Gov. Kristi Noem Says Gov’t, Not COVID, Crushed the Economy in CPAC Speech

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, said “government crushed the economy,” not the coronavirus, as she championed her rights-respecting approach to the flu-like bug against the tyrannical lockdown scheme.

“Just as quickly, government turned around and held itself out as the savior, and frankly the Treasury Department can’t print money fast to keep up with Congress’s wishes. But not everyone has followed this path,” she said on Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida.

Noem said state and local governments decimated the economy by imposing unconstitutional and harmful stay-at-home orders, business shutdowns, mask mandates, and the 6-foot social isolation policy.

She began the speech by joking that “a year ago most of you had no idea who I was.”

But Noem, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, earned herself conservative acclaim when she resisted calls to lockdown South Dakota’s citizens.

“In my administration, we resisted the call for virus control at the expense of everything else,” she said. “We looked at the science, the data, and the facts, and then we took a balanced approach.”

Noem said the models’ predictions about the lethality and hospitalization rate for the coronavirus, which bureaucrats and politicians cited to restrict the bill of rights, failed to materialize.

Anthony Fauci, who led Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, predicted that South Dakota’s hospitals would have 10,000 coronavirus patients at the disease’s peak. The actual number was 600.

“I don’t know if you agree with me, but Dr. Fauci is wrong a lot,” Noem said. “Even in a pandemic, public health policy needs to take into account people’s economic and social well-being. People need to keep a roof over their heads, they need to feed their families, and they need their dignity.”