Politicians are crafty people. They will do whatever they can to convince voters that they are one of the few good guys in the process, even while admitting that the process itself is corrupt.

And of course, it is. Modern-day politics is very corrupt. It is a game of money, power, pride, and legalized corruption — a sick symptom of a government that has grown far too powerful and far too large.

But almost no politician, with perhaps the rare narcissistic exception, will ever tell you the truth: that he is one of the swamp creatures.

In last week’s article, I laid out a set of rules for fighting through the deception and determining whether your local pandering politician is merely another cog in the machine of legalized corruption.

It is a pretty sound system.

Use the tools now available. There are more of them than ever before, including indexes and public records that expose those who are part of the establishment machine.

Then ask targeted, probing questions. Do not back down. Ask the three or four questions that will tell you exactly where that legislator stands:

Will you take the abstinence pledge from lobbyist money?

Do you support the Gann Plan to permanently dismantle the opaque, concentrated power structure in the Oklahoma House of Representatives?

Do you support the Save Oklahoma Plan, a basic policy platform designed to take power away from the government-managed economy and return it to the people and the free market?

Will you commit to never signing a nondisclosure agreement that conceals public business from the citizens you represent?

But if you need more, here is another clue: Look at the known, for-sure white hats in the Legislature — those who have refused to become cogs in the system — and pay close attention to how they are treated by those who hold power.

It was a sure way to draw a quick bead on the Charles McCall/Jon Echols regime: They tried to put Tom Gann on ice.

The state’s premier conservative legislator — known for actually reading the bills and voting according to principle — was the one they chose to freeze out?

McCall’s successor?

Kyle Hilbert?

He’s doubled down.

He’s done his best to also keep Tom Gann on ice, and he’s tried to send him some good company: Jim Shaw, the business-world success and champion of the grassroots who pulled off one of the greatest political upsets in Oklahoma politics during the 2024 election cycle.

A wise leader would have put both of those representatives at the leadership table.

In a House badly lacking in gravitas, the most thoughtful and business-savvy members of the institution are kept out of the leadership room.

That tells you almost everything you need to know about Hilbert and those who surround him.

But it’s not just who they keep on ice.

It’s who they choose to silence.

So, this week, when it came time for a state representative to give what many self-indulgent politicians clearly regard as their crowning moment — the capstone address of their political careers, the farewell speech — Hilbert’s team appears to have censored state representative Justin Humphrey.

Humphrey isn’t just your run-of-the-mill populist, although he certainly carries a powerful populist legacy that’s almost identical to that famous, upstart Oklahoma lieutenant governor of the past, Cowboy Pink Williams, who pulled off one of the most powerful political upsets in state history. Ironically enough, if the Republican lieutenant governor primary were to be held today, there’s reason to think that Humphrey would outpace every other current legislator who is seeking that position, some of whom have pure blue-blood resumes, and would make it to the August runoff.

So when Humphrey took to the podium to give his farewell speech, the House managed to find itself “on recess,” a turn of events, likely without precedent, that also dictated that the House camera wasn’t broadcasting Humphrey’s speech to the wider public.

Humphrey, who boasts one of the most intriguing legislative tenures in the House, had a lot to say. And unlike the boring farewell speeches of most self-indulgent legislators, his might have actually been worth hearing.

As it now appears, Team Hilbert wasn’t about to let the people of Oklahoma hear it.

But I would suggest that they censored the wrong person.

If the House had an ounce of self-awareness, instead of censoring (if they indeed did) the speech of one of the most interesting legislators, they would have instead censored the self-indulgent rabbit trails of leadership shill Scott Fetgatter, or the bitter musings of liberal Mike Osburn, now no longer worried about the conservative electorate back home and happy to show his true colors by injecting his leftist views of the current news cycle, including a seeming defense of the shocking, new violence culture of the TDS crowd, a particular, debilitating disease that’s clearly infected Osburn, much to the delight of the radical Democrats, and the two arrogant Republicans who applauded his comments.

Indeed, for those who possess even the basic skills of observation, coupled with the wisdom of a life of thoughtful human behavior observation, it’s the farewell speeches of the legislators that will really allow one to understand how very broken the Legislature really is.

In fact, it’s one of the most depressing things to observe.

Frequently, it’s a legislator whose brain has been broken by too many compromises, having no moral compass left and unable to come to terms with the bitterness of having to play a game where they pretend to hold one set of beliefs, only to, in actuality, think very differently, likely due to prolong, toxic exposure to the Oklahoma City swamp world.

Now, as they head off to the pasture, for a career as a lobbyist, or perhaps some government job, or maybe as a dark-money PAC figurehead tool, they must come to terms with the fact that they will no longer be important, reminisce about the past years when they were important, and, generally, no longer having to fear the electors, expose their real beliefs for all to see, letting down their guard, finally.

I never enjoyed those speeches. Yes, you would learn about the darkness from the self-indulgent meanderings, destroying too many minutes of the listener’s valuable time, but it was always a dark reminder of how good people become so very broken under the overwhelming pressure of a Capitol environment that, due to the size of government, has an assimilation pressure of darkness, legalized corruption, pride, power, and money in a way too few humans are built to handle.

And it was a reminder that few choose the narrow path. Most go down the broad way, to their own destruction, never availing themselves of the few tools that could have helped save their spirit.

Tools like the abstinence pledge.

They may have dismissed it as unrealistic, but it would have made all the difference.

So, aside from perhaps the limited purpose of training and educating the public, these performances of self-indulgence should generally be avoided by the discerning individual — the person who understands that God has given him only a finite stewardship over the valuable asset of time.

And time spent in the bitter glow of the has-been politician is simply not a wise investment of that limited resource.

So, if I could offer Team Hilbert yet another piece of unsolicited — and just-as-likely-to-be-ignored — advice, it would be this:

Do not censor the second-place Republican candidate in the lieutenant governor’s race, especially one who actually has an audience for what he has to say.

Maybe listeners could learn how this populist firebrand has, against all odds, managed to outpace his colleagues notwithstanding the fact that they have been complete tools of the establishment?

Now, that’s interesting.

No, if Team Hilbert is determined to spare the public from something, spare them from the broken politicians whose unattractive bitterness probably only matters to the “see-I-told-you-so” leftists who thrive on hearing their worldview confirmed by politicians who spent a decade or more pretending to believe one thing in public, only to finally admit that, for much of that time, they were really just grifting all along.

Stay tuned for the next update, as we delve into the hottest question in Oklahoma’s independent journalism world: Is Charles McCall’s dark-money group attempting to repeat the great 2018 purge of conservatives — only this time, not just purging conservatives from the House, but from the state Senate too?

Stay tuned. You won’t want to miss this incredible story of how the state’s leading independent journalist, through an incredible example of journalism, may have just exposed one of the most unbelievable dark-money stories in Oklahoma politics.

Let’s just say, if your local politician is the beneficiary of permit number 852, then he’s clearly a swamp creature.

If he’s the target of 852?

Then he’s doing something right.

Stay tuned.

When the House Fears a Farewell Speech
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




May 6, 2026 at 05:11PM - J Murphey

And, while they are at it, voters might as well ask their House member: Who did you support in the speaker’s race, Kyle Hilbert or Tom Gann? And even more importantly, who will you support in November?

That look of terror in their eyes as they instantly recognize the implications of their answer?

It will tell you everything you need to know.

There is an old lesson that every wise observer of human nature eventually learns.

