The following was put together by Wendi Montgomery Dial and published here on Oklahoma Grassroots. Wendi and Amber Evans will be on our podcast, Friday, November 1st at 9am live on our Rumble, YouTube, Facebook and LinkdIn channels to talk about this very thing! TUNE IN!
OKLAHOMA ELECTION INTEGRITY CHECK LIST
Send all irregularities by photo, video, or written file or affidavit to wendidial@protonmail.com
Look for your county election board’s meeting to open and count absentee ballots. Make sure you attend that meeting and DOCUMENT THE PROCESS. Take notes, videos, etc. Familiarize yourself with Title 26 as it relates to absentee ballot voting counting and take the statute with you. Find it here beginning on page 172. http://webserver1.lsb.state.ok.us/OK_Statutes/CompleteTitles/os26.pdf
Ask for the list of Absentee Ballot voters from your county election board before you leave. They must give this to you upon request and it will likely come on a CD ROM.
Gain access to the Election Data Warehouse by filling out the request form here https://data.okelections.gov/Home/GetPdf . It’s free and you may have access for one year once approved. Download the files for the voter registration records, Absentee ballot requests, voter history, and the deleted voter files. These records change daily, so download several times a week. Watch for deleted files to be put back into the system or other problems. Report to your county election board if you find issues in your county, then the state election board if the county doesn’t address the problems. Send a report of the issues to the above email address.
On election day, document your visit to your polling place. Record any report that you get from friends or family about unusual activities at their polling places. Take notes, videos, etc.
Check available wifi connections and screenshot all of them that populate your phone directly outside the polling place. Pay special attention to the ATT connections that WILL show up.
ASK HOW MANY TOTAL VOTERS HAVE COME THROUGH THAT DAY and keep track of how many scan their ballots before you reach the machine. If you are Speedy Gonzales filling out your ballot (if you are older than 30 you should know who that is), the number you’ve been given at the table won’t match the number on the machine. Check the number of ballots that have been run through the machine and make sure it closely matches how many total voters you have been told have come through. The numbers shouldn’t be off by more than the number of voting stalls in the polling place. If they are, then there’s potentially been extra ballots run through the machine.
TAKE A PHOTO OF YOUR BALLOT AND/OR VIDEO OF YOU SCANNING IT INTO THE MACHINE. THIS IS YOUR PROOF YOU VOTED AND HOW YOU VOTED IN CASE YOUR VOTER HISTORY IN THE POLLING BOOKS ‘GETS LOST’ OR IS NEVER POPULATED INTO YOUR HISTORY. OR, HEAVEN FORBID, OUR ELECTION BOARD’S DATA GETS WIPED.
If you vote straight party, still FILL OUT EVERY RACE INDIVIDUALLY.
IF THE MACHINES GO DOWN DO NOT LEAVE!!! STAY UNTIL THE MACHINE IS FIXED AND NEVER GIVE YOUR BALLOT TO ANYONE TO SCAN FOR YOU.
WHEN TO CALL YOUR COUNTY SHERIFF – first, have the number to your sheriff’s department number in your phone. Then DO NOT LEAVE until you have filed a report with a deputy and find out how to get a copy of it. Please send a copy of any report filed to the email address above. IF YOU HAVE TO CALL THE SHERIFF, please text 405-207-7709 and report the situation to that number, please. Do not call it. I won’t answer phone calls on Election Day except for people in my contact list. Thanks for understanding. Call the sheriff’s department if:
Told you already voted
Polls Closed Early
Unable to Cast Ballot
Denied Access To Vote
Claim You Aren’t Registered
Witness Illegal Activity
Told They Ran Out of Ballots
Observers Are Kicked Out
Political Intimidation
Forced to Vote Provisional
Major System Malfunctions
Call your local County DA’s office after you file the report with the Sheriff. If the Sheriff refuses to come and fill out a report REPORT THAT IMMEDIATELY to your local DA’s office and then by text to the phone number above.
Watch your voter history and document it daily. Take screenshots and watch for unusual changes in the records for the next SEVERAL weeks. Check it like you do your news feed in the morning. okvoterportal.okelections.gov/. Document any changes and send to the email address above.
Michael and I took some time this morning to go over the ballot and introduce people to various websites and articles that could help them become informed voters.
We had a LOT OF VIEWERS and a whole lot of COMMENTS which were great! We thank everyone for participating so very much!
Find the full video on our YouTube and Rumble pages, but here’s a short clip about helping our elderly family members, friends and neighbors to vote…
Here is the list of all the sources we used on the show today. Check them out – heck, check them ALL out! But the bottom line is SHARE, SHARE, SHARE!
We talked about this numerous times on the live show today. Just because a group is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get three justices tossed out of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, check them out yourselves, don’t just vote for them because of ads that tell you they’re horrible liberals. They may be, but CHECK IT OUT YOURSELF. We’ve got to stop believing people just because we believe they’re good people or have our best interests at heart. Usually, there’s money involved somewhere and THAT’s where the heart of the interest lies – even if it’s Republican-led!
