WATCH: South Dakota Governor Defends Decision to Not Lock Down State

Alternate headline: Why I’m Moving to South Dakota. (Okay not really because to be fair, Governor DeSantis has done a pretty decent job of handling COVID here in Florida, or as I like to call it, the Dong of America.)

ANYWAY on to the actual point of writing this article: South Dakota’s Governor Kristi Noem has been (predictably) facing some backlash for her decision not to thrust her constituents into a total lockdown to enforce social distancing. Speaking on “The Ingraham Angle,” Noem addressed her approach, and it is, in a word, refreshing:

“I had a real honest conversation with the people in our state. I told them I took an oath to uphold the Constitution of our state, of South Dakota,” said the governor. “I took an oath when I was in Congress obviously to uphold the Constitution of the United States. I believe in our freedoms and liberties. What I’ve seen across the country is so many people give up their liberties for just a little bit of security and they don’t have to do that.”

. . .

“If a leader will take too much power in a time of crisis, that is how we lose our country,” said Noem. “So, I felt like I’ve had to use every single opportunity to talk about why we slow things down, we make decisions based on science and facts, and make sure that we are not letting emotion grab ahold of the situation.”

Interestingly, no one has pointed out the obvious factor in making these decisions for South Dakota, which is that South Dakotans have been practicing social distancing unwittingly for pretty much the entirety of the state’s existence. (It’s #46 out of 50 states when they’re ranked by population density and I’d better not hear any of y’all ever say you learned nothing useless from COTR.)

Noem faced backlash for supposedly underreacting to an outbreak at a pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, but she has argued that the stricter measures adopted by many states (cough California cough cough) would have made no difference. And she’s probably right: The outbreak mirrors other outbreaks in essential operations even in states with draconian lockdown policies, and oh, what was that word I just used. . . Oh, right: ESSENTIAL. That plant would’ve remained open no matter what. People need their bacon.

But the governor has stood by her approach, citing her faith in the people of South Dakota to not be bloomin’ idiots:

“The people of South Dakota can be trusted to make good decisions. We have common sense. That’s why people want to live here, and that’s why I love living here,” she continued. “We’ve got one issue in a pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, but outside of that, two-thirds of our state has no cases or one case in an entire county, so we’re doing very well as a state. We are addressing the one hot spot that we do have and aggressively testing in that area.”

. . .

“We should be tracking who is in the hospital, what the death rate is, and South Dakotans are doing a fantastic job following my recommendations, and we’ve been able to keep our businesses open and allow people to take on some personal responsibility,” she said. “We’ve had a dramatic impact on the slowing down of the spread, and we’ll be able to handle it with a capacity in our health care systems, and it’s all because of decisions that the people made and the fact that we worked together to do that. And I think that’s what’s been unique in South Dakota.”

Imagine that. People being given information and then trusted to use it appropriately. And it’s. . . working?

How unexpected.

Watch the interview here: