Predatory is the Point
Unwilling to put the work in to training, Kristi Noem shot her 14-month-old dog because the lack of control was unbearable to her, exemplifying the authoritarian framework undergirding conservatism.
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By now, you’ve likely already heard about what Republican Governor Kristi Noem, who is on a shortlist to be Donald Trump’s V.P., did to her dog. We will not be getting into any details about it here but mentioning the broader facts, and for that reason, we are issuing a trigger warning.
TRIGGER WARNING (REPUBLICANS AND DOGS DO NOT MIX)
Conservatism has long been seen as the strict-father model, versus the the nurturing-parent model of liberalism. The cognitive framing behind conservative ideology is that children (and dogs) are born bad. They must be abused into submission.
This framing has been taken to an extreme as the Republican Party has allowed itself to by hijacked by an authoritarian. And so we are at the animal cruelty portion of this program.
Bragging about Her Own Lack of Self-Discipline
South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem is bragging in her book about murdering her puppy because she hated her. Noem hated her puppy for reasons that reflect poorly on Noem: a lack of training and lack of patience — speaking to the larger issue of a lack of discipline on Noem’s part.
This lack of discipline brings us to a psychological motivator behind modern day conservatism as it relates to the culture wars, which is a lack of personal self-control resulting in an obsession with controlling others. We see this in their attempts to control gay people, in their attempts to control women’s bodies, in their book banning in attempts to control what people think and even what information they can have access to — everything comes down to the kind of control a predator seeks over their victim.
Another way of seeing this is their belief (which they often cite as stemming from their religion) in an external locus of control. Studies show liberals, who are maligned on the media as having no boundaries, are actually much more disciplined in private, as they are motivated by an internal locus of control. Because they tend to believe in an internal locus of control, they teach their children about the importance of self-discipline.
This whole belief system extends out to policy. For example, liberals want to teach their children sex education so they can make better decisions for themselves as they navigate the turbulent waters of adolescence and young adulthood, whereas conservatives prefer to keep their children afraid of external judgment while only teaching them abstinence, which doesn’t allow for mistakes or bad judgment or natural teenage instinct. Then when a young girl ends up pregnant, she got what she deserved in their mind. They don’t want her to have the option of birth control, let alone abortion, because predatory control is the point.
Lack of Self-Control
This same mechanism is at play with men like Republican Speaker Mike Johnson, who doesn’t trust himself around pornography and so has had his own son monitor his porn usage, but Johnson is against abortion for religious reasons.
Johnson sees the world through his own lens, projecting his lack of self-control onto others, so he sees it as his job to impose control.
Another way of seeing this is that it is the energy behind authoritarianism, and can be seen in extreme authoritative parenting, which too often has religious roots championing abuse in order to control children.
Liberals don’t tend to see children as needing to be controlled but rather as needing to be equipped to make good decisions and self-govern. This is why they are more likely to raise children with self-discipline.
There is an old adage about girls who go to Catholic school that is exceptionally misogynistic and creepy, but also reflects the psychological concept that the more we try to suppress something in kids, the more they will act out.
Damaged People Hurt People
Imagine those kids as grownups, and you have Kristi Noem, the proud puppy murderer who couldn’t stand to be embarrassed by her out-of-control puppy named Cricket (i.e., a 14-month-old puppy acting appropriately for her age), who was revealing Noem’s personal failures by not obeying the Republican Governor.
Noem expected her puppy to be trained to hunt hunting with older dogs. That isn’t how training dogs to hunt works; it takes months to years to train dogs properly to hunt. But people like Noem don’t want to put the work into relationships, they’d rather force compliance and if that fails, murder is warranted.
Her lack of care about training a dog to hunt with her goes to the larger conversation about conservative policy championing letting anyone - even suspected terrorists - carry an automatic rifle in public spaces.
There is no discussion about the training such a weapon requires, or that in the military this training is intense, requiring dedication and discipline. They don’t want the responsible part of gun ownership. They just want the brazen predator cosplaying a hero. It’s very surface, very image based, and very empty of anything that could potentially be heroic one day.
They Really Don’t Get Basic Decency
Conservatives trying to defend Noem argued why are “libs” upset about murdering a puppy but not about abortion, which actually makes the predatory point even stronger.
The people who claim to be so concerned about a fetus do not care about live children being murdered at school in mass shootings, they worship Kyle Rittenhouse for his murder of two people and wounding of a third for which he was found not guilty on all counts because he apparently traveled across state lines AR-15-style rifle to “defend storefronts”, worship George Zimmerman, the acquitted killer of Trayvon Martin, and worship an adjudicated rapist and con artist who is currently in court facing criminal election interference in New York while his team argue before the Supreme Court that Trump has immunity for trying to steal elections because he was president once.
While certainly not all dog abusers are Republicans, there are enough storied about high-ranking Republican officials, think then presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who are /were running for the top job abusing their dogs to suggest a pattern might well be present — and indeed, it is found in the ideology itself.
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