Democrats Can’t Outrun Their Record on the Border
By Sen. John Thune

Four years ago, President Biden and Vice President Harris campaigned against the border security policies of then-President Trump. Soon after taking office, they set about dismantling these effective policies despite their team being warned that doing so could result in a surge of illegal immigration. That surge came, and it was Vice President Harris who was put in charge of handling the administration’s response. But it wasn’t much of a response.

Now President Biden and Vice President Harris are trying to claim they have been strong on border security all along, but the data tells a much different story. This administration has overseen three record-breaking years of illegal immigration at the southern border. Ten million illegal immigrants have crossed the border illegally during this administration. Included in that number are suspected terrorists, gang members, criminals, and 1.9 million known “gotaways” who have entered the country without being apprehended, which the chief of Border Patrol has called a “national security threat.”

Additionally, the Biden-Harris administration’s lax implementation of our asylum system is undoubtedly a “pull factor” for many migrants. In many cases, individuals who show up at the border claiming asylum are simply released into the country with court dates as far as a decade into the future. As we learned in June, this administration also gave de facto amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants whose cases were closed without resolution. Then there are the government-funded flights to cities around the country, guaranteed shelter in a number of cities, and, in California, illegal immigrants can get taxpayer-funded health care.

The effects of this crisis are not limited to the southern border alone. In fact, every state has virtually become a border state in one way or another. Here in South Dakota, law enforcement can trace illegal drugs in our communities to the southern border. Police in New York City recently revealed that illegal immigrants make up 75 percent of arrests in midtown Manhattan as the city deals with an influx of illegal immigrants. And many of us have seen the tragic stories of Americans killed by illegal immigrants who should have never been in our country in the first place.

A crisis has raged at the southern border for much of the Biden-Harris administration. On more than one occasion, the Biden-Harris administration has turned its back on border security, and their Democrat allies in Congress have voted against meaningful border security policies time and again. Try as the Democrats might to change their tune in an election year, the American people can see what’s happening with their own eyes, and they know that this administration’s disastrous record on the border is to blame.

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Safe Streets, Smarter Policies
By Rep. Dusty Johnson
September 20, 2024

BIG Update

For years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has said that sanctuary cities create a public safety threat and are one of the biggest impediments to ICE’s public safety efforts. A sanctuary city’s refusal to cooperate with ICE puts local law enforcement officers in danger.

After four years of the Biden border crisis, sanctuary cities have received tens of thousands of illegal immigrants. Biden’s soft-on-crime and open border policies have made these communities, and others around them, less safe.

These cities have used taxpayer dollars to solve problems their own bad policies have made. This should not be the case. I voted to pass the No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act to ensure no taxpayer dollars are used to fund housing, food, and healthcare costs for illegal immigrants.

BIG Idea

The South Dakota Auto Dealers Association knows how difficult it would be to limit vehicle emissions to meet the EPA’s overly burdensome rule. This rule would effectively require two-thirds of all new cars to be electric vehicles by 2032. Not only do we not have the infrastructure to support this EV adoption, but it outpaces consumer demand and severely limits your options when purchasing a vehicle. This week I voted to end this unreasonable EPA rule.

BIG News

I voted to keep our government funded and require proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. We must ensure election integrity. Showing a photo ID is a commonsense way to do that. Recently, Oregon discovered hundreds of noncitizens were mistakenly registered to vote, compromising our election security.

Keeping the government funded and operating and safeguarding our voting process are essential tasks of my job in Congress.

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Big 8.5 x 11 mail piece from the Open Primary group in mailboxes across the state today, just in time for early voting:

Harvesting Our Own Food Supply
By: Gov. Kristi Noem  
September 20, 2024  

Growing up on our family farm and ranch, there were two time periods that were busiest: calving season in the spring and harvest in the fall. The time has come for farmers to harvest most of their crops. It’s the fruit of their labor after a long growing season.

If farmers see good rainfall and fair weather, hopefully they have a strong harvest. If not, they pray for a better year next year. Unfortunately, many estimates show that 2024 will be one of the biggest drops in farm income on record due to drought in some parts of the country, severe storms in others (including here in South Dakota), and low commodity prices. I have worked on ag policy for 30 years – but this has been a hard year. 

