Aug. 14, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Some of the things that I like to remind people is we're the 28th largest state population, 19th largest land area-wise. | ||
| We've got some of the cleanest water, cleanest air in the country. | ||
| We have an all-of-the-above approach in energy. | ||
| In other words, we love oil and gas. | ||
| We're number six in oil production, number four in natural gas, but we're also number two in wind energy production. | ||
| So we have, we're one of only four states, four states, that 40% of our energy comes from renewables. | ||
| And so it's very attractive to a lot of companies right now. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and as you guys know, I'm off the grid for all of August, but we pre-taped | ||
| a bunch of interviews for you before I left the internet. | ||
| And joining me today is the governor of Oklahoma, Governor Kevin Stitt. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey, great to be with you. | ||
| Thanks so much. | ||
| Hope you're having a great time on your vacation. | ||
| This is Aaron. | ||
| I hope that I'm having a great time, too, not paying attention to the news. | ||
| But I am looking forward to chatting with you, because we met a couple weeks before I went off the grid. | ||
| Governor DeSantis held a little event in Florida for some governors and some Twitter personalities or whatever the rest of us are. | ||
| And you brought up a couple interesting points, and I immediately went up to you after. | ||
| I said, we got to chat. | ||
| So here we are. | ||
| So before we do anything, You know, people talk about Oklahoma, and most people probably say, hey, what's going on in Oklahoma? | ||
| I don't know much about Oklahoma. | ||
| So first, why don't we just get a little of your personal history, and then we'll dive into some of the stuff we need to know about Oklahoma. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Well, I'm the 28th governor of the great state of Oklahoma, fourth generation Oklahoman, and a business guy. | ||
| I was never in politics when I ran in 2018. | ||
| My story, I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma, where the University of Oklahoma is. | ||
| My dad was a pastor there, but I went to Oklahoma State in Stillwater for college, got an accounting degree, And then started my company shortly after college with $1,000 and a computer and lived the American dream story. | ||
| Today we have 1,600 employees, do business all over the country and I got inspired to run. | ||
| I watched a businessman get elected President of the United States and I saw my state kind of struggling and I looked and saw who was running. | ||
| It was just More of the same, really. | ||
| Just career politicians. | ||
| And I said, hey, if anything's going to change, we need business people. | ||
| We need a fresh set of eyes. | ||
| We need people like our founding fathers envisioned that were going to leave the private sector, go serve their country or their state, and actually change things and focus on the next generation, not the next election. | ||
| And so I told that to Oklahomans when I campaigned. | ||
| They agreed with me. | ||
| We won the election and today Oklahoma is really exploding in growth. | ||
| We have so many great things going. | ||
| We've got the largest savings account we've ever had. | ||
| We have the lowest unemployment. | ||
| I cut taxes last year. | ||
| More people are moving to Oklahoma than ever before. | ||
| We're top 10 in the country in that. | ||
| And so things are just really on the up and up for our state. | ||
| We're the 28th largest state, population-wise, right above Texas, figuratively and actually right above Texas, so I like to point that out. | ||
| So, I think a lot of people watching this are probably going, wait a minute, Oklahoma, it can't have that many problems that a successful business guy has to run. | ||
| I mean, we talk about California's problems, we talk about New York's problems, maybe Illinois's problems, I mean, mostly blue state problems. | ||
| What could possibly be going on in Oklahoma that a successful guy, I mean, you were running a multi-million dollar business, would have to throw his hat in the ring? | ||
| Well, when I say what I'm talking about, we had a teacher walkout, for example. | ||
| We weren't paying our teachers what market was, so I gave our teachers a pay raise to bring them up to market. | ||
| Government won't fix itself. | ||
| Government always wants to spend more, so bringing that fiscal discipline, I believe in smaller government, I believe in lower taxes, so bringing some of those disciplines into our state budget and running government like a business is kind of what I focused on. | ||
| There's 33,000 state employees in Oklahoma. | ||
| It's a $22 billion budget. | ||
| And normally people hire non-business people and people that have never signed paychecks, never set a vision and hired the right people, held people accountable. | ||
| So those are all the things that we brought to Oklahoma. | ||
