Kristi Noem’s National Guard Deployment Is America’s Future
The private sector has long been absorbing duties that belong to the government—and that pattern is intensifying.
The recent decision by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to accept private funding from Willis Johnson, a major Republican donor, to send her state’s National Guard to the Mexican border has been called unprecedented, a conflict of interest, an abuse of public power for personal political gain, an outsourcing and privatization of national security, an assault on the authority and legitimacy of the federal government, and a reflection of, as the journalist Paul Waldman put it in The Washington Post, “some people’s rejection of the idea that existing rules and structures have to be considered legitimate at all.”
It is all of those things. And it may be one other thing too: the
