Oklahoma Election 2022: October 2022 Archives

District 4 Tulsa City Councilor-elect Laura Bellis, speaking at a recent fundraiser for incumbent District 7 Councilor and Council Chairman Lori Decter Wright, called the three challengers in the November 8, 2022, runoff, "actual fascists," called Decter Wright's opponent a "Nazi," and said that she has reported him to the FBI multiple times. Decter Wright embraces Bellis's words, saying, "I thank Laura for saying all the things I can't say, as chairwoman of the Tulsa City Council -- at least not publicly!"

I first saw this video here, but it had already been in circulation. The fundraiser appears to have been recent. I don't recognize the venue.

The Tulsa Fraternal Order of Police- FOP Public Page posted the video, but edited down to key sections (omitting Bellis's fundraising pitch for Decter Wright) and with captions.

Here is my attempt at transcribing. Bellis's grating "uptalk" sometimes makes it hard to distinguish questions from statements.

...reliant on sales taxes to fund big services for people? So it's really scary to watch people who are complete actual fascists? Running for office. It's actually -- it's every runoff that is happening right now there's an incumbent city councilor? Who is like a common sense person? Who is up against what I would say is a literal fascist? And it's scary. And we've seen it in recent, in the past several months, what it looks like when one of Those People gets a seat on our school board. They vote no on things like, just approving the agenda. They actually sow chaos. And we can't have that.

So it's never been more critical to be engaged on the local level, which is why I'm so amazed that you all are here? It's so important to pay attention to these things, because again These People are trying to infiltrate -- They don't have an interest in policy work. They don't have a vision for what they hope to see in our community. They're not interested in making people's lives better. They're too busy, saying the word "woke" a lot and being scared about critical race theory. It's ridiculous. You know, that's not a conversation for the City Council? We can of course talk about inequities and so much more and dig into policy there, but that's not what they're doing.

And again, this person, I don't think should be legally be allowed to run, but here we are. I've reported him to the FBI several times, and nothing has -- I'm not kidding -- like, I have all this [inaudible] and I keep sending them the pectures [sic] of -- and -- if you don't donate now into Lori Decter Wright, I am going to be asking you all to help foot my therapy bill, 'cause I'm gonna have to work with him. Don't do that to me. [Inaudible] doesn't deserve that.

Anyway it's never been more critical to support at a local level. It's never been more critical, especially given what has happened to reproductive rights to have women at decision-making tables. Please, please, please, tell all of your friends they have to keep Lori Decter Wright on the Council. She's been a phenomenal leader, and again, we cannot have someone who's actively a Nazi on our City Council. Our city deserves better.

So please donate to Lori, not just because her opponent is a complete f[---]ing nightmare, but because she's an incredibly competent, compassionate, courageous person who [sic] I really wanna get to work with and our city really needs at this [inaudible]. So thank you all so much. Um, I think we just, like, we need to clap for Lori and all the work she accomplished.

In case you're got lost on your way in, the fundraising envelopes are over here. I'll just stand here, if you start walking by, [inaudible] just grab one to go with you. I'll know. Please, please, please, just donate.

Decter Wright then responded:

Thank you, thank you so much. I thank Laura for saying all the things I can't say as chairwoman of the Tulsa City Council -- at least not publicly!

Decter Wright thus approved Bellis calling an elected African-American female school board member, E'Lena Ashley, an "actual fascist," a label that was also applied to the three conservative challengers (Grant Miller, Christian Bengel, Ken Reddick) running for city council. Decter Wright cheered someone calling Reddick, her conservative Republican opponent, "actively a Nazi" and "a f---ing nightmare." Decter Wright put her stamp of approval on Bellis's opinion that disagreement and debate in public meetings is "sowing chaos" and to the idea that when people who are not approved by the city establishment run for public office, "they're trying to infiltrate." She made no objection to Bellis reporting Reddick to the FBI for daring to run against her.