Those who live capriciously — guided by impulse, emotion, personal loyalty, social pressure, and the crisis of the moment — tend to drift from bad decision to bad decision. They move from project to project, relationship to relationship, cause to cause, never pausing long enough to develop the system of judgment necessary to learn from their past mistakes.

It’s a problem that’s only gotten worse in the era of social media as society now has a collective case of ADD.

The result is predictable. They do not live so much as they react. They spend their lives managing the fallout from their last bad decision while preparing, usually unknowingly, to make the next one.

The secret to avoiding this fate? It is a system. You must have a system.

A person who intends to live wisely must develop a set of criteria, refined over time, tested by experience, and applied consistently. The criteria do not make every decision easy. They do not remove every uncertainty. But they do give the decision-maker something more reliable than feelings, instinct, fear, or social pressure.

This same principle applies to elected officials.

A constitutionalist legislator who hopes to survive the Oklahoma Capitol without being swallowed by its corruption must have a system. He must have a checklist. He must have a standard that exists before the vote, not an excuse invented after the vote.

Did the bill grow government?

Did it create a new bureaucracy?

Did it increase regulation?

Did it raise fees?

Did it carve out another exemption from transparency laws?

Did it exempt an agency from shared-service protocols?

Did it spend money that should not have been spent?

Is it, in effect, a special law? Did it transfer wealth from taxpayers to a favored political interest?

If so, the answer should usually be simple: no.

A consistent decision-making process keeps a legislator grounded. It gives him something to point back to when lobbyists rage, bureaucrats whine, leadership threatens, and the Capitol’s professional excuse-makers begin their work.

Without that system, the legislator becomes easy prey.

He starts rationalizing. He starts explaining away. He starts convincing himself that the big-government vote was actually conservative, that the transparency exemption was harmless, that the corporate welfare giveaway was economic development, that the lobbyist-funded dinner was appropriate, and that the betrayal of principle was really just the hard work of governing.

At that point, the brain is broken.

And once the brain is broken, the Capitol has him. The assimilation is complete.

Most regular readers of this publication will understand this problem instantly. Many will ask the obvious question: Why can’t my legislator do this? Why can’t they govern according to clear criteria, published for all to see?

But there is another question that must be asked first.

Why can’t the voter?

The voter is the higher authority. The legislator works for the voter. The legislator is hired by the voter. The legislator is retained by the voter. The legislator is promoted, excused, rewarded, or replaced by the voter.

If legislators must apply clear standards to their votes, then voters must apply clear standards to their candidates.

Otherwise, the voter becomes the political equivalent of the aimless legislator: guided by feelings, personal relationships, name recognition, last-minute mail pieces, church friendships, chamber-of-commerce applause, and the intoxicating flattery of politicians who know exactly how to tell grassroots conservatives what they want to hear.

So the question is simple.

What are your criteria?

What will govern your vote?

And when the 2026 Republican primary arrives on June 16, will you source your candidates with the seriousness the moment requires, according to clear, defensible criteria? Or will you be guided by those other co-opting factors?

Regular readers do not need to be told that the foremost criterion should be the abstinence pledge: the raising of the standard, the refusal to take the lobbyist and special-interest money that has so thoroughly corrupted state government.

A first-time candidate may find it easy to say he will not take lobbyist money before it is offered. The real test comes after election, when the money arrives in force.

It comes in campaign contributions. It comes in independent support. It comes in fundraisers. It comes in invitations. It comes in relationships. It comes in food, drink, entertainment, access, and the Capitol-city lifestyle that slowly transforms a citizen-legislator into a creature of the system.

The candidate who signs the pledge and means it is making a sacrifice. He is giving up thousands of dollars for his campaign account. He is giving up the social circuit. He is giving up the easiest path to political survival.

That does not make him perfect.

But it does mean he understands the disease.

If a candidate is willing to refuse that money, he is at least attempting to be part of the solution. If he is unwilling to make that commitment, then he is asking voters to send him into a corrupt system while refusing to take the most basic precaution against being corrupted by it.

And voters do such candidates no favors by sending them into Oklahoma City unprotected.

But, for the first time, there are a double-digit number of candidates who are making this commitment. And all across Oklahoma, Republican primary voters will have opportunities to support candidates who are attempting to raise the standard. They should take those opportunities seriously.

If the candidate has already held legislative office, the voter has another advantage: a record.

The Oklahoma Constitution’s Conservative Index has long served as one of the state’s traditional measurements of legislative conservatism. OKGrassroots.com has developed another important scorecard, built through detailed review of legislation and judged through the lens of Republican platform principles. The Oklahoma State Capital’s People’s Audit provides another layer of scrutiny, reviewing 93 of the worst votes of the 2025 session and explaining why those votes mattered.

If an incumbent legislator scores poorly across these indices, the voter must take that seriously. If a statewide candidate previously served in the Legislature and compiled a poor record, as almost all of them have, the voter must take that seriously as well.

The great danger in politics is not ignorance. It is rationalization. The voter sees the record, knows the record, understands the record — and then excuses it because the candidate is friendly, familiar, well-connected, personally likable, or skilled at performing conservatism before grassroots audiences.

This is how bad politicians survive. The most dangerous politicians are the best at getting you to convince yourself to betray your own values, the very motivation for why you are sacrificing to become involved in the first place, even when you don’t know that’s what you are doing.

Those sleazy politicians do not survive because voters lack information. They survive because voters explain the information away. There are simply too many resources now available to let the politicians get away with the scam.

And when voters excuse the same betrayals they once condemned, they become part of the problem they claim to oppose.

For State House candidates, one other question should always be proffered:

Do you support the Gann plan?

The Gann plan would change everything.

It would transform the Oklahoma House of Representatives from a centralized power structure — where the real decisions are made behind closed doors, dominated by the politics of special interests and protected by the pretense of deliberation — into a more open institution where ideas must be heard, debated, voted on, and judged by the people.

Under the current model, too many members live in fear of the speaker’s power. They function less like representatives and more like utilitarian lemmings: show up, press the green button, avoid angering leadership, attend the lobbyist dinners, and leave the hard decisions to the few people operating behind closed doors.

That is not representative government.

That is managed government.

The Gann Plan would give members real responsibility again. It would return the budget process to the open. It would force legislators to own their votes. It would make the House more accountable to the people who created it and less obedient to the leadership structure that captured it.

The day the Gann Plan wins adoption will be the day the House begins its return to the people.

Until then, every House candidate should be asked where he stands.

If a candidate refuses to support meaningful reform, refuses to challenge centralized power, and refuses to restore transparency to the House, then voters should understand what that refusal means.

He may talk like a reformer; but, until he says that he supports the Gann Plan, he is protecting the system. And it’s a very corrupt system.

And, while they are at it, voters might as well ask their House member: Who did you support in the speaker’s race, Kyle Hilbert or Tom Gann? And even more importantly, who will you support in November?

That look of terror in their eyes as they instantly recognize the implications of their answer?

It will tell you everything you need to know.

Candidates should also be asked whether they support Jim Shaw’s Save Oklahoma plan.

The strength of that plan is its simplicity. It gives candidates a clear policy structure through which they can show whether they are actually willing to confront the green energy, international-corporation, corporate welfare machine, the bureaucratic class, the taxpayer-funded-lobbyist industry, and the other monied special interests that dominate state government.

The question is not whether a candidate can say “limited government.”

