The following is a rant in first person format – something I have rarely done across the thousands of articles and commentaries I’ve written over the years. It’s the only way to convey the message properly. Here we go.
Five-plus years of directly observing and participating in GOP politics in South Dakota has left me scratching my head in continuing puzzlement.
BACKGROUND
Having been born and raised (K-12 grades) in South Dakota, fishing walleye (and every other fish imaginable growing up), hunting night-crawlers with a flashlight, seining minnows and crawdads, playing sports, etc., I had an idyllic childhood that left me naïve to the ways of the world. At age 17, I took my very first plane ride to Washington, DC, enroute to the US Naval Academy. That led to a 30-year Navy career (active and reserve), including deployments to the Middle East during Operation Desert Storm and for many exercises there and in the Western Pacific until my Navy retirement in 2004. That 5’9’’ kid who weighed 135 pounds back then ended up visiting probably 40 or 50 countries around the world (I have lost track). And naïve no longer. Those who continually try to tear down America and undermine the US Constitution – that would be MANY members of the modern Democrat Party – make me see red because as a lifelong national security practitioner and expert, I have remained loyal to my sworn oath my whole life.
But I digress…
Throughout that period, I was a defense contractor in San Diego working for various DoD/DoN agencies involved largely in information technologies, computers, communications/intelligence/surveillance systems, R&D, strategy, and policy. Got to travel all over the world including flying into Baghdad Int’l Airport in 2007 and 2008 on a C-5 while sitting on my loaner helmet (that procedure was learned in the Vietnam War to prevent one’s butt from catching shrapnel, etc., while flying).
While contemplating retirement, my younger brother (a retired Marine lieutenant colonel) convinced us to build a house in Springfield on the banks of the Mighty Mo. That suited me because I wanted to return to my fishing roots, and my brother would only be six miles away downstream from us. And thus, our house was completed, and we drove from San Diego to South Dakota, arriving in late December 2019.
Retirement after 30 years as a naval officer and 39 years as a defense contractor with one company loomed! However, the 2020 election changed all that. And I was about to learn that “Red South Dakota” – which looked like Heaven to a guy who’d lived most of his adult life in the lost-cause state of California – wasn’t quite as red as I thought it was.
THE FORK IN THE RIVER
I had become politically aware (and a veritable political junkie) during Reagan’s first presidential campaign in 1980 when a gnarly old Navy limited duty officer of Polish descent handed my a copy of Reagan’s favorite periodical that he read religiously virtually all of his adult life: Human Events, the National Conservative Weekly.
In those days before the internet, independent print media was where it’s at for real analysis and commentary because even then I learned that the three TV networks plus public TV were dominated by Democrat/leftwing narratives and voices. I subscribed to 5 different conservative periodicals and saved every issue, as I fully intended to make use of them in an overt political sense at some point later in life. They were intended to be my institutional memory. In about 2016 or so, my wife convinced me to get rid of all the big plastic storage containers that I had used to save all those back issues over the years. It was tough to do, but now all my 10,000+ files are digital and at my fingertips.
The point of this is that I became well-versed in US national-level issues of the day. Looking to retirement, we had lived in California for decades and watched the state taken over and destroyed by the Democrat Party – even in what was once blood-red San Diego County!
As I ended my defense contractor career, I began posting “threads” on Twitter after having shunned the new social media for years. Threads are what amount to articles broken into word-limited postings that are chained together in sequence to convey entire articles of, in some cases, over 2000 words each. Those Twitter threads on topics of interest to me (national security, foreign policy, economics, and particularly politics) caught the eyes of several independent media editors, and eventually I was asked to write for redstate.com and a couple of other outlets. I have lost track of the total number of articles I’ve written, but the number certainly exceeds 2,000 articles.
The peak of my Redstate career was in November 2020. While fishing with buddies on the Missouri River, my wife called me and said that Rush Limbaugh had just finished spending a whole segment (20 minutes) reading and commenting on one of my articles – in this instance about the questions of election integrity that were beginning to surface after the 2020 election. What a rush (pun intended)!
That article led to a series of follow-ons on election fraud that were sourced from an independent research group of PhD mathematicians, statisticians, computer scientists, and others who analyzed publicly available election information (voter rolls, Edison Research databases, election results, etc.), all of which are posted here. I discovered over time that anyone who repeats the Democrat myth that “the 2020 election was the most secure in history” is either ignorant of the facts or is a bald-faced liar.
