Earlier: Abolishing Oklahoma: Land Run Monument Removed from Community College in City Founded by Land Run

Way back in the George W. Bush administration a lefty writer named Thomas Frank took it upon himself to explain to his fellow gentry liberals how the people of the Midwest had become so deplorably deplorable, voting for conservatives like Bush when their fathers and grandfathers had been sensible Prairie Progressives. The title of Frank's book was "What's The Matter With Kansas?"

In this segment I shall attempt something similar, although much briefer. So: What's the matter with Oklahoma?

What turned my attention to Oklahoma was an email from a listener there, a teacher in an Oklahoma City public school. My listener is a middle-aged white male American, sensible and thoughtful. He told me how his public-school system there in Oklahoma City is being dragged over into the anti-white camp by the Superintendent, a chap named Sean McDaniel—white, of course—who took over the system in July of 2018.

Last July Oklahoma City teachers all had to participate in a one-and-a-half-day "virtual workshop" on, actual title, "Mental Health in The Dual Pandemics of COVID and Systemic Racism." My listener attached to his email the 12-page booklet [PDF] that accompanied this workshop. It's instructive.

The title gives away the game the authors are playing here. Yes, they're saying systemic racism is a pandemic, just like Covid. From the text inside, quote:

Students, educators, and administrators are experiencing unprecedented impacts from two concurrent pandemics. COVID-19 and Violence against Black and Brown People continue to threaten lives, safety, health, jobs, family structure, and communities.

If you have ever taken the trouble to look up statistics on interpersonal violence, you'll know that "violence against black and brown people" is overwhelmingly committed by, yes, black and brown people; and that if you limit your enquiry to violence between persons of different races, that is overwhelmingly black assaults on nonblacks.

The whole premise of this "workshop" is, in other words, a lie. Note that it is being imposed on schoolteachers, who presumably have better intelligence and more understanding than the average.

As I pointed out in my December Diary, and many others have seen, the purpose here is not instruction but humiliation. By obliging intelligent people to nod assent to this rancid gibberish for fear of losing their jobs, you are asserting your power over them and breaking their spirits.

Note also that this is Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain.

As Allan Wall pointed out the same week I got that email, quote from Allan:

Oklahoma is one of the reddest states in the Union. All of its 77 counties voted GOP in the past five presidential elections … Gov. Kevin Stitt and all elected state officials are Republican; the GOP has super-majorities in both chambers of its legislature.

Although, as Allan also noted, Oklahoma's junior senator James Lankford is an exceptionally spineless critter even by the standards of institutional Republicanism, with a D grade on immigration from NumbersUSA.

The senior senator, Jim Inhofe, is somewhat better, with a B grade; but he's also 86 years old, elected to his sixth senate term this past November. If he stands for re-election in 2026 he'll be 91. So Senate-wise the state has a spineless cuck and a seriously old guy who ought to have retired to a nice little ranch long since.

Whoa! Even as I'm finalizing notes for this segment, I see Allan Wall is posting again about Oklahoma. A college in Oklahoma City has removed a monument to the achievement of the state's pioneers — to the achievement, that is, of the near ancestors of today's Oklahomans. Very near ancestors: The monument celebrates the Land Run of 1889, in which year my own grandparents were all teenagers.

And the schoolteachers are doing workshops on Critical Race Theory. I can't imagine what Curly and Laurey would say.

So once again: What's the matter with Oklahoma?