Bellis, Decter Wright, and their ilk claim to be defenders of democracy, but the theme running through these remarks is that governing needs to be left to the "experts," and we should only elect people who will rubber-stamp everything that comes before them. When three school board members voted against the "consent agenda," they were saying that some of the items on that list, such as accepting Chinese Communist Party money for a program in our public schools, deserved further scrutiny and debate in front of the voting public. If you think full and open debate is "sowing chaos," you have the wrong idea about democracy.

Note how Bellis and Decter Wright narrow the scope of acceptable, legitimate debate. When conservatives and libertarians seek office to stop the government from imposing mask mandates, vaccine mandates, or business closures, "they don't have an interest in policy work," according to Leftist fascists like Bellis and Decter Wright. Apparently, it's only legitimate policy work in their minds if you're debating which businesses to force to shut down, but not legitimate to debate whether the shut down is any use at all. "Making people's lives better" to them always means government action, never government restraint.

Conservative and libertarian Tulsans have a chance on November 8 to elect three city councilors who will stand against the truly fascist attitudes of Laura Bellis, Lori Decter Wright, MyKey Arthrell-Knezek, and Connie Dodson.

Vote for Grant Miller in District 5, Christian Bengel in District 6, and Ken Reddick in District 7. That won't give common sense a majority on the Tulsa City Council, but it will once again have a foothold.

MORE: Don't forget: Lori Decter Wright was on the committee that allocated $112,784 in federal COVID-19 relief funds to a non-profit to conduct a sex survey targeting teenagers. All nine incumbent city councilors, including Decter Wright, Connie Dodson, and Mykey Arthrell-Knezek, approved it.

A few notes on the four Oklahoma Supreme Court justices and five Court of Civil Appeals judges on the retention ballot this year. None of the five members of the Court of Criminal Appeals are up for retention this year.

Judges in Oklahoma's appellate system are up for retention every six years. I am voting to retain Gov. Stitt's recent appointees on both courts, against retention not only of judges appointed by Democrats, but also of two Republican appointees who have shown questionable judgment, whether on the bench or in a public role away from the courtroom. As originalists now have a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court and are restoring state freedom to legislate on a number of issues, we can expect progressive judicial activists to move their focus to state courts as a means to overturn legislation grounded conservative public sentiment. Now more than ever, conservative voters need to ensure that our state courts are safely in the hands of impartial, originalist judges.

Two of the Supreme Court justices, Dana Kuehn and Dustin Rowe, are recent appointees by Gov. Stitt. Justice Rowe has written several careful dissents indicating a willingness to take a stand on principle and reason, even if it puts him in the minority. It makes sense to give both of Stitt's appointees the opportunity to continue.

Justice James R. Winchester was in the majority that unjustly tossed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) initiative petition. Pro-life activists remember that Winchester, a Keating appointee, consistently voted to strike down pro-life laws and initiative petitions that might have been used to give the U. S. Supreme Court the opportunity to revisit and overturn Roe v. Wade; instead that honor fell to the State of Mississippi. This year, Winchester voted in favor of putting recreational marijuana on the ballot, despite the same issue of supremacy of federal law (in this case, an actual law banning marijuana, rather than a fatally flawed SCOTUS decision resting on emanations and penumbras).

I recommended against retaining Justices Winchester and Combs in 2016. They should both be retired by the voters, giving a re-elected Gov. Stitt the chance to add to his list of excellent court appointments.

For the Court of Civil Appeals, I'm voting to retain Stacie L. Hixon, Gregory C. Blackwell, and Thomas E. Prince, all recent appointments by Gov. Stitt. Judge Prince served for many years as a member of the Oklahoma State Election Board. I am voting NO on retaining John F. Fischer, appointed by Brad Henry, and Barbara G. Swinton, appointed by Mary Fallin.

Civil Appeals Court Judge Barbara Swinton was serving as a district judge in Oklahoma County when she was appointed to the Civil Appeals court in 2016 by Gov. Mary Fallin.