Rejecting Oklahoma SQ 833 – The Case Against Public Infrastructure Districts (PIDs)
State Question 833 (SQ 833) introduces Public Infrastructure Districts (PIDs), giving developers significant control over infrastructure financing at taxpayers’ expense. Here’s why voters should say “No” to SQ 833.
1. PIDs Burden Taxpayers with Long-Term Costs
• PIDs allow developers to shift infrastructure costs onto property owners through special property taxes that can last for decades, even after developers have profited and moved on.
2. Developer Influence on Local Politics by Shifting Power to Special Interests
• Similar to Tax Increment Financing (TIF) districts, PIDs give developers leverage over local governance. This opens the door to political favoritism, where developers can game the system to gain tax advantages and special treatment.
3. Loss of Transparency and Oversight through Complex Bureaucracy
• PIDs add layers of government bureaucracy with minimal public input, making oversight difficult. The lack of clear rules for dissolving PIDs and vague governance structures risk unchecked developer control.
4. Lessons in Increased Corruption from Failed TIF Districts
• TIFs have already shown how developers can influence local elections and bend policies to suit their interests. PIDs will likely worsen this, embedding special interests deeper into local government.
5. Threat to Simple, Accountable Government by Erosion of the Free-Market
• PIDs bypass traditional free-market practices, allowing government-backed financing that distorts genuine market demand and punishes developers who play by the rules.
6. Legislators Who Voted “No” on PID Legislation (SJR 16) in the 2024 Oklahoma Session
These legislators advocated for a simpler, transparent government structure that serves taxpayers, not special interests:
Oklahoma House of Representatives: David Banning (R-Bixby); Tom Gann (R-Inola); Jim Olsen (R-Roland)
7. Vote “No” to Protect Taxpayers, Keep Government Accountable, and Reject Special-Interest Schemes
• Voting “No” on SQ 833 keeps taxpayers from carrying the financial weight of risky, developer-driven districts and supports transparent, free-market governance.
SQ 833 is a handout to developers, enabling costly, complex government-backed districts.
Voting “No” preserves a simpler, fairer government structure that works for taxpayers—not special interests.
So, before I was an education activist – and now a liberty activist – I was a biologist.
I actually have a BS (yes, I’m full of that! LOLOL) in Biology and a Master’s in Biology, both. In fact, I had intended to go on to get a Doctorate and teach, but once I found out that – in my experience – college professors were a bunch of big jerks I decided that wasn’t for me. Instead, I taught college as a TA and then after graduation, high school, middle school, my own kids and homeschool COOP kids.
Thus, I’ve been able to be fairly knowledgeable about issues we’ve covered that include science topics, like the Climate Change scam and all its universe of associated garbage.
Recently, I found out that Oklahoma had the second largest carbon capture facility in the world and the largest in the United States. I also found, as I asked around, that no one in Osage County (where the facility is located) seemed to know anything about it. This forced me – and our new writer Shane Smith – to do some research on carbon capture policy and what we found is that there really isn’t any policy other than no policy for green businesses, which doesn’t protect Oklahoma citizens at all. If you haven’t read our blog on the topic, you really should.
Last Friday, NeeAnn Clinton of Enid, in Garfield County, was on our podcast to tell us about a lawsuit residents have had to file against their Metropolitan Planning Commission for not upholding zoning laws in the case of a proposed 5000 acre solar facility just north of the city.
Though we kept trying to talk about solar, I kept inserting information about carbon capture because there were so many overlapping issues – mainly the lack of regulation.
At one point in the conversation I brought up a bit of biology…have a listen.
The slides embedded in the video came from the NOAA fisheries website. Go figure. I had learned about phytoplankton and blue-green algae when I was a student in college. So what? Now we don’t know this anymore? We’ve dumbed down our students so far in biology that not only do they NOT know the Carbon Cycle, but they don’t know what green plants/organisms do at all?
The schematic below shows specifically how oceanic environments SEQUESTER CO2 all by themselves without any help from carbon capture facilities.
In addition, just think of this one thing. What does the second largest carbon capture facility in the world run on? Electricity. Where does electricity come from? In Oklahoma, coal-fired electrical plants. So. Make sense of that. You can’t. It’s stupid.
Running a carbon capture system is incredibly energy-intensive, essentially requiring building a new power plant to run the system. This obviously creates another new source of air and carbon pollution since the U.S. no longer builds nuclear plants and even when it did never built them that small. This extra energy use undermines the whole goal of capturing carbon in the first place. Indeed, while the U.S. emits roughly 5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, removing 1 billion tons of that through direct air capture would require nearly the entire electricity output of the nation, according to research published in Biophysical Economics and Sustainability.
