Having found a real cup of coffee, I was walking back to my lavish room at the Spa Hot Springs Motel and Clinic on Main Street, White Sulphur Springs, Montana when the half-dozen biker guys poured out of their adjoining rooms and began the process of saddling up for the day’s ride. They were a riot of Harley-Davidson-branded gear. Harley vests. Harley belts. Harley t-shirts. Harley bandanas. And of course big, chromy Harley motorcycles.

Watching the elaborate packing process while sipping my latte I finally asked, “So what’s up with Sturgis this year? Have they called it off?” Four of them ignored me. The guy I picked for the alpha of the bunch shot me a look and said, “Fuck no.” The sixth guy, a bit more sociable, looked up from carefully folding his rain gear into his (Harley-branded) saddle bag said, “No way. It’s happening.” All I could say was, “Really. Well, that’ll be wild.” “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a protest.”

I was tempted to say something effete and out-of-touch big city liberal like, “A protest against what, sanity?” But I didn’t. At this point in the worst pandemic in a hundred years and with as many Americans dying every three days as died in 9/11, futility is the only product of a “discussion” with Harley-encrusted “protestors.” So ride on, dudes.

It goes without saying that the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a tribal extravaganza of face-to-face, jowl-to-jowl, belly-bumping machismo and consumer exhibitionism holds the high probability of being the single largest “super spreader” of COVID-19 held anywhere in the world since the outbreak began last November. A quarter of a million people, the vast majority middle-aged to older white men, will both ride into western South Dakota this week for the giant, mechanized bacchanal … and then turn around ride back to their homes, all across the country, spreading everything they picked up in Sturgis all along their routes, like a horde of toxic Johnny Appleseeds.

Bikerworld’s other big rally, in Daytona, Florida went on as scheduled this past March in the early days of the pandemic. But Daytona’s “Biketobefest” seems likely to be cancelled this fall, what with the virus surging worse than ever … in large part due to “protestors”, the roughly 36% of freedom-loving Americans who refuse submit to reality and continue to prolong and enhance the peril to the lives and livelihood of everyone else.

Letting Sturgis happen amid all this is of course not surprising given the culture of South Dakota. The current governor, Kristi Noem, once upon a time the South Dakota Snow Queen, is every Trumpist’s dream girl. She’s abolished the requirement to get a permit before carrying a concealed gun, opposed Obamacare and every form of abortion rigts she can find or be pointed at, is on record — during Obama’s term — as being very concerned about the national debt, so much so that as a Congresswoman she declared the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Medicaid, high-speed rail projects, cap-and-trade technical assistance, and subsidies for the Washington Metro rapid transit system examples of federal programs she thought needed a damn good whacking.

Then there’s the $400,000 fence she wanted built around the Governor’s Mansion … in Pierre (friggin’) South Dakota, the state government jobs (with salary increases) she gave her daughter and son-in-law, the $80,000 personal TV studio she had built and her order that the words “In God We Trust” — in 12″ high letters — be displayed prominently in every school in the state.

And all that of course was before she shrugged off any kind of science-based compliance with CDC virus guidelines.

Noem of course isn’t unique among South Dakota politicians. A few beauty queen touches here and there and she’s really just a FoxNews regular guest upgrade from the usual white male militarist-rancher anachronism. Put another way, Noem is precisely the kind of creature-from-a-different-era who blithely rationalizes away any responsibility to a world beyond that which sustains her.

I won’t bore you here with the long(est) version of my personal interaction with South Dakota’s authoritarian politics, namely it’s “Stop and Frisk” drug interdiction policy on its Interstate highway system. No more than to say getting pursued, stopped, interrogated and searched by a nervous young trooper (who kept repeating, “This is what I do and I’m good at”) under the pretense of being written a warning ticket for going 82 in an 80 has led to several revelations. Not the least being that South Dakota troopers tasked with stopping “drug smugglers” (i.e. anyone who they suspect might be running home with a gummi left over from their visit to Colorado) make no attempt whatsoever to stop, interrogate and search commercial truckers. Trucking companies have lobbies, y’know.

That and the South Dakota Superintendent of the State Patrol, replying to my complaint about the incident telling me, a 67-year old tourist, I didn’t deserve so much as an apology for the inconvenience of the stop because … wait for it … the twitchy officer, after rummaging through my wife and my underwear, eventually found an unopened jar of foot cream containg CBD oil. A jar my acupuncturist friend had given me. Foot cream you see is “an illegal narcotic” as far as South Dakota is concerned and therefore me smuggling it validated the entire stop, interrogation and search. (The Superintendent didn’t explain why I wasn’t arrested and forced to fork over the usual $2300-plus worth of fines to the state coffers.)

To date, the incident has to date led to dozens of conversations with South Dakota lawyers, journalists and politicians. (“It’s just an amazingly stupid place,” bemoaned one ex-journalist.) The still-developing picture is of a state like so much of Trump-loving conservative America that wears its “love of freedom” on its sleeve while routinely, regularly abusing the spirit of the most basic Constitutional laws. All in service to an ossified 1950s-style notion of “law and order.” (Throughout the incident above, I could only imagine what would be happening if I was a 20 year-old black kid, instead of an old white guy in a bland, late-model rental car.)

Point being. No matter what science or common sense or common courtesy say, no matter what’s good for the rest of the country, South Dakota wants the money the flagrant recklessness and naked stupidity Sturgis brings in.

So yeah, it’s a righteous protest. Ride on dudes. MAGA!