Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) candidate Mary Lou Bruner, R-Mineola, who at this point is best known for claiming President Obama as a young man was a drug user who worked as a gay prostitute to pay for his habit and numerous other incendiary statements, recently appeared at a meeting of several school superintendents in the SBOE district she hopes to represent.
While there, she gave a speech that was so full of inaccuracies that it appeared to have left the superintendents appalled at her lack of basic fact-checking and lack of knowledge of what was going on in their school districts. What Bruner got in return was an earful.
In one exchange, for example, when challenged by a superintendent, Bruner briefly insisted that she had better information than the superintendent because she had obtained it from a “citizen” living in the superintendent’s district.
At another point, in response to a question, Bruner claimed to have met with several superintendents in her SBOE district during her campaign, including the superintendent of the school district in her hometown of Mineola. That prompted the Mineola ISD superintendent to stand up and deny that the two had ever met or that Bruner had ever made an attempt to meet with her.
And, of course, Bruner’s speech included a number of conspiracy theories.
All of it prompted the Hawkins Independent School District superintendent, who on the video sounds highly emotional and perhaps even fighting back tears, to tell Bruner that he felt “insulted” by her attacks against public education and that the SBOE candidate had lost his vote.
Below are some highlights from Bruner’s speech to the superintendents.
And here’s the moment the Hawkins ISD superintendent confronted Bruner.
The runoff election between Bruner — who easily won the March 1 primary but was just shy of obtaining 50 percent of the vote — and fellow Republican Keven Ellis will take place on May 24. The winner will face Democrat Amanda Rudolph in November.
You can read much more about Bruner at our blog archive.
