From the campaign
Where I Stand on Medical Freedom, Public Health, and Food Integrity
The body is the citizen's, not the state's. I am not running to relitigate 2020, I am running to make sure South Dakota never repeats it.
I lived the COVID years in this town, same as you did. A family court case had brought my son to Rapid City in 2018, I followed him here, bought a house, and built a business, and then those years arrived and I watched what they did to the kitchen table.
The most personal decisions a family makes, about our own bodies and our own kids, started showing up from somewhere else. From an agency. From an employer reading a federal memo. From people nobody in Rapid City ever voted for. Folks here got handed a choice between a medical procedure they did not want and a paycheck they needed. Nurses who carried this community through the worst of 2020 were told a year later that their own medical judgment had stopped counting.
Whatever your family decided in those years, and families I respect landed in different places, the question underneath was identical. Who owns your body, you or the state?
The body is the citizen's, not the state's. That is the whole principle and everything else follows from it.
Oppose every form of medical mandate. Not some forms. No medical intervention forced on a South Dakotan as the price of a job, an education, or an ordinary life.
Protect medical conscience for doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. Nobody in this state should have to pick between a license and a conviction.
Classify lab-grown protein as adulterated rather than meat. If it came out of a tank it does not get to wear the name ranch families spent generations earning.
Take soft drinks out of SNAP. A nutrition program should buy nutrition.
Strengthen medical marijuana with real doctor-patient requirements. The voters created the program in 2020. Make it serve real patients the way a medical program is supposed to.
The one where people accuse me of contradicting myself
Somebody reads that list and tells me to pick a lane. The body belongs to the citizen, but you want soda out of SNAP? This is the objection I respect most, so it gets the straightest answer I have.
Medical freedom concerns what the state may force on your body, and the answer there is nothing. SNAP concerns what taxpayers fund, which is a different question wearing similar clothes. Nobody is banning soda. Buy whatever you want with your own money and I will defend your right to do it.
SNAP has Nutrition sitting in the middle of its name, though, and it exists to help families put real food on the table. Soft drinks are not nutrition. Declining to fund something is not the same act as forcing something. A definition of freedom that cannot tell coercion apart from a grocery line item is not a principle, it is a slogan.
On the next pandemic
Public health is a real job and the state has a real role in it, which is why I have no interest in the version of this argument that pretends epidemiology is invented and nobody should ever have been told anything at all. Gather honest information, share it fast, then trust free people to act on it.
What the state must never do again is force medicine on a citizen as the price of a job, a classroom, or a normal life. We tried coercion here and it did not build confidence in public health, it burned trust down. Broken trust is the deadliest public health outcome there is, because it is the one that carries into the next emergency. A government that levels with people gets cooperation. A government that strong-arms them gets resistance and has earned it.
Why a free-market conservative wants rules in the meat case
Markets run on honest labels. That is the answer.
Meat is an animal, raised on land, by somebody, and around Rapid City that somebody is frequently your neighbor. A product grown in a stainless steel tank is a different thing, and when it sells under the rancher's word the label is lying. A lying label is not competition, it is fraud. Classifying lab-grown protein as adulterated keeps it from entering our food supply dressed in somebody else's work.
Sell what you want. Call it what it is.
The marijuana plank is not a repeal
South Dakota voters approved medical marijuana in 2020 and I respect that vote without qualification.
A medical program earns the word medical through a real doctor, a real patient, and a real relationship between them. Strengthening those requirements protects the sick people the program was passed for, and it protects the program from the abuse that would eventually turn it into a punchline. The quickest way to lose medical marijuana in this state is to let it lose its integrity. I will not let it get gutted and I will not let it rot.
The conscience-protection objection, and the rest, are answered below.
What you are actually voting on
District 32 is the heart of Rapid City, downtown and North Rapid, and on November 3 it sends two representatives to Pierre. Both of those seats should answer to your kitchen table rather than to a party office or a lobbyist's spreadsheet.
I am a dad, a businessman, and a community advocate with a Juris Doctor, and I have spent the last two legislative sessions at the Capitol working to pass legislation for South Dakota families. So I know the difference between a promise made at a forum and a position written down where you can go check it. Everything above is written down.
The full platform is at zac4sd.com.
Strong Families. Strong South Dakota.
Anticipated pushbacks · prepared responses
Common questions on this issue
These are the questions and concerns that come up most often. The responses below are my honest answers, not talking points.
- Q. Conscience protection sounds like permission to deny care.
- A. Look at who it actually protects: a doctor, nurse, or pharmacist who cannot in good conscience perform or provide one particular thing. Forcing that person does not create more care, it drives good people out of medicine, and anyone who has waited months for an appointment knows this state has no providers to spare. Patients stay free to choose their providers and providers keep their conscience. That is how a free state handles deep disagreement: nobody gets conscripted. The same principle that protects your medical decisions protects the people in the white coats.
- Q. What about the next pandemic?
- A. Public health is a real job and the state has a real role: gather honest information, share it fast, and trust free people to act on it. What the state must never do is force medicine on a citizen as the price of a job, a classroom, or a normal life. We tried coercion and it burned trust to the ground, and broken trust is the deadliest public health outcome there is because it carries into the next emergency. A government that levels with people gets cooperation.
- Q. You call yourself a free-market conservative. Why is government in the meat case?
- A. Because markets run on honest labels. Meat is an animal, raised on land, by somebody, and around Rapid City that somebody is often your neighbor. A product grown in a stainless steel tank is something else, and when it sells under the rancher's word the label is lying. A lying label is not competition, it is fraud. Sell what you want and call it what it is.
- Q. The marijuana plank is a backdoor repeal.
- A. It is the reverse. South Dakota voters approved medical marijuana in 2020 and I respect that vote without qualification. A medical program earns the word medical through a real doctor, a real patient, and a real relationship between them. Strengthening those requirements protects the sick people the program was passed for and protects the program from abuse that would turn it into a punchline. The fastest way to lose medical marijuana is to let it lose its integrity.