| And so things are moving the needle. | ||
| We've deregulated our business, setting a level playing field, not picking winners and losers. | ||
| So people understand, you know, The great things about moving to our state, energy policy. | ||
| We have an all-of-the-above energy approach and that's led to the lowest cost of electricity to the business or consumer. | ||
| So keeping those conservative values going, even in a red state like ours, sometimes the bureaucracy and the government can get away from you and you've got to come in with an outsider to bring it back and check. | ||
| I heard you talk a bit about this a couple weeks ago, but how did you deal with all the lockdown madness and figuring out what to do and allowing or not allowing people to live their lives accordingly? | ||
| Well, you know, first off, we believe in freedoms in Oklahoma, and we believe in our Constitution, and we're not going to put our Constitution in the attic just because somebody in Washington, D.C. | ||
| says that we should do that. | ||
| You know, so we kept our state open the entire time. | ||
| I kept our schools open. | ||
| I wasn't going to say this business is essential and this business is not essential. | ||
| The only non-essential business is one that you didn't put capital in or you don't get your paycheck from. | ||
| So picking winners and losers like that, to me, is un-American. | ||
| It's not right. | ||
| And what we've done to our businesses and then what we did to our kids by keeping them out of school in these other states, it's just, it's an atrocity. | ||
| So in Oklahoma, we kept everything open. | ||
| And because of that now, people are realizing and recognizing the benefits. | ||
| Our businesses are having their best years ever, and companies from California are moving to states like ours because they're tired of the mandates and the dictating from the holier-than-thou government officials that we know best and do as we say. | ||
| So I think everyone watching knows my story, and you heard it at that event we did. | ||
| I am a new Floridian, about seven months in right now, after living in California. | ||
| And you mentioned you guys are getting this influx of people and businesses. | ||
| Does that worry you ever that, you know, these businesses come in, they bring a whole bunch of people, they've often voted the wrong way, which caused the problems in the first place, and now they have to integrate into a new state that is basically doing it right? | ||
| You know, we hear that a lot. | ||
| The folks that we meet from California, you know, I have those conversations with them. | ||
| I jokingly tell them, hey, I had to wait 18 years to vote in Oklahoma, so I expect you to wait 18 years before you can vote. | ||
| But they say, they go, hey, listen, here's the deal. | ||
| There's 12 million people in California that voted for President Trump. | ||
| The people that are leaving are recognizing the differences between a blue state and a red state. | ||
| And so, trust me, they're saying, we are on your side. | ||
| We believe in freedoms. | ||
| We believe in smaller government. | ||
| We believe in less regulation. | ||
| Doing business in California is an absolute beatdown. | ||
| I know that personally. | ||
| And from the regulatory climate, from the taxation climate, they're just so out of touch with what our values are as Oklahomans and most of Americans, that I think normal people are leaving there. | ||
| Before we jump into some of the specifics, what else do people have to know about Oklahoma? | ||
| I feel like it's just like one of those states that people kind of, they go through it, they maybe fly over it, and they don't think about it that much, but you guys are doing an awful lot when it comes to energy and a whole bunch more. | ||
| Yeah, well I mean I was just in Farmboro, England, representing our state for the aerospace and defense industry, and some of the things that I like to remind people is We're the 28th largest state population, 19th largest land area-wise. | ||
| We've got some of the cleanest water, cleanest air in the country. | ||
| We have an all-of-the-above approach in energy. | ||
| In other words, we love oil and gas. | ||
| We're number six in oil production, number four in natural gas, but we're also number two in wind energy production. | ||
| So we have, we're one of only four states, four states, that 40% of our energy comes from renewables. | ||
| And so, it's very attractive to a lot of companies right now, but we have the largest maintenance and repair facility on aviation in the country with Tinker Air Force Base, so great aviation industry. | ||
| We've got an inland port, so most people don't realize that about Oklahoma. | ||
| We have the farthest frost-free port in the country, all the way almost to Tulsa. | ||
| So a lot of great things going we got great agriculture We feed the world in a lot of cases from our from our agricultural side number two beef producer in the country So a lot of great things going and then the freedoms Oklahoma City, I think is the 25th largest city in the country. | ||