To make matters harder, that decline in farm income comes as prices remain persistently high for the basic necessities in life, like food, gasoline, and electricity. Farmers have to take care of their own families, too. And when farmers have smaller harvests, that means that the cost of those crops goes up at the grocery store.

Now more than ever, we need to thank our farmers for the work that they do, and we need to support them. They grow our food – we would be lost without them.

For that reason, I have made taking care of our ag producers a top priority as Governor of South Dakota. We’ve worked on numerous new laws and other actions to preserve agriculture for our next generation. We celebrate all our family farms, especially when they reach 100 years or more of ownership in the same family.

This past year, South Dakota passed the best bill in the nation to keep the Chinese Communist Party and other Evil Foreign Governments from owning our state’s precious farm land. China would never allow us to buy land in their country – they don’t even let their own people buy their land. We should not allow our enemies to become our neighbors.

I hope that other states follow our example. After all, South Dakota is just one state out of 50. Since passing that legislation, we just received our first report from my Department of Revenue, and there were no attempted purchases of ag land by Evil Foreign Governments in South Dakota. But we know that it is happening in other places. China’s ownership of American ag land grew by more than 5,300% in just a 10-year period.

And this threat is taking on emerging forms. Water rights have increasingly become an issue as foreign countries have attempted to lease American farmland as a means of stealing our water. And Russia has been buying American cattle to bolster its own beef production with our superior cattle genetics. They want to be competitive with our own beef industry. If they succeed, they will make it much tougher for us to maintain control of our own food supply. As I have said many times, our enemies – especially China – are attempting to infiltrate every aspect of our way of life 

As long as America can feed itself, we control our own destiny. Food security is a matter of national security. We need a strong and diversified food supply, and we must not rely on other nations – much less nations that hate us – to provide our food.

So we need our farmers. We need them to do well, to keep their farms in business, and to continue growing and raising the food that we enjoy on our dinner tables every night. I pray that our farmers enjoy a fantastic harvest. And I will keep doing everything in my power to guarantee their ability to grow our food for years to come.

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Breitbart has a story on South Dakota Senator John Thune and other senators calling out Vice President Kamala Harris, point out that her work as the “broadband czar” was as bad as her work as the “border czar:”

“It appears that your performance as ‘broadband czar’ has mirrored your performance as ‘border czar,’ marked by poor management and a lack of effectiveness despite significant federal broadband investments and your promises to deliver broadband to rural areas,” Thune and the Senate Republicans wrote.

and..

Tucked inside the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is a $42.5 billion fund to dramatically expand internet access across America. Otherwise known as the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, the program has failed to connect one person, even though the bill was passed 1,037 days ago.

and..

Thune cited Harris’s April 2021 statement, which said, “We brought electricity to rural America in the 1930s, and we can bring broadband to rural America today. The American Jobs Plan will make that happen.”

Read the entire story – and read the letter – here.

Failed to connect one person? Good gosh.

State Rep. Carl Perry on September 11:

News on Sept 20…

Maybe epic isn’t the word that Carl wants to use anymore?

(Maybe Carl is starting to have second thoughts about attending….?)

A candidate for North Carolina Governor, embroiled in controversy, is scheduled to speak at an event in South Dakota, according to a website post by Dakota First Action, a political organization.https://t.co/IBR2qn8dEM pic.twitter.com/Y9MvGzIFZO

— KELOLAND News (@keloland) September 20, 2024

In case you needed a palate cleanser after all the Dumpster Doeden/Mark Robinson craziness..  I bring you the #3 trending song on youtube:

The further a person goes down in the layers of burning dumpster with the Dakota First PAC led by Toby Doeden and Doeden’s event that is being headlined by Gubernatorial Candidate Mark Robinson from North Carolina, the deeper the pit in your stomach gets over what the promoters of this event seem to be embracing.

And this comes as the Republicans of North Carolina are bracing themselves for a story that reportedly has Republicans looking to offload their candidate for Governor, as well as Team Trump declaring him persona non grata.

There was a story when Toby Doeden first came on the scene that if you read it, it paints things in a very different light when taken alongside with the controversies brought to South Dakota, as he highlights embattled North Carolina Gubernatorial Candidate Mark Robinson.

In case you have forgotten, the story was in the Dakota Scout this last January that pointed out Doeden’s casual anti-semitism in a tweet as he denied terrifying statistics that 1 in 4 Jewish Americans were the victim of a hate crime, calling it “Fake.”

