However bad you think the audio and story out of McCurtain County, Oklahoma is, listening to it and hearing the story of how/why it became public is even worse.
On secretly recorded audio first reported by the McCurtain Gazette-News, GOP McCurtain County, Okla. officials — including the sheriff — talk about hiring hitmen to assassinate local journalists and complain that Black people now have the right to not be lynched. pic.twitter.com/N8XKNwpgqW
— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) April 17, 2023
And now comes the fallout, via The Heartland Signal:
GOP officials from McCurtain County, Okla. are being investigated by the FBI after they were caught on tape expressing their frustration about it not being socially acceptable beat up and hang Black people, as well as their desires to hire hitmen to kill newspaper reporters.
The audio was published by print-only newspaper McCurtain Gazette-News, and it released transcript of a recording from a county commissioners meeting last month to the public that allegedly incriminates several public officials after disturbing comments were made. The full audio recording from Gazette-News reporter Bruce Willingham will be released by the newspaper at a later date.
After hundreds came out in protest, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) has called for the resignation of McCurtain County Sheriff Kevin Clardy (R), District 2 Commissioner Mark Jennings (R), Investigator Alicia Manning and Jail Administrator Larry Hendrix for their comments in the meeting. District 3 Commissioner Robert Beck (R) is also cited in the audio.
The transcript suggests that the group first started discussing a recent fire which killed a woman and her two dogs. The group joked about the woman’s body parts falling off her body, and that it is similar to eating barbecue.
“So we get her in the body bag and Kyler goes, ‘You do know what we gotta do right?’ Faith goes, ‘No, what?’ He goes, ‘You gotta pre-heat the oven 350 degrees, leave her in there for 15 minutes,’” said Clardy.
Later in the transcript, Jennings and Clardy had a racist exchange and went back and forth about society making it unacceptable to lynch Black people.
“I’m gonna tell you something. If it was back in the day, when that when Alan Marshton would take a damn Black guy and whoop their ass and throw him in the cell? I’d run for f—ing sheriff,” Jennings said.
After Clardy said things aren’t like that anymore, Jennings continued.
“I know. Take them down to Mud Creek and hang them up with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights than we got.”
Jennings supposedly went on to say that he knows of two large pre-dug holes “if you ever need them,” referring to disposing the remains of Bruce Willingham and his son, Chris, also a Gazette-News reporter. Jennings also said that he knows of “two or three hit men, they’re very quiet guys.”
Manning chimed in and claimed nobody would care if two of the Gazette-News’ reporters were harmed. “Yeah, but here’s the reality,” Manning allegedly said. “If a hair on his wife’s head, Chris Willingham’s head, or any of those people that really were behind that, if any hair on their head got touched by anybody, who would be the bad guy?”
The trio was supposedly frustrated with the Gazette-News portraying the sheriff’s office unfavorably in their reporting.
The Sherrif’s office is not exactly taking responsibility:
KOCO:
In the recordings from the McCurtain Gazette, County Commissioner Mark Jennings and Sheriff Kevin McLardy can be heard allegedly talking about hanging Black people and killing Gazette reporters.
Late Monday night, the McCurtain County Sheriff’s Office issued a statement claiming those recordings were altered. They also said death threats have been made against McCurtain County officials and their families.
“Many of these recordings, like the one published by media outlets on Friday, have yet to be duly authenticated or validated,” the McCurtain County Sheriff’s Office posted to Facebook. “Our preliminary information indicates that the media released audio recording has, in fact, been altered. The motivation for doing so remains unclear at this point. That matter is actively being investigated.”
The publisher of the McCurtain Gazette had left a recorder running because he thought county business was being conducted out of session and off the books. Instead, he got a recording about killing Gazette reporters, presumably himself included.
As of Tuesday afternoon, neither County Commissioner Mark Jennings nor Sheriff Kevin McLardy have resigned.
Sorry Andrew – there’s nothing wrong there, at least in terms of how the south still works. It just got caught on tape.Report
Shocked that Oklahoma is in the south, tbh…Report
Well, it sure ain’t the Midwest.Report
One interesting way to look at it is the way major football programs in the middle of the country have — at least until recently — moved from one conference to another. That’s middle in an east-west sense. Several to the SEC. Nebraska to the B1G. Colorado to the Pac-12. The guy at your link is wrong about Nebrasks. The eastern third or so, with way over half the the population, is very much Midwest. When I moved to Colorado 35 years ago, it was immediately obvious that U of Colorado was looking for any excuse to go Pac-whatever — the Front Range, with >75% of the population, looked west not east by then.
My friend the anthropologist and I both claim that the rural Great Plains — those counties in white on my map here — is a very substantial cultural divider.Report
They have been essentially Texas-extended for some time. They are well known for anti-tribal and anti-black racism; the worst race mob attack on black Americans in the last century unfolded in Tulsa.Report
When governor freaking STITT is calling for these dudes to resign, you know it’s bad. Citation: I live in Oklahoma.
I am not sure I even claim myself as an Oklahoman any more despite having lived here longer than anywhere else I’ve lived; have become really disgusted with how the state is run, top to bottom, in the past 10-ish years. (My job is here, I own a house here, or I’d be gone)Report
Elsewhere I’ve read comments asking why Stitt did this in Oklahoma, and whether it would happen in Florida or Tennessee (with speculation that it wouldn’t). One of the possibilities is that Tennessee and Florida are growing faster than the national average, but Oklahoma is well below that average. Not a new trend — Oklahoma lost a US House seat after the 2020 census.
I have to believe that at some point reputations will get so bad that the effect on growth will get much more pronounced. Governors get dinged if the state economy and/or budget isn’t doing well relative to neighbors. Another example — at one point, multiple western states that had not adopted Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion had Republican governors urging their Republican legislatures to just take the f*cking money and fill nasty holes in the state budget.
Or maybe reputations are already bad enough. The general meme is that the South is growing at the expense of the Northeast and Midwest. But that growth is spotty. From the 1990 census on, several Southern states have lost a US House seat rather than gaining any.Report
https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/mccurtain-county-oklahoma-officials-recording/index.htmlReport
McCurtain County has a population of less than 31KReport
We have absolutely no evidence that the police are behaving worse here than in other places.Report
Actually, I kinda think this is relevant Twitter subtweet about the police:
https://twitter.com/pookleblinky/status/1268369820673867780?t=GfGMJuViDI9YwoKqXyOxlQ&s=19Report