| We've got the Thunder a professional sports team So the quality of life the commute in Oklahoma is like 15 minutes compared to an hour in some of the other major metro areas So people love the quality of life Come visit Oklahoma. | ||
| And I'm guessing house prices a little bit better than here in Florida right now. | ||
| Definitely, definitely right. | ||
| I mean, we obviously are, you know, everything's going up all over the country, but we've got an arbitrage right now. | ||
| And that's what businesses are seeing is that they can come in and the quality of life with the cost of living allows them to pay less than you can on some of the coast. | ||
| And with COVID, you're seeing people move and saying, I don't have to work. | ||
| In this big city or through technology, we can live anywhere. | ||
| But we're also seeing headquarters move to Dallas-Fort Worth and move to Oklahoma City and move to other states and get out of the New York City areas or the Bay areas where crime is rampant and homelessness and all the stuff that doesn't happen in our state. | ||
| You mentioned the amount of oil and gas you guys produce and then also wind power. | ||
| Does that cause any tension in the business community or any tension with the federal government? | ||
| Because the federal government at least seems to view oil and gas versus wind as very, very different things. | ||
| They like one, they don't like the other. | ||
| You know, that's the thing that blows their mind whenever I go and meet with the Biden administration and their Secretary of Energy, and we talk about it all the time. | ||
| Those things can coexist together. | ||
| We believe in the free market in Oklahoma. | ||
| We believe in an all-of-the-above approach. | ||
| So they do coexist just fine. | ||
| We love our oil and gas industry, and you can't have an intellectually honest conversation about the needs of Americans And a reliable energy grid without talking about natural gas and talking about oil. | ||
| But we don't shy away. | ||
| We're leaning into hydrogen, for example. | ||
| I signed an MOU with the governor of Arkansas and Louisiana. | ||
| We believe that we will get one of the four hydrogen hubs to prove out. | ||
| It's a two billion dollar kind of program to prove out a commercialization use of hydrogen. | ||
| But you're going to need pipelines for hydrogen development. | ||
| We can coexist together, and you can talk about transition, and you can talk about oil and gas. | ||
| And again, we don't know why there's such an attack on the oil and gas industry from this administration, because what's their alternative? | ||
| Is to buy oil from Russia or Saudi Arabia? | ||
| Because demand is the same, and here's something that I'd like to point out to people. | ||
| Every president of the United States since 1973 has had an energy independence policy, whether they're Republican or Democrat, until this administration. | ||
| And they wanted to just cancel everything, cancel the Keystone Pipeline, make drilling impossible, but what they forget is we still have to drive to work, we have to heat our homes, our businesses, we have to drive our kids to soccer practice and football practice, and so the demand is the same, and they're not being honest. | ||
| Do you think that they actually are just simply not being honest, or this is by design? | ||
| They know people have to go to work, they know people have to get in the car, but they are sort of telling us, hey, we want off this stuff regardless of the repercussions. | ||
| You know, I hope that's not the case, but I've seen the reports just like you that they make these statements like, well, we knew that prices were going to be jacked up for a while, but that's going to be part of the process to get off of oil and gas. | ||
| And I hope that's not true, because to harm Oklahomans or to harm Americans just because you have some kind of left-wing agenda That's not the president that I would hope would be representing our country. | ||
| But, you know, I don't know what's happening because it doesn't make common sense to most Americans on why they're burying their head in the sand and not having an honest conversation when just a couple years ago we were energy independent. | ||
| And you're now seeing inflation skyrocket. | ||
| Everything costs more. | ||
| 40-year highs at everything. | ||
| And actually, they're harming the people that they actually think that they're protecting. | ||
| That's what people need to understand, is these policies from the Democratic Party actually hurt Average Oklahoma, middle-income people. | ||
| The rich get richer and it hurts everyday Oklahomans. | ||
| It's the Republicans. | ||
| It's a free market. | ||
| It's the innovation of business that actually helps the middle class grow. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| You're preaching to the choir over here. | ||
| My audience gets it. | ||
