Governor Stitt tries to scare up votes by lying to Chick-Fil-A superfans

Last Updated on May 18, 2021, 6:04 PM | Published: May 18, 2021

OPINION — Gov. Kevin Stitt thinks Oklahomans are dumber than he is, and If Oklahomans believe his hilarious claims about President Joe Biden being responsible for a sauce shortage at Chick-Fil-A, he might be right. 

This week, Stitt sent out a hair-on-fire fundraising email claiming that Biden’s policies are the reason why a hateful poultry chain does not have sufficient packets of slop in which blinkered customers can dunk their factory-farmed chicken parts. The email referenced a May 12 story in The Hill reporting about this supposed national crisis.

“You read that right, Miranda,” Stitt or someone like him wrote in an email shared by local Twitter badass Kendall Brown, “Chick-Fil-A has a sauce shortage. And you want to know why? Because of Joe Biden’s radical liberal policies.”

I know there are people reading this column who gasped a little at my Chick-Fil-A insults while wiping precious, rarer-than-gold chicken frosting from their lips, but they have made their own moral calculation on Chick-Fil-A. Even so, the reasons why they cannot get more than one packet of Bigot Sauce have nothing to do with Biden or his policies.

Stitt and his comms team only quoted the headline. The Hill article went on to note supply chain disruptions, employee shortages and the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline as reasons for the shortage. Notably, the story did not mention Biden or his policies. 

Now, let’s set the table on Stitt’s alleged fast-food crisis. Colonial Pipeline shut down its operations to contain a ransomware threat by a Russian cyberterrorism organization called DarkSide. Because Colonial is responsible for 45 percent of fuel supplies for the eastern United States, Chick-Fil-A was allegedly unable to get sufficient quantities of sauce to many of its stores.

This has nothing to do with Biden or his so-called “radical liberal policies.” It has everything to do with Russian terrorists, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Stitt’s willingness to lie.

As The New York Times’ cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth wrote in her new book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, “Putin laid down only two rules for Russia`s hackers. First, no hacking inside the motherland. And second, when the Kremlin calls in a favor, you do whatever it asks. Otherwise, hackers had full autonomy, and oh, how Putin loved them.”

It should also be noted that Republicans, not Democrats, have dragged their heels on improving cybersecurity infrastructure. And former President Donald Trump actually encouraged Russia to engage in cyberterrorism against his political adversaries during the 2016 election. 

At any rate, Colonial Pipeline restored 100 percent of its operations by May 15, or two days before Stitt started trawling for reactionary Chick-Fil-A superfans.

Another point in The HIll’s story referred to an employee shortage, and conservatives are loudly complaining without substantial evidence that people do not want to work low-wage jobs because they receive $300/week unemployment benefits — which, by the way, Stitt is ending for Oklahomans next month because, I suppose, he wants them all serving him his precious chicken condiment. 

According to Glassdoor, a cashier at an Oklahoma City Chick-Fil-A makes $10 per hour. If that cashier works 40 hours a week, they will receive an approximate net weekly pay of $324.34. If that worker has one non-working dependent, then they are living $1,851.68 below the poverty line defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. 

If Stitt wants Dan and Bubba Cathy of Chick-Fil-A to have the number of employees needed to ensure a never-ending cascade of viscous dipping liquid, they should work together to enact a $15 minimum hourly wage, and maybe build a pipeline for Chick-Fil-A’s damned sauce.

All of this data is probably too much for people who are likely to believe Stitt’s lies about Biden sucking all the sauce out of their lives, but the truth is usually far more complicated than Stitt’s lies. 

At its core, the email is a scare tactic to drive Oklahomans to vote for an unpopular, ineffective governor, and if scaring poultry-centric sauce goblins is all he has left with 17 months until the election, Stitt is in deep chickenshit.