political animals

(edited after publication)

So interesting today to see that Governor Stitt has fired three members of the state school board because, “…it’s clear that our education infrastructure has fallen prey to needless political drama.”

Political drama. What does that actually mean? But then the Governor loves to use catch phrases – you know – like political animal – the term he used when he was out in Chairman of the House Appropriations and Budget Committee, Representative Kevin Wallace’s district, trying to get him re-elected over the grassroots, common family man the people preferred, Jim Shaw?

Seriously. What political drama? Literally. What exactly was the DRAMA the Board was engaging in?

I never saw a one of them talking about their jobs outside the Board in a way that invoked DRAMA. None of them were going before a camera to talk about their jobs or to condemn the Superintendent or the Governor or creating MAGA videos in their cars. SO WHAT DRAMA?

I think he means the DRAMA of removing the teaching certificates of taxpayer-supported public school employees who were preying upon children. THAT drama!

Seriously, does anyone realize that we’ve had a drag queen principal with a drunk driving and child pornography charge – who only went away because of outside pressure by local media outlet V1SUT – and a Superintendent in Shawnee and a coach in Shawnee and incidents in Kingfisher and Ninnekah and Salina and Perry and Wewoka where districts are being sued because NO ONE WOULD PROTECT STUDENTS FROM EMPLOYEES WHO WERE HURTING CHILDREN? THAT kind of drama Mr. Stitt?

Kendra Wesson – one of the removed Board members – is one of the most transparent, hard-working, smart, committed women I know. She was always prepared for a meeting and truly had a heart for kids – a not-so-surprising-fact when you find out that she has eight of her own. Her removal is absolute NONSENSE. She wasn’t engaged in any kind of political drama in any way. All she was trying to do in her position was go over and above to help Oklahoma kids.

WHO IN THE HELL FIRES SOMEONE LIKE KENDRA WESSON????

She and this Board were actively involved in attempting to remove teachers and other public school personnel who were a danger to children – and now all of them but two – Governor Stitt’s attorney at Gateway Mortgage, Sarah LePak – and Zach Archer – who, like Governor Stitt, works in the financial industry – are left. What do they know about education? Apparently, they know how to be an attorney and a financial analyst – but, dang it – that is the kind of person our Governor admires!

So what about these new Board members?

Michael Tinney is the husband of Ginger Tinney of Professional Oklahoma Educators. Mr. Tinney is an oil and gas attorney with Ames, Ashabranner, Taylor, Lawrence, Laudick & Morgan in Oklahoma City. I guess we should be happy that he’s at least CONNECTED to someone who knows about education, ‘cuz at this point, we’re 0-2 there.

Ryan Deathridge is a small business owner and the Kingfisher County 911 Director. He has a double major in Agriculture and Finance.

If he is from Kingfisher, he is resident of the Kingfisher Public School system where the district was slapped with a $5 million dollar lawsuit over charges of abuse by Kingfisher Football Coach Jeff Myers. Myers, who was banned from any further activity with the team and whose contract was not to be renewed by the Board, was still employed as of December, when Kingfisher had to let go 22 positions to pay the settlement from the suit after the Kingfisher County Excise Board refused to pass the settlement cost on to tax payers.

And then we found this:

Apparently, in the 20-teens Deathridge was associated with the electric ‘car’ tax credit craze. And yes, there were federal income tax subsidies taken for the vehicles.

What an interesting choice for the State School Board. He has no education experience either.

And then there’s Chris VanDenhende who is listed in the Governor’s press release as being from Tulsa. According to VanDenhende’s LinkdIn page, he is from Stroud, Oklahoma, in Lincoln County, where he is Chief Financial Officer at Southwest Fuel Systems, LLC. and Mint Turbines.

Interesting choice Mr. VanDenhende. Apparently, he is friendly with Mr. Stitt’s friend, Kevin Wallace.

In a Lincoln County News Herald “Report From Kevin Wallace” on April 6, 2022, Mr. Wallace says, “I was fortunate to be invited to dinner on the eve of this event with many representatives from the industries. Chris VanDenhende, chief financial officer and chief strategy officer for Southwest Fuel Systems and Mint Turbines in Stroud, also attended. VanDenhende spoke recently at the Stroud Chamber banquet. It was a pleasure to get to see him again and to discuss his company’s growth in our House district.”

