MAGA’s Fake Frontier Woman

Puppy killing is kind of a test, isn’t it?

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” - DH Lawrence

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The MAGA innovations in uglifying American culture and politics keep coming. They're such disrupters.

Remember when we called it a break in the Overton Window when Trump started crossing political speech lines, dog-whistling sexism and racism? At first, we couldn’t say the name for what he was doing when he urged his fans to beat other Americans. “You know what they used to do to a guy like that in a place like this?” Trump said to roars of approval at a February 2016 rally in Vegas. “They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.” He’d already sic’ed his retired NYPD goon Keith Schiller out to Fifth Avenue to rough up protestors of Mexican origin who were objecting to his routine characterization of them as rapists and killers when he urged his MAGA rallies to beat up protesters. 

We still weren’t using the F-word when Trump brayed that waterboarding “is great but I don’t think it goes far enough.” And then, he added about the protesters: “I’m just a guy who doesn’t want to be pushed around by a bunch of animals. These are animals.”

How far we’ve come since the summer of ‘16, sliding down down down. From politicians who send out Christmas cards with their kids holding AR-15s in front of the tree, to politicians assaulting reporters and getting elected anyway, to MAGAts threatening the lives of elected officials and Dr. Fauci, and driving judges into hiding or forcing them to hire security. 

And now, a contender for selection as Trump’s vice president bragged that she executed a puppy. Puppy killing is kind of a test, isn’t it? A toeing of the next line. Real Americans shoot puppies. That dog don’t hunt? Bye, bye doggie.

Noem saw fit to include that yarn about a dog named Cricket - who she couldn’t train to hunt - in her upcoming autobiography, she says, to illustrate her willingness in politics, as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly.” 

During the pandemic, Noem gained MAGA hero status over her refusal to issue a statewide mandate to wear face masks. She has since made herself into an avatar of the style of the fascist femme. 

All that, plus a truck and a gun — and the supposedly farm-girl grit it takes to kill a puppy.

In her book, of which The Guardian got an advance copy, she says that once she realized she couldn’t make Cricket into a proper bird dog, she got her gun, drove Cricket to a “gravel pit,” and shot her. “It was not a pleasant job but it had to be done,” she wrote. “And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

Apparently, the smell of blood inspired her so that on the same afternoon, she ran home and grabbed a goat she didn’t like. She brought it back to the same gravel pit - in her truck of course. She shot, missed, wounding the nervous, terrified critter, then ran back to the truck and grabbed another bullet, which finished the job. Then she went to pick up her kids at the school bus stop, leaving the unmarked mass grave behind.

To get ahead of the puppy-killer backlash, she posted the Guardian story on her own social media last week and doubled down. Her book contained “more real, honest and politically incorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping,” she promised.

The puppy killing test may have proved too much for many MAGAs, who although fine with bloodying socialists and anti-Trumpers, throwing brown people into concentration camps and cheering on rapists like Andrew Tate, are not quite ready to execute dogs. Even MAGAs like Jeannine Pirro and Fox insult comedian Greg Gutfeld went to town on Noem, prompting her to go into a social media panic with a flurry of diversionary posts.

Again, what a disruptor. Noem, a woman ahead of her time.

All the attention should have her publishers, Center Street, a division of Hachette, which itself is a division of the French multinational Lagardere, popping the grand brut. Cynical Center Street publishes a rogues’ gallery of autocracy-enablers and fascist adjacent “writers” including Newt Gingrich, Vivek Ramaswamy, insurrection day acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, and the NRA shilling “Gun Babe” Riley Gaines. Ka-ching!

An essential aspect of fascism is first accustoming the public to violence and cruelty. If you can get used to that, you can get used to the rest of it. The cop taking down the professor at Emory, knee to back, zip tie to wrists. The nurses at Texas emergency rooms who refuse to check in miscarrying pregnant women, letting them bleed out on the floor of the waiting room rather than risk a costly legal challenge from Ken Paxton.

Historian Ruth Ben Ghiat, author of an important recent book (Strongmen) on the similarities between modern-day autocrats and Donald Trump, has often spoken about how Trump’s normalization of violence unleashed something hideous. “January 6, the coup attempt, hugely radicalized the [Republican] party,” she said in a recent interview. “It happened because of radicalization, but it was like a thunderbolt. It—talk about breaking taboos. It gave people like, you know, different politicians, this kind of light bulb went on, that they could get away with anything. And so that's why instead of renouncing Trump and disavowing Trump on January 7, they doubled down, and now 1/3 of our House, in our Congress, is composed of election deniers. They're violent. There are calls to violence by major Republican politicians every day.”

