Unfortunately, after having Representative Shaw on the show to talk about the Save Oklahoma Plan, Michael and I decided that we would remove ourselves from the plan.
Here’s a short video that I clipped from the beginning of our interview with Dr. Becky Pelham on why Oklahoma kids can’t read (which you simply must watch because Dr. Pelham is amazing and explains it beautifully – then share with your legislators) that explains why. Really, it’s only #4 on the plan – mandatory E-Verify.
Does this mean we don’t support Representative Shaw? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Of course we support Representative Shaw. The Save Oklahoma Plan can definitely save Oklahoma if we focus on the rest of the 6 points and then try to figure out ways to keep people here illegally from making cash at jobs sites – among other issues. Apparently, ICE and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol (among other state agencies) are making a dent in the problem of illegals in Oklahoma – we should let them continue, while finding ways to catch those slipping through the cracks.
I wrote about several E-Verify issues in our last post, but our friend Knoxie (on X) wrote a really great post about why she is concerned about the E-Verify part of the SOP and it is great information. Check it out.
@ShawForOK@shanejett@KendalforOK I write to urge you to oppose any state legislation that would mandate or expand the use of E-Verify for Oklahoma employers. While the system is often presented as a simple tool to curb illegal immigration, real-world evidence especially from… https://t.co/yCM4YcqaY4
Bottom line is this – we support Representative Shaw and 6 of the 7 planks in the SOP.
If #4 is changed in some way, Michael and I will reevaluate and sign back on. In the meantime, the grassroots can’t get bent out of shape on the issue of who’s supporting the plan and who isn’t. Arguing with one another over this will create hard feelings and cause us to lose elections we need and possibly prevent good people from running against bad legislators. Let’s just agree to disagree and work together where we can. Next year are important elections. THOSE trump everything in importance. Let’s make sure we unite to get good people in the building a 23rd and Lincoln at all costs!
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.
April 20th, Governor Stitt played at giving with one hand and taking away with the other.
On the one hand, Governor Stitt signed ‘controversial’ ‘immigration’ bill HB4156; a solid bill that provides deportation and fines and/or jail time for those found to commit ‘impermissible occupation’, defined thusly
“A person commits an impermissible occupation if the person is an alien and willfully and without permission enters and remains in the State of Oklahoma without having first obtained legal authorization to enter the United States.”
All Senate Republicans voted for the bill as did all Republicans of the House. Democrats voted in blocks against the bill in both chambers.
While many ‘press’ headlines center around the word ‘controversial’, only one headline contained the fact that an Executive Order on immigration was signed by the Governor on the same day as his signature was inked to the bill.
During a press conference of the signing, the Governor announced the task force, saying, “Our hands have been forced by the unprecedented border security crisis that has seen more than 52,000 Chinese Nationals, along with terror organizations, illegally infiltrate and wreak havoc on our great nation and state,” he says. “Simply put, we will not tolerate threats to our communities and we will not become home to sanctuary cities.”
I just signed HB 4156 in response to Biden’s failure to secure the southern border— we must be a law and order state.
I’m also announcing the launch of a Task Force to explore opportunities for those here contributing to our communities and economy.https://t.co/OvQlCRsgWd
Since Oklahoma passed a state question deciding the use of medical marijuana in 2018, there has been a steady rise in violent crime in once idyllic rural countrysides thanks to Chinese national-run marijuana grows. This has largely stemmed from the fact that the Oklahoma legislature not only got off flat-footed on the creation of laws to regulate the ‘medical’ marijuana industry after the question was passed, but then found themselves apparently unprepared to regulate the NEW state agency they created to regulate the industry.
Reading the Executive Order signed directly after the bill, is instructive. Here are the first two whereas’:
Note the wording in the second paragraph, “…honest, hardworking Hispanic or OTHER international migrant populations here…”. How is anyone here in the state illegally, honest. This begs many questions then. Are shoplifters honest? What about murderers?
The EO then goes on to blame the Biden administration for not issuing VISAs or permits (how can he be blamed when he’s allowing millions of people to flood the borders of this nation illegally – there’s no possible way to keep up with the backlog that kind of volume of humanity would generate) to those immigrants who have “long filled gaps in Oklahoma’s workforce”.
In fact, it’s almost as though the EO says, ‘We have a bunch of Chinese Nationals who are causing crime in Oklahoma, so we’re going to get these people out of the state, but everyone else here illegally is honestly working to fill jobs too good for legal Oklahomans and we need them to stay, so we’re going to figure out a way to make that happen’.
Here is what the Task Force is assigned to do.
Who will serve ON the Task Force?
Look at #5. Is Oklahoma a border state? What about an international airline hub? No? Why then is there a Mexican Consul located in Oklahoma?
According to the largest post to the Oklahoma Mexican Consul page on the Mexican Consulate website, the Oklahoma Consul can help to REGISTER Hispanics to VOTE. As to what the Twitter page for the Oklahoma Mexican Consul says, one wouldn’t know unless one was fluent in Spanish.
According to the Oklahoman, the Mexican Consul was opened last year (5.20.23), to provide people with their “Mexican passports, birth certificates and other government-issued documents” in order to keep them from having to journey to Little Rock, AK, Kansas City, MO, or Dallas, TX – the latter of which is a four hour drive from Oklahoma City.
HB4156 is being lauded among Conservatives as helping to stem the tide of illegal immigration in Oklahoma, but clearly, that’s not the bottom line. If the bill is going to be signed and touted as ‘controversial’ yet the Governor goes on to sign an EO for a task force to make ‘honestly’ illegal aliens, legal, what exactly does the bill mean then?