By February 2021, I had my “fork in the river” moment, in which I decided to get off the couch and get involved in SD politics as opposed to being a spectator. That led to an 18-month journey to elect an GOP executive board in my county, which had been inactive in the SDGOP for years. That journey ended in August 2022, and another one began: the meeting of dozens (if not hundreds) of fellow Republicans across the state, as well as the building of 50 or so digital folders for collection of now hundreds of articles and commentaries on key issues and state legislation under consideration, observing many legislative session days in Pierre, helping organize a group of life-minded county-level officials, and gripping and grinning various Republicans at county Lincoln Day Dinners across the state. And then there were the hundreds of hours of phone calls with some of those same people over the last three years. Suffice it to say, that journey opened my eyes!
WHAT I LEARNED
As a lifelong systems analyst who made a living trying to make complex systems understandable for average people, the SDGOP presented a challenge analogous to problems I’ve tackled in the past. The purpose of this article is to focus on one troubling phenomenon that I discovered in my “journey of discovery.” There are certainly other issues that need to be tackled (e.g., some SD politicians were once Democrats and changed their party affiliation but not their core ideology in order to have a career in politics), but this one has been sticking in my craw for some time.
I have been amazed to find a number of Republicans who are active in the Party, as well as other “strap-hangers,” who seem to let emotions determine who they interact – or in many cases don’t interact with! – in the Party. Let me explain.
There are a lot of people in the SDGOP who somehow over the years got on the wrong side of an issue or two with elected Republicans and/or other Party officials, and those differences in the past cloud their judgments of their opponents years – and in some cases decades – later. I have found that the people on both sides of these disagreements actually agree on most of the issues of the day but can’t seem to get beyond those past emotional arguments. Furthermore, there are a number of people who simply refuse to associate or even communicate with various elected Republicans due to those past disagreements.
Now I get that the Republican Party encourages open debate and discussion – unlike the Democrats who crush debate and demand conformance from top to bottom in their Party. But many Republicans in South Dakota have forgotten and routinely violate Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.” The Cvrk modification is to not speak ill of any Republican in public so as not to give the Democrats ammunition to use against us.
Unfortunately, there are those in the SDGOP who bad-mouth other Republicans on blogs (e.g., the infamous one run out of Brookings), Facebook pages, Signal channel groups, and social media, which provides fodder for the left-leaning media on which to feast and helps the Democrats with their political strategizing. [Note: Regarding that Brookings-based blog, I have found it to be absolutely the most divisive voice within the SDGOP “firmament.” It regularly attacks elected Republicans, Party officials, and others by name – and usually by misrepresenting the facts. That guy has attacked me by name several times, yet we have never met, and he has no earthly idea what I actually think about ANYTHING in the realm of politics. And for the life of me, a big problem is that our most senior elected Republicans continue to advertise on that website. It’s an issue that needs to be corrected!]
Some in the SDGOP forget that elected Republican officeholders are almost always better than their Democrat opponents. Even marginal Republican officeholders deny Democrats “resume enhancement opportunities” (checking off experience blocks in pursuit of higher office). I mean, who in his right mind wants to elect a Democrat as our only US representative to Congress when all that would do is help tip the balance and possibly result in a “Speaker Hakeem Jeffries” and all the crap and worse that we endured during San Fran Nan’s speakership?
The point is this: Republican officeholders are tools in the toolbox. They are who we must use/leverage/influence until “worn out or replaced.” And in politics, you can’t influence elected politicians unless you communicate and are on good standing with them, i.e., you haven’t publicly insulted them, and they will actually LISTEN to and discuss issues with you beyond just the fact that you’re one of their constituents. It doesn’t matter how they voted “last time” (other than for consideration during the next Republican primary); it matters how they vote “next time,” and the only hope to impact/influence them in the future is through further civil dialog – unless/until they are primaried out because of their past voting record.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Long-term grudges are counterproductive and, frankly, reflect a surprising political unsophistication. There is no hope of influencing anyone unless that person will take your call and/or not walk away from you when they see you approaching them in person.
Chastise in private if you must, but praise in public when warranted (even those who vote contrary to the SDGOP party platform on occasion also vote consistent with the platform on other issues). Chastise them for their “bad votes” in private, and praise them for their “good votes” in public. Keep the communications channels open in expectation that you can influence them positively in the future. You have ZERO influence if you can’t talk to them. And work behind the scenes to replace any during the primaries who are determined to be lost causes over time.
Remember Reagan’s 11th commandment!
Here endeth the sermon.
The end.
This article originally appeared in Stu Cvrk’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission
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