Swinton was a long-time board member of the Justice Alma Wilson Seeworth Academy, a school chartered by Oklahoma City Public Schools. Swinton served on the board from around 2002 until the school's closure in 2019, serving at various times as board president, vice president, and treasurer, according to Swinton's 2021 interview with Brenda Holt of the State Auditor's office. Seeworth closed its doors in May 2019 . Last month, the school's superintendent, Janice Grigg, was arrested and charged with embezzlement:

Annual school audits as early as 2009 warned the board of possible law violations and a troubling lack of internal controls meant to prevent fraud, state auditors said.

A 2012 lawsuit from a former Seeworth principal and auditors' letters in 2017 and 2019 communicated concerns over possible abuse of school funds. Finally in March 2019, a longtime Seeworth contractor sent a whistleblower letter to Swinton, the school board president at the time, alleging financial wrongdoing by Grigg, according to the state audit.

Auditors found an email in which Swinton appeared to dismiss the allegations.

"Thank you for your concerns about the financial health of Seeworth," she wrote to the whistleblower in a March 10, 2019, email. "These concerns were addressed by our board with our accountants and you should not have any concerns that the funds are being mishandled."

NonDoc's reporting from 2019 about the mistreatment of whistleblowers by the Seeworth board puts Judge Swinton in an especially bad light.

Oklahoma hasn't elected a Democrat to statewide office since 2006. Since 2004, every county in Oklahoma has given a plurality of its vote in every presidential election to the Republican nominee. Voter registration, a lagging indicator, continues to trend toward the GOP across the state, most strongly in southeastern Oklahoma, aka Little Dixie, which was Yellow Dog Democrat country for most of Oklahoma's first century. Republicans have super-majorities of 82-19 in the State House and 39-9 in the State Senate.

So it's astounding to see a poll a month before the election giving a Democrat the lead over an incumbent Republican governor. The latest Sooner Poll of 300 likely voters has Democrat Joy Hofmeister leading incumbent Republican Kevin Stitt by 46.8% to 43.0%. Crosstabs have not yet been published, but those polled would support Donald Trump over Joe Biden in a 2024 rematch by only 52.7% to 40.8%, which may indicate that the universe of those polled leans far more strongly to the left than the actual Oklahoma electorate. The actual vote in 2020 was Trump 65.4%, Biden 32.3%; Trump managed 55% of the vote or better in every county except Oklahoma County. It is hard to believe that Oklahoma voters have a more favorable opinion of Brain-Dead Biden after 20 disastrous months.

Dark money has funded dozens of mailers, TV ads, and social media posts misrepresenting the facts in order to hang the false label of "corrupt" around the governor's neck. Even if these ads fail to persuade Republicans to vote for the Democrat, it may succeed in discouraging GOP voters from filling the box next to Stitt's name.

In truth, Republican voters who want the party's platform enacted ought to be stampeding to the polls to give him another term in office, overflowing with gratitude for Stitt's record and filling their social media feeds with calls for his re-election.

Kevin Stitt promised to sign every pro-life bill that crossed his desk. Stitt kept that promise and earned the endorsement of the National Right to Life Committee. Because Kevin Stitt is in office instead of his Democrat opponent, Oklahoma has the strongest pro-life laws in the nation.

In February 2019, Kevin Stitt signed constitutional carry into law, one of the first bills approved during his term, affirming the right of Oklahomans to keep and bear arms without needing government pre-approval. This would not have happened had his Democrat opponent won the 2018 election. Stitt has been endorsed both by Oklahomans for the 2nd Amendment (OK2A) and the National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund, which gave Gov. Stitt an A+. Hofmeister earned an F.

While many parts of our country were undercutting the efforts of their police forces to protect the law-abiding citizens against criminal predators, Kevin Stitt backed the blue and earned the endorsement of the Oklahoma Fraternal Order of Police. Gov. Stitt signed pay raises for law enforcement officers in the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, Oklahoma Department of Corrections, and other state public safety employees, funded three academies to train new OHP officers, and established a mental wellness program to support all Oklahoma public safety officers and their families.