| Anything else we should know broadly about Oklahoma before I want to dive into some of this stuff that I heard you talking about, about what's going on with the Native American reservations there, which is really fascinating. | ||
| But anything else you want to get off your chest quick? | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm good. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I'll probably circle back to it. | ||
| Okay, so when I heard you speak a couple weeks ago, you told a really fascinating story and was describing some of the tension that Oklahoma faces over what's going on with the Native American reservations there and how there is seemingly a disparate distance in the way laws are being applied when it comes to Native American population versus the average Oklahoman. | ||
| You told a couple anecdotes about that. | ||
| Can you just kind of give me the 101 on that? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Well, first off, the McGirt decision came out in July of 2020. | ||
| And basically what it said, it was the U.S. | ||
| Supreme Court decision called McGirt. | ||
| So I'll encourage everybody to look it up. | ||
| But basically it said that we still had reservations in Oklahoma. | ||
| So about half of our state was all of a sudden turned back into an Indian reservation. | ||
| Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a million people, was now considered an Indian reservation. | ||
| And here's the deal. | ||
| I'm not against the Indians. | ||
| I'm actually a member of the Cherokee. | ||
| We're proud of our heritage. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You, literally. | ||
| You yourself. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| I can show you my card. | ||
| My heritage, I have Indian blood. | ||
| So I have a membership to the Indian, to the Cherokee Nation. | ||
| So it's not an anti-Indian thing. | ||
| But this is a pro-Oklahoma thing. | ||
| This is a common sense thing. | ||
| So what was happening is we had tribal governments then saying that they didn't have to follow the laws of the state of Oklahoma. | ||
| They were saying that if you were Indian, you didn't have to pay taxes in Oklahoma, but every other race did. | ||
| They were saying that the district attorneys couldn't prosecute crimes the same way. | ||
| So you had a situation that you didn't have fairness. | ||
| You didn't have equal protection under the law. | ||
| And so I fought like crazy against all odds, really, because they're super powerful. | ||
| They're using taxpayer dollars to get in and influence races and try to run negative ads against you, etc., etc. | ||
| But I got a case back to the Supreme Court and said, listen, we have to be able to prosecute to protect public safety all crimes in eastern Oklahoma. | ||
| And the Castro-Urte case just came out since we talked, I believe, that gave us a huge win. | ||
| And they said, Yes, you do have the right to prosecute all crimes in Oklahoma. | ||
| And furthermore, they said that Indian reservations are still part of a state and therefore they're subject to state jurisdiction, which gives us a lot more certainty now than we had once before. | ||
| So those are all things that I think Americans need to be aware of because this would be like the Supreme Court coming into your city and your state and saying, This used to be Indian land and so you no longer have to follow, they don't have to follow zoning or taxation laws, you know, those kind of things. | ||
| That's how it threw us into a kind of turmoil in our state. | ||
| Yeah, well, I would imagine that the average citizen, after the McGirt decision, probably... It increased tension, actually, between the communities, right? | ||
| I mean, if you're just the law-abiding citizen, and now someone breaks into your house, or whatever it might be, and then they're not going to be prosecuted because of their lineage, I could see some tension developing. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| I mean, we had district attorneys telling people that if you have an Indian tag on your car, you need to park in the garage because there were people targeting those people because they knew that the state couldn't prosecute those crimes. | ||
| So it was just ridiculous. | ||
| I mean, the 9-1-1 calls going into our 9-1-1 system, they were having to ask the question, well, are you Native or not? | ||
| And people were like, well, do I have to tell you if I'm Native or not? | ||
| Because then you won't come out. | ||
| And so it was all this turmoil, and I'm glad that the Supreme Court did the right thing to say, hey, this is still a state. | ||
| We have to be on equal footing with every other state. | ||
| We have to be able to regulate business and oil and gas and zoning and mining and all the things. | ||
| We can't turn that on to county by county depending on what Indian tribe used to be located there. | ||
