Image by Moises Gonzalez.
Acts of cruelty to animals are more than a slight personality flaw. A history of animal torture and abuse has been linked repeatedly to serial killers and mass shooters.
Which brings us to the deranged animal-killer Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor who is running to be the fascist leader Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump’s second vice president beginning January 20, 2025.
In her recent memoir No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward, Noem proudly tells the story of how she killed her puppy Cricket and a goat in a gravel pit while a shocked construction crew looked on.
Here’s a recent report from The Guardian:
‘ “Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant. What unfolds over the next few pages shows how that effort went very wrong indeed – and, remarkably, how Cricket was not the only domestic animal Noem chose to kill one day in hunting season…She includes her story about the ill-fated Cricket, she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.
By taking Cricket on a pheasant hunt with older dogs, Noem says, she hoped to calm the young dog down and begin to teach her how to behave. Unfortunately, Cricket ruined the hunt, going “out of her mind with excitement, chasing all those birds and having the time of her life”. Noem describes calling Cricket, then using an electronic collar to attempt to bring her under control. Nothing worked. Then, on the way home after the hunt, as Noem stopped to talk to a local family, Cricket escaped Noem’s truck and attacked the family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another”. Cricket the untrainable dog, Noem writes, behaved like “a trained assassin”.
When Noem finally grabbed Cricket, she says, the dog “whipped around to bite me”. Then, as the chickens’ owner wept, Noem repeatedly apologised, wrote the shocked family a check “for the price they asked, and helped them dispose of the carcasses littering the scene of the crime”. Through it all, Noem says, Cricket was “the picture of pure joy”.
“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.
“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.” Noem… got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit. “It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”
Incredibly, Noem’s tale of slaughter is not finished. Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was “nasty and mean”, because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled “disgusting, musky, rancid” and “loved to chase” Noem’s children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes.
Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.
At that point, Noem writes, she realised a construction crew had watched her kill both animals. The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children. “Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”’
This is some seriously demented shit. Let’s see if we’ve got this right: Kristi Noem fails to properly train a lovely young bird dog, fails to secure the beautiful, fun-loving canine while visiting some chicken-owning friends, and the dog does what many a carnivorous dog would do. Noem decides she “hates” the dog and executes it. Then she kills a goat that pissed her off by stinking (don’t you hate it when goats smell bad?) and messing up her kids’ clothes. Noem seems like to like it that that her daughter “Kennedy” (really?) wants to know where Cricket is.
Never mind that Kennedy’s desire to see Cricket contradicts Noem’s claim that the dog was “dangerous to anyone she came into contact with.” (The demented governor’s clearly daughter had no fear of the puppy.)
I wonder about the untold rest of the story. Did Kristi Noem look Kennedy in the eyes and scream as follows:
“MOMMY SHOT YOUR DOG DOWN IN COLD FUCKING BLOOD, KENNEDY. THAT’S RIGHT, LITTLE GIRL, I BLEW A HOLE IN HER HEAD AND LEFT HER TO BLEED OUT IN THAT GRAVEL PIT OVER THERE. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT? SHE WASN’T A GOOD BIRD DOG, KENNEDY, SO I DID WHAT I HAD TO DO! I HATED CRICKET, KENNEDY, SHE JUST DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO BEHAVE LIKE A GOOD DOG AND NOW SHE’S DEAD! WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MOMMY NOW? OH, AND GUESS WHAT, REMEMBER THAT GODDAMN GOAT THAT STINKS AND KNOCKS YOU OVER AND MAKES YOUR CLOTHES DIRTY? MOMMY KILLED HIM TOO! (To the construction crew): HEY WHAT ARE YOU GUYS LOOKING AT? GET BACK TO WORK, PEONS OR I’LL SHOOT YOU TOO!”
(Saturday Night Live skit-writers, feel free to use this.)
The bigger point here isn’t that Noem is a psychopath. It isn’t even that this dog- and goat-killing monster is a state governor with a (now fading) shot at being one heartbeat away from the most dangerous office on Earth early next year. The main thing to note for me is that she is a player in a political system where eliminationist cruelty is seen as a virtue. Let’s not kid ourselves: what Cruella Kristi Noem is trying to signal with her animal-slaughtering tale is her cold-blooded readiness to savagely put down brown-skinned immigrants, Black Lives Matters protesters, resisters of US-backed Israeli genocide, LGBT activists, indigenous activists, environmentalists, abortion rights movements, really the broad panoply of insufficiently fascist Americans her sick, Hitler-channeling master Donald “Dictator for a Day” Trump “calls “the radical left” and likens to “vermin” who need to exterminated in an act of national purification.