And he was called out for it by the past chair of the SDGOP:

This guy wants to represent South Dakota in Congress yet disrespects victims of anti-Semitism. No thank you, @TobyforCongress. Here’s a tweet from Toby Doeden’s recently deleted Twitter account: https://t.co/GFIduGbn5a pic.twitter.com/z4hvap3Pdc

— Dan Lederman (@danlederman) January 10, 2024

Of course, Doeden claimed his post “was taken out of context,” despite declaring “THIS IS FAKE” when faced with statistics about Jewish hate crimes. I’m not sure what other context it could be taken in, but as you’ll read, this seems to be a recurrent theme.

Now fast forward 9 months as momentary candidate and now Political Action Committee leader Toby announced he was holding a conservative rally, and bringing a headliner that no one in South Dakota had ever heard of:

Mark Robinson.. Why on earth would Toby Doeden bringing Mark Robinson to South Dakota? Among the first things we found out about Robinson?

In 2018, Robinson shared an anti-gun-control post on Facebook that said, in part: “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.” And last year, speaking at a Charlotte-area church, he said Christians “are called to be led by men,” though he later appeared to backtrack, saying his remarks were meant to encourage men, not imply women couldn’t be leaders.

At a news conference in October, Robinson also downplayed his previous statements about Jews and the Holocaust. “There have been some Facebook posts that were poorly worded on my part,” he said, according to NBC affiliate WRAL of Raleigh. “There is no antisemitism standing here in front of you.”

Read that here.

Oh. More anti-semitism, with accompanying claims of denial. Where have we heard that before? Of course, Robinson denied that it was anti-semitic holocaust denial, much like Doeden denied his statement.

But, as we’re finding out today, maybe it wasn’t the only time..

According to Business North Carolina, Mark Robinson is expected to go on CNN later today to defend himself against a pending story that supposedly accuses him of referring to himself as a "Black Nazi," smearing MLK and making antisemitic comments.https://t.co/Ebb5RqRNBY pic.twitter.com/GGBwbFr2UQ

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 19, 2024

Right now North Carolina Republicans and Team Trump are holding their collective breath waiting for the CNN story, and how bad it’s going to be, and whether they can push him off the ticket. Forget Robinson’s race at this point, right now he threatens to to sink Trump in that state, and to take the entire slate of Republican party candidates down with him.

Yet, this is the person that Toby Doeden is holding out to headline his “night of inspiration, networking, and entertainment.”

If hate-speech is what this event is trying to inspire, it seems that Toby Doeden is going down that road.

**UPDATE**

The CNN Story is out.

Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”

and..

In the pornographic forums, Robinson revealed his unvarnished thoughts on issues such as race, gender and abortion.

Writing in a forum discussing Black Republicans in October 2010, Robinson stated unprovoked: “I’m a Black Nazi!”

That same month, Robinson wrote in another post that he supported the return of slavery.

“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few,” he wrote.

In March 2012, Robinson wrote that he preferred the former leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler over the leadership in Washington during the administration of Barack Obama.

“I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” he wrote.

And that, Dakota First Victory Gala attendees, just may be your speaker.

Gov. Noem Joins Governors’ Coalition for Energy Choice

PIERRE, S.D. – Governor Kristi Noem is one of the founding members of the Governor’s Coalition for Energy Choice (Coalition). The Coalition will help state leaders formulate smart energy policies that will benefit working families, businesses, and our communities.

“We believe in an all-of-the-above approach to unleash American energy and drive down costs for families across our great country,” said Governor Kristi Noem. “South Dakota is the number one state in America for production of renewable energy, not because we mandate it, but because we trust our energy producers to create the most energy for South Dakotans at the lowest cost. The entire nation should take that same approach.”

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 77% of South Dakota’s electricity generation comes from renewable sources, primarily wind and hydropower. South Dakota is also an ideal place for emerging energy production such as next-gen nuclear capabilities and other technologies.

Gas prices are up 51.3% since January 2021, and electricity prices are up 30.1% over the same timeframe.

The Coalition will ensure continued energy choice, minimize permitting and other regulatory barriers, limit expensive energy mandates, focus on affordability and reliability of energy infrastructure, and coordinate to positively manage energy resources and the environment.

Governor Noem was joined in launching the coalition by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, and Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon.

You can find Governor Landry’s announcement of the coalition here.

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