In fact, the carbon capture scam is SO BAD that Rex Weyler of GREENPEACE FOR PETE SAKES, though he believes that Climate Change is a thing, and big oil is the devil, he does believe this:
The swindle appears simple: Pretend to help solve a problem, while making the problem worse, socialize the costs and liabilities, and privatize the profits. Clever.
Weyler’s article is really very good – lots of great information on all the failed CO2 capture attempts through today – but people won’t like it because it points to big oil as the generator of the scheme for regeneration of spent oil fields and our Governor won’t like it because it basically echoes what Michael says in the clip above – it’s all about the Benjamins. Period.
Oklahoma shouldn’t perpetuate scams on the back of their citizens and taxpayers, so you’d better let your legislator know you won’t put up with giving these private companies carte blanche to wreck your back yard and kill you with a CO2 pipe break and you’d better do it NOW!
October 25th, we hosted NeeAnn again so she could give us an update on their fight to stop the solar installation.
I urge you to watch the full live podcast on either our YouTube or Rumble channels, but below is a clip of NeeAnn talking about the fact that Garfield County residents have had to sue the City of Enid’s Metropolitan Area Planning Commission to force them to uphold zoning laws inside a 3 mile corridor through which NextEra has already begun construction WITHOUT ANY PERMITS.
Now think, just like we – and V1SUT Vantage – have explained with public schools that trample on parental rights, victims (taxpayers) of the Garfield County NextEra solar scheme, have to take their hard-earned dollars in hand and sue people whose jobs only exist because of TAX DOLLARS. So, citizens have their dollars taken from them by their government by force with the Constitutional expectation that their rights and liberty will be upheld by that same government, only to find out that they’ll have to use MORE of their hard-earned paychecks to force the government to do their jobs. This, is a sure sign of government tyranny.
NeeAnn and I also talked about the fact that what we’re seeing with the NextEra solar project in Garfield County is the same thing I’ve found with carbon capture in Oklahoma – NO ONE IS IN CHARGE OF PERMITTING OR PROTECTING THE SAFETY AND PROPERTY RIGHTS OF CITIZENS. How can this be? Because our Governor wants Oklahoma to be an “Open For Business“, “Top Ten State“, with a “More Of Everything, All-Of-The-Above Approach” to energy development. Okay, but where are the citizens in those political soundbites? What about their rights to their property and safety?
Those thing aren’t a priority of our Governor and that’s made very clear when you hear both NeeAnn and I talk about our findings with respect to the ‘green energy agenda’ in Oklahoma.
So let’s hear that from NeeAnn again…
Please, go to the website Garfield County residents have created to educate residents and other Oklahomans about NextEra’s solar facility, Stop Skeleton Creek Solar. While you’re there, be sure to donate to their cause because, as I well know – lawsuits aren’t cheap!
Families who need health care the most in Oklahoma – foster and adoptive families and those in low income brackets – are having an impossible time getting it since our previous system – SoonerCare – was uprooted to implement a managed care system – SoonerSelect – but how did we get here and what do we do?
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
In 2020, Oklahomans decided (by a very narrow vote on SQ802 and although they had rejected Medicaid expansion as far back as 2016) to provide Medicaid to 200,000 more people in the state than were being served at the time. In bi-partisan opposition – that included Governor Stitt – it was argued that making more Oklahomans eligible for Medicaid would cost Oklahoma tax payers millions of dollars at a time when Oklahoma’s budget was in the red and that patients would receive significantly worse care on a system which would become overburdened by costs and bureaucracy.
Millions and millions of dollars were devoted to convincing Oklahomans to vote ‘Yes’ on the measure by the ideological left and the Hospital Association – the members of which stood to receive federal and state dollars for treating Oklahoma Medicaid patients. Because millions in one-time federal funds were available to help start managed care via President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (dubbed ObamaCare), proponents of the question argued that Oklahoma would be turning away millions in federal funding because of partisan disdain for the HCA and disadvantaging from health care those already financially disadvantaged.
October of 2020, The Oklahoma Health Care Authority (HCA) put together an RFP (Request for Proposals) to institute a ‘managed care’ system in place of the current SoonerCare program.
January 2021, Governor Stitt announced that he would create a new managed care plan for Oklahoma’s Medicaid patients called SoonerSelect. During that month, the HCA awarded 2.2 billion dollars worth of contracts to four companies for administration of SoonerSelect – Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma, Oklahoma Complete Health (aka Centene), Humana Health Horizons and UnitedHealthcare, though the Oklahoma legislature – the voice of the people – was never consulted on either the RFP, or the selection of the insurance managers.
During early 2021, Oklahoma Health Care officials were told the state would also qualify for approximately 520 million dollars in Federal funds under the American Rescue Plan Act (instituted to ‘help’ Americans with the burgeoning costs of everything during the ‘pandemic’) to help the expansion of the Medicaid program along for two years.
March 25th, 2021, several associations representing various Oklahoma medical providers filed a lawsuit against the state arguing that SQ802 didn’t allow the OHCA to award contracts for SoonerSelect to private insurance companies.
