Restoring the Citizen's Voice

August 25, 2023: Clarification & Invitation

Copyright Notice: This original content is not to be reproduced, in whole or part, including on social media, without express written permission from The V1SUT Vantage. Email connect@V1SUT.com to request permission.

In this V1SUT Vantage article:

• The City of Bartlesville was Blocking This Publication’s Emails: Are They Also Blocking Citizens?

• Doxing and Discrediting Dissent: Reporter for Local Paper Works Overtime to Protect Elites and Activists

• Giving a Public Voice Back to We the People: Become a V1SUT Vantage Citizen Contributor

• A Citizen Speaks: ‘The Wrong Kind of Republicans’ by Don Baldwin

The City of Bartlesville was Blocking This Publication’s Emails: Are They Also Blocking Citizens?

The V1SUT Vantage posted an article earlier this week that exposed further subterfuge and progressive policies of appeasement in one of Oklahoma’s district courts. Unequal application of the law is a national problem that observably has it’s roots wrapped around our increasingly activist, local courts.

The article concludes by informing the public that local police had not responded to this publication’s request for public records involving the subject of the article for some time (submitted by email as instructed). It seems the Bartlesville Police Department (BPD) was not to blame for the delay in acknowledging the request.

Within hours of publication and with the prompting of Trevor Dorsey, perhaps that city’s lone councilman seeking to truly serve citizens, the BPD reached out to inform our public records request and a reminder about the request were not received when sent. It seems this publication’s email address has been blocked within the city’s system for some time. There was mention of clearing up the error with IT (the IT guy always gets blamed for digital censorship) but thinking people understand that decisions such as these come from those higher up, often with something to hide. And wouldn’t you know it, what arrest records they do have about the subject of the article had been completely expunged while our email requests were blocked, and now they can’t legally release any information to the public or the media.

This discovery explains a great deal. The city email network covers all public entities and offices (@cityofbartlesville.org email addresses). The V1SUT Vantage has reached out to elected officials seeking comment and balanced coverage of several local issues and received no response. Our assumption that those parties intentionally chose not to respond appears to have been incorrect. It now seems more likely that someone didn’t want us to connect.

Public information is available to all and it is unlawful for government to hinder access to that information. It is unknown how many other media outlets, individuals and Bartlesville residents may be blocked from communicating with their representatives in local government or requesting public information.

Doxing and Discrediting Dissent: Post Publication, Reporter for Local Paper Works Overtime to Protect Elites and Activists

From the moment the same article dropped, a reporter from the Bartlesville Examiner Enterprise made quick work of contacting nearly everyone in town that The V1SUT Vantage has interviewed, seeking personal contact information for contributors to the publication. Eventually, he emailed us directly, claiming to be a defender of fellow residents wanting to “hold people accountable” and requesting information about sources, methods and individual writers. His pattern of discrediting local, grassroots efforts to reclaim the GOP or to prevent crossdressing adult men from gyrating before children in the town’s most public square left us obviously skeptical.

Across middle American, rural and local papers have sold out and experienced consolidation under the umbrella of large, progressive conglomerates. The Bartlesville Examiner Enterprise is now a Gannett entity operated out of the DC area. Real people are left with nothing of value to read and nowhere to express their opinions and concerns about their communities.

Giving a Public Voice Back to We the People: Become a V1SUT Vantage Citizen Contributor

All of these attempts to block and dox from just one town’s local officials and its defensive arm at the local paper brought a clear understanding that, much like what is happening at the national level, We the People no longer have a public medium for expressing our positions or publicly questioning even local government, including its judicial system. That begins to change today.

This publication, in addition to its investigative reports, is seeking to give a public platform to the silenced majority. If you’ve experienced frustration, as many of you have expressed, after your carefully worded letter to the editor of your local paper immediately met the round file for failing to be screamingly progressive enough, we welcome your submissions. If your communications to a local or state representative have gone unacknowledged, we’d love to hear what you were trying to communicate. Send us what they won’t share (email at connect@V1SUT.com).

