Surprise! The rollout for Kristi Noem’s anti-LGBTQ+ “whistleblower hotline” has been a total sh*tshow
From prioritizing feelings over facts to radical indoctrination, as a country, we should be ashamed of this.As a state, South Dakota can show the nation what quality higher education is supposed to look like.
pic.twitter.com/wMdl7Op2EfNoem encouraged students, professors, faculty, parents, taxpayers, and anyone with a phone, really, to call and complain about anything and everything “woke” happening at the state’s public higher education institutions.
Within hours of the hotline going live, the mailbox was full. Shortly after that, Noem announced that–surprise!–it had received an alarming number of reports of schools encouraging “transgender ideologies” and requiring students to share their preferred pronouns during course introductions.Other complaints included students being asked to wear masks and take COVID tests, being assigned to read non-white authors in their freshman lit courses, being supplied with Ukrainian flag pins, and being encouraged to take antidepressants to help cope with, wait for it, depression.But things quickly went awry when confusion arose over who was actually supposed to manage the hotline and field the thousands of incoming calls.
Noem initially said the Board of Regents would handle it, but the Board of Regents said it was being “fully managed by the governor’s office,” despite the fact that callers were greeted with a message thanking them for “calling the South Dakota Board of Regents whistleblower hotline.”At some point, the board agreed to take responsibility for managing the hotline and clearing its overloaded mailbox… only for an entirely new set of difficult questions to emerge.
