Addresses the immigrant experience and womens issues at the time. Melissa homestead, english professor at the university of nebraska lincoln has talked for many years and will join us on the program. Watch books that shaped america featuring my antonia. Free mobile video app or online. Be sure to scan our qr code to listen to forked cast. You can learn more about the authors of the books featured. South carolinas republican governor kristi noem outlines priority speaking at Steamboat Institute conference in colorado and what else she hopes to accomplish, this is just over an hour. Good afternoon. I am so excited to be with all of you. Thank you so much for inviting me and getting a chance to spend with friends is absolutely remarkable. I love her. Have you gotten a chance to know her a little bit. Shes amazing, isnt she . Yeah. She gave my whole speech for me so now the i dont have to say anything real important. I just get to spend some time with all of you sharing a few thoughts. Listen, im the governor of the great state of south dakota but i think the most important thing for all of you to know about me today is that im a grandma. So i, theres a couple of things that happens when you become a grandma. I was frankly for years was irritated by all you grandparents in the room because you would always go on and on about how amazing it was to be grandparents and i kept thinking, theres no way it can be that great and then my daughter cassidy and soninlaw kyle had miss addie, everything changed. Shes brilliant. Its amazing. Shes 2 years old and has brother named branch who is six months old but the other day we had a chants to go to chance to go to my mothers birthday party. Im sorry, im telling a grandma story right away. Addy spent half an hour with me on the floor trying to get me to teach her to tie her shoes at age 2. She kept saying, tie, tie, at 2 years old i said to the cassidy, she is so much smarter than you kids were. [laughter] cassidy, said, no shes not, you are paying a lot more attention to her than you did us. You were working all of the time when we were growing up but i thought at 2 years old if she knows how to tie her shoes, she gets to be the next president of the United States, right . The best thing about being a grandma is you get to lose your filter. And i think that whats going on in this country right now all of us are ready to lose our filters, arent we . We are looking for little more normal human beings that are genuine that will tell the truth. Today im going to have a conversation with all of you. I want to share with some of you my background, my stories, some of you how many of you never heard me speak before . Quiet a few. I will tell you who i am because im guessing most of you in this room have never even heard my name until probably 3 or 4 years ago when it was during the covid pandemic and night after night on the National News the liberals were kicking me in the head and they were kicking me in the head for the decisions i was making in south dakota, Rachel MaddowElizabeth Warren were calling me irresponsible for the decisions that i was making. But i tell you, my people were happy and they were happy because they were free. So im going to give you a little bit of a background and an understanding of how i make my decisions not just as governor but as a person and i think in order for you to know that you need to know me and how i grew up. I grew up as the daughter of a rancher and his wife my dad was very, very tough. In fact, he was the kind of guy that woke us up every single day by yelling get up, more people die in bed than anybody else. I remember lying in bed thinking is that true. We got up and worked with our family. We were always together. He taught us work ethic and the value of being together as a family and created children that knew how to tackle problems. Obviously just remember not being able to figure him out and what he was doing. He never once taught us to do anything. He just had us do it. For instance, i was about 12 years old when my dad and i were leaving the field, we were big farmers and ranchers in the state of south dakota, one to have largest operations at the time and we were leaving a field after harvesting corn with a semi load of corn and i was sitting in the passenger seat of semi and dad turned to me, i forgot i have to bring the other truck home. Here, christy, jump over here, make your corners wide and i will meet you and i immediately start today cry and started to drive home the 7 miles that i had to do get to the farm. I took the widest corners you have ever seen. I didnt even shift all the way home because i didnt know how and i remember when i got back into the farm yard i didnt know how to stop the semi. All i could do is turn it off and let it drift to a side. As it slowly drift today a stop the first thought that went through my head is i can not believe that i lived and the Second Thought that went through my head was i bet i can drive anything now. Thats what i think was the greatest gift that my dad gave me. He gave us impossible things to. Do he gave us hard things to do that we never dreamed we could accomplish and by doing that he developed children that became Problem Solvers, in fact, one thing that he did to me when i was younger too we were out fixing fence one day and where is the post pounder, have you ever built a fence with post pounder, i said its in the pickup, he said go get it right now and i can tell that he was mad that i didnt have, i ran to the pickup because all you did with dad was run and when i handed to him, he said you should know what i need before i know what i need and i remember standing as a 10yearold need how would i ever know what he needs before he knows what he needs but he was teaching us to think 3 steps ahead of him. , to always be prepared to whatever situation, he never had to lose time and he could be efficient and solve problems before they became a problem. As an adult, as a business owner, as serving in the state legislature n congress and as governor, over and over again i have learned that thats the greatest gift my family gave me