They're Creating A Theocracy in Oklahoma Right Now
In Oklahoma over the past few years, there have been bills put forward:
- Designating the Bible as the Official State Book.
- Establishing the nation's first taxpayer-funded religious charter school.
- Displaying the Ten Commandments at the state capitol.
- Mandating the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom.
- Using Bible verses to justify spanking children with disabilities in school.
- Religious school tax credits.
- Banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.
- The governor claiming the state of Oklahoma for Christ in his inaugural speech.
I spoke with Rep. Mickey Dollens, one of the few Democrats in the Oklahoma legislature, about these bills and how he and others are fighting back.
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AXIS Moondy AXIS Moondy Over the past few years, there's been a strong push for theocratic bills in this building that have some advanced, some have made it throughout the chamber, and some have been signed into law.
And I have evidence.
I've compiled just a list off the top of my head.
We have had bills that would require the displayment of the Ten Commandments at the State Capitol, mandating the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms.
We've passed the nation's first publicly funded religious charter school.
We have religious school tax credits.
We've heard members in this chamber quote the Bible to justify hitting kids with disabilities in school.
We had a bill that would have designated the Holy Bible as the official state book.
We have the banning of the teaching of evolution in schools, and our own governor claimed that in his inaugural address that the state of Oklahoma is for Christ.
That is State Representative Mickey Dollins on the floor of the Oklahoma State Legislature, recounting just some of the bills that have been put forth in the legislature and advocated by the governor in order to privilege Christians in the state of Oklahoma.
For Dolan's, it's a push for theocracy.
For me, it's certainly a push for Christian nationalism, a way to make it such that if you are a Christian in Oklahoma, you have an elevated position in culture, in politics, in the economy, and certainly in the public schools.
After hearing his speech on the floor of the legislature, I contacted Representative Dollins to see if we could talk about the bills he mentioned and everything else happening in his state.
So today I present my interview with Representative Dollins about what's happening in Oklahoma.
For subscribers, we have an extra 15 minute segment on the attempt to remove ballot initiatives from Oklahoma, meaning an attempt to remove an avenue of direct democracy available to citizens in that state.
It's an attempt to take power away from the people.
We also talk about poverty.
in Oklahoma and how it has been an intentional policy choice.
Representative Dollins shares his stories from driving an Uber very early in the morning to help constituents in his district get to work.
Many of them have full-time jobs and yet can't afford permanent housing.
Many of them work two jobs and can't afford a car so they Uber to work.
And those rides with the representative are a chance for him to hear their stories, to hear what they need from their government and how their life could be better with a little help.
So if you're a subscriber, stick around for that segment.
It's truly enlightening.
Thanks for being here, y'all.
Here is my interview with the representative.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I'm joined today by an incredible guest, someone whose work I've followed and am just excited to finally have a chance to talk to, and that's Representative Mickey Dollins.
We're going to talk about a bunch of things happening in the Oklahoma legislature at the minute, at the moment, excuse me.
Before we do that, tell us how you got to the legislature and what motivates you as a lawmaker.
You've had a pretty amazingly interesting life and I think we should just get at least, before we get into this miserable, depressing stuff, you should tell us some of the cool things you've done so we can kind of take that into the next half an hour.
Oh, thanks, Brad.
It's been quite the journey that's led up to this moment here at the State Capitol.
But first and foremost, my message would be to people who are considering running for office, especially at the local level, I'm a state representative, is that you don't have to have many prequalifications.
In Oklahoma, you have to be 21 years old and not have a felony.
And you're qualified and be able to vote.
And if you have those three criteria, you're eligible to run for office.
Growing up, politics wasn't mainly discussed in my home life very much.
I had no intention of running for office, but throughout my life, there were three big things that happened that led me to where I'm at today.
When I was a kid, I loved playing sports.
It's what kept me out of trouble.
It made my decisions much easier on what not to do, and it kept me in line in the classroom.
And so when I was a freshman in high school, I decided I wanted to earn a Division I football scholarship.
And that pretty much dictated everything I did from there and worked really hard.
And the team was terrible.
We only won one game my senior year, but thankfully I had enough individual success, you could say, to where I caught the eye of some Prominent football teams and I ended up signing a full-ride scholarship at Southern Methodist University.
And it was here where actually I took some classes in sociology and learned about world religions and the history and how many religions in the past have shared similarities.
And one of the professors that really broadened my horizons from a small town in Oklahoma, which is Bartlesville.
Going from Bartlesville to Dallas was a huge change in perspective and opportunities.
But that professor was Adrian Tan.