To begin this showcase of the goodness and wisdom of We the People, please enjoy a beautifully crafted synopsis of the battle between his area’s longstanding GOP elites (think UniParty, Rhinos, and country club buds) and a brave group of grassroots conservatives seeking to right the sinking GOP ship. The piece is printed with permission of its author, Don Baldwin. Thank you, Don. No matter where you reside, Don’s message likely resonates.

Don Baldwin, resident of Bartlesville

The Wrong Kind of Republicans

by Don Baldwin, resident of Bartlesville, Oklahoma

My wife and I moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 2021, leaving behind the west coast where we had lived most of our lives and which we had thought was our home.

We quickly met some local Republicans and started working on making connections. Folks were friendly but one puzzling thing was the veiled and often insulting suggestion that we should avoid associating with the “wrong” kind of Republicans. Which kind of Republicans was the wrong kind? Let me offer some observations from the past couple years.

The ”wrong” kind of Republicans

The people we were urged to avoid, who I will call Grassroots party members, are very passionate about freedom (be it the right to Worship, gun rights and OK2A, preventing forced immunization, or parental rights). They take a hard line on protecting the unborn and insist on protecting families from attempts to indoctrinate or groom their children. They are also passionately against most taxes. It should be noted that these positions are in complete alignment with the Oklahoma GOP platform.

They insist on a bottom-up approach to politics, with voters controlling precincts, precincts controlling counties and counties controlling the state party. That flow of control exactly matches the state GOP rules…but not the way the party has actually been run.

These are the people I have befriended since we have been here. We do not always agree but disagreement tends to be respectful and healthy. And cordial disagreement is crucial to maintaining a civil society.

The “right” kind of Republicans

The other type of Republicans we encounter here, who I will describe as the Establishment GOP is lukewarm on promoting the actual Republican platform and tends to be antagonistic towards Republicans holding those views. Their priority is fundraising and a continual and often preemptive capitulation to the left, while attempting to rationalize that capitulation as some kind of “victory”. Their approach seems designed to ensure a continual flow of funds into the party, which will perpetually ALMOST stop those pesky Democrats. The Establishment GOP prefers top-down control of the party, thereby opposing the state party’s own rules as well as its platform.

The Establishment GOP talks a lot about “unity” but only unity with them in control. They have long been in control here in Washington County. When Grassroots candidates gained control of the County Committee (which the state GOP platform describes as the supreme Republican party authority of the county) in early 2023, the Establishment’s interest in “unity” completely evaporated.

• Armed guards were hired for unpublicized meetings and attempts made to provoke confrontations by illegitimately preventing guests from entering.

• At the County Convention, an Excel spreadsheet used to calculate votes for county chairman and vice chair “accidentally” failed to count some votes, creating incorrect election results and an attempt was briefly made to brush aside conflicting, accurate tallies.

• That spreadsheet was eventually turned over but did not retain a history of edits… the Establishment members of the county GOP find this funny. (Along with questions about catering for the County Convention going 200% over budget).

• If that election just described raises concerns about voting integrity in the state, it should. The Establishment vice chair sent her own nomination to the state election board in conflict with the chairman’s nomination. When the County Committee announced a meeting to discuss removing that Vice Chair, she tried to block said meeting with a Temporary Restraining Order.

• Since then, the Establishment has attempted to mire down every meeting and prevent discussion. They also have Bartlesville news sources repeating their every statement on demand.

These months of tantrums and juvenile attempts at manipulative behavior would be disappointing during normal times but then normal times have been gone in our country for several years. We do not have a functioning Southern border and authorities are seemingly intent on causing as much economic, energy and food supply chaos as possible. 

The allegedly conservative Bartlesville City Council responded to concerns about drag queens performing for kids by illegitimately negotiating a deal with LGBT activists to protect their “right” to twerk for children, despite receiving contrary feedback from a couple thousand voters. Our Republican state Senator has sponsored a bill to make abortion MORE common and seems incapable of discussing its details honestly with constituents.

Oklahoma is technically a red state but it will not be a truly conservative state until we resolve legitimate concerns about election integrity…and the state GOP is forced by its members to adhere to its own platform and rules.