Gov. Stitt has appointed three excellent jurists to the State Supreme Court: John Kane, Dustin Rowe, and Dana Kuehn. For the first time in history, a majority of the justices were appointed by Republican governors. Five of the nine justices are 70 or older, including one justice, Yvonne Kauger, who has been serving since her appointment in 1984 by Gov. George Nigh. Three justices were appointed by the previous Democrat governor, Brad Henry. There will be vacancies, and recent events in Kansas demonstrate the importance of installing strict constructionist justice in a post-Roe world. Activist justices in our neighbor to the north struck down pro-life legislation on specious constitutional grounds, and an attempt to fix the problem with a constitutional state question went down in flames with the help of a well-funded disinformation campaign. Now that SCOTUS will no longer interfere with state regulation or prohibition of abortion, leftists will use state judiciaries to thwart protections for the unborn. Stitt has shown good judgment in his judicial appointments, and we'd be wise to allow him to continue rather than allow Oklahoma's version of Kathy Hochul to appoint activist leftists.

Stitt has also appointed 4 of the 12 members of the Court of Civil Appeals, which has a majority of judges appointed by Republican governors in only two of the four divisions. One Democrat appointee, W. Keith Rapp, died in August at the age of 88; a Stitt appointment to fill that vacancy would mean one more division with a majority of Republican, strict-constructionist appointees.

Kevin Stitt streamlined state government, signing legislation to consolidate state agencies and making agency leadership accountable to the voters through their elected officials. He modernized the state civil service system, helping state agencies recruit, retain, and reward the most dedicated employees, and he gave public employee retirees, including teachers and firefighters, the first cost-of-living adjustment in more than a decade. Making state agencies a better place to work means better people working on behalf of the people of Oklahoma, and Stitt's efforts won him the endorsement of the Oklahoma Public Employees Association.

Kevin Stitt used the power of the purse -- allocation of new federal COVID relief funds -- to force the University of Oklahoma's Oklahoma Children's Hospital to cease performing surgical "gender confirmation" mutilations on children. The scope of the bill was limited by the stated call for this special session, but if re-elected, Gov. Stitt will sign broader legislation to ban the practice in Oklahoma. Earlier this year, Gov. Stitt signed legislation protecting girls' private spaces from men claiming to be women; SB 615 requires multiple-occupancy restrooms and changing rooms in our public schools to be reserved exclusively for one biological sex or the other.

Kevin Stitt signed HB 1775, which bans specific elements of "woke," racist indoctrination from Oklahoma's public schools and universities. The bill is succeeding in flushing out radical teachers and administrators who see public schools as a missionary endeavor to convert children to their anti-civilizational ideology.

Unlike his counterparts across the country, Gov. Kevin Stitt kept COVID-19 pandemic restrictions to a minimum, resisting calls for a statewide lockdown and mask mandate. Gov. Stitt was the third governor, after Doug Burgum in North Dakota and Mike Dunleavy in Alaska, to end the statewide COVID-19 state of emergency. (Emergency declarations in Wisconsin and Michigan were terminated earlier by court order, over the objections of Democrat governors.) Within a few months of that early reopening, Oklahoma's unemployment rate reached record lows, among the lowest in the nation.

Under Kevin Stitt's leadership, Oklahoma has improved election security, guaranteed patients the right to have a loved one with them in the hospital, protected schoolchildren from obscene materials, prohibited biologically impossible non-binary birth certificates, and reformed the state funding formula to ensure school funds follow students to their new school district. Kevin Stitt has enthusiastically supported school choice. Gov. Stitt has been endorsed for re-election by former President Donald Trump.

As state superintendent, Hofmeister supported ineffective mask mandates. Gov. Stitt moved to reopen Oklahoma as soon as it was safe to do so, while Hofmeister's plan for school closures would have kept Oklahoma's public schools shut for more than half of the time between September 2020 and March 2022.