And that really opened up my life, especially being in a dorm with students from all over the world.
I had not been really exposed to different cultures or anything.
But I was playing football, and I was majoring in English, and my plan was to become an English teacher.
And one day, we were playing a game in Birmingham, Alabama, and I missed a flight, and I bought my own ticket.
I got on a commercial airline, and on that airline, I met a guy who owned an oil company in Oklahoma City.
He was a roughneck, and he had worked his way up and bought some rigs, and he offered me a job for when I finished playing college football.
And I thought that sounded pretty cool, because my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my dad had all worked in the oil fields, and my dad was the first to get a college degree and go work for Phillips in Bartlesville.
And so, after my last game, my senior year, I pretty much decided that's what I was going to go do.
And then, unfortunately, my brother died by suicide, and he had always wanted me to try out for the NFL.
And so I put all of that emotional energy into trying out for the league and did a pro day and had a pretty, did pretty well in that, but obviously did not get drafted.
But about two weeks later, I got a phone call from the United States bobsledding team that asked if I wanted to try out for Team USA.
And being from Oklahoma and then at the time living in Dallas, I said, there's no bobsled tracks within thousands of miles from me.
Well, how do I do this?
And they invited me to Lake Placid, New York, and I pretty much did another performance test, a combine.
And from there, I was asked to be the second pusher on a four-man bobsled.
And that's exactly what I needed at that time.
After my brother's death, I needed that camaraderie and that focus and something to channel that energy into.
And then, like, going from Bartlesville to Dallas, being able to compete for Team USA was a huge eye-opener.
Now, it was for the first time in my life getting to travel to different countries.
I had the opportunity to represent the United States in Canada and overseas in Austria and Switzerland.
And so not only am I learning about different cultures and people, but I'm also able to have that support that I needed, that I was lacking from being on a team.
And it was over in Switzerland where, I mean, we were there to compete, but we also got to learn a little bit about the culture.
And I noticed they had a great apprenticeship program, and it seemed like they were investing in their schools more, and lots of opportunity.
It was really clean.
It just seemed a lot different from where I grew up.
And I came back to Oklahoma and was offered that job on the drilling rig.
And so I became a roughneck for about a year and a half.
And the cyclical nature of oil and gas is there's always a boom and a bust.
And so I kind of came in as it was going, as it was declining.
And about a year and a half later, there was a bust.
And as a result, we had to lay our rigs over, and my colleagues and I were laid off.
And I was the only guy on the rig that had a college degree, so I was hired pretty quickly as a schoolteacher.
But my buddies, they didn't have the $90,000 a year job that we were doing in the oil fields.
They were basically going back down to about minimum wage, which in Oklahoma has been $7.25 for the past 15 years.
And I didn't know it at the time, but that was a result of the lack of economic diversification.
And I knew that I was always thinking about my friends who were left, you know, kind of waiting for that next oil boom.
So I became a teacher at a metro school in Oklahoma City with the largest in Oklahoma City called U.S.
Grant.
It's a Title I school, so a lot of kids there have had experienced adverse childhood experiences at home or ACEs.
But I got a lot of fulfillment from that.
I was also helping with some coaching, and I liked it so much, I bought a house just right down the road from Grant High School.
And then in 2015, due to years, a decade of failed trickle-down economics, the state went into a $1.5 billion revenue failure.
And it was so bad that schools had to close down to four-day school weeks.
There were a bunch of teachers laid off, and me being a new hire, I was one of them.
And so with all of this accumulating, I decided, well, who is my state representative?
At this point, I had a little bit better background in politics.
And so I wanted to hear from them myself and couldn't get ahold of them.
I've always thought of myself as a Democrat, just on the values of helping out the underdogs and making sure that people have a level playing field to reach their full potential.
And my current state rep was a Republican.
And I reached out to a couple of neighbors and no one had heard of this guy.
And that's when I decided that I was going to run for office for mental health, like people like my brother, for economic diversification or jobs for people like my friends on the drilling rig, and for public education.
For my fellow teachers and the students who were basically put in a situation due to a failed tax policy implemented by Republicans in Oklahoma over the past 10 to 15 years.
And I just started knocking doors.
I had very little.
I called up friends and family and I asked them for a donation because I needed a walk card and I also needed an updating voting list so I knew who to go talk to.
And I got started.
I bootstrapped everything.
My friend on the bobsled team designed all my stuff.
And then with all of my extra time after being laid off, I just went door to door from sunup to sundown and had the conversations with people who I knew voted.
And as a result, I was able to flip my district from red to blue in Ruby Red, Oklahoma.