Meanwhile – though the legislature hadn’t gone into the 2021 session believing Oklahoma would institute Medicaid expansion – SB131 was created to put “guard rails” on the creation of a policy should it be brought to the legislature. SB131 was meant to prevent managed care administration of the SoonerSelect program because the legislature preferred – overwhelmingly – for the OHCA to administrate the expansion directly (as it had done with the SoonerCare program) without allowing private insurance organizations to serve as middle men between the HCA and the provider. The bill became law without Governor Stitt’s signature.
Consequently, the 2021 legislative session ended without passage of any specific legislation regarding the SoonerSelect program.
Several days after the vote to table, the ONLY physicians appointed to the OHCA by Governor Stitt, Dr. Jean Hausheer and Dr. Laura Shamblin, were removed – also by Governor Stitt – without explanation.
When the legislature resumed in February of 2022, SB1337 – a 44-page version of the Governor’s managed care plan – was introduced via floor substitute, passed after a very lengthy process, and signed by Governor Stitt in May, all to provide the needed legislation for the change to the SoonerCare system that should have been provided from the beginning. This put many legislators who were against managed care from the start in an unenviable position, as they felt they had to vote for SB1337 in order to provide some of the ‘guard rails’ SB131 was to have provided for a managed care system.
Since the implementation of managed care last year, foster families, adoptive families and others qualifying for Medicaid, have been unable to get the services that they had gotten under SoonerCare.
Several Oklahomans have reached out to us about this, so we called Senator David Bullard – a stalwart against the managed care system – to talk about the issue. We also included Salome Vaughn, an adoptive mother to her special needs grandson, who has not been able to receive services for him since the program began.
In the clip below, Senator Bullard describes what managed care is and some of the problems he’s seeing with the program, especially in RURAL AREAS – patients not being seen, doctors leaving the SoonerSelect program because they aren’t being paid, clinics literally going out of business – including an obstetric clinic that helped to deliver babies in the rural area around Hugo, Oklahoma. Everything so many Oklahoma Republican lawmakers said would happen BEFORE Governor Stitt forced this program.
HOW TO MAKE IT STOP
In the clip below, Senator Bullard tells Oklahomans how they can help stop managed care and revert it back to the previous OHCA-administrated system. Oklahomans banded together to remove a large number of moderates from the Senate and House this primary season, we just need to stand together and demand that the legislature STOP the SoonerSelect program and revert to the SoonerCare system in 2025.
As Senator Bullard said, doctors and PA’s need to send emails to, or call, their Representatives and Senators (find them here at the bottom of the page if you don’t know who they are) and ask them to ROLL BACK MANAGED CARE.
And as Salome said, parents with children on SoonerSelect, should do the same thing.
If you would feel better about it, send emails directly to david.bullard@oksenate.gov, but MAKE YOUR VOICES HEARD! WE CAN ROLL BACK MANAGED CARE, BUT ONLY IF YOU STAND UP AND SPEAK OUT NOW before the 2025 session starts.
LIKE, SHARE and COMMENT on our clips. Send them to your family and friends! Find the FULL live videos on YouTube and Rumble and don’t forget to subscribe to our channels while you’re there!
Dubbed Bantam, this facility is a project of Colorado-based Heimdal, Inc., and is located at the CapturePoint Carbon Hub in Osage county in northwest Oklahoma. The facility itself will allegedly remove 5,000 tons of CO2 every year which will be permanently stored in underground facilities being developed by CapturePoint.
This project is just one of many that have emerged since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which increased the 45Q carbon sequestration tax credit (initially added to the tax code as a part of the Energy Improvement and Extension Act of 2008) for every ton of CO2 stored from $50 to $85.
A chorus of Oklahoma Republicans praised the new project, with governor Kevin Stitt stating, in a post to Heimdal’s LinkdIn page:
According to CapturePoint’s website, the company owns and operates on 6,900 acres, but has contracted rights to 10,000 acres in Oklahoma for use as carbon storage space. CO2 is transported from CVR’s facility in Coffeyville, Kansas, via a 68-mile pipeline to CapturePoint’s Oklahoma facility for storage.
Below is a Google map of the area showing the CapturePoint facilities in relation to Kaw Lake and the city of Shidler. (C02 + H2O yields H2CO3, carbonic acid)
Despite the fact that no local news sources covered the opening of the nation’s largest carbon capture plant and that subsequent information can only be gleaned from industry magazines, Oklahoma’s leaders have been deeply involved in making this state a home for the carbon capture and sequestration industry for some years now.
Our oil industry has been using CO2 for enhanced oil recovery since 1982.