The question is whether the candidate will apply limited-government principles when the Chamber wants money for its green energy members who are destroying rural Oklahoma, when agencies want more power by means of taxpayer-funded lobbyists, when the turnpike authority decides to raise toll rates yet again, when foreign interests want to buy up farmland for the latest cyanide-treated black-market marijuana farm that destroys the lives of so many, or when statists want to force the identities of Oklahoma citizens into the REAL ID sharing system but refuse to require illegal aliens to have their identities verified, allowing the modern-day labor exploitation market to continue to thrive.

A candidate who cannot oppose corporate welfare in plain English now will certainly not oppose it in office after Election Day.

Every candidate should be asked another question:

Have you ever signed a nondisclosure agreement related to public policy, public spending, economic development, or government negotiations?

And will you pledge never to do so?

The NDA has become one of the most disturbing tools in modern Oklahoma government. It allows politicians to sign away transparency and then claim they cannot tell the people what is being done in the people’s name.

It is government secrecy by contract.

When a legislator does this, he surrenders. He has betrayed his constitutional oath to the people, and he is acknowledging a higher power than his constituency.

This abuse became especially visible during the era of corporate welfare on steroids, when state leaders negotiated massive incentive packages in secret, withheld the identity of potential recipients, and then rushed the public process once the deal was already functionally complete.

The pattern is now familiar.

The deal is developed behind closed doors.

The public is told almost nothing.

The Legislature is brought in late.

The pressure campaign begins.

The vote is rushed.

And by the time citizens understand what is happening, the decision has already been engineered.

A key example is the massive incentive package connected to the UAE-backed aluminum smelter project. As more Oklahomans began to understand the proposal and its implications, opposition began to grow. But by then, the process had already been largely shaped. The machinery was already moving, and introduced over the weekend, and up for a final vote in the House by a Tuesday, the public-facing vote was a mere show.

That is not transparency; it is not deliberation, and it is certainly not constitutional self-government befitting our republican system of governance.

It is rule by secrecy, wrapped in the language of economic development.

And any candidate who cannot say, clearly and without hesitation, that he will not participate in that system is not ready to represent the people.

All of this returns to you: the voter.

It is easy to blame the politicians. And much of the blame belongs there.

But politicians do not promote themselves. Voters hire them, and as the employer, you are the highest authority.

If voters keep rewarding the very people who built this corrupt system, the system will not change. It will become worse. The secrecy will deepen. The spending will grow. The corporate welfare deals will multiply. The lobbyists will become more powerful. The speaker’s office will become even more imperial.

You can never allow your vote to be denigrated into a mere social gesture.

It is not a favor.

It is not a reward for friendliness.

It is not an expression of who shook your hand, remembered your name, attended your event, or spoke convincingly at your Republican grassroots group’s meeting.

It is so much more than that.

It is an act of self-government.

It is the tool given to the citizen by the design of the American system and our founders, and preserved by the sacrifice of so many who came before us. To truly honor this sacrifice, your vote must be governed by reason, principle, evidence, and a clear standard.

So build your checklist.

Ask whether the candidate has signed the abstinence pledge.

Ask whether the candidate takes lobbyist or special-interest money.

Ask how the incumbent scored on the big three indices: The Conservative Index, the gold standard of Oklahoma conservatism since 1979; the incredible OKGrassroots.com Republican Platform index, so thorough and complete and the work product of many hours of dedicated volunteer labor; and The Oklahoma State Capital’s People’s Audit, nicely capturing the worst votes that lawmakers never expected to be held accountable for.

Ask whether the House candidate

Your Vote on June 16th Is Not a Favor. It Is an Act of Government. Are You Doing it Right?
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




April 28, 2026 at 05:24PM - J Murphey

As with all things good, when they start to catch on and when the grifters who make their money begin to realize the value of this proposition they want to get in on the action.

This election cycle is the breakout year for what is the real answer to the problem of a big state government that only gets bigger, more inefficient, and, frankly, more corrupt—even as we elect “small government” Republicans who campaign on the principles of Adam Smith and Ronald Reagan, only to deliver on the concepts of Keynes and Krugman.

That solution? Well, regular readers will know it well; it’s what I have commonly termed as the abstinence pledge. It’s the expectation that our elected officials will move into the 21st century in terms of ethics and apply the standard that applies to all professionals: that they will not take monetary benefit from those who depend on the decision-making ability of those who make the policy and take the money.

And as the state prepares to publish the official ballot, we can now say that, for the first time ever—for the very first time—there are a double-digit number of candidates making this commitment.

And for the very first time, ever, every Republican primary voter in the state will have the opportunity to vote for a candidate who has taken this commitment, as one of those candidates is at the very top of the ballot: Jake Merrick campaigns for the governor’s position with this as one of the foremost points of his platform, and due to that role, he has been able to go statewide promoting the concept and spreading the good news that the people of Oklahoma no longer have to settle for the status quo, for the legalized corruption, and for a system that has created so much cynicism in the general electorate, who have rightly concluded that most of their politicians are no better than crooks, leeches upon society, running a big grift, and the sleaziest of the sleazy.

When Jake Merrick asserts that he can run and hold office on a platform of refusing the obvious conflict of interest that the great majority of other candidates gaslight the public into believing is not a conflict of interest, he is restoring the people’s belief in a broken system—and in the idea that that system, maybe—just maybe—could be fixed.

And though Jake Merrick faces long odds—and even if he does not win—he has already been a historic pioneer. By going on stage time and again and spreading the good news about this concept to listeners who did not even know it was an option, he is giving that message for the first time and sending a signal of what is to come in the next few years: a new generation of candidates yet to raise the standard. Win or lose, just by accomplishing this, and putting the no lobbyist pledge on stage for all to see, he’s already laid claim to a historic first and an amazing legacy. It is a calling for him to be in this place at this time, spreading that word, letting people see the light, and showing that it is possible to realize a higher standard and to reform the broken system.

But that’s not all. For what I believe is the first time ever, the number of legislative candidates who have also made this commitment reaches into the double digits.

In some parts of the state, there will be ballots where voters, for the first time ever, will have the privilege of picking no-lobbyist-money candidates in no less than three distinct races, where a Senate candidate and a House candidate are joining Merrick in making the commitment to raise the standard.

But here’s where things start to take a bit of an interesting turn.

As with all things good, when they start to catch on and when the grifters who make their money begin to realize the value of this proposition they want to get in on the action.

This isn’t a bad thing, in that it shows the great value of this commitment, and that even those who make their living playing the corrupt political game recognize the intrinsic value of once again being able to inspire people back to a mindset where they can believe again—that their vote has value, that they really can make a difference, and that not all politicians are corrupt.

But of course, those of us who have advanced this concept as the leading tool by which the people can reclaim their government from the legalized corruption that dominates it today must do what we can to protect the integrity of our valuable proposition. For those who would abuse the trust of the people—who would inspire them to once again believe that they can make a difference, and then, subsequent to that, betray that trust—will do far more harm than those who just tell the same old lie: that “it doesn’t make a difference when I take the lobbyist money because it won’t affect me.”

In the future years, we will no doubt be challenged to specialize and finally craft the tools, the means, and the methods by which we protect the integrity of the commitment. More on that to come; but in the short run, it’s important to explain and expose the scam by which those who would seek to draft on the commitment, without actually making the sacrifice that’s required to really reject that special interest influence, are perpetrating. To understand how to defeat this particularly devious scam, we must first understand the scam.

It works like this.

A consultant advises the candidate that they should take the no-lobbyist pledge. However, the consultant subsequently explains that after the election, that candidate can quickly form their re-election committee for the next time, and the re-election committee will be able to take the dirty money.