was to helping me think strategically, think ahead 3 steps from everybody else was, be a Problem Solver and the fact that they gave me the confidence to tackle bigger things all of the time i think was a great gift. Thats what we need in the country for our kids frankly. We are crippling our children in this country and we are crippling them [applause] we are crippling them because you have people doing things for them. Stop doing kids for your kids. Our job is not to do everything for them and solve their problems, its to prepare them for life and they should have to do hard things. They should have to do hard things to give them confidence to take the on the biggest things to come. Its not always that fun to challenge them but the best gift you can give them is to prepare them for life because if you look out across the landscape in this country right now weve got some challenging times ahead. But the one thing that i wanted to talk about today is hope. I talk about freedom. Governor, all you ever talk about is freedom. Ive never seen a time in history where we saw the government in such a short period of time take freedoms. People rolled over and gave them freedom of a ly. The government during the pandemic told people that they couldnt go to church, they gave up their freedom of religion. Because the government is letting social media forms and the media tell them what people can say and what they cant say, they are giving up their freedom of speech. So ive never seen our freedoms more challenged and ive never seen people use fear to try to control people the way we have seen the last several years. Freedom is important and we need to remind people about the greatest gift that freedom is to us and to this generation and previous generations but right now people are desperate for hope. Themas jefferson in his inaugural address talked about us being the worlds best hope. Abraham lincoln said we were the last best hope. Where will we go if we lose this country . Where else is there somewhere better than the United States of america . We are still the hope to the world. The rest of the world looks at us, watches us, our actions and now how we speak and they gather hope from that or they lose hope. So while its so hard to define really what hope s today i want to the talk a little bit about it because from now on we dont have to guess what hope is. All you have to do is look at the state of south dakota. You see, i have learned in many, many years of lessons that i have seen that leadership has consequences. All you have to do is to look from state to state the last several years and saw that it really mattered who was in leadership during those times the and every state is doing differently according to who was in leadership, all we did in south dakota the last several years and i will talk a little bit more about that is that we just did what conservatives have always said that they believe. We just did it and it worked. My background growing up in a farm, in a ranch and business was critical to forming the person that i am but i also think for all of us we need to tell our stories bus thats how we inspire people to do better. I tell people every day when i leave them, i just say be better, today we can be better than we were the day before. Yesterday we may have failed, yesterday i may have screwed up but today we have the chance to be better. Now, growing up all i wanted to do was to be a farmer and rancher like my dad. He was tough, he was a cowboy. If you thought of john wayne, that was pretty much my dad. I knew even when i went to college that i wanted to grow up and end upcoming home and taking over familiar businesses and work beside him every single day. The only problem that when i was in college my dad was killed inside our farm. I remember sleeping all night long, how are we ever going to get through this, one person in my life that i thought was irreplaceable. I could not see the next 24 hours without him. Then we learned within the several weeks and the first couple of months after he passed away that we were going to be hit with a death tax, the estate tax. So at the time i was 22 years old. I was married. I was about 8 months pregnant when my dad passed away because i had gotten married when i was 20 and we were farmers and ranchers and thats what you do you have kids that help you work in the farm, right, so we were on it. We were making babies. So i was 8 months pregnant when my dad passed away and i learned that we owed death taxes. At the time the federal estate tax was 55 of whatever you owned. Now if you can imagine my dad at age 49, we were farming thousands of acres, we had hundreds of cattle, we had large operation, but we didnt have any money in the bank. We were like a lot of Business Owners in this country especially small Business Owners, we had assets but that didnt mean that we had cash flow readily available. I could not believe we had tragedy that occurred to the family and all of a sudden the federal government was threatening, taking away our Family Business because of their tax policy. In fact, i learned very quickly what an unfair tax it was. The only place in tax code where we doubled tax someone and it made me angry. I ended up quitting college, coming home, taking over the operation and took me ten years to pay off those taxes. I went from banker to banker trying to get them financed and to the get them financed all by one banker. I finally got one that took a chance by me and he went out and found wealthy farmers that would loan me the rest and i went out and starting a Hunting Lodge to make more money off of the asset that is we had so we could farm it, ranch it and hunt on the property. We started custom harvesting business. My mom went out and bought a restaurant because she thought it would be fun. I dont know if any of you are in the restaurant industry, within six months i was managing her restaurant for her as well. Kristi, i thought i would sit in the front booth and have coffee with my friends all day. In ten years we did pay off those taxes but it made me angry. So people ask me all of the time how i got