In October of 2020, current governor Kevin Stitt signed the “Regional Carbon Dioxide Transport Infrastructure Action Plan”, along with Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming. The signatories to this plan entered into a “Memoranda of Understanding”, committing to jointly develop “the buildout of regional CO2 transport infrastructure”. According to document, “the vision of this memorandum is to accelerate, through state leadership and coordination, the deployment of regional CO2 transport infrastructure networks and the development of carbon hubs…”
Last year, the Oklahoma legislature released SB200, Oklahoma Carbon Capture and Geological Sequestration Report. This report attempted to inform legislation eventually created via SB200 (Boles, Rader) regarding jurisdiction of dangerous class VI injection wells, yet according to a statement submitted by the Petroleum Alliance, “It is unclear if projects for direct air capture and sequestration are allowed under the Oklahoma Carbon Capture and Geologic Sequestration Act.”
With the opening of the Bantam facility, it appears that Oklahoma is set to see an explosion of investment and build-out of CO2 pipeline throughout our state. At the Great Plains Institute website, in a document entitled, “Implementing Carbon Capture and Storage Technology”, the Institute provides a map of Oklahoma with potential CO2 pipeline corridors that crisscross our state like a spiderweb, transporting the liquified carbon dioxide.
But is this what Oklahomans want? How many residents know what carbon capture is, let alone that the world’s second largest carbon capture facility is located in their state? How would they feel if they found out? Capture point is seeking permits for an additional two class VI (CO2 sequestration) wells in the area – one would think that eventually nearby residents would want to know that something so dangerous is near to them and Kaw Lake now, with the possibility of more to come.
These pipelines are far different from the more familiar oil or natural gas pipelines, in that the CO2 being transported must maintain immense pressure. To transport carbon dioxide via pipeline, it must first be compressed into a liquid state, known as “supercritical CO2”. This requires up to 3000 psi of compression, which, as you can imagine, is extremely dangerous. The CO2 must maintain this compression as it travels through the pipeline.
Because of this immense transmission pressure, CO2 pipelines run the risk of “running ductile fractures”, where an initial rupture creates a chain reaction as escaping CO2 converts to a gas, rapidly opening a tear along the pipe at 100 meters per second. CO2 is heavier than air. Should the pipeline rupture, any released CO2 will settle on the ground, sucking the oxygen from every living thing in the vicinity, just like it did to the people of Satartia Mississippi last year.
Could these pipelines withstand an earthquake or other unpredictable accident? What is the protocol for cleaning up a massive CO2 leak? How will first responders get close enough with their equipment to seal the leak and clear the area of the dangerous gas?
The Biden administration seems to think that a simple increase of the 45Q tax credit will magically jumpstart a green revolution, with the oil and gas industry leading the way. But, perversely, this subsidy has drafted Big Oil into the Green Agenda, with Oklahoma actively seeking to place itself at the forefront.
An analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense found that, from 2010 to 2019, 90% of 45Q tax credits were based on fraud. Do we have any reason to believe that this level of fraud won’t continue in expanded form as greater numbers of these facilities are built across our state?
A 2021 article from FORBES denotes no less than 6 taxpayer green boondoggles funded by American taxpayers. But then Oklahoma need look no further than Canoo – a troubled electric vehicle company to which Governor Stitt gifted 15 million Oklahoma taxpayer funds to locate to Oklahoma, only to have them struggle against bankruptcy, unable to fund themselves, let alone return an investment to the state.
Several questions need to be asked: Should Oklahoma really become a dumping ground for out-of-state CO2? How much land would be enough to even make a small dent in the amount of CO2 produced yearly? Even if a DAC facility functioned as intended, it would remove only an insignificant fraction of CO2 from the environment. The CO2 itself, once moved to a permanent underground storage, would need to be monitored for centuries to ensure that it doesn’t leak back to the surface. Who will bear liability, should the carbon dioxide leak to the surface?
A 2022 report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that these facilities fail far more often than succeed. Of the 13 carbon capture facilities examined, seven underperformed, two failed, and one was abandoned entirely.
In a later report, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that the premier Norwegian CCS facilities, the ones used to justify much of the push for expanded carbon capture, experienced significant anomalous CO2 storage behavior that could have led to a disastrous gas leak. This directly contradicts the rosy predictions of Bantam and CapturePoint’s press releases and statements from their supporters.
Another point of concern is whether these carbon capture facilities are generating more CO2 than they capture, completely undercutting the stated reason for their existence. Has this been a concern at all among the supporters of this subsidy-created gold rush? Several analyses have found that the process of capturing carbon, liquifying it, and either transporting, storing, or using it in enhanced oil recovery actually produces more CO2 emissions than it captures.
Another question is: how much land is enough? As money continues to flow into the carbon capture industry, more land will continue to be permanently taken out of use in order to build more facilities. But it will never be enough. The International Energy Agency found that 32 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide would need to be removed from the atmosphere yearly in order to prevent global temperatures from rising a mere 1.5 celsius. It’s an impossible goal that our leaders are apparently ready to sacrifice much in a vain attempt to reach.