Of course, this defeats the whole purpose. Few lobbyists are going to contribute to a new candidate who is competing in either an open seat or challenging a co-opted incumbent. For the most part, lobbyists are going to stay out of that fight, wait to see who the winner is, and then forever pledge their support to that winner, immediately hedging their bets and then, once they have corrupted the newly elected office holder, keep them as the new co-opted incumbent in office for as long as that incumbent keeps doing their bidding.

For a first-time candidate, refusing lobbyist money is hardly a sacrifice. Done right—by informing and inspiring voters—it will deliver a five-to-ten-point boost, creating a major advantage with virtually no downside, since their lobbyist support was never significant to begin with.

Should they win, however, the commitment becomes far more significant. A candidate who has pledged to refuse lobbyist money must then follow through when it begins to arrive in two forms: first, tens of thousands of dollars in campaign funds—money that can be used for personal “officeholder” expenses, and to deter future challengers; and second, the steady stream of perks—fine dining, entertainment, and social access at Oklahoma City’s most exclusive venues—where professional relationships with lobbyists quickly evolve into personal ones, and with them, a level of influence that shapes that legislator’s actions and best explains the many, many betrayals of our values.

So, those candidates who have been advised by their consultant to take the pledge and then subsequently, as soon as the day after the election, to in effect betray that pledge do much more harm to the integrity of the system than those who just straight-up admit to the fact that they will be taking the lobbyist money.

No, the real abstinence commitment isn’t that the candidate will refrain from taking money prior to election day, when the lobbyists aren’t going to give it anyway, but rather that throughout the next term of office, at no point will they take either the campaign contributions or the personal gifts, and thus they will be immune from the number one co-opting influence of officeholders: money. Thus, by making this commitment, they are making it clear that in a world of legalized corruption, they will not be corrupt, and the standards that apply to just about every other profession—that the decision-maker does not take monetary influence from those who depend on that decision-maker for their livelihood—are applied in this most important of arenas: the public trust.

So when you are approached and solicited by a no-lobbyist candidate, it’s important to ask the questions that determine if this candidate is a part of the new scam to take advantage of the trust of the voters.

Will the candidate agree to refrain from all lobbyist largess throughout the entirety of their next term of office?

If they can’t make this commitment, then this candidate has either knowingly or unknowingly become a part of the new, great scam to take advantage of the greatest tool that we have for returning our government back to the conservative values of the people and to a world where legalized corruption no longer thrives.

The true and actual commitment requires that the candidate make the commitment to refuse all lobbyist political contributions from both the lobbyists and the principals—in other words, the employers of the lobbyist—for the entire term during which that person holds office, whether or not the person is running for reelection and has a new committee.

To make any other commitment aside from this is simply to draft on and scam the very best hopes and beliefs of the voters.

Secondly, we’ve now reached the point where there are those who have made the commitment in the past to refuse this money, and they have no doubt inspired the voters and inspired a new belief within them. But now those office holders are under tremendous pressure to give up the exceptionalism, to take the easy path, and to give in to the temptation to take that dirty money. They see so many other politicians taking the money, and they can’t help but give in to the pressure.

When one makes this bad choice, it’s truly heartbreaking. But we must come to terms with the fact that these types of betrayals are sure to happen, and when they do, the grassroots who dedicate their time and energy to these various candidates are well advised to place that time and energy with the other candidates for office—that ever-growing number of candidates for office that are still intent on keeping this very special commitment.

Those who would support the candidates for office who have betrayed the pledge, and help them get re-elected, perhaps because of personal loyalty or relationship or because they are unable to come to terms with the betrayal, are propagating the same corrupt system that will never end so long as we the people allow the big grift to continue.

There are now plenty of other no-lobbyist-money candidates now that desperately need the support and the energy of the grassroots.

So with very rare exception, my best advice to those who want to make a difference with their time and money is to find and identify the no-lobbyist-money candidates and then get on board and build a relationship, and ensure that not only does that candidate win on election day, but they know that as long as they keep their commitment and as long as they vote in accordance with constitutional principles, your support will always be there for them, and they will never have to get scared, get fearful, and give in to the temptation.

This is how we take our government back.

Help spread this important message; share it with your personal network. And, if you have yet to subscribe, don’t miss the opportunity to get your free or paid subscription, and support this work. We are just getting started.

The No-Lobbyist Money Movement Hits Critical Mass
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




April 18, 2026 at 11:13AM - J Murphey

Brian Hill had a problem. As a newly announced candidate for lieutenant governor, the Mustang House member had set out on the obligatory “Gaslight the Grassroots” road tour to convince Oklahoma’s burgeoning Republican grassroots crowd that he, Hill, was really a “conservative.”

As Hill concluded his presentations to what is perhaps Oklahoma’s most dynamic grassroots group, the Logan County 2nd Amendment Association and Logan County GOP, his gaslighting endeavors were almost immediately exposed with one question: “Can you explain your 43 score on the 2023 Conservative Index?”

As Hill stumbled through his answer, attempting to excuse his poor performance on the gold standard—since 1979—of exposing the dark art by which Oklahoma legislators pretend to be conservative at election time but govern as liberals, he had become the latest victim of a grassroots savvy that has exposed the duplicity of so many special-interests-co-opted legislators turned statewide candidates.

These are politicians who believed they were skillful enough to pull the wool over the eyes of the patriotic grassroots—voters who, desperate to save their nation, the greatest in the history of the world, are eager for heroes and are wanting to trust those who claim to understand American principle and thought.

Time and again, these ambitious legislators, now seeking higher office but handicapped by the fact that they have governed as institutionalists, who have long been funded by and done the bidding of those who are using the power of government to cash out to their personal benefit, have been exposed by the grassroots gauntlet.

Put simply, the grassroots are becoming ever more sophisticated, and with the advent of a free and open X following Elon Musk’s purchase, and any number of tools such as The Conservative Index, have had the power to expose just about all of them, starting with gubernatorial hopeful Charles McCall, whose support has fallen back as wise Republican voters have become aware of his legislative record.

There has been, in fact, just one very noticeable exception: a termed-out legislator whose liberalism was repeatedly and frequently documented by The Conservative Index, who averaged a 57 score, firmly in official RINO territory, in his last nine years of officeholding.

It’s a cautionary tale, as this lawmaker held one of the best scores, a 90, in his first three years; but, unfortunately, this is what made him so dangerous: he never lost the ability to talk conservative and to make conservatives believe he shared their values. But after those first three years, his scores tell a very different story. By 2017, his first year in leadership, as he advocated for tax increase after tax increase, his score plummeted to a 10—an all-time low that, until then, would have been inconceivable for a Republican legislator.

In fact, his scores are lower than Hill’s—the fellow establishment lawmaker whose low score was highlighted at the Logan County meeting.

During the last nine years of the legislator’s tenure, I would challenge anyone to point to a time when the House Republicans did what they did best—betraying the conservative, free-market principles of Bastiat’s The Law, or the special law principle in Crockett’s Not Yours to Give—and when this legislator could be found on the right side of the vote.

Put simply, the system had changed him, and he’s very different than when he was a new House member, as so often happens to most of those who play the game. But, because he never lost the talent for talking the talk, his ability to make all of those betrayals go away—well, that’s all pure politician skill, a clear inability to feel shame, like almost no one in the modern history of the state has possessed; it’s an amazing study.

