Ever since Kristi Noem revealed that she shot a 14-month-old dog for being “untrainable” and then doubled down on the puppycide for “politically incorrect” street cred, the once-rising GOP star has come under near-universal scorn and her veepstakes aspirations have seemingly tanked.
The South Dakota governor has found few defenders among her key right-wing allies. Fox News and Newsmax, for example, have largely ignored the story rather than attempt to excuse her puppy execution. (Since this article’s publication, Fox News has covered the story across several of its programs—including a segment on The Five in which Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters joked that “at least she didn’t eat the dog like President Hussein Obama!”)
Nevertheless, there have been some MAGA media personalities who’ve rallied to Noem’s side.
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A veritable grab bag of pseudo-masculine trad conservatives, gun rights activists, Trumpy lawmakers, and far-right provocateurs have fired off contrarian takes saying Noem did “nothing wrong.” According to some of these defenders, even if the governor’s actions were a little beyond the pale, it’s nothing compared to Democrats “killing their own children” via abortion.
Texas State Rep. Matt Schaefer, the chair of the state’s House Freedom Caucus who decided last summer he won’t run for re-election, wondered on Sunday what the reaction would have been “if Kristi Noem had killed a pre-born baby, and wrote about it.” Besides being fiercely anti-abortion, Schaefer also helped author the state’s law that allows the permitless carry of handguns.
John R. Lott Jr., the so-called “Gun Crowd’s Guru” and a former Trump Justice Department official, declared over the weekend that Noem actually acted responsibly by killing her puppy.
“The media's outrage is misplaced over the story of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem killing her 14-month-old dog,” he tweeted. “The dog had massacred a neighbor's chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another. It had bitten her and was ‘dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.’ It was ‘untrainable.’ She responsibly handled this.”
He claimed that animal control would have handled the situation similarly and speculated that the incident makes it more likely that Donald Trump—who infamously dislikes dogs—would choose her as his running mate.
Liz Wheeler, a former OAN anchor who has since launched an anti-vaxxer podcast, meanwhile, defended Noem because—you guessed it—abortion.
“There’s a lot of outrage on the internet about this story, particularly from leftists who are calling her loony for having killed her family dog. And I think there’s a valid argument to be made that this is a distasteful thing to do or a weird thing to do,” Wheeler exclaimed. “But here’s the thing! This outrage that we’re hearing from leftists about how crazy it is, how horrible it is that Kristi Noem shot her dog—where is the same outrage when almost a million times a year, here in the United States, unborn boys and girls…are suffocated, dismembered, their skulls are crushed and they’re killed in the womb?”
Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh, a far-right troll who is transgressively anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ, parroted this exact argument.
“Consider that prominent politicians have publicly confessed to killing their own children and none of them provoked even a tenth of the outrage that Kristi Noem is experiencing right now for killing a dog,” Walsh tweeted on Saturday.
“It’s worse than this, actually. In fact the politicians who bragged about killing their own children were actively celebrated by many of those condemning Noem,” he added. “Meanwhile plenty of conservatives who are blind with rage over Noem killing a dog had little or nothing to say about these political leaders who, to reiterate, openly boasted about murdering their own children.”
Walsh’s Daily Wire colleague Michael Knowles—best known for his cartoonishly over-the-top trad Catholic rhetoric—shrugged off the controversy during his Monday broadcast, claiming that’s just Real America.
“Yes, it was politically dumb for Noem to admit this. Yes, her political calculation misfired. I'm mixing metaphors. You get the point. But the third point is: Noem didn’t do anything wrong,” he asserted.
“There’s nothing wrong, intrinsically, with humanely putting down a farm dog. A bullet to the head is about as humane away as you can put down any animal,” Knowles continued. “You say, well, Kristi Noem should have given it up for adopt—yeah, maybe, I don't know. Maybe she should have tried to train it harder. Okay, I guess. What about the chickens though, man? We've got all this sympathy for Cricket, the assassin dog. We got all this sympathy for this old nasty goat. What about the chickens? Won't somebody please think about the chickens?”
In the end, though, former Fox News Radio host Todd Starnes may have had the most ridiculous defense of the MAGA governor. He pulled out an oldie but goodie from the 2010s era of conservative media outrage.
“Obama ate a dog. Now, what were you saying about @KristiNoem?” Starnes snarked.
