NYTimes: Grassroots Oklahomans Take over City Government

A grassroots movement of ordinary Oklahomans has won half the seats on Enid city council, and majorities on the school and library boards, yet the New York Times is blaming white tribal politics for the movement’s success.

The “Enid Freedom Fighters” movement began in July 2020, when the local council proposed a mask mandate, according to the New York Times December 26 report:

“In February [2021], they swept the local elections, winning three seats on the City Council — including Mr. [Jonathan] Waddell’s and Mr. [Ben] Ezzell’s. Winning felt good and they kept going. Over the course of this year, through a series of elections, appointments and City Council votes, they have helped get four candidates onto the school board and another four onto the library board, Ms. Crabtree said, the latter after a disagreement over a display of L.G.B.T.Q. books for Pride Month.

“The [group’s members] have assumed effective control of most of the public bodies in Enid,” Mr. Ezzell said this month. He estimated that those who cared enough about the mask mandate to show up at a public meeting to speak against it were a small minority of the city’s 50,000 population. But they had an outsize effect on the Council’s moderate members, because in this moment of defensiveness and threat, going against members of your own tribe [emphasis added] is extremely difficult.

The claim of tribal politics was broadened by a quote from a picked academic in Israel:

“If my American identity [emhphasis added] is an important part of who I am, and suddenly there’s a serious threat to that, in some ways that means I don’t know who I am anymore,” [Eran Halperin] said. “It’s an attack on the very core of how I see myself, of how I understand myself.”

Waddell, who lost his seat on the city council to the grassroots movement, blamed local voters’ response to the diversity that is being imposed by the federal government’s delivery of legal immigrant and illegal migrants to local companies, such as the meatpacking plants:

He said America is in a moment when the people who ran things from the beginning — mostly white, mostly Christian, mostly male — are now having to share control. Their story about America is being challenged. New versions are becoming mainstream, and that, he believes, is threatening … He sees it as the next chapter in the story of what it means to be an American, of who gets to write this country’s story.

The NYTimes is strenuously pro-migration, and it posted the article under an apocalyptic headline:  “First They Fought About Masks. Then Over the Soul of the City.”

But the local American voters have a modest explanation for their success.

The Oklahoma National Guard is facing off against the Biden Pentagon over its vaccine mandate for service members. https://t.co/wOe1YYzmKx

— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 19, 2021

“There are a whole bunch of people who are realizing, oh, apathy didn’t serve us well,” local activist Melissa Crabtree told the NYTimes‘ reporter. “Because we learned a lot. We’ve educated a whole lot of people … I think people are waking up.”

Many polls show that Americans want to like immigrants and immigration. But the bipartisan federal government has exploited that openness since 1990 to extract tens of millions of migrants from poor countries to serve U.S. businesses as workers, consumers, and renters. “The county of Garfield, in which Enid is the seat, was 94 percent white in 1980. Last year, that figure was about 68 percent,” the NYTimes reported.

That economic strategy damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and also raises their rents.

The strategy also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

A wide variety of little-publicized polls has shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based,  bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.

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