It’s the same statewide candidate who has filled his campaign coffers with the generous donations of the whos who of the lobbyist scene, and the liberal scions who led the transformation of the House to its modern-day configuration of institutionalist domination, to include liberal former legislators Carol Bush, Marcus McEntire, and the great purger of legislative conservatives himself, who some may say is Oklahoma’s modern-day answer to Gene Stipe, Chris Kannady, while still expecting, and worse, receiving, the very public support of far too many grassroots conservatives.

And it’s the legislator who didn’t just, time and time again, vote for both the tax increases and the biggest corporate welfare giveaways in the history of the state, in the era of Corporate Welfare on Steroids, but who, as majority floor leader, ran the floor, facilitating the process by which all of this happened in the least transparent of ways, moving from concept introduction to final approval in the tightest of windows of public purview—an abuse that Tom Coburn took to the State Capitol to rightly express his dismay at and liken to the corruption of Washington, D.C.

As he now campaigns for statewide office, his mailer portrays the scope and scale of this incredible willingness to gaslight, as he purports to have “stood with Trump when it mattered most.” While, in fact, this politician was in very public opposition to Trump when it mattered most: as the Biden Justice Department and the radical left sought to bankrupt Trump and put him in jail, establishment Republicans recruited Ron DeSantis to stage the coup that would move the party past Trump. This legislator? Well, he became the highest-ranking Oklahoma legislator to sign on with the effort, in a public endorsement of DeSantis. Today, he rewrites that history with seemingly no sense of shame.

And, as the era of social justice peaked, this liberal legislator was there for it, voting time and again to diminish our values, including the notorious HB 1835—perhaps the Democrats’ greatest wishlist item of choice—aligning counseling standards with woke national groups, an unconstitutional restriction on free speech that would have allowed the state to take away the licenses of Christian counselors who sought to save the lives and souls of innocent children whose corruption is the obsession of the woke left, something one would expect in the atheistic Soviet Union, but never in the United States—and HB 3088, another Democrat initiative, the implicit bias training mandate, designed to force Oklahoma’s health professionals to be trained on their “implicit bias.”

And in 2020, as the Democrat establishment conspired on making a joke of the election system, it was this legislator who voted for the Democrat effort to more than double the notary cap on mail-in ballots, HB 3317, that analysts have rightly attributed to be the Democrats’ foremost tool for election fraud.

From the proposal that appeared set to enable FedCoin, to the proposal to allow legislators to stay in office for 20 years instead of the current limit of 12, to the $3.8 million waste of taxpayer dollars to study turning every Oklahoma road into a toll road—tracking and taxing Oklahomans for every mile they drive—to his repeated authoritative performance on KWTV, where, as a guest panelist throughout the COVID era, he repeatedly instructed viewers to “wear their mask,” an authoritarian order that this writer gleefully refused, with extreme prejudice, now, as I review what I affectionately call the “insane votes” document, I have found this legislator to be not only on the wrong side of history, having only scratched the surface of the betrayals in this article, but to have demonstrated a judgment so bad as to disqualify him for the future support of any thoughtful conservative who has the intellectual honesty to care about principle and to put that principle above personal relations—because, at the end of the day, that’s the only skill which will allow one to withstand the advances of this incredibly savvy politician.

For to fail in this task—well, it’s to become the victim of that previously mentioned verb, and to find oneself in a state of having been “echoled.”

If you’ve been “echoled,” don’t feel bad. You are far from the only victim of Oklahoma’s most savvy politician. But now, you know the truth. The question is, do you have the courage to recognize it?

Because if not, one can certainly make the case that no consistent moral standard remains by which future legislators can even begin to be held responsible.

If you’ve found this update insightful, there’s much more like this coming. You don’t want to miss it. If you’ve yet to subscribe to weekly updates, sent directly to your email, you may do so at OklahomaStateCapital.com.

Introducing Oklahoma's Most Shameless Politician
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




April 9, 2026 at 11:39PM - J Murphey

Think of it like this: if you were—as the most awful turn of fate would have it—forced to appoint an Oklahoma politician to oversee your personal affairs, perhaps your family trust, who would you pick?

Would you pick John George, the state representative who, aside from House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, has cast the most “yes” votes thus far this year—voting yes 499 times, but finding his “no” button only five times, and missing three?

Or would you pick Tom Gann, the legislator known for setting up an entire IT system to apply consistent criteria to bills—to analyze them, to find where they betray Oklahoma values, creating bigger government, etc.—and the legislator behind the meme, “Gann was right”?

Yesterday marked the release of the Oklahoma State Capital’s Capitol Conformity Tracker, mid-year report. Issued. as the state’s three-day filing period opens, on the 1st of April, through the 3rd—registering candidates for the 2026 Republican primary on June 16th—the report provides the reader with one last sanity check for reaching the decision: should I run against my incumbent state representative? Does my incumbent state representative still deserve a challenge? Or have they, at the last minute, seen the light and changed?

Over the last 17 months, since your state representative took the oath of office, numerous indices and measurement tools have emerged to guide you—both in deciding whether your incumbent should be challenged and in identifying the specific issues on which to educate the electorate. Even in a worst-case scenario, where you do not win, your challenge—using these tools—can help the incumbent see the error of his ways and prepare the electorate to hold him accountable in a future race, should he fail to adjust and represent the values of the people.

Once this foundation is built, though you might not ever hold that office yourself, you will have paved the path for another challenger to step up next time and to return the district to the people.

That said, perhaps your incumbent has already adjusted. Perhaps he has been conscientious—learned from indices such as the vital OKGrassroots.com Republican Platform Index, which measures and finds most wanting in terms of consistency with Republican principles. Or the Oklahoma State Capital’s People’s Audit, which gauged the 93 worst votes in 2025 and found that most Republican representatives are voting far out of line with the values of the people and should be replaced.

Time and again, through a variety of means and methods—from these indices, to the ever-growing social media presence, to the thriving grassroots ecosystem inside of Republican party organizations all across the state—grassroots individuals have engaged in and attempted to educate their elected officials, thus, attempting to negate the need to replace them.

Has it worked?

Is your incumbent the extremely rare individual who has been able to claw back his soul from the forces of darkness that dominate the Capitol world and the overwhelming peer pressure to comply?

Introducing the mid-year run of the Oklahoma State Capital’s Conformity Index.

This index is based on a simple premise: in today’s legislative culture—an ever-degrading culture, ever more removed from the ideals and promises of the first-generation Republican majorities—we know that much legislation in the House of Representatives is, at best, unnecessary and, at worst, contrary to the values that most candidates for office purport to hold as they seek election. In other words, it turns those candidates into grifters and perpetuates an ongoing deception on the voters.

If a legislator has a propensity to vote “yes” in excess of 90%, then—though it is a lazy rule of thumb—that has been proven to correlate with most more in-depth indices: put simply, that legislator isn’t representing the people or the values they campaign on, but rather the institutional forces of government and government-subsidized private interests.

If the legislator votes “yes” in excess of 80% of the time, they are what are known as the “mediocraties”—a group that too often gives in to pressure and casts values-betraying votes, but from time to time steps up and does the right thing.

As a simple premise, subject to occasional exceptions, those members of the public who step up to challenge those who vote “yes” in excess of 80% of the time are doing the wider public a service and keeping the system honest. And the rule of thumb suggests that the challenger will have plenty of material available by which he can educate that wider public.

These challenges matter.

In 2024, the last election cycle, three challengers to incumbents won election. All three replaced sycophants—those who vote yes with rare exception—and all three now reside in the group of the elite eight that vote “yes” less than 80% of the time.

