continues to define our state as individuals take risks, invest in their communities, and create new opportunities for future growth [Secretary of State Monae L. Johnson and Dakota Wesleyan University, 2026 Q1 Business and Economic Data Analysis Summary, 2026.05.21, p. 1].
“…the recent closure of the state’s Hormel facility…”—wait, what? Did I miss something? I was not aware that South Dakota had a Hormel facility, let alone that one had closed recently. Cimpl’s Meats shut down its slaughterhouse in Yankton in March 2025 and moved operations to a new plant less than an hour west of St. Louis, Missouri (where cattle are cheaper and workers more plentiful), but Cimpl’s belonged to Green Bay Wisconsin-based American Foods Group, not Austin Minnesota-based Hormel Foods. Aside from Cimpl’s departure, I can’t find reference to any recent major meatpacking closure in South Dakota. Among news items the Secretary may have misremembered, Wholestone Farms closed its butchery and bailed on building a big hog chop shop in Sioux Falls in 2023 after it received big government pork to expand the Nebraska facility it bought from Hormel in 2018, but that had nothing to do with Hormel operating or ceasing to operate in South Dakota. Sioux Falls just avoided losing the big Smithfield slaughterhouse by swinging a state-sweetened deal for the Chinese-owned meatpacker to set up a new plant in Crooks, but Hormel has no part in that move.
(A former Hormel lobbyist now propagandizes for South Dakota’s Beef Checkoff program—maybe we could ask him?)
Unless I’m forgetting some famous fixture of South Dakota’s critter-killing industry, it appears Secretary Johnson is hallucinating…
…or maybe Secretary Johnson had an artificial intelligence large-language model write her summary for her, and the AI LLM robot exercised its inherent and inevitable falsification. I ran the first three paragraphs of Secretary Johnson’s intro through four free AI detectors—ZeroGPT, GPTZero, HumanizeAI, and Quillbot—and they all said the SOS’s introduction was almost definitely (actual results: 100%, 100%, 98%, and 100%, respectively) produced by AI.
Wuzzit Hormel or Hormuz?