Hofmeister said in announcing her candidacy that Stitt's pro-freedom approach to the pandemic is why she switched parties to run against him. Hofmeister wanted to subject Oklahoma to the same sort of never-ending restrictions that Michigan Gov. Christine Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and NY Governors Andrew Cuomo and Cathy Hochul imposed on their states.

If Hofmeister becomes governor, all of the progress we've made under Stitt and his Republican predecessors will come to a screeching halt. Hofmeister opposes parental choice in education. Hofmeister opposes legal protections for the unborn. Hofmeister, indebted to the Democrats who elected her, will veto conservative reforms of state government and will fill her staff, cabinet, state courts, and state boards with her leftist allies.

Jamison Faught at Muskogee Politico has documented Joy Hofmeister's "long con." Hofmeister claims that her values have not changed since her first campaign for office as a Republican, but she has taken positions this year that would have killed her 2014 Republican primary campaign against incumbent State Superintendent Janet Barresi.

Just days after announcing her newfound party, Hofmeister attacked Governor Kevin Stitt over transgender birth certificates. Gov. Stitt recognizes the scientific fact of male and female, while the 'Newly-Improved-and-Woke' Joy Hofmeister apparently feels like pandering to flaming leftists. By the way, she accuses Gov. Stitt of pandering to extremism, which is highly ironic given her apparent disregard for science.

In a recent article from TheFrontier, Hofmeister criticized Gov. Stitt for signing pro-life bills, giving the lame excuse that "[abortion] is a decision that is personal and one between a woman, her doctor and her faith." Right. Do you think she would have said this during her campaigns as a Republican? I think not.

Joy Hofmeister was indicted and arrested (that's her mugshot above) for campaign ethics violations, colluding illegally with the dark-money campaign attacking her opponent. Despite overwhelming evidence clearly documenting violations of the law, Oklahoma County Democrat DA David Prater dropped charges shortly before her 2018 re-election. You can read the indictment of Joy Hofmeister and the documentation on which it was based at this link.

Earlier in this article I mentioned the dark-money attacks labeling Stitt "corrupt." They rest on a handful of "scandals" that aren't scandalous at all.

The so-called Swadley's "scandal" was driven by Gov. Stitt's desire to make our state parks a top-10 experience by offering high-quality regional cuisine from an Oklahoma based restaurant chain. The usual government contract process results in boring bistros run by multinational institutional food service conglomerates who fill their menus with the bland and barely edible. Swadley's had built a popular chain of barbecues with 8 locations, starting from their hometown of El Reno. I've eaten at a Swadley's Barbecue a few times and always enjoyed it, and I was looking forward to visiting a state park and eating at a Swadley's Foggy Bottom Cafe. Stitt didn't profit, nor did any of his friends or business associates. At worst, Swadley's put more money into the renovation of these restaurants than was strictly necessary to build a more enjoyable dining experience. But political opportunists labeled this, without justification, as corruption and got it shutdown. One of the negative consequences of this destructive political maneuver by Hofmeister's supporters was the Western Swing Music Society of the Southwest's cancellation of the annual Western Swing Weekend at the Lodge at Sequoyah State Park (formerly known as Western Hills) because the Lodge had no food service available after Swadley's was evicted.

When school doors were shut because of the pandemic, parents who had been reliant on public schools suddenly had to find ways to continue their children's education. The switch to online instruction meant that many low-income families urgently needed to upgrade electronics and internet access and purchase software and books. Federal aid was made available to meet that need, and Gov. Stitt and Secretary of Education Ryan Walters made it their aim to get the money into the hands of Oklahoma families as quickly as possible with as little red tape as possible. Rather than incur the delay involved in competitive bidding, Oklahoma's Chief Information Officer hired ClassWallet, a national company with experience handling educational grants, to manage the funds.