The impact of the 2024 election has been incredible—a result that can be very visually expressed through the following graphic.

Uniform “yes” voting collapsed in 2025, and thus far in 2026 it has held. If replacing just three lemming incumbents made this much difference, imagine the impact of replacing three more? Or five? Or ten?

That said, even after all of the educating of 2025, the number of legislators who have gained a reputation for being conscientious—actually reading the bills and attempting to consistently vote in terms of principle—have stayed relatively stable.

And in the most-recent run of the report, released just hours before filing day, a last-second measurement has been given: has your co-opted policymaker changed his ways?

Here’s what we know.

The number of legislators who have shown an independence and courageous spirit—a determination to do their job right and not simply mindlessly hit the yes button, and thus representatives who should be returned to office, and who a challenger would be ill-advised to run against (i.e., a replacement isn’t needed)—remains stuck at eight:

These representatives, The Elite Eight of the Oklahoma house of representatives, are, by rank, as follows:

#1: Tom Gann, voting “Yes” 45.2% of the time.
#2: Molly Jenkins, voting “Yes” 46.9% of the time.
#3: Jim Shaw, voting “Yes” 54% of the time.
#4: Rick West, voting “Yes” 54% of the time.
#5: Justin Humphrey, voting “Yes” 63% of the time.
#6: Jim Olsen, voting “Yes” 72% of the time.
#7: Gabe Woolley, voting “Yes” 76% of the time.
#8: David Smith, voting “Yes” 78% of the time.

Think of it like this: if you were—as the most awful turn of fate would have it—forced to appoint an Oklahoma politician to oversee your personal affairs, perhaps your family trust, who would you pick?

Would you pick John George, the state representative who, aside from House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, has cast the most “yes” votes thus far this year—voting yes 499 times, but finding his “no” button only five times, and missing three?

Or would you pick Tom Gann, the legislator known for setting up an entire IT system to apply consistent criteria to bills—to analyze them, to find where they betray Oklahoma values, creating bigger government, etc.—and the legislator behind the meme, “Gann was right”?

Who would be more conscientious and hard-working in governing your affairs?

Not only that, but George’s many yes votes mean he is on the record voting for countless pieces of bad policy, such as the now-infamous—and dead-on-arrival in the Senate—House Bill 3660, which House District 32 Rep. Jim Shaw put on the national stage last week. Just imagine the possibilities for George’s challenger—and yes, a courageous person has stepped up for this task—to use this vote as an illustration of how out of touch George is from the conservative values of House District 36, an incredible district with so much potential to host one of the best state representatives in the state, instead of one of the House’s foremost lemmings.

Then, there are the mediocraties: this is a group of 18 House members who regularly cast good votes, but also cast many bad votes. Some of these legislators already have challengers, and those challengers will have plenty of material to work with. But it is to be hoped that if these legislators survive the challenge, they will not go to the dark side, but will instead see the challenge for what it is: an important, vital accountability tool designed to bring the mediocrity into a position of strength—to be able to hold their own, and to truly represent the values they purport to hold, but too often betray.

Finally, the “lemmings”—the mindless tappers of the green button: that’s everyone else. And for each of these, someone—anyone—in those districts must step up and challenge, put their name on the ballot, and do what is right for the voters of the district, to educate them on the truth, and even if not successful, to build a foundation for the eventual replacement of that co-opted representative.

One will find the latest report, listing the scores of every State Representative at: https://www.oklahomastatecapital.com/sl/ccmy2026

The filing packet for state representative can be found here: https://oklahoma.gov/elections/candidates/2026-candidate-filing-information.html

If you find that your representative is still a sycophant, and is still mindlessly hitting the green button, then they are overpaid, not doing the job, and it’s your great calling to step up and give your community the ability to make the right choice—and restore balance back in favor of the people.

Within hours, Shaw’s 21-second video post on X, commencing with, “So, this was my day today…” and exposing the specifics of House Bill 3660, had received hundreds of thousands of views, now sitting at 800,000 views, perhaps the most viral piece of social media in the history of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and by the end of the week the story was being broadcast through national media sources from The Daily Wire to The Blaze, with Shaw capping off the week as a guest on Sean Hannity’s radio show.

Last week was a legislative deadline in the Oklahoma House of Representatives—one of the most dangerous times of the year. It is when legislators abandon the pretense of sober, thoughtful parliamentary protocol and regulate late into the night, while the people sleep. The politicians call it “working hard.” In truth, it is an antiquated ritual of the political class: a fake world, disconnected from the real, yet at the cost of those who live therein—the hard-working taxpayers forced to finance it, and who, by means of that requirement, simply don’t have the time or ability to know what is going on.

But this week, the man the leaders of the House have worked to put on ice just demonstrated how all of that is set to change.

That’s because, despite the machinations and self-congratulatory back-patting—on full display in the countless House press releases claiming to solve just about every problem in society, usually through the creation of some new pointless government program—the most notable moment came from the Iceman, whose effectiveness the establishment politicians have worked so hard to limit, in what has now been revealed as a futile effort.

In just 21 seconds, House District 32 Representative Jim Shaw calmly and coolly asked a simple question, understood the implications of the shocking answer, and then, due to the magic of Elon Musk’s X, and Shaw’s real-world awareness of how shocking that answer really was, showed the real world exactly what was happening. The state and even the nation quickly took notice—and rightly so.

Within hours, Shaw’s 21-second video post on X, commencing with, “So, this was my day today…” and exposing the specifics of House Bill 3660, had received hundreds of thousands of views, now sitting at 800,000 views, perhaps the most viral piece of social media in the history of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and by the end of the week the story was being broadcast through national media sources from The Daily Wire to The Blaze, with Shaw capping off the week as a guest on Sean Hannity’s radio show.

As one wise observer noted: “that House chamber was filled with politicians who are aspiring to greater heights, many of them set to take to the June primary ballot in the various campaigns for statewide office and/or Congress, and they would have killed for the free earned media that Shaw received last week.”

These same politicians have propped up an establishment regime that, through the administrations of two powerful House speakers—McCall and Hilbert—has conspired against Shaw from day one. First, they did whatever they could to keep him out of the Capitol. Then, once he made it in against all odds, they attempted to put him on ice, trying to bottle up his legislation, table his rules reform proposals and freeze him out of the system.

And now, even as “the empire strikes back” and their establishment-backed opponent moves to replace Shaw in the upcoming House District 32 election, they face the humiliation of being exposed on a vote they clearly never expected would be broadcast to the wider public.

But it was so much more than just incredible irony.

It’s the fulfillment of a vision dating back two decades.

It’s also, once again, confirmation of an eternal truth, often communicated by these articles, and regularly ignored by the scoffing legislators—in this case, literally chortling legislators—of the secret to avoiding these types of traps. What appears normal in the fake Capitol world is often very offensive in the real world and there’s one clear prognosticator of the difference: the vote of House District 8 State Representative Tom Gann.

It’s also perhaps the official end of a nascent campaign for lieutenant governor.

And, most of all, it’s the future: how the people from the real world will defeat the political class, and their dark money financiers.

Read on.

There’s a reason this one was so meaningful, to me, your writer.

As I campaigned for state representative, I was heavily motivated by advancing a platform of using technology to once again put the people back in charge of government.

My foundational theory goes like this: in the era of big government, larger in size and scope than ever dreamed by its creators, it has become impossible for the people to hold it accountable. Thus, it is the money of special interests that confuse and deceive the people, giving them just enough information to lead and guide them to their preferred candidates, who all too often win the day—leaving very few government officials actually working for the people, and instead mostly working for special interests, in this now unique blend of a corrupted capitalism, integrated with socialism and technocracy, that threatens to destroy the greatest republic in the history of the world.