No, Oklahomans do not want high crime rates – certainly not drug trafficking crime which tends to be graphically violent – but Chinese nationals are not the only ones here in Oklahoma committing drug crimes.
In January, Representative Justin Humphrey – a former law enforcement officer with years of experience in drug court – filed HB3133 to have drug trafficking become an act of terrorism. This bill blew up in the media, but not for the terrorism designation for drug trafficking. It blew up because he identified two Mexican cartels – the Sinola and New Age – as primarily trafficking in fentanyl, a drug responsible for many tens of thousands of deaths across the US and a skyrocketing number in Oklahoma according to the Oklahoma State Department of Health.
Because Humphrey also used the word ‘Hispanic’ in the bill, a firestorm ensued in which Humphrey was accused of racism. This prompted him to comment, “I believe these continual accusations of racism present an indisputable danger to America freedom and democracy.” (Apparently, the Legislature is aware of this issue and did add fentanyl to the Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Act this year through SB1280 – a bill that doesn’t contain the word ‘Hispanic’.)
In fact, the Governor’s EO goes out of its way to eliminate any appearance at all of considering a member of the Hispanic population as here NOT ‘honestly’.
Biden won 63% of the Latino vote in 2020 and is now appealing again to Latino voters by saying that they are the reason he won the election against President Donald Trump. According to Oklahoma Watch, Hispanic voters outvoted Black and Asian voters in the 2022 Oklahoma mid-terms by a large margin.
In fact, the RNC helped open an Hispanic Community Center in south OKC, where former Oklahoma Republican Committeewoman, Pam Pollard said they were “also going to be doing voter registration”. Clearly, the Latino vote is important and catering to that vote is something the Oklahoma GOP hopes to do.
Last year, Oklahoma Senator Michael Brooks (D), an Hispanic, proposed a bill to allow illegal immigrants to gain state driver’s licenses. The only thing an illegal person here in Oklahoma had to do to obtain a DL was show that they had been paying their taxes. This ignited a firestorm among Oklahoma citizens who believed that such cards could be used to allow the owner to vote illegally.
So it would seem that politics is out in full force when looking at the scope of HB4156. After all, our Governor is nothing if not a ‘workforce’ governor who sees it as his job to “make Oklahoma the state where it’s easiest to start and grow a business’. Yes, government MUST get out of the way to do that, but that will absolutely not happen by making lawlessness legal and more efficient.
It’s my job to make Oklahoma the state where it’s easiest to start and grow a business.
We’re already seeing it happen before our eyes. We’ve cut regulations, got government out of the way— we’re now Top Five in Real GDP growth.https://t.co/t8vkBAXBxh
President Biden will undoubtedly go down in history as one of the worst presidents in all American history – especially on immigration. If the President won’t act to stem the tide of people illegally entering the United States, Oklahoma, should act in its own best interest to protect its citizens. It should secure its own borders from those wishing to enter illegally, whether they bring crime and brutality, OR NOT.
Just like President Biden’s student loan bailout is a slap in the face to all the hardworking young people who have worked hard to pay their way through colleges and universities, ANY attempt to give people who come to Oklahoma illegally an end around the immigration system is a slap in the face to those who have come here the right way – the HARD way – the EXPENSIVE way – the way that includes NATURALIZATION.
Today in Oklahoma, rather than a tapestry of Oklahomans of different international backgrounds united together under the Oklahoma flag, we have different areas of our cities and towns devoted to Hispanic populations, or Asian populations, or Islamic populations (including taxpayer sponsored Madrasas) – many of whom came to Oklahoma but can barely speak a word of English.
Cynically, maybe this is the reason the Superintendent of one of the largest Hispanic population schools in Oklahoma is so annoyed about HB4156. Mr. Brewster’s X feed is full of similar posts. Is there a reason that a taxpayer funded Superintendent shouldn’t be fired for advocating lawlessness? Or is lawlessness just really fine anymore – especially if it occurs in the Hispanic population?
Deeply disappointed with our Governor and legislature.
I have never been ashamed to be an Oklahoman until today.
Governor Stitt is a professing Christian. Just a basic reading of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible would confirm that Jewish communities did not welcome ‘outsiders’. Yes, they were to be kind to those who lived among them, but they were not to intermarry, or allow others outside their faith to serve in their governments or in their Temples. Why? Because when they let down their guard and assimilated those of other faiths, their communities lost their identity in their God and quickly became affiliated with those of the outsiders.
Thanks in large part to unchecked immigration at the federal level, this country is completely different in values today, including that of national pride, than even during the 1960’s with all its generational upheaval. One has only to look at the demonstrations on college campuses in favor of Hamas – a known terrorist organization – to see that statement as absolute truth.
Should Oklahoma be a state closed to immigration? Of course not. Our country has been richer for the many legal immigrants it has welcomed from across the world over its several hundred years, as is our state. However, Identifying people here in Oklahoma illegally as ‘honest’ is wrong and on the very dangerous downhill side of a very slippery slope.
Allowing Oklahoma to develop its own system for vetting and assimilating people into the state because ‘we need workers’, or because they are already here working, is wrong.
In Biden’s economy, it may be hard for many to feed their families. Are we going to allow these families to steal food from grocery stores because Biden won’t do anything about inflation except print more money? Biden is paying off student loans. Because of this, are we to allow every student who wants to attend a school of higher learning for free to do so?
Actions have consequences and allowing lawlessness – especially lawlessness based on identity – has arguably the most far-reaching and frightening of all to the safety and security of ALL Oklahomans. The bill passed by Oklahomans to protect Oklahomans from unchecked illegal immigration and signed by Governor Stitt is a good bill. The Governor shouldn’t even consider providing an end-around.