And I've been elected for now for eight years.
That was back in 2016.
And in Oklahoma at the state level, we have term limits.
So I'll be term limited in 2028.
And I will say, over the past three years, there has been quite the increase in theocratic legislation that's rooted in Christian nationalism.
And the purpose for me wanting to be on your podcast was to send out an SOS or a Save Our State.
to the people who may be listening to this, that if this legislation hasn't already hit your state, it's inevitable that it will, especially if you're in a deep red state like mine.
All of these bills are pretty much copy pasted and as part of a larger agenda for a Christian nationalist takeover.
But we do have hope because there's a lot of allies out there, like Americans United and others who are putting their resources to use and their brilliant minds to combat this theocratic takeover that threatens a lot of our states and ultimately, in my opinion, our nation.
All right.
I love talking to folks who start in education.
I've been in education for my entire adult life.
My younger brother, same thing, and then my youngest brother is a third grade teacher.
So it's near and dear to us as a family, and yet we're here today to talk about a chaplain bill in Oklahoma that, as you've said on the legislature floor there, is dangerous.
And is going to introduce things into the life of Oklahoma schools that will threaten students who have had adverse experiences and everyone else.
So tell us about that chaplain bill and what it might do in your state's school system.
You brought up ACEs.
Oklahoma ranks worst in the nation for adverse childhood experiences.
We also have a critical shortage of school counselors like many states around the country do.
And for the past three years, our prior superintendent, not the one we have right now, which you've probably heard about in the news, our prior state superintendent, Joy Hoffmeister, requested three years in a row an additional $58 million in appropriations to hire new school counselors and to give the ones we have a pay increase, because right now they're only making $40,000 a year and leaving for other states that pay more.
And so my debate on the House floor was like, if we have a shortage in school counselors and we rank worst in the nation for children who are having adverse experiences, this is a solution that is pretty evident.
We need to invest in more school counselors to mitigate the amount of ACEs around the state.
But no, they did not.
Instead, their answer to solving a lot of our social ills is to delegate the responsibility of government to churches, nonprofits, and volunteers.
And this has got us bottom in the nation in all of the metrics that we want to achieve in, such as health care, public education.
But in my opinion, a lot of this is by design.
And so instead of actually solving the problem with investment and paying school counselors what they deserve to be paid, They choose to go off and volunteer chaplains at the point of this bill had required no background checks, no certifications, no qualifications.
And I wanted to make a point that while there's nothing wrong with school chaplains, expecting to replace them with certified, trained mental health professionals in school is like asking a nurse tech to perform open heart surgery.
Absolutely nothing against nurse techs, nothing against good chaplains, but it comes down to they're simply not trained to do this job.
And despite the efforts and great debate on the floor, this bill passed.
Now, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it did pass with only 54 votes, which means 19 Republicans voted against the bill, which is pretty uncommon.
Mostly the time with contingent bills like this and social war issues or cultural war issues, it seems to go along party lines with one or two votes that deviate.
But this one barely made it off the floor.
Unfortunately, it did pass the Senate, and then it went over to the governor's desk.
And since then, we've heard from like Lucian from the Satanic Temple, who has promised that he's got Satanic chaplains that are ready to volunteer and go to our schools, which is raising a great political point.
Because if you're going to allow chaplains from one denomination or faith Then it has to be open to all.
And I know that Americans United, Rachel Laser, Brilliant Mind, who's filing and fighting these theocratic bills, and the Satanic Temple, who's raising political points in the media, it has had an effect.
Because to this point, the governor has not signed the school chaplain bill, which has been on his desk for over a week now.
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I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
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We've seen this happen in Florida.
We've seen it happen in Texas.
I've talked to Representative James Tallarico in Texas, who's also a former educator, and talked about the dangers of this kind of school chaplain program for public school students.
This fits a larger profile of Ryan Walters, the superintendent of schools in Oklahoma.
He says, and I quote, The Supreme Court has been wrong.
There's no separation of church and state in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence.
It doesn't exist.
We will bring back God to schools and prayer back in schools in Oklahoma and fight back against that radical myth.
he He created a committee to advise and recommend guidance to local school systems on how to protect every student and parent's freedom to worship.
There's more here, and we'll get to it in a second, but would you mind helping us understand how a chaplain bill fits into a larger Christian nationalist vision by the head of schools in your state?
Yeah, it really comes down to the Seven Mountain Tenets, which is an extension of New Apostolic Reformation.
And what that means is that Christian nationalists want for their version of Christianity to be included in all sectors of public life, whether it's education or movies, society.
It's their version of what America is.
How to make America great again.