Our only chance is technology—and the education it enables—not just to find the truth, but to share it.

A key part of that strategy, and a foundational one, was the live broadcast of all government in a form and format that would be accessible to everyone, from any location, and better still archived and placed into the record for all to see at whatever time and place they are able to see it from.

As a city councilman, at a time when it was cutting edge to do so, I had sponsored the resolution that put city council footage available for all to see, and as a candidate for state representative, I campaigned on doing the same for the House.

My first legislation got bottled up, but Speakers Lance Cargill and Chris Benge eventually endorsed the idea and made it happen, and soon thereafter, the State Senate—not allowing the House to show them up for what they were, a closed, secretive chamber of the era of Stipe—followed the example.

When Jim Shaw took a clip from that feed and went viral, rightly outraging the populace, I enjoyed that comforting satisfaction of realizing the fulfillment of the vision, as I do each time I see someone from the wider public, from outside the Capitol, clip, share and analyze legislative footage.

This was the intent: chasing away the shadows, allowing the truth to be seen, and placing the ultimate judgment in the hands of the public—the same public who pays the bill for all of the nonsense, nonsense that, though born in the fake world, has so many real-world implications.

In an era when the very foundational precepts of modern-day governmental transparency are under attack, specifically open meetings laws, seeing part of our Transparency 2.0 platform doing its thing is very comforting and quite validating.

A majority of those who were in the House chamber as Shaw asked his question and received the shocking answer chose to ignore the obvious, cast the wrong vote, and likely assumed the whole thing would simply die away.

But make no mistake: once Shaw had the foresight to create the 21-second clip, and with the aid of Elon Musk’s free speech platform, that bill was dead! It was forever destined to reside in the compost bin where it belongs, not technically dead just yet, but by the next legislative deadline, it will have dissolved away into nothingness. Shaw didn’t kill the bill at the time of the vote, but he did just hours later, with a single tweet. Magical!

The only legislator who doesn’t seem to realize the mortality of this proposal? Its author. He made the unfortunate decision to send out a press release defending the measure, speaking to its purported intent—not its significance in enabling potential abuses—a common strategy wielded by those reluctant to admit the far-reaching effects of new, unvetted policies, especially those more at home in atheistic, life-devaluing, blue-state America, where this specific legislation is a much nicer fit, than traditional, Biblical red-state America.

But as with all transformational moments, the beneficial effects of Shaw’s action didn’t end with the killing of bad legislation, or the subsequent, and very well-deserved, national media attention on Shaw and the bill.

By the end of the week, the second-order effects started to become apparent as Shaw made a key point: in previous weeks, as legislators had played the complicated game of trying to keep Shaw and his popular legislation on ice, they had a problem. Unlike last year, this year is an election year, and because Shaw’s legislation was so popular, any number of committee chairmen potentially faced a day of reckoning for bottling up those proposals.

This fact had caused the ice to begin to thaw, as Shaw, the Iceman—driven by his persistent, polite, cool, and collected approach of simply proposing popular ideas and presenting them professionally—brought the pressure.

As the chairmen started to crack, legislators were forced to actually vote on Shaw’s proposals in committee. But they still didn’t want to hand him wins, so they held long meetings where they desperately sought to poke holes in the proposals—a level of scrutiny rarely applied to the bills of other authors, whether Republican or Democrat.

To those familiar with observing the Legislature, the double standard was clear: when a member of the establishment, or one of their enablers, proposes a bill, that bill is often passed, seconded, and approved within just a few seconds. For the most part, public deliberation doesn’t occur in the House. Much of the public-facing action is merely the slightest pretense of parliamentary process, with real decisions being made behind closed doors.

Shaw pointed to the committee hearing on House Bill 3660 as an example. It had taken just seconds for that bill to emerge from committee.

Had there been true deliberation in committee, the 15 representatives who advanced the bill might have protected the wider House from taking such a bad vote—and they themselves wouldn’t now be on record with such a dead weight dragging down their re-election efforts, in an election year nonetheless, provided, of course, that courageous challengers step forward to hold them accountable. Stay tuned.

As Shaw explained this paradox, a popular grassroots social media account published the shocking footage from the actual committee meeting where House Bill 3660 had been initially approved. It showed the non-serious legislators chortling and guffawing as they quickly advanced the bill, slightly slowing down the rapid approval only by virtue of their non-serious desire to make a big joke out of the whole matter.

Leading the joviality was none other than lieutenant governor candidate Brian Hill—a man who, like so many other House members, has spent years brutalizing conservative values as a sitting legislator, yet now takes to the “gaslight the grassroots” speaking circuit in an attempt to win support for his next political endeavor.

For whatever progress Hill—the author of the now-infamous track-and-tax pilot program, part of the plan that would have turned every Oklahoma road into a toll road—had made with the grassroots in his gaslighting tour, it all likely faded away with just that one clip.

It’s yet another amazing validation of the concept of capturing live video. It’s one thing to see a bad vote on paper, but when the people can see and assess the actual demeanor of the policymaker as they engage in their malpractice on the people who pay their salary—their employer—well, that keeps the policymaker from being able to spin the truth. And for Hill’s campaign, already struggling for viability, it’s probably time to call the coroner. The cause of death? Transparency and truth—the two toxic factors to a politician’s ability to gaslight.

As the social media personality, who had the wherewithal to look at and then post the committee coverage, closed her clip, she sagely highlighted an oft-repeated eternal truth of this substack: in a room of the insane, there was one sane person standing strong—Tom Gann.

In that fake Capitol world, where 15 lemmings signed on to support the indefensible, one man from the real world was able to, as he has done time and again throughout the years, understand how the bill would be viewed in the real world, and to do the right thing, regardless of the fact that he was likely very lonely and alone in that room on that particular day.

It’s a fascinating observation of human psychology: what is it that makes one willing to hold firm even when all alone? In a world too often defined by the Asch experiment, what leads one to survive? What is it that allows a person to clearly state that they see four lights, not five?

And one must ask: how many times has Gann stood alone and done the right thing, never to be noticed?

Had it not been for Shaw’s tweet, and the social media influencers follow-up post, this would have joined the many other moments that very few even know about—times when Gann has shown the way, but few have followed.

And thus, once again, validation of one of the Oklahoma State Capital’s eternal truths: if you are a legislator, and you look up at the board and your name is in green, but Gann’s is in red, and you don’t ask yourself, “What does he know that I don’t know?” then you are in a perilous position. You are likely to be rightly victimized the next time Jim Shaw decides to tell the public, “So, this was my day today…” or, worse, destined to join the long list of less-than-notable politicians who will forever go down in history as betraying the foundational values of, and potentially contributing to the destruction of, the greatest republic in the history of the world.

One can only imagine the value the footage of legislative proceedings will hold for future researchers, should it survive—as we must hope and believe it will—if they are ever tasked with analyzing the decline of the American republic. And one suspects they will conclude that it was the actions of men like Tom Gann and Jim Shaw—their willingness to stand against the mob—that offered its best hope for preservation.

But with the advent of transparency technologies, and the ability of legislators like Shaw to recognize the significance of even the most fleeting moments, capture them, and communicate them to the wider public, perhaps that future historical analysis won’t be necessary.

The truth has a way of getting out, and good, somehow, tends to prevail—even as it requires great courage to do so.

