Leopards Ate My Face

South Dakota is an interesting place. I live here and it's a Republican supermajority at the state level, so Trump supporters enjoy an extraordinary level of comfort.

This place is the perfect example to show how the conservative political machine have taken root across rural America. It started with Nixon's silent majority and has only grown more powerful through the Reagan and Bush II administrations. All of the seeds that Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh sowed in the nineties have grown into an angry, bitter rabble out here.

People here are led to believe that there are dark forces at the gates both domestic and abroad. Those liberals in other states want to convert South Dakota into a woke hellscape. The farm crisis in the eighties made people distrust Washington D.C. and foreign trade. Lots of people think we need to completely revert back to an imaginary time and place.

I was born after George McGovern but it's fascinating to think of a time that this state would have a democratic, anti-war governor who would run for president. That was the seventies and we had democratic U.S. representatives until the Tea Party movement pushed them out.

Since then, we have but a handful of left-leaning political leaders in the state. The Democrats are effectively powerless outside of larger towns and reservations. Neoliberalism died here about 20 years ago, so any establishment Democrat has a snowball's chance in Hell to run here.

I'm rambling but I wanted to give some insight from someone who lives here. I'm not hopeful that much will change here politically. I've felt marginized by the national Democratic party since I graduated high school, so they aren't going to come "rescue" us from this mess. Talking about this place online only draws ridicule from other liberals and left-wing folks.

There are some bright spots, as we had 5,000 people show up at one of our Hands Off rallies:

https://www.sdpb.org/politics/2025-04-07/nationwide-hands-off-protests-draw-thousands-across-south-dakota