There is a distinction to make, though.
When I say Christian nationalists, I'm talking about people in positions of power who use their authority to dictate their narrow perspective of what they believe Christianity is onto society at large.
I am not talking about Christians who vote their values in the ballot box.
That's far from it.
The people who I refer to as Christian nationalists are legislating their religious morality and not taking into anyone else's religious beliefs or lack thereof.
I did say a quote on the floor that I heard the other day, and it said, the best way to protect religious freedom is to keep government out of religion and religion out of government.
That is the best way.
And when you have people like Ryan Walters and Governor Stitt that are imposing their religious morality, dictating it, legislating it, their theocratic legislation, that should alarm anyone Who wants to defend religious freedom because that is exactly how they aim to chip away at it.
The governor, we'll go back to Ryan Walters, but Governor Stitt in his inaugural address quoted that every square inch of Oklahoma is for Jesus Christ and went on in about a five minute speech that is included on YouTube of on the Capitol steps of declaring that we are a Christian state.
This upset many Jewish leaders, many Muslim leaders, and of course people who do not partake in a faith or religion.
We, I feel like as Oklahomans, are not nearly as Theocratic, as a lot of lawmakers would like you to believe.
And I have proof for that.
In 2016, there was a state question.
By the way, Oklahoma is only one of 26 states that has the power of direct democracy through ballot initiatives.
And we need to talk about the tactics that legislators are using to chip away at that.
But state question 790 in 2016 asked the people of Oklahoma very directly, Should public tax dollars be used to fund religion, religious purposes, and activities on state grounds, including the Ten Commandments at the state capitol?
The people of Oklahoma overwhelmingly voted that down by 57%.
Yet, the people who continue to be elected in this building continue to push back against the will of the people and impose their religious beliefs.
And now we can go back to Ryan Walters.
He's been doing this since before he was elected.
He sent out an email not too long ago to teachers, giving them a simple prayer of what to pray for Israel in their classrooms.
He's requested that the Ten Commandments poster be mandated to be displayed in every school classroom.
And the examples of rules that he's wanting and the things that he's pushing, they go on and on.
I just, on the floor the other day, I used a example from my debate.
Just from the top of my head, I wrote down a few examples of theocratic legislation that we have heard in the House of Representatives over the past couple of years.
And I mentioned a couple of these, but there's a bill right now making its way, not a bill, but there's a Supreme Court case right now making its way For the nation's very first publicly funded religious charter school by the Catholic Church, the St.
Isidoro School here.
And that is one example of you gave, Ryan Walter, saying there's no such thing as separation church and state.
He'll simply say in every interview, I reject that.
I reject that.
Like he has a divine, he's divinely appointed to reject that in his mind.
But the problem with this is that you've got one of the, or the wealthiest religious institution in the history of the world that wants taxpayer dollars to implement a virtual charter school.
This isn't even a brick and mortar school, it's just virtual.
But the point of this is to create a case to go up to the US Supreme Court In order to erode secular religion, which is the way it's always been.
And it's the way, as I mentioned earlier, to erode secular public education.
But keeping public education secular is the best way to protect religious freedom.
But you have a pretty conservative US Supreme Court that may overrule Centuries of precedent and that's exactly the word plan and running this very first publicly funded religious charter school through Oklahoma Would you be able to share with us a bit of the prayer that Ryan Walters?
sent out to Oklahoma school teachers to pray for Israel Yes Tomorrow, October 12, 2023, all schools are encouraged to have a moment of silence to reflect, meditate, pray, engage in silent activity to show support for Israel.
All Oklahomans stand with Israel.
We stand against the vicious attacks.
Israel has been a strong ally of the U.S.
Here's a sample prayer for those of you who pray.
Let us offer a prayer for safety and peace for the people of Israel.
We pray that violence against the Jewish nation should stop and that a time of healing occurs for the people who are lost.
We pray for our leaders and stand strong and defend any attacks against the Israeli people.
Now, without getting into the geopolitics of the war in Gaza, Him as a state superintendent has no effect on world politics.
And for him to, again, impose a very narrow-minded suggestion for a prayer goes beyond his role as a state superintendent.
And the teachers that were interviewed felt uncomfortable doing this, especially at the time of October 12th, which was just a few days after the vicious attacks, did not feel comfortable even knowing exactly what was going on to have this conversation, especially with young did not feel comfortable even knowing exactly what was going on And then not too long after this, State Superintendent Walters went into a first grade classroom and prayed with them and filmed it and then put it on his Twitter.
