This interview originally aired on In the Moment on SDPB Radio.
The Dakota Political Junkies tune in to Gov. Kristi Noem's speech in Paris for hints at how she might approach the upcoming legislative session — and perhaps the presidential election.
Mike Card is a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota. Jon Hunter is publisher emeritus of the Madison Daily Leader and a member of South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame.
They analyze Noem's closing remarks, try to define "wokeism" and identify the responsibilities of journalists when it comes to political coverage.
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Lori Walsh:
Welcome back to "In the Moment", on listener supported SDPB Radio. I am your host, Lori Walsh. An American governor goes to Paris. Governor Kristi Noem offered closing remarks at something called the Worldwide Freedom Initiative. It was billed as an inspirational summit that gathered citizens concerned about their country's current state of affairs. Themes for the conference included strategies from the Trump 2016 presidential campaign, border security in the battle to reverse what the group calls a trend toward wokeism. Now, the governor took questions from the audience. She was asked twice about those vice presidential ambitions. She'd never directly answered those questions. But for more on the speech and a few other topics we've selected for today, we welcome our Dakota Political Junkies to the studio, Michael Card is a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota. And John Hunter is publisher emeritus at the Madison Daily Leader and a member of the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame. Dr. Card, welcome. Thank you for being here.
Mike Card:
I'm pleased to be here. Thank you.
Lori Walsh:
Jon Hunter, welcome back as well.
Jon Hunter:
Thanks, Lori. Appreciate it.
Lori Walsh:
All right, let's start with the fact that a governor goes to France to be part of this initiative. How unusual is that to begin with, that we're watching a South Dakota governor in a conference room in France talking about her political origin story really? Who wants to start us off?
Mike Card:
As we look at each other.
Lori Walsh:
Jon Hunter.
Jon Hunter:
I find it interesting right away, and I like your lead in, American governor goes to Paris, it sounds like a good movie. Governor Noem has always held herself out as an ambassador for South Dakota and that's why she travels so much and talks to people around the country, usually in campaign settings. There's always been a little bit of a question whether those are political stops or ambassador kinds of things. But the first thing that struck me when I read that was the possibility of a true ambassadorship.
Maybe that if someone is elected favorable to Governor Noem, then they would select her as an ambassador to someplace, maybe a little bit of foreign experience. I can't see any value to South Dakota to this trip. Now that's not to say you can't do political trips. People do it all times. You can take vacation in Paris if you choose to, even if you're a governor. It's clearly a political trip in some form. We don't know how that was paid for. Some people might ask that question, probably either the conference itself maybe or one of her campaign funds or a donor, we don't know. But that's what struck me is that maybe instead of being a VP candidate or a cabinet post, maybe she'd be interested in ambassadorship.
Lori Walsh:
Mike, how'd she do if she's running for that kind of consideration? Did she speak like an ambassador in this speech?
Mike Card:
She didn't seem to talk much about foreign affairs. It was mostly repeat what I heard, which may not be what she said because we all listened through filters.
Lori Walsh:
I have the transcript, I'll fact check you. What did you hear?
Mike Card:
What I heard, she was basically telling her origin story of how she got interested in politics and from her upbringing and her dealings with her father. And she left out some details, but she only had 33 minutes or so to talk. She didn't say much about foreign affairs. What she did have to say were some things about eliminating wokeism, whatever wokeism is and basic conservatism, and that was appropriate for the audience. It was a good speaking engagement in many senses. And she's apparently well thought of within this particular group, and that's to be expected there. Talking about freedom and she maintains freedom is the one word. The question is freedom for whom and over what?
Lori Walsh:
I went down the rabbit hole of what is wokeism starting with Miriam Webster yesterday, and anyone who's listening, who is a linguist and who wants to come on the show and unpack how this word has gone from one thing to another to another to where it is today, and the disparate definitions people have when they're using it, that'll be a very fascinating segment. But I agree with you. What wokeism is really depends on what you think it is.
Mike Card:
Who's using it?
Lori Walsh:
Who's using it is what it means. All right, a lot of her origin stories, some of the things we've talked about before. My father was very much like John Wayne, the semi truck driving when she was 12.
Mike Card:
Minus running over the tractor.
Lori Walsh:
Minus running over the tractor. I'm going to lose my thought right there. Before we ran over the tractor, the death of her father. That's very prominent, now she does say in here that they were one of the largest just producers in the state, which I thought was interesting, "At the time, we were some of the largest farmers and ranchers in our state," and that I don't think I realized or it'd be worth knowing more about before her death, were they the largest ranchers in the state of South Dakota or some of? I had not heard her say that before.
Jon Hunter:
Right. I haven't either.
Lori Walsh:
I had not heard her put that context into it before. I'm curious to know more about that. Now I want to juxtapose her speech with Donald Trump's speech, which has been getting a lot of press because it's near Veterans Day now. She's in Paris near Armistice Day.
She mentions it. And as you pointed out in our email correspondence, Mike, that we know of, she did not go to any of the cemeteries as part of her visit. But she mentioned how honored she was to be in France at this time. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is doing a Veterans Day speech, which causes quite a lot of... What's our word today?
Jon Hunter:
Angst.
Lori Walsh:
Angst. Today there's a little bit of angst about what he talked about and there's angst and debate about how the media should cover it. I want to start that with you, John Hunter, as a newspaper publisher with lots of experience, is the media tough enough when the President uses words like vermin to refer to who he's defining as his political opponents?
