New to Politics?
You Need to Know the Players and Avoid the Creepy Politicians
Learn About the 2019 Effort to Strangle New Trump Supporters Running a County GOP
Newcomers to politics expect everyone to get along but that is rarely the case. Sometimes it is just a case of “you went against my project or my bill last time” and sometimes it is because power hungry people are clawing for power, and even worse, political Renfields, named for the iconic character in the Dracula movies who is always eager to do his master's bidding and the dirty work. The good news is that generally the groups and activists sort out into two groups; those working for the movement and those working for themselves or a higher politician.
Of all the types the Renfield types are the most damaging to conservative values. Politics is a gentle fight (sometimes not) that decides who gets to make the rules. Big money, especially the congressmen and U.S. Senators carry a lot of money and influence that is used against the conservative/Trump agenda. These types are paranoid about their political base back home so they use surrogates, the Renfields, to fight their battles and to stymie anyone wanting change.
And it should be no shock that those most likely to sell out are those running the GOP which is why we need a change of leadership. Right now we have David McLain and what a disaster he has been after he blew through the Party's bank account and sold out. Before he was the GOP chairman it was Pam Pollard so the two are deeply intertwined in all things.
The last GOP State Convention where we elected leadership was in late spring of 2019. At the time Senator Lankford was pushing hard for a change in Party leadership with an appointed Executive Director that held 99% of the power and to get there rules needed changed to weaken the hold the individual Party members had over leadership. And both Lankford and Pollard knew that the vote would be difficult so they needed to stack the deck against the Trump supporters.
Just a few days before this late spring convention the current GOP Chairman Pam Pollard sent out the rules for the convention, the Platform that was to be voted on, and the various resolutions and Party rule changes that required a vote at the convention. Now under our Party rules there is a ten day deadline so that the various county GOP officials can distribute the info to the delegates via email and discuss the changes. Pollard was warned multiple times by multiple long term leaders about the deadline yet when she was challenged on the late submission she claimed she was “confused” on the deadline.
This came up at the Executive Committee meeting the night before the convention, the county leaders wanted to follow the rules and pass the changes that needed votes to the next convention as is required by the State GOP rules. AJ Ferate and the hack politician acting as the parliamentarian suggested that the rules be ignored and then offered a motion to accept the filings as “timely filed.”
Now this is Pelosi and Shummer kind of shenanigans. Why were Pollard and the other GOP leaders so much in a hurry to ram things through? One reason was that Pollard and Senator Lankford who was pulling the strings wanted to stampede the convention into allowing the votes transferring power to the new system of leadership, a professional (and beholden) Executive Director.
But the other reason is far worse, Pollard was trying to strangle a new group of Trump supporters down in Coal County.
Coal County had some of the old guard Republicans in charge, hard core ultra far right religious types but a new group ran by Trump supporters had flooded the precinct meetings/county convention for that county and had elected the Trump supporters as Chair and Vice Chair and booted out the old guard. Consider that just a few years earlier Coal County was around 75% Democrat so for the GOP this was a huge win to flip a county red and have a functioning Party there. But a nearby county was considered the home territory of another anti Trumper/RINO, a political consultant named Holly Gerard. Gerard it was said was furious at seeing the Trump supporters take over a county GOP so sources claimed that Gerard and Pollard hatched a plan.
Pollard had already set a deadline for County conventions in early March. And remember that many small rural counties will have thirty people show up so they will hold the precinct meetings in the first hour and the county convention in the second hour. But Pollard made the rules, she didn't follow the rules, so late in March she lit out to Harmon County way over in the Southwest corner of the state where there was an unorganized county with no GOP Party leadership running.
Pollard appointed a woman she knew as GOP chairman for the county, and at her kitchen table they held the county convention for the newly organized GOP group with two people.... Why all the trouble? Because one of the things you get to do at precinct meetings is to propose new rules and resolutions, then once passed by the County GOP at the convention these new rules and resolutions HAVE to be brought up for a vote at the State Convention. So Pollard and her new friend created a new rule that required all delegates at the 2019 convention be registered Republican voters two months before the precinct meetings. Because they knew that many of the new Trump supporters had recently changed over to Republican.
This new rule, when passed at the state convention would have removed the new GOP Trump supporters as delegates and re installed the original old guard as both delegates and as the leaders of the Coal County GOP. Pollard also stepped in and declared the new Trump supporter ran Coal County leadership as void and said she recognized only the original Coal County leadership.
However, all their RINO plans came to naught as the vast majority of the delegates were furious over the Lankford/Pollard plan to strip power away from the County GOP officials and the delegates. There was a stampede away from the Pollard/Lankford/Gerard plans and the illegal motion passed the night before to put all these late submission issues to a vote was slapped down.
So if you are new to politics be very careful about who you cozy up to or who tries to befriend you. There are dozens of characters like this, Renfields always willing to mislead the new people, always terrified their past deeds will come to light, and even more terrified to let down their masters in high places.