Tens of thousands of acres have already been scooped up by the carbon capture industry. When our leaders finally admit that atmospheric CO2 removal has been a massive, enormously expensive boondoggle, how will these carbon hubs and wells be disposed of? Is it even possible to do so safely?
Our children and grandchildren will be forced to clean up the mess created by the futile attempt to “capture” carbon and store it. Why is our state intent on placing this burden on its future generations? Why not a nuclear reactor facility instead of carbon capture? Why not something that directly benefits the people of our state? There’s nothing more “green” than nuclear power, so why the push to instead make our state a reservoir for CO2?
Carbon capture is a costly dead end. We need to force our leaders to realize it before its too late.
No general Oklahoma voter can exercise their vote for one of the most important political positions in the legislature – Speaker of the House. Why, you might ask? Though that’s an excellent and reasonable question, I honestly don’t know, but as long as I’ve been aware, we’ve had to rely on our elected House Representatives to do that for us – often in secret vote.
What, you might say? How can the leader of the House – the one that picks the Committee Chairs, the one that decides what bills are heard, the one that sets the tone for the House of Representatives and can break a tie with their vote on any contentious legislation heard in committee – not be voted on by Oklahoma voters, though he or she would lead one entire half of the body of our legislature? Well, again, that’s a really excellent question.
Here’s what it says about the process in the article announcing Hilbert’s election – because there is nothing on the Oklahoma Legislature website that explains how the Speaker of the House is elected.
Under majority caucus rules, the speaker-designate for the upcoming Legislature is selected through a caucus election on the first Monday in March during election years. The 60th Legislature will be seated after November’s elections and convene for its first session in 2025. The entire body of the House will formally vote on its next speaker on organizational day for the 60th Oklahoma Legislature in early January 2025.
Majority (Republican) caucus rules can change every year, so that’s a comforting notion.
But not so fast. There is at least one other vote for House Speaker, so Hilbert’s ascendancy isn’t written in stone.
And why shouldn’t there be another vote? Some of the members of the House at the time of the first vote were either term-limited, or voted out in the primaries. Some still face a candidate in the November 5th election. Why should Representatives who won’t even be seated in the House during the 2025 session vote on the Speaker position instead of the newly elected Representatives who will serve in that legislature?
Recently, representative Tom Gann of Inola has thrown his hat in the ring to challenge Kyle Hilbert for Speaker. (Here’s a bit about Tom Gann from Ballotpedia.)
I thought it might be interesting to compare the two candidates, so I went through the Oklahoma Ethics Guardian System and pulled their Ethics reports from January through August – the first three quarters of the filing year. To make it easy to read, I loaded both Contributions and Expenses data for each candidate into an Excel spreadsheet.
Here is Tom Gann’s. Representative Gann has been in the House since 2016.
Here is Kyle Hilbert’s. Hilbert has also been in the Oklahoma House since 2016.
Totals are at the bottom of each column, but let me recap:
Tom Gann had no contributions for the first three reporting quarters. He had no real expenses other than the loan he repaid himself from 2023.
During that same time period, Kyle Hilbert took $1900 from individuals (including former legislators), $5750 from lobbyists, $61,151.32 from 38 different PACs (9 originating out of state), $20,657.67 from individuals associated with some kind of a business (the entry was John Smith, CEO of XYZ Corporation) and $2950 from two separate tribes – for a total of $92,408.99.
Hilbert’s expenses are not fully listed here. I picked out his payments to other House members – a total of $97,200.00). He also paid CAMP and James Martin Company for his political needs. Both often work together in the world of Oklahoma political consulting.
This is a video of Kyle Hilbert from a KFOR political program on Sunday mornings. Please note. According to him, his job is to get Republicans elected to office.
Clearly, he’s not read the Constitution. That is NOT his job. His job is to protect the liberty of his constituents. Please also note – he was convinced that former Chair of the House Appropriations Committee Kevin Wallace would be re-elected. In a stunning victory for LIBERTY in Lincoln and surrounding counties, citizens came out during a hot July primary to UNELECT Kevin Wallace because he was more interested in special interests than his own constituents – kind of like Kyle Hilbert.
The Hilliary family are big political donors, including to Governor Kevin Stitt and State Superintendent Ryan Walters. We looked at the Hilliarys’ political contributions since 2015 and found they donated $705,803.20 to candidates and PACS that support them. $249,315.60 of that came directly from Hilliary Communications co-CEO Dustin Hilliary. In April, Dustin was appointed by Governor Stitt to the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, even though Dustin, himself, does not hold a college degree.
Here is an invitation for a fund-raiser for the PAC. Note, that James Martin Company – who is paid many multiple thousands of dollars by Hilbert’s campaign account – is taking RSVPs.
The main donations to the PAC are other PACs, lobbyists and individuals associated with companies or corporations – many of which are the same ones donating to Hilbert’s campaign.