Eligible families had access to a digital wallet that could be used with 36 approved vendors, most of them specializing in classroom materials and supplies, but also including Office Depot and Staples, sources for general office supplies and computing equipment, and Tracfone, a source for high-speed internet hotspots for families without their own high-speed internet access. The digital wallet system meant that families could simply purchase items from the approved vendors, without the red tape of submitting a purchase request and waiting for approval or submitting an expense report and waiting for reimbursement.

As our students face disruptions from COVID-19 and schools turn to distance learning, we must ensure all Oklahoma students have the supplies and materials necessary to meet their individual education needs. By giving families these funds, we are empowering them to choose what materials are most necessary to make their children successful academically.

Some parents took unfair advantage of the streamlined system to buy non-educational equipment for their own enjoyment. They figured out that they could buy anything that Office Depot or Staples had available for sale online, and that includes many items without educational value that are offered online only, never in stores, like Christmas trees and grills. One estimate, compiled by a partisan news outlet, puts the total wasted on such items at about $650,000 out of the program's $18,000,000 total. Their analysis has large amounts in broad categories that are likely to include legitimate educational purchases, but even accepting their numbers, the amount wasted is less than 4%. Any waste is regrettable, but the cost of pre-screening every purchase would have been to delay the 96% of legitimate purchases made by honest parents.

The latest attack involves a privately-funded proposal to build a new governor's mansion at the State Capitol complex. The proposal pre-dates Gov. Stitt's time in office, and the project could not possibly be completed before the end of his second turn. Stitt's family did not move to Oklahoma City until the end of the school year during which his inauguration occurred. A $2 million renovation of the mansion's electrical, plumbing, and HVAC systems was already underway, and when the family moved from Oklahoma City, they moved to the Centennial House at 6500 N. Kelley Ave., owned by the Oklahoma National Guard. The Stitt family was able to move in to the governor's mansion in the spring of 2021, but in an October 2021 interview about the renovations, First Lady Sarah Stitt said, "We have lived here for a while, but we do want to protect our family life, so we are looking for a house probably just for our family." The Stitt family, using their own funds, acquired a home in Edmond about a year ago. None of this has been done in secret, but irresponsible news media outlets have created a false impression of the sequence of events designed to tar the reputation of Gov. Stitt and his family for the sake of helping a leftist Democrat win the governor's office in America's most Republican state.

Hidden special interests, some of them led by nominal Republicans, have spent millions to get rid of Gov. Kevin Stitt. Although much of the dark money is untraceable, Stitt has faced hostility from tribal governments, from the marijuana industry, and from leftist teachers' unions. Leftists in mainstream media have helped to amplify and distort the dark-money accusations.

Kevin Stitt defends the interests of all Oklahomans, which offends tribal officials who want to accumulate power and wealth at the expense of the well-being of their own citizens as well as the non-citizens who live on so-called "sovereign land" -- the former territories that were allotted and sold over a century ago under tribal agreements with the US government. These tribal officials supported a child molester's court appeal in the pursuit of their own power. Stitt understands that lightly-regulated, highly-potent marijuana will produce a generation of schizophrenics, dangerous to themselves and others, and stands in the way of the cannabis industry that wants to warp Oklahomans minds to fill their own pockets. Stitt believes that Oklahoma children should not be stuck in underperforming schools that inflict woke dogma and trans madness in place of true education, frustrating the leftists who see public schools as their publicly funded cathedrals for converting the children of conservative Oklahomans.

Gov. Kevin Stitt is defending Oklahomans, particularly Oklahoma families and children, against the special interests who want their power and money no matter how many Oklahomans it hurts. Oklahomans should enthusiastically re-elect Kevin Stitt as governor.

MORE:

Jamison Faught, the Muskogee Politico, writes that Oklahoma Republicans must not fall asleep on the governor's race, reminding us, "Liberals win when conservatives take things for granted. Brad Henry was governor of Oklahoma for eight years, vetoing important legislation and styming conservative policies - because conservatives took things for granted in 2002."

OK2A's Don Spencer explains why it's crucial for 2nd Amendment rights supporters to turn out to re-elect Kevin Stitt.