But, that’s not all (I feel like Monty Hall). Mint Turbines has been collecting Oklahoma Quality Jobs Incentive Payments since 2020. In 2024, his company got a ‘shout out’ from the Oklahoma Commerce Department, that included the following text:

Strategic Public/Private Partnerships and Industry Engagement

With nearly 72,000 square feet of factory and warehouse space, Mint Turbines is one of the few certified MRO facilities in North America. Known for its commitment to quality and customer service, the company serves both commercial and military sectors, ensuring top-tier turbine engine performance and reliability. Mint Turbines has partnered with ACES at numerous trade shows to boost their visibility within the aerospace industry and showcase their capabilities to key industry leaders.

They also received about $100,000 in training reimbursements from Department of Career and Technology Education and a 2 MILLION DOLLAR Federal Loan from the Export Bank.

So, no one on the State School Board has ANY EDUCATION EXPERIENCE at all and only attorney Mike Tinney is involved with someone who does. I’m sure that will be SUPER helpful to Oklahoma’s kids and will put us well on the way to improving our NAEP scores.

What’s even more interesting, is that Senator Julia Kirk put out THIS press release shortly after the “shake up” occurred.

Followed shortly by Senator Mark Mann.

Well thank God the DEMOCRATS are happy! That’s certainly why we elected another Republican Governor – to make Democrats happy!

The only other thing that sounds SUPER FISHY here, is that the Governor would decide TODAY, the day that Auditor Cindy Byrd was to make her audit of Tulsa Public Schools public, to make this School Board ‘shake up’ announcement based on the stupid premise of “political drama”. The Governor just had Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller stand with him for his state of the state address – touting the equally stupid cell phone bill (even funnier…Supt. Miller created his district’s policy without a law, yet the Governor pointed to him for support of the bill) and, as we all know, the Governor is from Tulsa.

Interestingly (I know, I keep using that word), Auditor Byrd was unable to release the findings because a truckload of lawyers working for TPS invoked an obscure law to halt its release. At her press conference she said the findings are significant and that she wasn’t allowed to provide the results to the public because of a law that no one had ever used in her 28 years as an auditor.

People, this state is in trouble. The people who run it do NOT HAVE OUR BEST INTERESTS AT HEART.

In fact, did you know that Governor Stitt still had financial interest in Gateway Financial Services and other Gateway entities as of 2019? Did you know that Oklahoma has given Gateway First – the fusion of Gateway Mortgage and Farmers Exchange Bank of Cherokee – hundreds of thousands of dollars in Quality Jobs Incentive Payments since 2019?

This State Board of Education ‘shake up’ was WRONG. Dead WRONG. It won’t help our NAEP scores, but I guarantee it’ll help score political points with someone somewhere – and that has to be what ALL of this is about. So, make no mistake, none of this was about helping Oklahoma kids!

It is a very sad thing to have to say, but we’ve come to a point in our country when the basic values held by so many in America – particularly rural Americans – of hard work, faith in Jesus Christ, love of family, patriotism, being neighborly and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps without bending the knee and kissing the ring of government, are being out right demonized.

And not just demonized by a media many Americans today have begun to realize merely manufacture government propaganda rather than reporting actual news, but by their own elected representatives and fellow citizens.

This primary season, a young man from HD32 – a district which bumps up against the border of eastern Oklahoma county where I live – decided he had great concerns about what was happening in his backyard.

Plans are being enacted by private ‘green energy’ companies (which get American tax-payer subsidies and couldn’t exist in the free market without them) to create wind generation installations in the back 40’s of these Oklahomans – some of whom have maintained family ownership of their properties since statehood. Most landowners don’t want that, yet absentee owners have sold out for the promise of the dollars they think they can collect while ruining the health and vitality of the land of their on-site neighbors with giant, bird-killing, non-compostable, oil-leaking monstrosities and they’re nervous about keeping their land intact. [If you’re interested in the problems with this ‘technology’, you can find a full podcast on the issue here.]

His own Representative, Kevin Wallace (Chairman of the House Appropriations and Budget Committee – a very powerful position in state government because it holds the purse strings to how Oklahoman’s tax dollars are spent), admitted to dumping human waste on his property as fertilizer twice and then defended it by saying that it was legal in Oklahoma to do so.

