South Dakota's Department of Health has been turned into a sloganeering outlet for the Noem administration.

I couldn’t get the full text of the South Dakota Department of Health’s gratuitous announcement of its “no mask” policy on our home page, but it’s really a doozy. Here it is, as posted on X (formerly Twitter):  While we anticipate an increase in Covid-19 during the upcoming respiratory virus season, the S.D. Dept. of Health has never issued a mask mandate and doesn’t plan to start now. South Dakota will continue to stand  as a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world.”

This, of course, is a rehash of the Kristi Noem fantasy that South Dakota is a place where freedom thrives and that under her watchful gaze our state isn’t merely just a place to be free – it's the world’s “beacon of freedom,” all of which comes across as rhetorical megalomania.

I mean, South Dakota is a “beacon of freedom” for the rest of the world? C’mon.

I suppose there are some people in our state breathing sighs of relief that they won’t have to be told to wear masks just in case there’s a flare-up of Covid-19 in coming months, but considering that masks weren’t mandated during the pandemic, why would they be worried about it in the first place? South Dakota’s Health Department really doesn’t have to make a peremptory announcement that masks won’t be required if a second wave of Covid-19 materializes. This is just us South Dakotans making a lot of noise about ourselves.

Noem’s administration just felt the need to bring up mask mandates and South Dakota’s determination to ignore them. Obviously, Noem still thinks her rejection of those mandates was some kind of a coup, but as it turned out, South Dakota’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was no great shakes. The decision put us around the middle of the pack in terms of outcomes, so Noem’s handling of the crisis wasn’t particularly noteworthy in terms of results.

On that score, and maybe not directly relevant but interesting nonetheless, 10 out of the 10 best performing states, going by the metrics of the Council of Foreign Relations, went blue, politically, in 2020. Same goes for the metrics applied by The Commonwealth Fund.  

Political coloration notwithstanding, though, a more grating aspect to the S.D. Health Department’s self-promoting “no mask”  announcement is its spurious claim that the mandate won’t happen because South Dakota is a “beacon” of freedom.

Why is the claim spurious?

Because that fantasy of a restriction-less, free society isn’t the case for so many South Dakotans whose freedom is choked off by the reality of state-imposed limits on their lifestyles and aspirations. Women who want full reproductive freedom don’t think South Dakota is much of a beacon for them. Same goes for those who seek a broad spectrum of ideas in history and social studies instruction in our public schools.  University of South Dakota students aren’t free to post messages on campus bulletin boards without prior approval, and gender-affirming medical care, consisting of widely accepted procedures within the nation’s medical establishment, is banned in South Dakota.

For people affected by these mandates, South Dakota is a beacon of conformity, and that’s a fact no matter how frequently and how loudly our state’s public pronouncements claim otherwise. 

John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills.  He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years.  His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald.  Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam.