Kristi Noem’s dog-killing embodies the cruel phoneyness of today’s Republicans
After South Dakota’s Republican governor, Kristi Noem, proudly admitted in a forthcoming memoir to marching her young puppy Cricket to a gravel pit to kill her with a shotgun, she rationalized the despicable act by arguing that Cricket had been aggressive.
She also said that she used the same gravel pit to shoot a “disgusting, musky, rancid” unnamed goat – but botched the job, leaving the goat to suffer unnecessarily while she rushed to her truck to get a second shell. (It’s unclear why Noem, supposedly a shrewd outdoorswoman, didn’t think to carry more shells on her.)
Noem has defended her story by proclaiming that Americans want “leaders who are authentic”. It’s a bad excuse. It’s also untrue, because Noem, like so many other political firebrands who are infiltrating and redefining the Republican party, is anything but authentic.
Her political brand is simply a veneer – a fake, stylized brand of dangerous Trump Republicanism whose moral roots are about as deep as a bad facelift. This brand not only fails what used to be the Republican party; it is also destroying and dividing the US, and it’s more evident than ever here in the American west.
In Montana, the Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, has a registered cattle brand, yet he owns no cattle. He takes agricultural tax exemptions on his luxury estate in Bozeman even though he doesn’t do much serious ranching or farming.
In 2021, Gianforte illegally shot and killed a collared Yellowstone wolf that had its leg caught in a steel-jawed trap. He wanted to stuff the wolf and display it in his office – presumably without its radio collar, which would have dampened the effect he was going for.
Then, after realizing he didn’t have the proper training certification to shoot a live animal stuck in a trap for what could have been days, Gianforte tried to lie to investigators about shooting it. If this sounds familiar, it is; in 2017 Gianforte also misled police officers after body-slamming a Guardian reporter.
Yet Gianforte wants his constituents to believe he is, somehow, a fair-chase hunter – a rugged, tough-guy Montanan, even though he spent most of his life in front of a computer screen in the Philadelphia suburbs. In Montana,
we have a more accurate word for people like Greg Gianforte and Kristi Noem: posers.
Real hunters, real gun enthusiasts, real bird dog owners – “realAmericans”, to use a phrase so often invoked by the Republican party – know that politicians like Gianforte and Noem are phoneys. They’re trying to create fake versions of themselves to publicly demonstrate their capacity for cruelty and extremism without being bothered by any responsibility or morality.
I’ve sold millions of guns in my career as a former firearms executive, but I am no longer a Republican. That’s because I stood up for what I believed in when I saw things take a turn for the worse. I left what I considered a dream job because of a lack of responsibility and morality in the gun industry.
I’m still, however, very much a hunter. Since I was a kid, I’ve owned and rigorously trained bird dogs like the one Noem killed. I have three today. One of them is Aldo, a German wire-haired pointer just like Cricket.
These dogs are exceptional companions whose strong prey drive means they need daily exercise and training; I’ve spent hundreds of days hiking and shooting and hunting with my dogs. All bird dog owners know this, and Noem has no excuse. If neither Kristi Noem nor Greg Gianforte have the patience, responsibility or moral compass when it comes to basic decency to animals, they lack the fundamental decency needed to govern a state.
Real hunters are sickened about what Gianforte and Noem did because we understand our social compact. We know that real fair-chase hunting relies on a tightly woven fabric of self-enforced ethics, respect for our wildlife and the stewardship of the animals who have, for millennia, stood by our side – pets like the one Noem executed in a gravel pit with a shotgun because she was “untrainable”.
If Noem applies this kind of reasoning to her job, and we must assume she does, no wonder South Dakota’s economy has plunged to among the worst in the nation since she took office.
If Gianforte believes “fair-chase” hunting is shooting a collared animal stuck in a trap, no wonder that under his tenure, starting teacher salary in our state has fallen to 51st in the nation (that’s right, a territory beat us!). No wonder his approval rating is at a miserable 37%. No wonder he couldn’t be bothered to explain why the property taxes on his privately owned home went down last year, while virtually everyone else around him got a tax hike.
For years, responsible, reasonable people in the west have seethed at the unabashed theft of our societal goodwill by posers like Greg Gianforte and Kristi Noem.
There is no good that comes from the devastating story of Cricket’s demise, or the wolf that wandered out of Yellowstone only to get caught in a trap until Greg Gianforte showed up with a gun.