| How was that for you, with your background, having to go in and do something that I'm sure a certain amount of people thought you were a turncoat, or there's probably words for it that need not mention on this show. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| You know, here's what I tell people. | ||
| I said 95% of Native Americans like me that have part Native blood, we're proud of that, but we're American and we're Oklahoma first. | ||
| So they actually agreed with me. | ||
| It was only those at the very top of the tribe, the big bosses that were really fighting us and putting money against us. | ||
| One tribe said they were going to stop flying the Oklahoma flag on their land. | ||
| Which then the citizens really revolted and he quickly changed his tune, that chief did, like two days later and said, oh, okay, well I decided I would keep flying the Oklahoma flag. | ||
| So they took it too far and you know, things have a tendency, if the pendulum swings too far, people go, hey, this doesn't feel right and it comes kind of back to balance and we believe that's why the Supreme Court brought that case back. | ||
| Let me ask you, as a Native American, that means automatically you have to represent all Native Americans. | ||
| How do you feel about, you know, when they have the Atlanta Braves or the Washington Redskins? | ||
| You know, it usually seems like it's a bit of a media construct, but obviously everyone has their own feelings. | ||
| Listen, we're so sensitive. | ||
| It doesn't bother me a bit. | ||
| Every single person like me, 10% of Oklahoma's population are native, about 400,000. | ||
| I think the media blows that up a portion. | ||
| It's just like anything, it's a very small vocal minority. | ||
| And what's disappointing is these businesses and these professional teams just end up caving for a very small vocal minority. | ||
| And I know that's kind of where we're at today, but I think the bigger point to me is We believe in America and based on your merit and your hard work and your education and how hard you want to work depends on your success. | ||
| Not the color of your skin or your nationality. | ||
| I want a system that is fair for everybody and doesn't pick winners and losers. | ||
| And I think when we try to Pay people off, or give money to this race, or try to quote-unquote right this wrong. | ||
| I think those are bad precedents, and it'll end up breaking our country, and it divides us further. | ||
| Do you sense we're divided sort of in an irreparable fashion? | ||
| I mean, when you talk about freedom and capitalism and limited government and all of those things, that, yeah, that's happening in red states. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It seems to be strengthening in certain states, certainly the two states that we're in, but it's not happening in blue states. | ||
| And it doesn't seem like it's going to turn around in blue states. | ||
| What do you think about that tension going forward as the United States of America? | ||
| You know, I mean, that's the million dollar question. | ||
| You know, you look back to our leaders like, you know, Ronald Reagan, and it felt like he could bring people together and kind of talk about capitalism and the exceptionalism of America in a way that kind of brought us together and revitalized our country. | ||
| And so we hope that we can get back there. | ||
| Because I believe that the majority of Americans think like I do. | ||
| We believe in God, and I think you take God out of the values, and we believe in, we were founded our country on these biblical values. | ||
| We believe in freedom of religion. | ||
| That means we don't discriminate against any religion, but we certainly don't discriminate it, we can't discriminate against the Christian faith either. | ||
| And so I think that most people believe in family and capitalism and you have to work hard and let's create a level playing field for everybody to go succeed. | ||
| And it's just disappointing when some people think that the answer is government handouts and they think that the answer is more government and more taxes. | ||
| That's just, you can look across history, you can look at other countries that have tried that model. | ||
| And I think that's failing, but I still believe that the majority of Americans think like we do. | ||
| So if we say this in a correct way, I believe that's the winning message. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you. | ||
| How have you guys done when it comes to all of the woke stuff, keeping the gender stuff and the critical race theory, all of that out of the schools, or has it seeped in and what are you doing about it? | ||
| You know, again, sometimes it tries to seep in. | ||
| What I've done about it is I was the first governor in the country that passed the bill that bans critical race theory. | ||
| And the media kind of calls it critical race theory, but here's all my bill said. | ||
| It just simply said that in our school system, We're not going to teach that one race or one sex is superior to another race or another sex. | ||
| That's all it says. | ||
| Old school. | ||
| How can you argue with that? | ||
