Guest post: SDGOP civil war nearing execution

Editor's note: South Dakota's teflon teevee anchor Shad Olson is having none of Pierre's overt culture of corruption.

On the last day of last year's South Dakota legislative session, a patriot lawmaker stood feet away from a clearly audible conversation on speakerphone between another lawmaker and a former governor, (no, not her) negotiating a lucrative "donation" to the lawmaker's not-for-profit organization on condition of purchased support for the billion dollar prison boondoggle and lobbying influence for same.

The witness immediately reported the incident to legislative leadership expecting at very least a face-to-face reckoning with the accused party and an explanation for what had every appearance of open bribery in exchange for vote switching on the prison project. The most egregious and hefty of several similar examples of alleged prison vote quid pro quo.

Three attorney lawmakers and a spouse witnessed that report. And did nothing about it except plot the trashing, primarying, disgorgement and persecution of the select disgusted few who knew the story and lost confidence and respect for the do-nothings in caucus chamber.

The public silence of that eyewitness has allowed the necessary space for the Odenbach-Hansen-Lems-Radke-Pat Powers cabal to continue their pretense of moral infallibility, and through their laughable passel of trundling special needs surrogates, a year long reign of cancel culture and defamatory terror against lawmakers and anyone else who was in Pierre and knew 2025 not as a rightful revolution in conservative majority policymaking, but as a melange of corruption, intimidation and fratricidal attacks against the likes of Phil Jensen, Dylan Jordan, Brandei Schaefbauer, etc.

By a bunch of career politicians and neoconservative lightweights who cut the nastiest of deals to secure their perches atop the Pierre slag heap. The people who rode to glory opposing a single CO2 pipeline project but who now sing the AFP hymnal supporting data centers.

As always, the inherent danger of remaining silent when an enemy knows you know their secrets is suffering their survivalist urgency to preemptively destroy, discredit, and ostracize the source before the damning truth of their misdeeds reaches daylight. When slashed tires and doctored gas tanks don't convey the message.

From the godawful HB1020, the billion dollar prison betrayal and the "Nice People" gubernatorial race where hired surrogates spit daily venom and acid at opponents and now, tell pernicious lies to law enforcement to engender new grist for their illiterate smear operations, the 2026 division in the South Dakota grassroots is intentional, pervasive and fatal to the movement. Carried by fools and justified by scripture readings.

Telling public truth about secret corruption is a matter of survival as much as whatever courage is required to defuse a bomb before it detonates. Doing or saying nothing about deadly secrets guarantees the outcome as surely as failure to snip the wire before the timer reaches zero.

Silence by whistleblowers is always more dangerous than disclosure.

Always.