The thing about Ryan Walters right now is that because he has been so vindicative and retaliatory towards so many school districts, threatening their accreditation, creating unnecessary conflict and drama, his ratings are extremely low amongst Oklahomans.
And I believe that his only pathway forward in politics is if Trump is reelected and then appoints him to some a cabinet position.
And I believe that that's why he's trying so desperately, even to the point of spending taxpayer dollars to hire a PR firm for the sole purpose of getting him on Newsmax and Fox News.
He's so desperate to get the attention of Trump and his cabinet that he could hopefully be appointed going forward.
But here you have a opportunistic, pretty much if you've seen the musical, The Music Man, the exact same situation of someone who comes in, creates false scenarios, gets people scared, and then uses that to exploit and do pretty much everything except his job.
And And as a result, we have lost out on federal grant funding.
There's been over 136 resignations from the State Department of Education.
They haven't even had a lawyer there because they all resigned.
But it's all part of the plan to starve out public education, then basically fault them for not performing well, and then using that as a reason to continue to push their voucher scam, which is just, they did it last year, they appropriated $200 million, and 95% of people who took advantage of that were already sending their kids to private school.
And we're coming up on budget negotiations and they want to raise that up by another couple hundred million.
And the people who are going to get the first crack at it are going to be the ones who are already taking advantage of the basically the government handout or coupon for the rich who are the affluent who are already sending their kids to private schools.
I want to come back to the Ballot Initiative issue, but one more thing about Ryan Walters and education, and then we can go to the Ballot Initiative set of events.
He talks about a Western Civilization course in order to graduate high school.
So if I'm reading that in California or Georgia or Oregon, I'm thinking, well, yeah, that's fine.
I mean, what's the big deal?
But it seems, if you dig deeper, that the Western Civilization Course is a patriotic education curriculum developed by Hillsdale College, the overwhelmingly conservative Christian college in Michigan, that is a sponsor of Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation.
Would you help us understand that?
I mean, that seems like just one more way to smuggle in something to the education system that has an overwhelmingly Christian nationalist vision for the state.
This is a perfect example of people who scream the loudest about a particular issue are likely doing it themselves.
And in this case, it's indoctrination.
We had a terrible event that happened in Greenwood.
Oklahoma, in the Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, about a hundred years ago, it was a Tulsa race massacre.
And when asked about how are teachers supposed to teach a Tulsa race massacre if they can't bring up issues of race and those issues, CRT, critical race theory, Walters responded with, then you could talk about it without making skin color an issue, which that's the very reason then you could talk about it without making skin color an issue, which Also, looking back on critical race theory, the very first law ever passed in Oklahoma was a Jim Crow law of separate but equal.
That was Senate Bill 2.
And so, unfortunately, with teachers who feel like they can't teach these important lessons in history so that we are not doomed to repeat them, it's basically creating this, we are perfect, nothing has ever gone wrong, nothing will ever go wrong, we're superior in every nothing has ever gone wrong, nothing will ever go wrong, we're And you have nothing to learn from our history's mistakes.
Unfortunately, that's not going to get us to top 10, as our governor continues to say, which also admittedly, he said that talking point was just aspirational.
But whenever teachers are afraid to teach history and the realities of systemic racism and how many of this state's very first bills were Jim Crow laws, and how it's not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, how some of those can still be Um, having problems on communities, that doesn't help anyone in preventing atrocities like that from ever happening again.
Many people listening to this podcast may be familiar with the book and movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, that had the systemic killings of Native American people in Osage County, which is where my grandmother grew up in Fairfax.
I was never even taught that in high school.
I grew up in Bartlesville, which is just about an hour away from where all that happened in the 1920s.
And I wish I had known, because when I was running a bill in 2020 about missing and murdered indigenous people, And a constituent whose loved one went missing in Indian country, and as a result, the county police couldn't help her, the state couldn't help her.
She had to go to the FBI, and it was this huge, complicated jurisdictional maze, which we eventually wrote a law for, and that has been replicated in other states to help indigenous people and their families find loved ones.
If I had had some background in that at the time when that book was just coming out, I would have been a better lawmaker for it.
So we need to talk about the things that happened in the past, and even if they are extremely uncomfortable, so that way we're not going to make the mistakes, or at least we have some knowledge of what some people who we may not interact with on a daily basis, what they may be dealing with residually, even if it was only 100 years ago or 50 years ago.
Representative Mickey Dollins, I want to say thank you for being here.
Thanks for your insight.
Thanks for telling us about some of the inside story of what's going on in the Oklahoma legislature.
And I appreciate your work and your service.
Hope we can talk again.
Thanks for listening today, y'all.
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