| Let's teach our kids, not indoctrinate them and teach them that they're inferior because of the color of their skin or they're somehow responsible for something that happened a hundred years ago. | ||
| I'm not going to teach that to a first grader. | ||
| That's ridiculous. | ||
| I also signed the Save Women in Sports Bill. | ||
| Which to us in Oklahoma, I mean, we don't know what's going on with the rest of the country because for us, it's like everybody applauds me that we're going to protect women's sports and athletics and girls are going to play in girls sports and boys are going to play in boys sports. | ||
| I'm not going to let a biological male compete in high school against a female that's been training her whole life where he has physical advantages on the track or in the swimming pool against that girl. | ||
| It doesn't make sense to us in Oklahoma, so it's easy for me to sign these kind of bills. | ||
| Is there any pushback on that stuff in Oklahoma? | ||
| You get anything? | ||
| I mean, you get some of the whacked out folks, but it's a very small minority here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What else is going on since you're talking so much about business and that really is your background and you've mentioned this sort of low, you know, less regulation and that sort of thing. | ||
| What else is going on in the business world? | ||
| If someone's watching this in Cali right now and they're thinking about getting out and I get emails every day from Cali people on the way out and I'm usually selling them on Florida, but if they want to stop before they get here and see what's going on. | ||
| You gotta stop. | ||
| I mean, listen, Florida's second place compared to Oklahoma, okay? | ||
| You might have a little bit of the ocean, but if you want to make money and you want the quality of life, Oklahoma's the right spot to be. | ||
| But, you know, technology companies we're going hard after. | ||
| I'm looking at where the research and development dollars are headed. | ||
| We just landed a huge, huge electric vehicle manufacturer. | ||
| We're going after that supply chain around electric vehicles. | ||
| We have more electric vehicle charging stations per capita than any other state. | ||
| Level 3 charging stations. | ||
| So we're leaning into that stuff. | ||
| Most people go, well, Oklahoma's just oil and gas. | ||
| Simply not true. | ||
| I mean, we love our oil and gas, and we are making sure that we do our part for our country on our oil and gas side. | ||
| We're also not naive to where the R&D dollars are headed. | ||
| They're not in combustible engines anymore. | ||
| They're in electric vehicles. | ||
| So we are all in there. | ||
| We're going into hydrogen. | ||
| We are looking at that transition and what type of other energy sources can we have. | ||
| And as California is having rolling blackouts, we have the cheapest electricity cost to the business in the country. | ||
| Yeah, it's nice to hear things are going right sometimes, right? | ||
| I mean, so what are your headaches then? | ||
| I mean, what are really the headaches? | ||
| You're giving me a pretty rosy picture of a state and you seem like things are pretty sensible there and all that stuff. | ||
| You must have a couple of headaches. | ||
| Well, I've got a couple of teenage daughters, so if you could help me, I've got six kids and... Six kids! | ||
| Yeah, my wife and I, we've been married 24 years. | ||
| We have six children. | ||
| Our oldest is 21 down to eight. | ||
| So just like every business person or mom that's having to work, you have to balance your home life and raising your kids and being a good husband and a good father, as well as your day job, which my day job happens to be governor of the state. | ||
| So it's always busy, but it's fun. | ||
| It's an honor of a lifetime to serve your state where your grandparents grew up and I pinch | ||
| myself thinking about my granddad who had an eighth grade education. He was a dairy farmer in Skytook, | ||
| Oklahoma and now his son, his grandson is governor. So I just want to work my tail off and make | ||
| sure I leave my state the best possible state it can be when I come back to the private sector. You | ||
| couldn't give me anything other than All right, so you're in a pretty functioning state that seems like things are going pretty well. | ||
| The woke stuff's not getting in. | ||
| You got business, you got natural resources, and all of those things. | ||
| Was there anything, when you came in as a businessman, to learn how government operates and look at budgets and the way they spend and all that stuff? | ||
| Were you just pulling your hair out? | ||
| I'm trying to get something here that might have frustrated you along the way. | ||
| Well, I don't really want my legislature to see this, but working with the legislature has been difficult. | ||
| Number one, I'm trying to get school choice done across the finish line. | ||
| I think that's the issue that would turn our state around. | ||