The main expenditures from the PAC fund the campaigns of Oklahoma Representatives – including Hilbert. Why? Aren’t people from their own districts supposed to be supporting their office? Aren’t they to be Representatives of the People, not PACs or other candidates or legislators? If a candidate is receiving money from the campaign of a ‘leadership’ PAC or the Speaker Designate, what does that say about the independence of those Oklahoma Representatives? What happens when a bill is run and the Speaker needs votes? (Notice, not every legislator is on either Hilbert’s or WolfPAC’s list). Some Oklahoma legislators don’t take funds like those described above, thus circumventing any of the questions posed about their consequences.
Don’t Oklahomans have the right to wonder what happens during the next vote for Speaker? Do legislators who got checks feel the need to vote for the person who gifted them of his campaign funds? It surely does beg the question and an answer should be carefully considered.
In contrast, here is a video of Tom Gann during an October 8th Interim Study held at the capitol which described how Oklahomans can lose a host of their Constitutional rights when police officers pull over cars and use data captured by Automatic License Plate Readers.
Hmmm…is it just me, or is there really no comparison between Gann and Hilbert now that we’ve had the chance to look at them side-by-side?
Gann is funded by NO ONE – Hilbert is funded by PACs and lobbyists and individuals who represent/work with large corporations and businesses within the state – people who could very well have a stake in any legislation run through the legislature.
NOW, if any of the issues I’ve brought up concern you, contact your House Rep RIGHT NOW and ask them to vote for Tom Gann for Speaker of the House! (If you don’t know who that is, please slap yourself and then go here) It’s the only way to put government back in its box – the one that exists solely of PROTECTING OUR RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES.
List of PACs Contributing To Kyle Hilbert’s Campaign January through August, 2024
Advance Freedom PAC
Amber Integrated PAC
American Electric Power Committee for Responsible Government
American Fidelity Corp PAC
Architects Political Action Committee
Associated Builders and Contractors Oklahoma PAC
AT&T Oklahoma PAC
Beer Distributors of Oklahoma Political Action Committee
Bondsman Political Action Committee
Brightspring PAC (KY)
Boeing Company PAC
CARE PAC
Cox PAC
Delta Dental of Oklahoma For Oral Health PAC
Dentaquest PAC (MA)
Enterprise Holdings Inc. PAC (MO)
IP-PAC (DC) (also an International Paper PAC)
International Paper PAC (DC)
Invenergy Political Action Committee (IL)
Marathon Oil Company PAC (TX)
OK Beef PAC
Oklahoma Academy of Physician Associates
Oklahoma Committee of Automobile Retailers
Oklahoma’s Electric Cooperatives PAC
Oklahoma Funeral Directors Association PAC
Oklahoma Optometric Political Action Committee
Oklahoma Pharmacists Association PAC
Oklahoma Society of Certified Public Accountants Political Action Committee
Due to scheduling issues, Camilo Ulloa and Jessica Perez joined the live podcast via a recorded interview Michael and I did with them the Tuesday before.
Camilo (who goes by Cam) was born in Columbia and emigrated here with his parents when he was 7. Jessica was born in Arizona, near the Arizona/Mexico border. Her mom was adopted from Mexico as a child. Cam is employed with the military in Oklahoma and Jessica is employed with a well-known non-profit, also here in Oklahoma.
Both Cam and Jessica are appointed members of the Governor’s Hispanic Council. We talk about that in the full video and it’s worth just that topic alone to watch the entire podcast, but I’ll say just this; neither Jessica nor Cam were appointed to the Task Force and as part of the Hispanic Council, they were not tapped for their views on the topic.
It’s also important to point out here that Cam and Jessica are both Oklahoma Republicans. Cam has been so active in the party that it’s a rare Republican who hasn’t at least met him at a party function.
Cam and I have been talking about the Governor’s Task Force since my article on its creation and after a quick video Michael and I did on the Task Force’s recommendations. He reached out with numerous insights that I hadn’t heard in the press, so I asked him to come on and talk about them. Since Jessica serves with him on the Governor’s Hispanic Council, Cam suggested she come too.
Of course, one of the topics discussed was the Task Force’s plan to provide – no joke – Driver’s Privilege Cards to non-citizens. Here’s Jessica talking about SOME of the problems this would cause.
Here is the link to the article I mentioned in the video, but it wouldn’t matter if I gave you this particular one or not. You could find a million of them if you search, “illegals driving”. Seriously, we should all call out Lt. Col. Joe Williams, designee of the Commissioner of the Department of Public Safety for having zero clue about what constitutes PUBLIC SAFETY.
I scoured the section of the recommendations under the heading “The Task Force recommends issuing Driving Privilege Cards to qualifying non-citizens to address public safety concerns” and couldn’t find a single place in which they said that the ‘non-citizens’ getting these cards would be TESTED like regular Oklahoma citizens are, TO DRIVE. That’s honestly outrageous.
But that’s not all, listen to both Jessica and Cam talk about what happens when we give non-citizens the same rights as citizens. Our state gets BLUER!
