I don’t think that North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum likes the Dickinson area, and I will explain why.  I got this impression when Governor Burgum stepped in, uninvited, to steer both the Theodore Roosevelt Library and the Theodore Roosevelt Museum away from Dickinson in the Summer of 2018 .  I became even more certain when Governor Burgum announced out of nowhere recently, that he would like to relocate the women’s prison away from New England to Bismarck.

The Theodore Roosevelt Library and the Theodore Roosevelt Museum would have been very good for Dickinson, increasing the prestige, importance, and image of both Dickinson State University, and the town of Dickinson.  It would have also benefited the local economy greatly.  Now, closing the women’s prison in New England, 26 miles south of Dickinson, will remove New England’s largest local employer.

I know why Governor Doug Burgum does not like the Dickinson area, and I really want to explain it to you.  On this blog website, I have tried to explain Dickinson for the past four years, and it seems like it is impossible to get through to most of the local people.  The local people ignore and disregard what I write, and they don’t know that failing to recognize their shortcomings is going to be fatal for Dickinson in the end.

Governor Doug Burgum was born in, and grew up in, the small agricultural town of Arthur, North Dakota, population 400.  He knows, exactly, exactly, how people are in Dickinson, Belfield, New England, Richardton, Taylor, Amidon, Bowman, and Watford City.

Governor Doug Burgum graduated from North Dakota State University located in Fargo, North Dakota, the largest city in North Dakota with over 100,000 people.  Governor Burgum then attended Stanford University in California where he received a Masters of Business Administration.

For those of you who don’t know, Stanford University in California is one of the most difficult colleges in the United States to get into.  Stanford only admits the best of the best, the smartest of the smartest.  Once you get in, you are surrounded by some of the most intelligent and brightest people in the world.  At Stanford, Doug Burgum became friends with a classmate who later became the CEO of Microsoft.

After graduating from Stanford University, Doug Burgum went to work in Chicago for a short while.  Soon he returned to Fargo, and he helped form a business software company called Great Plains Software, which he became president of.  In 2001 Great Plains Software was sold to Microsoft for $1.1 billion.

I have given you Doug Burgum’s background, growing up in an isolated North Dakota agricultural town with 400 people, getting out, going to college in Fargo, getting an MBA from Stanford University in California, creating a billion dollar software company in Fargo, to make sure that you understand, that Doug Burgum has already experienced for the first eighteen years of his life, the stupid bullshit that you people in Dickinson, New England, Belfield, Richardton, Bowman never cease to get out of and put behind you, the kind of ignorance that never stops.

Because of the barren, desolate, freezing plains of North Dakota, where there weren’t even any trees to build houses out of, and people had to stack cut grass sod to make 10’x12′ houses for their entire family to live in, it was a struggle for the first settlers in North Dakota to even survive.  There was no hospitality or generosity, or help given to others, it was a matter of each family for themselves.

It wasn’t a matter of anyone getting ahead, it was a matter of merely surviving from one year to the next.  The only way that anyone might feel like they got ahead in North Dakota, was when someone else failed.  In fact, if someone failed, if they died or had to leave, there might be some land or some improvement that was left behind to scavenge.  This was the origin of North Dakotans withholding help from others, hoping that other people failed, or seeing other people’s failure as a win for them.

This was also part of the origin of North Dakotans’ hatred of education and people with an education.  Someone else getting an education was a threat to them.  The only thing that North Dakotans had to look forward to was someone else failing, so someone else benefiting from education was a detriment to them reaping from someone else’s failure.

If you ever got out of the small North Dakota towns where people withhold help, seek other people’s failure, and hope for other people’s failure, to large cities or large universities, you would see a change in attitudes, outlook, and beliefs, where people believe in opportunity, growth, improvement, innovation, prosperity, success, collaboration, and shared success.  The attitude that, “A rising tide, raises all boats.”

In contrast, the epitome of Dickinson, Belfield, New England, or Bowman is a 300 lb, ham-fisted, battle-axe woman, working at a local business who will not serve customers, leering and sneering, snarling, “We didn’t ask you to come here!”

Or, the local Police in Dickinson knowing that there is an extreme shortage of women, posing as a woman on-line wanting to meet men for sex, then luring a recent DSU business graduate from Nepal to have sex, then acting like a character out of the movie Deliverance, “Oooooeeee!  Look what we got here boy!  We going to put you in jail for 20 years!  That’s right, we going to put you in jail for the next 20 years!  Ooooooeeeeeee!”

Or, that western North Dakota companies were responsible for a two to three year backlog of unpaid wage complaints with the North Dakota Department of Labor.  And western North Dakota property owners quadrupled the rents and housing prices to the highest in the United States to where workers were sleeping in their vehicles, under bridges, and in the bushes.

So yes, Governor Doug Burgum, uninvited, had to intervene in order to steer both the Theodore Roosevelt Library and the Theodore Roosevelt Museum away from Dickinson, lest people from across the country and around the World be accosted or harmed by the local people here in the Dickinson area.  The Governor was probably thinking, “God knows what the people in Dickinson would have done to the tourists and scholars that would have arrived from around the World.  They would probably have been beaten up, extorted, robbed, and put in jail.”

Something else that the local people in Dickinson do not know or understand yet, if Dickinson State University does not hurry up and immediately get underway with a technical training program for industry and the oil field, Dickinson State University will be shut down.

The way that the State of North Dakota looks at it, the elected representatives, civil servants, and educators, “Why should we use state money to fund Dickinson State University?  It is a publicity nightmare for the State of North Dakota:  Awarding degrees to foreign students who have not completed the course work;  The Attorney General having to dissolve the DSU Foundation over questionable financial practices;  The unaccountability of the Strom Foundation for the spending of donations;  DSU recruiting thug hoodlum athletes;  The evidence of DSU graduates not having college level literacy.  Wouldn’t it be better for higher education in North Dakota, to no longer waste money on DSU, which only downgrades and weakens the reputation of higher of education in North Dakota?”

What probably really impressed Governor Doug Burgum about western North Dakota, with thousands of local land owners receiving oil leases and oil revenue, what they have done with this money.  The new fifth-wheel luxury travel trailers, side-by-side buggies, and lifted four-door four-wheel-drive one-ton diesel trucks, makes the Governor proud of this investment in North Dakota for future generations.