ROPE Report

Friday (1.17.25), Michael and I had a guest slated to appear for our podcast that wasn’t able to come on. Consequently, we did what all good LIVE podcasters do – we scrambled!

Fortunately – and unfortunately – there’s never really a lack of anything to talk about in Oklahoma politics, so we began by discussing our previous podcast with Senator Kendal Sacchieri. If you haven’t seen that yet, I highly recommend it. It created the MOST IMPORTANT 7 MINUTE VIDEO YOU’LL EVER SEE. The Senator is absolutely invaluable when it comes to explaining complicated things like property tax – which she did amazingly well.

At any rate, we replayed the 7 minute video and had Kendal on for a few minutes to clarify a few things and then we moved on to talking about education.

It was during this segment that Michael said the following about the teachers he talked to when he was running for school board. Suffice it to say, his comments were extremely distressing to a former teacher like me who LOVED the autonomy of my classroom.

We had heard this about teachers during the Common Core years. It’s astounding and, frankly, horrifying that we let this continue.

Next stop, AI teachers with your kids plugged into Skynet all day. Don’t scoff or laugh. We’re so close to there.

After that, we discussed the green agenda.

It’s my contention that people have no idea what nature is anymore and therefore don’t even really know what’s good for it or not, what it looks like raw and wild, or how to appreciate it in that state. Hint: A park is a tiny microcosm of nature that is usually trimmed and watered and fertilized – it’s not really nature. We’ve gotten so plugged into the web and so unplugged from outside, we don’t understand that our idea of what’s green and what’s not, is super skewed.

I talked about an article I wrote for the Federalist several years ago, “How Living In Chaos Makes It Impossible For Us To Run Our Lives And Government“. In the article, I wrote about our family’s move to our farm and how weird it was for all of us to leave the city. I advanced my thesis about nature by way of three paragraphs from the forward – written by one of his sons – to one of my favorite books, “Witness“, by Whitaker Chambers. It’s a very long book, but WELL worth the time it took to get through it.

As I say on the podcast frequently, I read, via earbuds and a subscription to Audible because I have so many chores in the growing season that it’s the only way I can actually “read” written material! Sometimes, when the book is very good, I buy it and add it to my ever-expanding research library – the one I hope my children fight over when I’m gone!

I read these three paragraphs on the podcast as we were talking about the green agenda. I feel them so deeply, I actually got choked up, so if you want to see me cry on the podcast, definitely check out the full live version on YouTube or Rumble! Please, read these paragraphs and tuck them in your heart. We’re having our humanity stolen from us daily, certainly don’t give it up voluntarily.

“The farm was your kingdom, and the world lay far beyond the protecting walls thrown up by work and love. It is true that comic strips were not encouraged, comic books were banned, the radio could be turned on only by permission (which was seldom given or asked), and you saw few movies,” he says, addressing his children. “But you grew in the presence of eternal wonders. There was the birth of lambs and calves…There was also the death of animals, sometimes violent, sometimes slow and painful – nothing is more constant on a farm than death.”

“Sometimes, of a spring evening, Papa would hear that distant honking that always makes his scalp tingle, and we would all rush out to see the wild geese, in lines of hundreds, steer up from the southwest, turn over the barn as over a landmark, and head into the north. Or on autumn nights of sudden cold that sent the ewes breeding in the orchard, Papa would call you out of the house to stand with him in the now celebrated pumpkin patch and watch the northern lights flicker in an electric clouds on the horizon, mount, die down, fade and mount again till they filled the whole northern sky with ghostly light in motion.”

“Thus, as children, you experienced two of the most important things men ever know – the wonder of life and the wonder of the universe, the wonder of life within the wonder of the universe. More important, you knew them not from books, not from lectures, but simply from living among them. Most important, you knew them with reverence and awe – that reverence and awe that has died out of the modern world and been replace by man’s monkeylike amazement at the cleverness of his own inventive brain.”