Biosludge is a nightmare. It smells so badly that neighbors who live downwind of an application often can’t take full breaths outdoors, it draws flies and it contains everything that goes down the sewers in Oklahoma county from pharmaceuticals to industrial chemicals. Like many of his neighbors, this young man had developed great concerns about what this substance could do to the health of his family and his neighbors, but also the health of the aquifer from which we ALL draw in this region. [If you’re interested in the problems with biosludge, you can find a full podcast on the issue here.]

And these are just a few of the concerns residents in the district have had for years.

After realizing that no one – including Wallace – seemed to be confronting the issues that affected them beyond giving them lip service, entrepreneur and family man, HD32 resident, Jim Shaw, decided he needed to run against his politically powerful representative to try and do something about these issues for his neighbors and himself, running on a platform of Land, Livelihoods and Legacies.

The incumbent conducted his campaign abysmally. Wallace called Shaw (a political newcomer and a neighbor) a liar and a hypocrite via social media, direct mail and video ads nearly daily, and – late in the campaign – posted a Google Earth photo of Shaw’s farm with his address clearly labeled for the public to see, calling him a hypocrite for coming out against ‘green energy’ initiatives when he used a small solar panel bank for personal sustainability. According to one writer, Wallace’s construction company has undertaken numerous state jobs, “raising questions about whether Wallace’s legislative position has intersected with his business interests”. But then, Wallace is no stranger to public money, having accumulated about $68,000 in disaster and commodities subsidies over the last 10 years.

Donors to Wallace’s campaign – during which he spent over $440K just in the pre-run off period – read like a “who’s who” of lobbyist, special interests and PACS. In fact, frequent ROPE contributor Karmin Grider found that – over his entire career in the House – Wallace had collected less than 1% of his campaign funds from people in his district.

One of Wallace’s campaign issues centered on a bill to stop foreign ownership of private land in Oklahoma. Shaw researched and found the touted bill did nothing to stop foreign ownership of private land. When he challenged Wallace on the issue, Governor Kevin Stitt produced an off-the-cuff video supporting Wallace, the bill and Wallace’s role in passage of the bill while calling Shaw supporters “political animals”. (But Wallace did vote for a bill to protect people who put biosludge on their farms from possible EPA fines over ‘forever’ chemicals.)

During the run-off election, House Speaker Charles McCall, Governor Kevin Stitt, Marathon PAC Chairman Thomas Tillison (a PAC which contributed $5k to Wallace in the run-off and whose family contributed $7,600 during the primary), Senator Grant Green and Speaker-elect Kyle Hilbert all came to the district to stump for Wallace. (Photos taken from public posts to Kevin Wallace’s Facebook page)

I awoke this morning to a video in Facebook Messenger and a headline from the Oklahoman.

The article in the Oklahoman labeled those of us who supported (and still support heartily) candidate-now-Representative, Jim Shaw, “far right-wing”.

The video (below) was from a man I’ve become friends with while supporting Jim Shaw for election. He lives on his family’s long-held farm in the district, is wildly intelligent and salt-of-the-earth as they come. This is a timeline he created from pictures he’d taken from start to finish of the campaign featuring all the neighbors, friends and now-friends who came together wanting a leadership change in the district.

THESE are the “political animals” – the “far right-wing” people who overturned a powerful member of the Oklahoma legislature when they believed he didn’t have their best interests in mind.

Call us what you will, but we’re God-fearing, loyal, patriotic, self-sufficient and loving. We’re proudly American. We’re your neighbors. We’re everything all Americans USED to be.

So as the propagandists seek to minimize us, demonize us and destroy us, they should just understand one thing with every fiber of their being;

WE’RE THE FOUNDATIONS OF RURAL AMERICA AND WE’RE NEVER GONNA TO CHANGE.

Video audio: Sturgill Simpson Coal Miner Family From Kentucky.

ROPE Report

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Republican Governor Stitt Sides With Democrats To Keep The Education Status Quo By Firing State Education Board Members Engaged In Protecting Oklahoma Kids

Governor Stitt Calls Us “Political Animals”, The Oklahoman Calls Us “Far Right-Wing” – Who Really ARE HD32 Jim Shaw Supporters?