But at least now the rest of the nation can see the dangers of electing these phonies.
Ryan Busse, a former firearms executive, is a Democratic candidate running to become Montana’s next governor
to-find dimensions. While Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels and Pharrell speak to Smith’s sole impact on hip-hop in particular (suffice to say without Smith, Adidas probably never gets into business with Kanye West), Lee’s film caters more to tennis geeks who have long admired Smith’s serve-and-volley game and his equally relentless commitment to social justice causes.
Smith emerged as a global celebrity while the US was divided over the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement. In the film, Smith is candid about growing up in the homogeneous cloister that was 1950s Pasadena. It could have easily saddled him with a close-minded worldview. But instead of defaulting to whiteness, Smith embraced the things he didn’t know – not least Ashe, the best friend who remains in his heart. “He was just a great guy,” Smith recalls, “the leader, the one who was having to go through things we didn’t have to go through. His wife and daughter are still close to us. I mean, we really enjoyed each other’s company – and it was him who made that possible.”
Together, Smith and Ashe visited hospitals in South Vietnam with their Davis Cup teammate Clark Graebner and Bob Lutz – the partner with whom Smith set a new standard in doubles play. “Bob Lutz had a guy die right in front of him,” Ashe told the New York Times 20 years later. “It was a very sobering experience.”
As the current class of students lead protests on college campuses all over the country, Smith can’t help feeling like he’s watching history repeat – not least at USC, his alma mater. “It reminds me of the era when I was there,” he says, “when there were a lotof demonstrations – for civil rights, the war, political upheaval, Kennedy getting shot. It’s somewhat similar; I was thinking, Is it going to get back to a quieter time in another few weeks or months? What’s going to be the evolution of what’s going on right now? And certainly there was the evolution in my period where the war did end eventually, but there’s always been a tension in the subcultures in the United States and around the world. We don’t know how it’s going to transpire.”
With tennis being a balkanized sport played all over the globe, Lee had his work cut out tracking down footage of Smith’s career and shooting amid Covid restrictions – which robbed the project of one of the game’s most colorful personalities in Ilie Năstase, the bad boy who tangled with Smith at Wimbledon. “Năstase’s the type of guy where if you didn’t want him to talk, he would talk,” Smith jokes. “And then if you wanted him to talk, he’s quiet. He’s an enigma.”
Shooting at Centre Court, where Smith was crowned champion in the first men’s final held on a Sunday, was a massive coup. “Stan has such incredible relationships around the world,” Lee says. “So when he asked, it was like, ‘When do you wanna do this?’”
It was Lee’s good luck that the Smiths shot hours of home videos from the world tours and that Margie had held on to the footage all these years. And those behind-the-scenes peeks of their private life become that much richer when their family welcomes in Mark Mathabane, the South African émigré who went on to become a bestselling author and college professor thanks to Ashe and Smith hatching his escape from apartheid.
For as much as Smith has done publicly and privately to support righteous causes, in the film, Smith expresses some regret for not going even harder. “I could’ve done more with Arthur,” he says, before drifting back to a few of the small ways he helped Mathabane – whom Smith set up at USC. “I would drive and stop at a phone booth and call him back. He’d have a problem with a coach or something. He was like our first son, so we got that experience.”
Many of the traits that make Smith such an approachable superstar (his gentleness, his humility) can also make him an unintentionally tough nut to crack. But Lee eventually got him to open up by watching old match film and family home videos, the bulk of which Margie and Stan hadn’t seen since they were shot. (Watching them watch themselves for the first time in decades is one of the film’s many tender moments.) “He gets vulnerable,” Lee says. “He gets emotional. It was emotional for me.”
As for the shoes that Smith made famous, they might look simple next to the current crop of air-cushioned, moisture-wicking offerings. But back in the day, the Stan Smith was as hi-tech as it got, the rare sneaker that didn’t gush out sweat under heavy use. “We were wearing canvas shoes,” Smith remembers of the preferred footwear on tour. “One of the great things about [the Stan Smith shoe] was it had these holes in it, which would help when it was really hot in Washington DC and humid places like that. It was a big deal to be able to wear those shoes.” Now, at last, young sneaker heads know exactly why.
Who is Stan Smith? opens in Los Angeles on 3 May, New York on 10 May and around the rest of the US throughout May with a UK release to be announced