Kristi Noem Book Controversy: Dog Shooting & Kim Jong Un Claim
Key Takeaways
- •Kristi Noem's memoir 'No Going Back' triggered immediate backlash after excerpts revealed she shot her dog Cricket and a goat, and falsely claimed to have personally met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
- •In a video titled 'SCANDAL: Kristi Noem's Husband Caught In Cross-Dressing Fetish,' Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire breaks down each controversy, dismisses the sensational headline as a fabricated smear, and argues that the real damage Noem suffered was entirely self-inflicted.
- •Shapiro's central case is that a politician who can't vet her own memoir is not a politician ready for a vice presidential vetting process.
The Book That Handed Her Critics a Loaded Gun
Kristi Noem published 'No Going Back' apparently without asking the most basic question a political memoir requires: how will this read to someone who is not already on my side? The excerpts that spread fastest were not leaked by opponents. They were in the book. Ben Shapiro opens his SCANDAL: Kristi Noem's Husband Caught In Cross-Dressing Fetish video by zeroing in on this point, noting that the story about shooting her dog Cricket, followed by a goat, didn't become a controversy because of media bias or political targeting. It became a controversy because Noem put it in writing and sent it to a publisher. That is a special kind of unforced error.
Shooting the Dog Was the Headline, But the Kim Jong Un Claim Was the Problem
The Cricket story dominated social media, but Shapiro argues the Kim Jong Un claim is the more disqualifying detail. Noem wrote in her book that she had personally met the North Korean dictator. Shapiro's rebuttal is simple and hard to argue with: a sitting American governor meeting Kim Jong Un would not be a footnote in a memoir. It would be a diplomatic incident. There would be records, security briefings, and international coverage. None of that exists. When Noem attempted to walk the claim back, Shapiro describes her clarification as doubling down rather than correcting, which compounded the original error instead of containing it. Fabricating a meeting with one of the world's most isolated and closely watched leaders is either a lie or a memory failure serious enough to disqualify someone from higher office on its own terms.
What the Title of This Video Actually Is
Here is where it gets a little meta. The video is titled 'SCANDAL: Kristi Noem's Husband Caught In Cross-Dressing Fetish,' which is exactly the kind of headline designed to get clicks from people who have no intention of watching the video. Shapiro addresses this directly and briefly: the claim is fabricated, not supported by evidence, and exists purely to embarrass a political figure through personal humiliation. He uses it as a textbook example of how manufactured attacks circulate, contrasting it sharply with the controversies that are real and documented. It says something about the current information environment that the false story needed a debunking and the true stories were somehow less viral.
The Vetting Problem Nobody Wanted to Say Out Loud
Shapiro's broader argument isn't really about Kristi Noem specifically. It's about what these errors signal in the context of a vice presidential shortlist. His logic runs like this: if a candidate's own memoir contains a debunked foreign leader meeting, a story about killing pets that reads as tone-deaf to any non-rural audience, and anecdotes she apparently didn't pressure-test with a single advisor, then what happens when an opposition research team gets six months and a budget? The vetting process for a national ticket is not gentle. Noem's book, in Shapiro's framing, is a preview of what that process would surface, except she handed it over herself. This is the kind of political miscalculation that
Our Analysis: Shapiro's framing of this as a scandal about Noem's husband is a distraction play. The actual story is simpler and more damaging: Noem fabricated a meeting with Kim Jong Un in a memoir meant to showcase her foreign policy credibility. That's not a gaffe. That's a vetting catastrophe.
The husband rumor deserved exactly the dismissal it got. But burying the Kim Jong Un lie inside a tabloid headline lets Noem's team reframe her as a victim of smears rather than the author of her own undoing.
If Trump was ever serious about her as VP, this book ended it quietly. Watch how fast her media appearances slow down.
There's a broader pattern worth naming here. Political memoirs written during a veepstakes are essentially audition tapes, and the audience isn't just primary voters. It's the campaign's opposition research team stress-testing every sentence. Noem's book failed that test before it was even published. The Kim Jong Un claim alone would have surfaced in any serious vetting process — except she published it herself, at scale, with her name on the cover. That's not bad luck. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the next level of scrutiny actually looks like. Whatever her strengths as a retail politician, this episode suggests her preparation for national-level exposure was nowhere close to where it needed to be.
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Source: Based on a video by Ben Shapiro — Watch original video
This article was created by NoTime2Watch's editorial team using AI-assisted research. All content includes substantial original analysis and is reviewed for accuracy before publication.
