Gentner Drummond would be a disaster as Oklahoma governor
by Everett Piper · The Washington TimesOPINION:
A metaphor often used to describe cultural warning signs is “the canary in the coal mine.” It is a story that highlights how certain dangers in life, if ignored, could destroy us.
The origin of the canary metaphor in America dates back to the mining practices in Appalachia, where coal miners would take a caged canary into the mines. They did this because the bird, being more sensitive to poisonous gases than humans, served as an early alert system.
Each day, as the men descended deeper and deeper into the earth, they would keep an eye on the canary, knowing that if it died, something was desperately wrong and that if they did not reverse course immediately, they would suffer the same fate as the little bird.
The moral of the story is clear: The canary was a harbinger of things to come. Those who ignored it did so at their peril.
Political, social and economic systems have such canaries, and they come in the form of candidates. On the Democratic side, we have examples such as Graham Platner and James Talarico.
On the Republican side, the poster child this year is Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who just emerged as one of two candidates to advance from the primary to the August runoff for governor.
Oklahoma is sometimes called the reddest of the red states. All 77 counties, for example, voted for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024, and not one of these counties voted blue in the past five successive presidential elections.
Despite all this, Mr. Drummond, a wealthy man who has repeatedly supported left-wing Democrats over Republicans, has advanced to a runoff where many consider him the odds-on favorite to win.
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Here is just part of Mr. Drummond’s resume. In 2020, he gave $1,000 to Joseph R. Biden’s campaign to defeat Donald Trump. When the media exposed this gift, Mr. Drummond claimed it was all a “mistake” and that he had not made the contribution himself; his wife had. (Sidebar: Aside from how disingenuous such a “chivalrous” explanation appears, it also raises the question: If your spouse — arguably your most trusted political adviser — is this pro-Biden, why should anyone with a conservative bone in their body vote for you? But I digress.)
Oklahoma news source BatesLine reports that Mr. Drummond has a long, established history of donating money to Democrats. In 2004, he gave $1,000 to Democrat Brad Carson’s unsuccessful effort to unseat Republican Sen. Tom Coburn. That same year, Mr. Drummond gave $2,500 to Democrat Dan Boren’s campaign to defeat a Republican for the U.S. House.
Public records also show that Mr. Drummond made four-figure donations to help other liberal Democrats in their unsuccessful campaigns to defeat conservative Republicans, such as Rep. Jim Bridenstine and Sen. Jim Inhofe. (Note: As of this writing, Mr. Drummond has made no attempt to pin all these on his wife, but the day is young.)
In 2023, Mr. Drummond, as Oklahoma’s attorney general, partnered with extreme left-wing organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation to deprive Oklahomans of their right to select a state-approved Catholic charter school as one of their schools of choice.
He also fought the Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the nation’s most conservative and successful law firms, on matters of religious freedom in doing so.
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Finally, there is Mr. Drummond’s 2018 support of Chris Brecht for Oklahoma’s Judicial District 14 judge. Mr. Brecht is the attorney who obtained the first gender-nonbinary birth certificate ever issued in Oklahoma. His legal priorities include attempts to defeat Oklahoma’s SB1140, a bill that protects the rights of Christian adoption agencies to place children in homes that share their religious values.
Mr. Brecht, with Mr. Drummond’s full endorsement, called the bill “hateful, discriminatory and blatantly unconstitutional on its face.” The fact that Mr. Drummond wanted this man to serve as a judge in the reddest of red states seems almost surreal.
I could go on and on. Mr. Drummond’s giving history reads more like the donation histories of Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Mr. Biden than that of an Oklahoma Republican. His candidacy is truly a canary in a coal mine — not only for Oklahomans but also for all Americans.
We ignore it at our peril.
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• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com.
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