| We want to empower parents, not just the zip code that a kid has happened to be born in or live in at this time. | ||
| I tell people all the time, School choice should not be for the rich. | ||
| It should be for everyone. | ||
| And these are kids in Oklahoma, and they're 700,000 kids. | ||
| Let's make sure we educate them, and we give them the best opportunity to put parents back in charge. | ||
| So trying to get that across the finish line is a goal of mine, if I'm fortunate enough. | ||
| What kind of pushback do you get on that? | ||
| Because I would imagine in a red state, I mean, there's so much momentum behind that right now, I can't imagine it's too much, right? | ||
| Well, we did not get it across the finish line this past session. | ||
| Hopefully we can next year, but really the rural folks, and they're right in the fact that there aren't a lot of the private schools, but those aren't the schools we're talking about. | ||
| A lot of it, it's the inner city. | ||
| It's the large school districts that are indoctrinating the kids, and then you have to try to, you get parents that are showing us the books that they're teaching. | ||
| You can't micromanage every single school district, so let's inject competition, let parents choose where to send their kids to school, whether it's a | ||
| Christian school or a Catholic school or a or a charter school. We need more | ||
| of that in our state. So that that's definitely a challenge to try to get | ||
| across the finish line for our for our state budget process. It's got | ||
| its own I'm always trying to hold our budgets flat. | ||
| And sometimes you fight with some of the legislature that wants to grow government, to be quite honest with you. | ||
| And you have to really hold that in check because we're always... Nobody, it seems like, fights for the taxpayer. | ||
| You've got all these lobbyists and all these industries will come in and hire folks that advocate for their industry. | ||
| But nobody advocates for the taxpayer. | ||
| And that's my job. | ||
| That's what I tell them. | ||
| Hey, I'm here fighting for the taxpayer. | ||
| Let's hold budgets flat. | ||
| Let's make sure that we give money back to the taxpayer in the form of lower taxes. | ||
| How much coordination do you do with some other red state governors? | ||
| Cause the event that we were at, it was kind of off the record at first, but of course the media gets it. | ||
| And then they announced everybody that was there is what it is. | ||
| But you know, there are obviously a bunch of other red state governors there. | ||
| And it seemed like you guys kind of talk some of this stuff out. | ||
| I don't know if it's official, but you know, really go back and forth on, it had a lot to do with COVID lockdowns and how maybe you would do it going forward if they tried to pull anything else. | ||
| But is there a lot of coordination on, on that kind of stuff or, or other issues? | ||
| You know, I think there is. | ||
| I would call it a lot. | ||
| Republican Governors Association, I think, is the greatest organization as far as political action group in the country. | ||
| So I meet with those governors probably three or four times a year. | ||
| We all have each other's cell phones, so we'll text each other and And I'll call Billy in Tennessee, by the way, you know, for example, and say, hey, what are you doing on this? | ||
| Or, hey, I saw something in the paper about, you know, Tennessee's doing this. | ||
| Can you walk me through your thought process? | ||
| So we take ideas from each other, for sure. | ||
| And then we bounce, you know, kind of what we're seeing in our state with one another. | ||
| So it's a great collegial group. | ||
| That we're able to meet and kind of going through the same thing together. | ||
| COVID was a gut punch for all of us. | ||
| So we were all getting hammered from the media on, you know, demanding that I lock down. | ||
| I was one of the only governors in the country that refused to do a mask mandate, for example, statewide and just got hammered by the media. | ||
| So we've got a liberal, you know, fake news media here in Oklahoma too. | ||
| Ah, finally, I got something. | ||
| I got something. | ||
| Okay, I don't know why that gives me a little bit of joy. | ||
| It can't be that perfect there. | ||
| You know, I'm loving Florida these days. | ||
| All right, well, you're going to appreciate what I'm going to do right now because I am also a capitalist and a free market guy. | ||
| So I'm going to thank you for joining me on the show, and then I'm going to ask you one more question. | ||
| Perhaps the most important question about Republican leadership going forward. | ||
| We're gonna do that exclusively for our subscribers. | ||
| So we're gonna wrap up this one and go right over to the locals community. | ||
| So Governor Kevin Stitt, I thank you for joining us. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you wanna watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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