And this was just a clip. In the full video (found here on YouTube and Rumble), we talked about the fact that there is very little way that this Task Force is talking about any other than non-documented citizens – those coming across the border – not the ones already here, or coming here, with Visas to work.
People who hire foreign workers – like those they seem to be talking about in the recommendations on H1B Visas – do so directly. A worker here on an H1B Visa doesn’t just ‘show up’ for work – they have to be recommended by their employer to work for them, or they have to be sponsored by a church or another sponsoring organization. These pathways are already well-known and well-used by Oklahoma employers.
It may seem nuts for Jessica to say that the majority of undocumented people can’t even read in their own language before entering the country (making them a HUGE liability in every way – including public schools!), but I found a study done in 2017 – before it became racist to say “illegal immigrant” – which clearly shows that English literacy hovered around 40% for immigrants. With our own student scores now at 49th in the nation, how could we expect anything different for those coming to this country – especially those coming illegally?
Since the Biden/Harris Administration’ open borders policies, child sex trafficking has more than TRIPLED. Do we think this will get better with illegals acting like citizens because they have a card that lets them drive? That just opens up a whole new world of TRAFFICKING via – legal driving!
Bottom line, NOTHING THE GOVERNOR’S TASK FORCE RECOMMENDED SHOULD BE CONSIDERED AS POLICY IN 2025. The recommendations grows government, is a joke to public safety and doesn’t address the fact that most skilled workers coming here to work already have a path to that job without Oklahoma getting involved.
I urge you to read the Task Force recommendations for yourself, but my favorite is where they invoke the 10th Amendment as a way to give illegals ‘driver’s cards’. Why don’t we do that instead of accepting every dadgum federal dollar that comes down the pike? What the HECK is going on in Oklahoma? Wake up people, at this point Oklahoma is only ‘red’ because of it’s copiously bleeding values.
As much as I support Ryan Walters’ attempts to root out leftist ideology from our classrooms, it appears that the most damaging instances are flying completely under the radar, and finding their way into the classroom without anyone noticing.
A recent example of how students are being exposed to left-wing ideas is two books that have been assigned to fifth grade students at McKinley Elementary in their advanced reading course: “The Path to Paper Son”, by Grant Din, and “Louis Share Kim”, by Barbara D. Krasner. Both books can be listened to in their entirety in the YouTube link provided.
The books are fictionalized accounts of how Chinese immigrants in the 19th century tricked American immigration officials into allowing illegal Chinese immigrants to gain US citizenship by falsely claiming that Chinese nationals were a part of their family. The books paint a sympathetic portrait of this dishonest tactic, justifying it on the grounds that living in China was too dangerous for these Chinese citizens, and so they must immigrate to the US by any means necessary on humanitarian grounds.
The books are a part of the MyView Literacy program that is used as the primary curriculum at Norman Public Schools, and I believe the primary pipeline through which this political ideology is infiltrating our schools and reaching our students’ minds.
Are these books appropriate for impressionable elementary students? How will these books alter the worldview of young American children, particularly how it relates to our modern immigration crisis? We are experiencing the greatest crisis of illegal immigration that this country has experienced in decades, and justifications for allowing it to continue are identical with the justifications for the Chinese immigration described in these books.
The MyView curriculum appears designed to foster an emotional judgment of immigration long before the true facts of the negative effects of invasion-level immigration reaches our children, and long before they’ve developed the capacity and maturity to understand them. As we know, a deeply-held emotional prejudice will easily overpower facts learned later.
The implicit moral of these two books is that it is okay to allow illegal immigration, even if it means breaking the law, if doing so allows foreign illegals to escape homeland for a better life.
Is this really a lesson that we want our kids learning in school? This is virtually identical to the justifications used today by our leftist-dominated political and humanitarian institutions, that have allowed millions of unvetted and undocumented migrants to flow unimpeded into our country, with tens of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, and other nationals given automatic parole and flown in to the US to be settled in unsuspecting communities, bringing cultures, habits, and even crime, that are incompatible with the American communities that are forced to contend with these newcomers.
Books like this smuggle a pro-immigration worldview into our classrooms right under our noses, molding the worldview of our children to automatically support the waves of immigration, and opposing any attempts to stop the flood.
I would urge Ryan Walters to, instead of pushing bibles and chaplains in our schools, instead thoroughly scour the current reading curriculum, primarily MyView Literacy, for political activism disguised as ordinary reading material. This is the overriding manner in which leftist orthodoxy is finding its way into our schools, and it must be rooted out.
With our state reading levels sitting at embarrassing levels, why should SEL and other forms of stealth political activism be given priority? Why is there not a concerted effort to focus like a laser on real literacy and math proficiency, or, God forbid, typing proficiency? In our computer age, typing proficiency is vital, and yet a typing class has not been offered to my children in either elementary or middle school.
Our priorities are totally out of whack, and as a result we’re condemning our children to a diminished future.
