Kristi Noem has awakened America’s oldest conflict. It won’t end well

Donald Trump has an attack dog and her name is [Kristi Noem](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/trump-ice-barbie-kristi-noem-empathy-deportations-4023177?ico=in-line_link). As the snowy streets of Minnesota erupted this January, Noem has become the face of Trump’s spin to valorise the brutality of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and to demonise the protesters in its path.

Noem is a grandmother, although she doesn’t look it, a living embodiment of Maga’s fiat for women to get sprogged up before the age of 25 and then stay that age forever. We learned about the existence of her granddaughter, Addie, when Grandma Kristi spoke gushingly to a 2023 NRA forum about Addie’s appetite for gun ownership. “She already has a shotgun and she already has a rifle and she’s got a little pony named Sparkles too.” Addie at this point was not quite two years old.

Noem has always been an advocate of owning guns and using them. Before she became Trump’s second-term Homeland Security Secretary, she was the Republican governor of South Dakota, a local politician in the Sarah Palin mode who grew up on a ranch. She became best known to international observers as a woman who had [shot her own dog](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68909801) – and then implied she’d like to do the same to Joe Biden’s German shepherd.

A memoir released in April 2024 was supposed to position Noem as a Trump running mate: instead, it started a national debate about whether it was really appropriate to shoot Cricket, a wirehead pointer, after Cricket escaped Noem’s control on a pheasant hunt. Later in the memoir, Noem wrote of her dreams of moving into the White House and disposing of Biden’s dog, Commander. (“Commander, say hello to Cricket for me.”) She lost the VP race, but her career survived.

In South Dakota, however, Noem’s term as governor is best remembered for two things: resisting pesky federal government attempts to impose Covid controls, and sending the South Dakota National Guard far beyond state lines to hunt immigrants near the Mexican-US border. (The National Guard is a set of reserve units, raised and based in each state, to back up the federal army – it [goes back to 1636](https://www.nationalguard.mil/About-the-Guard/How-We-Began/).)

Noem even teamed up with a billionaire who promised to fund the deployment – until Biden intervened to ensure that the 2022 National Defence Authorisation Act federally banned National Guard units from crossing state borders on the payroll of private donors.

Noem was outraged: “If Joe Biden federalizes the National Guard, that would be a direct attack on states’ rights,” [she tweeted](https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fx.com%2FKristiNoem%2Fstatus%2F1755003058507903249&data=05%7C02%7CRobbie.Smith%40theipaper.com%7Cf2963e38d31b4688003508de5db71fb3%7C0f3a4c644dc54a768d4152d85ca158a5%7C0%7C0%7C639051238384598467%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=Fa6VErwCDLK5SiJhCEYGp3Umk6MHP4rvPy4gZk1wGPI%3D&reserved=0). Since the American Revolution, American conservatives have argued that US states need to keep their militia as independent as possible from federal control, and Noem drew on a long tradition of regional resistance in her complaints.

Conflict against the ruling government is America’s oldest conflict.

Understood geothermal muskets its buffalo time