Noem is representing sadistic cruelty, a critical component of fascism. Noem is signaling her readiness to back her fellow psychotic Donald “Blood and Soil” Trump to the hilt when he: acts on his promise to invoke the Insurrection Act on the day of his 2025 inauguration; sends out the military to round up “illegals,” set up internment camps, and “end inner city crime in one day;” purges the federal government of everyone who doesn’t sign a loyalty oath to Him; orders the shooting of people who occupy one of his “drill, baby drill” sites and the bloody repression of antiwar activists who rise up against his invasion of Mexico. Noem wants Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump to know she’ll be the rabid attack dog Vice President Mike Pence couldn’t quite be – a fully obedient, well-trained German Shepherd for Dear Leader Donald.
That’s what the Cricket story is all about in Frau Noem’s memoir. “No Going Back” means no return to previously normative bourgeois democracy, civility and rule of law. It means going to full-on MAGA Republi-Nazi rule under the cult of Herr Trump.
This is of course deeply consistent with her sadistic far-right anti-women, anti-Black, anti-gay, anti-transgender, anti-climate record as a governor, a record that has included the open embrace of Covid denialism along with the usual far right positions.
Cruella Noem may have significantly damaged her vice-presidential ambitions with her dog murder tale. Americans, me included, LOVE their dogs and this is true across the nation’s sharply polarized partisan divide. The Cricket execution is proving to be a public relations disaster for Noem within and beyond South Dakota, where even Republicans have been taken aback by how transparently her focus is on her national ambitions.
That’s good to know, but the sad fact of the matter is that Cruella Kristi Noem had reason to think that boasting in print about psychopathic heartlessness might work to her political advantage. A harsh fact that should not be lost in our puppy-loving rejection of her demented insanity is that – as Henry Giroux has been telling us for years – US society and political culture are poisoned by ubiquitous, callous, brutal, and parasitic cruelty – cruelty to all sentient beings, dogs and humans and birds and …you name it.
The taproot of this cruelty is the capitalist system, for which there is no higher purpose in life than the egoistic pursuit of private accumulation and appropriation and under whose rule humanity is mired in a soulless, savagely rat race of each against all: individual against individual, family against family, household against household, community against community, nation against nation, human society against livable ecology. This vile system contaminates everything it touches, including the natural environment we all share with other living things. It is the seedbed of multiple national imperialisms that threaten to blow the planet up many times over. It is the engine of a spreading global pathology of fascism, which feeds on the profits system’s relentless profaning and delegitimization of the democracy it disingenuously pretends to uphold.
While the formerly republican Republifascists are in the vanguard of the No Going Back crossover to authoritarian Christian white nationalism (Amerikaner neofascism), the Democrats are deeply complicit in the process. They are partners in the making and protection of a cruel, sadistic, militaristic, cancerous and violence-based social and political order at home as well as abroad. The blue party doesn’t just lead in the infliction of imperial bloodshed abroad; it also brutally crushes dissent at home. With Democratic mayors and university presidents cracking down on students protesters who rise up against the richly bipartisan American Empire’s funding, equipping, and political and diplomatic protection of racist and apartheid Israel’s savage, genocidal ethnic cleansing of most of the Gaza Strip, we see Weimar/Vichy Dems combining mass murderous imperialism abroad with brutal repression at home.
As Democrats decry Cruella Noem’s murder of a single dog in South Dakota, try to imagine how many beloved family cats and dogs have been murdered along with 40,000 Palestinian human beings, mostly women and children, by the genocide that Israel has inflicted for half a year with the support of Joe Biden and most of the Democratic Party.
Cruelty? It’s not just about the Republi-fascists. The Democratic war and genocide party is now applauding and backing the openly election-denying Christian fascist US House Speaker Mike Johnson because he worked with them to help pass legislation to spend tens of billions of dollars to continue the United States’ backing of Judeo-fascist Israel’s crucifixion of Gaza, to further fuel an unconscionable and US-instigated bloodbath in Ukraine, and to further preparation for a coming war with China. All through the post-October 7th genocide in Gaza, top Democrats have helped justify the heartless slaughter of innocents by maliciously playing along with the sick Orwellian lie that equates opposing racist genocide with “antisemitism. Democrats are in the vanguard of the repression of the righteous student protests, cruel suppression demanded by fanatical neo-McCarthyite Congressional Republi-fascists and applauded by Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump himself. Look for a good number of Democrats to take up the role of the French Vichy regime in coming years. America’s cruelty, inseparably linked to its capitalism, the taproot of its imperialism, is richly bipartisan.
Trumpolini, Genocide Joe, the whole damn system has to go.
This essay is based on a talk I put up on The Paul Street Report.
The post The Cruelty is the Point appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
