Local GOP candidate forum last night was interesting to say the least, featuring D7’s Jeff Struwe and D8’s Rick Weible.

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Yesterday was filled with a lot of Republican activity.  I attended the local GOP monthly lunch, where I listened to Public Utilities Commissioner Kristie Fiegen give an interesting talk on South Dakota’s energy mix, with far more being generated in renewable sources than we actually consume here – which is good news for our state’s economy as the nation becomes more insistent on those sources being renewable.

But.. it may also pose challenges for us in the future, as some of these sources don’t work so well in the deep winter when we’re living in an arctic hell of our own choosing. Seriously, it can get chilly here. Find out more on our energy mix LIVE at SPP.org, which Commissioner Fiegen drilled into our heads yesterday.

At the Lunch, they reminded us of the GOP Women’s forum that evening, with a number of candidates speaking.. which, except for being Mr. Mom, I didn’t have much going on in the evening. I had to run to WalMart, because my 10 year old printer finally died, but I wanted to hear what they had to say. So I attended, and just got something on the way via Amazon.

And I’m glad I did.  While it wasn’t an eye opener with a couple of these candidates, it was an exclamation point which yelled – “HOLY BUCKETS, there are a couple of people we REALLY don’t want to elect to office.”

First off, District 7 Legislative Candidate Jeff Struwe went further into depth from his diatribe at last weekend’s GOP meeting, where he declared he wanted to “take porn books” out of schools (those porn books including Diary of Anne Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Glass Menagerie, etc.).   Last night, literally his entire speech was him explaining that he got involved in politics because of “Moms for Liberty,” but because the School Board didn’t do what he wanted, he feels the need to replace the entire Brookings School Board. And because it would take too long over several election cycles to replace them all, he just decided that running for the legislature was faster than running for school board:

Apparently we should all be excited for the nanny-state zealots to take over.

After we heard from Jeff, who wants to run to force his will on us all, we got to hear from snake-oil salesman and Elkton resident Rick Weible, who is running against the Senate Majority Leader in District 8.

And according to Weible, he would have you believe that the only reason Secretary of State Monae Johnson won was because of him (ignoring her complete disavowal of him), and that – working with South Dakota Canvassing – he’s personally responsible for writing 99 bills, with over 60 bills that made it through both Houses of the legislature, and 14 that were signed by the Governor:

I can’t help but call shenanigans on this claim. He didn’t offer which bills they were. He didn’t say how they were passed into law or who sponsored him. He just threw some numbers at the crowd, and expected us to believe them because he was holding a microphone in his hand. 

I’m guessing there would be a number of legislators who would disagree… or at the least would completely deny that they fronted a Weible bill. It’s literally like he just pulled random numbers out of the air and told the crowd in attendance I did that.

Because lacking the legislators standing up and personally giving him credit, there’s a lot of smoke being blown here.

We also heard from Justin McNeal, candidate for Congress who moved to South Dakota in 2021. He had flyers talking about how his grandparents lived in the state, so he’s connected with South Dakota.  Congressman Dusty Johnson’s campaign Representative Hayley Halverson appeared on the Congressman’s behalf, as Dusty was delivering & pinning medals to Vietnam War era Veterans in another town and could not attend.

All in all, it was a good event, and well worth attending in April when many of the GOP candidates who will actually win the election in Districts 7 & 8 will be in attendance.

Versus those we heard from last night, Struwe & Weible, whom we should sprint away from.

13 thoughts on “Local GOP candidate forum last night was interesting to say the least, featuring D7’s Jeff Struwe and D8’s Rick Weible.”

  1. People always want local control of the schools until their locally-elected school board does something they don’t like, and then all those sanctified local control principles go out the window, and nothing less than a centralized government mandate will do.

    1. If I recall at the time, it was “if you want to opt out of having those books available, opt out.” But, that was not good enough for “Big Brother.”

      Sorry, I was thinking of a dystopian George Orwell novel. I’m sure they’ll try to ban that as well.

  2. at the luncheon yesterday, there were two women who were there from Lake County “because we don’t have any leadership there.”

    I asked for clarification. “we don’t like Casey Crabtree and his pipeline bill, ” referring to SB 201, which takes control away from the locals.
    “and our county commissioners won’t even let us speak to them about it,” referring to the Lake County Commissioners refusal to put discussion of the pipeline on their agenda.

    Local control is sacred until it isn’t. I gave up talking to them after that.

  3. at the luncheon yesterday, there were two women who were there from Lake County “because we don’t have any leadership there.”

    I asked for clarification. “we don’t like Casey Crabtree and his pipeline bill, ” referring to SB 201, which takes control away from the locals.
    “and our county commissioners won’t even let us speak to them about it,” referring to the Lake County Commissioners refusal to put discussion of the pipeline on their agenda, and their only 50′ setback.

    Local control is sacred until it isn’t. I gave up talking to them after that.

  6. Which city in South Dakota would serve as Wackadoodle Central Coalition Headquarters? Who would be their coalition chair?

  7. The definition of narcissist is “a person who has an excessive interest or admiration of themselves”. I would joke “if you vote for Weible you will get a politician that only thinks of his own grandiose ideas” but there is no way in hell he will get 20% of the votes in that district.

    I’m calling Crabtree’s win right now.

  8. it’s disturbing to me that this craziness is happening in Brookings, which has always been a solid mainstream Republican community. How did these people wrest control of the county Republican Committee. Where were all the responsible Republican people? This is the county that sent Gordon Mydland to Pierre, and many other outstanding South Dakotans.

    1. the wackadoodles showed up, annoyed the sane, responsible ones so much they stopped participating

    2. I think both sides of the fence are polarizing, and politics are getting to be a dirty word. Which is keeping more and more people out because they don’t have any interest in dealing with the crazy.

      You’ve got extreme woke culture on the left, and paranoid conspiracists on the right. Most of the normal people nope out of that stuff and would rather spend time with their families.

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