Jon Hunter:
I'd really like to run with this. It takes a little bit because it's very complicated. What is the press's responsibility in this kind of thing? And the first thing I started doing in my mind was calculating how old a person would have to be today to have been an adult during World War II? Of course Hitler did that back in the thirties, used that sort of language. You have to be at least 96 years old today to have been an adult during World War II and you had had to been at least 70 some just to have been born around 1945. There are a lot of people in America who have not experienced Nazism or maybe even understand it very well. I have students at Dakota State who don't know who Richard Nixon is or George Bush. The history is lost.
I think part of responsibility in covering these things is putting things in perspective, maybe historical perspective and saying, "Here's politics then, here's politics now." And I'm not directly tying that, but you could use other examples in America of how that rhetoric was used or not used. And we've had nasty politics for 250 years in America in some different form. And journalists need to be fair about this and what I mean about fair and present things in the context in which they're presented. You don't want to take out little clips, and that's what people do for advertisements, especially political advertisements. You piece together Jamie Smith from here and there and tuck it in. But journalist responsibility is to report that within context. The last thing is if someone says something outlandish, do we need to cover everything that's outlandish?
If I say SDPB Studio is 75 stories tall, it's an outlandish statement. It's not true. Do journalists have a responsibility of saying that if I'm shouting it from a podium? It's very complicated, Lori. It's hard to be a journalist today. If I may, I want to hit something that Mike talked about briefly in the Noem thing in Paris. So much of today's rhetoric is given to a tiny audience. Notice she was speaking to conservative people who they already believe her message before she gives it. She didn't go to the street coroner or a general assembly in Paris and speak to all French people.
It was to this, when former President Trump speaks to a group, it's always a rally of people who already like and believe what he says. Most of these speeches, it doesn't seem as though you speak to general audiences anymore. They're all people who are already polarized and not speaking to. I think your message is well received because they already believe it before you said it. How does a reporter cover that? People are applauding every word, but there are people outside or down the street or at home who are not applauding every word. How do you cover their reaction? I'm getting carried away here, Lori.
Lori Walsh:
Because I'm also drawn to this idea of it's an event and when Donald Trump was in the presidency, a lot of people who were supporters of him would distinguish their love of hearing him go off in a speech, that they would laugh at things and that they would applaud things. But then you would say, "Is that what you really want to happen? Do you really think that these people are vermin, for example?" "No, that's just Donald Trump being Donald." There was an entertainment excuse that a lot of his supporters were at least trying to attach to his speeches.
And obviously we saw on January 6th how seriously some people took this, but a whole lot of people were like, "That's all in good fun. We'd like to see him go and do that." Mike, I'm curious to see, based on what John has said from the media, where is the responsibility to say, "That's dangerous, this is language that was used to dehumanize people during these periods in history?" Governor Noem going back to her, she says in her speech, "You got to know your history. You got to know your history." Again, which history are you going to bring up today? What do you want to add to this?
Mike Card:
I think as John noted, context is incredibly important for anything that anybody tries to tell us and any new ideas. Putting in the context of that this is similar to what was said in the 1930s in Germany, to rile the people up, it's going to rile a certain percentage up who will then take action. What we have is a responsibility both as citizens because the news is coming at us fast. One of the tactics that's being used by politicians of today, almost all politicians is, "I can say something. I can slip something in on a Friday afternoon when people aren't going to be watching the news on Friday night. The news cycle goes fast. We get a new scandal as reported to us will happen tomorrow or maybe the day after tomorrow and we'll forget about what happened today. We have to put things in context ourselves, but we also need people to help us do that."
And one of the ideas that I would recommend for in news media, again, that's not my profession, so I'm preaching to somebody else's choir and that is to say, "Do you really believe that and not to treat these as equal statements that individual politicians are putting forward?" Because it's like saying, when President Trump noted that we should try ivermectin and maybe we should inject bleach, those are preposterous ideas for one's health to put a medicine not designed for humans and bleach, which could kill you to ask his supporters, "Do you really believe that?" And to note this is a preposterous idea, should we vote for someone to be our Chief Executive of the United States who puts forward such preposterous ideas?
Lori Walsh:
And I feel like for context we should say the full quote, which was, "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections. They'll do anything whether legally or illegally to destroy America and destroy the American dream." That would be the full context of the quote. We got to wrap here, John. The last 30 seconds I want to add history lesson. The Jewish people are depicted as mice in the book, "Maus", because they were referred to as vermin that needed to be, Art Spiegelman said, "Here's the vermin, here's the mice, here we are." You can never forget that word Vermin.
Jon Hunter:
Agreed. I'll do it in 15 seconds. I think Americans should be worried if someone is saying we need to root out certain Americans and we need to eliminate, or whatever the verbs are for people who disagree with, we will root out basically everybody who doesn't believe what I believe. I think Americans should be deeply concerned about that.
Lori Walsh:
All right. And Kristi Noem has some challenges if she's going to be attached, I heard her saying in Paris with the rhetoric, I heard Donald Trump saying they don't necessarily match and she's trying to walk that line. We'll be checking on that in the future to see how she handles that. John Hunter, Mike Card, always a delight. Looking forward to the state of the budget address where you're going to spend a whole hour with us and we'll give you the time that these minds deserve.
Jon Hunter:
Looking forward to that.