Killing the puppy and the goat and then mentioning motherhood in the same paragraph, the Governor of South Dakota is cosplaying Frontier Woman. She is a fake, of course. But, to MAGA, that’s beside the point. 

The optics of the faux frontier have been essential to modern Republican Party messaging at least since Ronald Reagan, the actor on his movie horse playing movie cowboy. There is no more frontier in America except for that between entitlement and wealth and poverty and despair. But the mythology of the hard-spirited pioneer is coded into the culture of people whose horses are couches, whose horizons are giant flat-screen TVs, and whose roughest vittles are endless bags of Door Dashed Chick-fil-A and fries and Diet Coke.

Historian Greg Grandin, in his excellent Pulitzer-winning book, The End of the Myth, From the Frontier to the Border Wall, traces how the violence and cruelty of the frontier as an essential element of our national culture inevitably turned inward. By the late 1800s, the Indians were all dead or herded into reservations, and there was no more internal “frontier." The seething resentful strain in our people that had its “safety valve” on the indigenous people, and then, in the South, on raping enslaved Black women, soon had nowhere to go. 

For a while, America’s foreign wars provided the safety valve (Grandin uses the term throughout his book.) “The psychic workings of democracy, no less than constitutional mechanisms and guarantees (such as the ability to vote out leaders, to take grievances to court, to speak and assemble in public), were discussed in the language of vapor release,” he writes, of the history of this phenomenon. “Philosophers and theologians easily bolted the “safety valve” onto their moral premises, to the idea that vices and weaknesses had to be controlled or balanced by virtues and strengths.”

He reminds us that while the US banned former Confederate soldiers from participation in the military after the Civil War, they and their sons were welcomed into the fight against brown people in the Philippines, where southern generals presided over gory atrocities. When the Confederate battle flag was flown in Vietnam, the Pentagon tried to ban it, but President Johnson needed the Dixiecrats, so the objectors gave up. 

The Iraq War was the last of these foreign safety valves to replace the nonexistent American frontier, the urge to action harbored by a people taught to believe in boundless opportunity who were now confronted with another reality. 

Trump’s Mexico border wall symbolizes the end of the frontier. It’s all just us in here now, with wealth inequality widening by the hour and the boundless limits promising opportunity now a figment from a gone time, replaced by downward mobility. Hence, the Republican candidate for President training his followers to regard their fellow Americans as vermin, as people polluting the blood of the nation, and promising to “root out” political foes. 

“Today the frontier is closed, the safety valve shut,” Grandin writes. “Whatever metaphor one wants to use, the country has lived past the end of its myth. Where the frontier symbolized perennial rebirth, a culture in springtime, those eight prototypes in Otay Mesa loom like tombstones. After centuries of fleeing forward across the blood meridian, all the things that expansion was supposed to preserve have been destroyed, and all the things it was meant to destroy have been preserved. Instead of peace, there’s endless war. Instead of a critical, resilient, and progressive citizenry, a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting”

It’s of course no accident that Noem plays cowgirl. She presides over one of the sparsely populated Western states reeling from decades of failed economic and social policies, clinging to the frontier myth for identity and self-respect. She is among the cadre of right-wing pols who lack the imagination and will to do anything for the descendants of the real homesteaders besides Drill Baby Drill.

Every scientist in the world and most sentient humans know that extracting and burning more fossil fuel is the road to planetary extinction, but Noem and her ilk are all in for more oil and gas pipelines as the cure for what ails unlanded rural people living without health care or social safety net or other potential green jobs that government could provide and encourage. When Biden revoked the license for the Keystone XL pipeline shortly after his inauguration, residents of dying small towns near Mount Rushmore that stood to gain a few jobs were in despair. This despair, writ large, fuels the MAGA movement.

The Standing Rock Protests against the controversial Dakota Pipeline that also runs through South Dakota engaged climate and progressive activists and attracted enormous media attention - for a while. Before and during the Trump years, protesters faced corporate-hired goons, dogs, and quotidian violence trying to deny corporate access. The tribes eventually won their case demanding an environmental review. Even the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 agreed that such a review was needed, but the Dakota Pipeline remains fully operational, without it. It is, as the Sierra Club puts it, a zombie project.

As Grandin wrote: “A few do still have access to something that looks like a frontier, as the kind of treaties and agreements represented by NAFTA has given corporations their own endless horizon. Recently, the World Bank took stock of the extreme concentration of global wealth, the emergence of new technologies that reduce the need for human labor, and the ability of investment to move across borders at will, and gave this advice to the world’s poorer nations: you need to keep employers happy by doing away with ‘burdensome rules.’”

Kristi Noem, puppy killer, is a fake frontierswoman for the last (fake) American frontier. She is all in on normalizing violence in service to a very different kind of homesteader - the corporate entity and the one percenters bankrolling her party.