Look, I realize that this is horribly cold, but Noem is attempting to set herself up as something continuous with the Trump brand of performative indifference to polite norms and the classic GOP posturing as somebody who’s tough. The story is an exercise in branding, where the intention is describe an act that would trigger disgust and shock in the kind of people that conservatives view as weak, and to do so in a way that makes her more of what her target audience want than her competitors.

Here’s the part I hate but feel I have to point out: this story could be embellished because the parts we find upsetting and ugly are plausibly touch-ups designed to sell Noem to reactionaries. The stuff that seems so upsetting that you’d only write it because it’s true is feasibly an (unsuccessful) attempt to create ad copy for her intended audience: remember the selling point is how capable of doing dirty, uncomfortable things she is, that the direct contrast is “I can shoot my dog, I can govern my state because both are require coldness and expediently doing hard things.” By focusing on the act of shooting the dog we’re neglecting that she’s intentionally presenting shooting the dog as exemplary of…something. The act of depicting this, including the internal details such as her anger and disappointment with the puppy are deliberately put onto a page as ad copy.

Gross. It’s gross.

Think on that: think on what has become normal in conservative discourse to brag about, to say without shame. Shit, go look any given day at what Laura Loomer says into a microphone; watch Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley perform “Anything you can say that involves state terror, I can say worse.” Every new candidate trying to make themselves distinctive has to figure out how to set the bar lower…be uglier, be more shocking, more authentic in their compact indifference to norms in ways that signifies strength to cruel people that think themselves superior…while not hitting anything that upsets their audience because their own performative hardness is in fact riddled with sentimentality and genuine emotion that they just don’t admit to.

It’s like doing the limbo blindfolded, and the limbo bar is Donald Trump giving a speech where he graphically describes executing a Moro rebel with a bullet dipped in pig’s blood.

Weak people are more dangerous; they’ll arrive at killing you faster because they’re primed to escalate, to make everything a point about their strength. We’re looking at the aesthetics of the weak and cruel. It doesn’t matter if they are psychopaths, they are incentivized by the enclosed culture that they’re within to behave like psychopaths..which is actually scarier, because psychopaths are at least blessed rare, while tryhard fuckups doing anything for clout are myriad. The loop of performance and reward is spiralling down, it’s not a cult it’s teenagers goading each other into eating Tide pods. We don’t have the luxury of imagining that this is the bottom, the outlier, because pretty soon somebody else is going to have to top this.