involved in government and politics, it was through that, that i knew if we had owned a gas station, if we had owned a different small business, the only way that we could have pay taxes was to sell our Family Business and i knew that that shouldnt be the story of the american family. So i started to show up at meetings. At the time the u. S. Senate majority leader was mr. Tom dashell from the state of south dakota. I became a thorn in his side. I showed up at all of his meetings. I was passionate about tax reform and after a period of time he appointed me a committee that oversaw all the federal programs in the state and with usda ran the programs and ended up recruited to run for the state legislature. I decided to run because in south dakota you can be a citizen legislator, south dakota has legislature thats only in session for 40 days a year. So theyre all citizens, they show up, its wonderful as governor because as governor they are there for a month and a half and they leave again for the rest of oh the year but i decided i could, you know, my husband and i together with our three kids at the time that i could still run our businesses, be the general manager but i could go and contribute to our legislature and do that and do them all well so i ran for the legislature, was there about a week and i recognized the leadership controlled everything. And decided if i was going to be away from my family and if i was going to be away from our businesses then i was going to be as impactful as possible and i ran to be majority leader in the house and elect today that. While i served in the legislature [applause] while i served in the legislature i rewrote our property tax system in south dakota. [applause] we had a lot of people at the time being taxed off their property and couldnt afford property taxes. Remember, south dakota doesnt have income tax. We dont have a personal property tax. We basically have a 4 and a half cent sales tax which this year we cut but at that time our property taxes were overpriced and many people were struggling with it so i wrote, rewrote our property tax system and people started to the talk to me about running for congress. My husband and i had no desire to go to congress. In fact, for two years we kept saying no. We had a democrat that represented south dakota in the u. S. House and most people dont think about south dakota being a state that would a lot of democrats but we are, we are very populist state. We are pretty conservative now but previously even back then we had a full democrat delegation that represented us in congress. We had a blue dog democrat that the represented the state and senator john thune knew that she was coming after him and his next election and thought that if the someone could beat her in her first reelection for the representative job before she would challenge him that that would take care of his problem too. So his folks kept recruiting me for a couple of years to try to run for congress and kept sending people to me frankly from all over the country to say, would you run against her and beat her although she had a 90 Approval Rating in south dakota. She was one of the last few blue dog democrats, did not vote for obamacare, did not vote for the stimulus package, the only thing that she had done that i really could talk about in the campaign against her was that she voted for nancy pelosi. [laughter] so when brian and i finally decided to run we talked about nancy pelosi a lot. [laughter] but that was really the decision that we made, listen, maybe we should just run and if we lose then they will leave us a lender and they wont wonder us anymore with this idea of going to washington, d. C. We got into that race and it became very competitive and ended up being one of the top five racers in the nation that year and i ended up winning that race and getting elected to represent South Carolina in the u. S. House. That was in 2010. [applause] when i got to congress, of course, i was passionate again about tax reform. Sponsored a complete repeal of the death tax but served on many different committees, served on the ag committee, education and Workforce Committee on Armed Services committee which i appreciated very much because i had to chance to go to many different countries, dmz war zones, afghanistan, took a lot of those trips with the Leadership Team in the house because i was elect today the Leadership Team there but then ended up on the ways and Means Committee which is the committee that many people describe to me as the one that have the most ways it can be mean. [laughter] so the ways and Means Committee has jurisdiction over all tax policy, a lot of healthcare policy, trade policy about 80 of what goes through the house goes through the ways and Means Committee and i was excited to get put on that committee so i would have the chance to do tax reform and was absolutely thrilled when we elected President Trump who was passionate about tax reform too. Had the chance to work on that bill [applause] had the chance to work on that bill for two years and to see it signed into law was a wonderful opportunity for me. And then the i decided that after being there for eight years and getting the chance to work on several National Defense authorization acts to do tax reform, do farm bills, that i really wanted to look at the opportunity to become governor of south dakota. People had asked me to consider it and i realized that being a governor is being different than serving in congress. In congress you get the chance to work on bills, you can talk about policy, you can give a lot of speeches and press conferences but governors, governors are ceos. Governors get up every single day and get the chance to make decisions, to have an agenda and state of south dakota had been dying, our state had been shrinking, people had been leaving, kids and grandkids were having to leave to get careers somewhere else, our economy was stagnant. We didnt have new industries that had come in in the last 30 years and i recognized that we needed a governor, a ceo that had a vision for the future, building stronger families but also g