The

The Iceman Takes Charge in the Oklahoma House of Representatives
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




March 30, 2026 at 11:53AM - J Murphey

Thus, at its core, the effort should be seen for what I believe it really is: a bid to rob the people of Oklahoma of their ability to vote by pushing candidate filing into December, when the public is distracted by the holidays, helping incumbents avoid challengers, win by default, and then govern unchecked in service of monied special interests.

I recently described the 5 o’clock smirk that will spread across the face of so many co-opted incumbent state representatives on the afternoon of April 3rd, as those representatives hit refresh on the State Election Board candidate-registration portal, for the 100th time over the course of the previous three days, and realize that they — they have gotten away with it.

For the previous two years, they have regularly betrayed the conservative values they campaigned on — their contract with the voter — in service of their financiers, the institutional, monied special interests who have filled their campaign war chests, to intimidate and deter any brave challenger who might seek to expose those many violations of conservative values and principles.

Now, for the remainder of the legislative session, that smirking incumbent will be able to betray those values even more, unchecked by the concerns of facing an impending election and, in some cases, having earned lame-duck status, and now free to indulge in their foremost corpulence of choice: living the Oklahoma City high life with little to no future constraints or consequences.

Perhaps no one is more anticipating his 5 o’clock smirk than the Speaker of the House, Kyle Hilbert himself, who, due to his problematic votes and decisions on a range of issues — and the fact that he represents a dynamic, conservative constituency capable of figuring out the truth — could easily face a credible and significant challenge of his own, a potential challenge that has likely kept him in check.

So one has to appreciate the temerity of Hilbert’s House Bill 2425, a proposal that Hilbert recently passed in the House Rules Committee — the committee made up of the most sycophantic of the sycophants, guaranteed to pass any proposal authorized by the Speaker. The committee dutifully passed Hilbert’s 2425 within the span of just a couple of minutes — a major rework of the state’s election system, with little deliberation, or even an attempt at pretended deliberation, deserving of a significant policy proposal such as this.

If ultimately approved by the Legislature, instead of having to file in April for a June primary election, candidates would instead file in December for a March primary election.

One can only imagine the advantage this would give those incumbents, having likely not drawn a challenger due to the fact that December falls before the session — and before the people of Oklahoma have a chance to know how their representative will be voting on the issues — and then giving them a free hand to do whatever they want, knowing that the electorate will not be able to judge their conduct for at least another two years.

Just as Oklahomans dodged the bullet that was the jungle primary proposal, Hilbert is set to shoot a new hole in the integrity of the primary voting system — a system that, in the last election cycle, terrified the Oklahoma City Capitol crowd by defeating both the Senate’s pro tem-to-be and the House appropriations chair.

Hilbert, in advocating for the proposal, points to Texas, which sports a March primary. And he’s right about that. But what Hilbert didn’t point out is the fact that Texas, in a system far superior to the one in Oklahoma, only empowers its legislators with a biennial legislative session. Texas legislators do not convene in the election year. Oklahoma’s, on the other hand — not content to legislate on the people on a biennial basis — terrorizes the populace on a yearly basis with new laws, fee hikes, bureaucracy creations, mega-giveaways to the corporate class, and much more.

Likewise, in neighboring Arkansas, which also holds March primary elections, their legislators do not have a policy session in the election year. Thus, there is no free hand granted to the Texas and Arkansas legislatures to enact policy knowing that there will be no referendum on their conduct for years to come — at which time the various value betrayals will be a distant memory in the minds of the people.

Hilbert’s only other stated logic for justifying this change. The pretext for overhauling the state’s primary election system? According to Hilbert, it’s to align the state’s primary with the state’s presidential preference primary, a unique election that occurs every four years.

But, should this be judged a credible goal, Hilbert could have just as easily suggested moving the once-every-four-years presidential preference primary to June, giving Oklahoma the unique opportunity to be the potentially deciding factor in that contest as one of the last states to weigh in — a rare but not impossible potentiality — as opposed to moving the once-every-two-years state primary up to March, thus giving legislators a free hand to terrorize the populace with no immediate repercussions for their bad actions.

Thus, at its core, the effort should be seen for what I believe it really is: a bid to rob the people of Oklahoma of their ability to vote by pushing candidate filing into December, when the public is distracted by the holidays, helping incumbents avoid challengers, win by default, and then govern unchecked in service of monied special interests.

It is just one of the many bad bills where legislators, due to the fact that they have an unnecessary, superfluous legislative session in which to work, can’t help themselves, attempting to fix what isn’t broken.

Fortunately, as the people attempt to expose and stop proposals such as these, they have a new tool at their disposal: oklahoma.statelens.org.

This tool, designed to allow the people to research, track, categorize, and generally get the word out about key legislation, illustrates how the best transparencies in government will come not from the public sector, but the private.

The service uses updated technologies to quickly return information in a way that the Legislature’s clunky public-facing tools — still depending on 25-year-old technologies — simply can’t match.

In this case, those wanting to track election bills simply need to tap the “All Bills” menu item and enter the term “elections” into the search bar. A fetch request immediately provides the user with all election bills, where he can scroll down to view the status of Hilbert’s initiative.

It is the new must-have tool in the arsenal of those who are endeavoring to engage in public policy and to know — and expose — the efforts of politicians such as Hilbert and initiatives such as HB 2425 that empower the political class at the expense of the common man.

And one more note for those who are seeking to have their voice heard: every Republican member of the House Rules Committee in attendance at that vote — the committee known for being the sycophants of the sycophants — passed this bill out of committee without so much as asking a single question, leaving the only two or three questions to come from the Democrat members.

Normally, they can get away with this because they are often viewed as untouchable — either lame ducks, such as the chairman of the committee, Mike Osburn of Edmond, and thus unaccountable to the voters — or safely ensconced in their districts to the point that they can cast any vote and not face consequences.

However, one of those Republicans, John Pfeiffer, will be on your primary ballot this June because he is seeking statewide office. Pfeiffer, long one of the top “green-voting” lemmings, who in 2025, out of 1,023 votes, appears to have found his “NO!” button all of 10 times. So embedded in Pfeiffer’s DNA is the desire to vote “Yes!” that he appears either unable to find that red “No!” button, or so arrogant as to believe he can win statewide office and the people will never find out about — or hold him accountable for — his many, many values-betraying votes, even though verdict day is now less than three months away.

Is he right?

Will he get away with it?

You get to render your decision on June 16th, as you do on many current and ex-legislators who are running for statewide office, pandering for your vote, but believe they can defy gravity and keep engaging in the big grift.

If you have found this information informative and helpful as you seek to hold your state government accountable, then take a moment to share it with your personal contacts. And, if you have yet to subscribe to this publication and want to become one of the most informed of the informed on matters such as these, take a moment to subscribe.

And remember, if you want to prevent your incumbent’s 5 o’clock smirk, go ahead and grab your filing packet from the State Election Board, then hit reply to this email, and let’s talk about the great service that you will provide to the people of Oklahoma by holding the system accountable.

House Speaker Kyle Hilbert Launches New Attack on Oklahoma's Primary Election System
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




March 23, 2026 at 09:05AM - J Murphey

I still vividly remember the day, in the spring of April 2014, getting that text message. It took a moment to realize its significance — a significance that wouldn’t fully set in until years later: in the dawn of the era of dark money, following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision, I would be patient zero, as the Oklahoma monied special interests set about to defeat grassroots conservative office holders, purging the House of the People from those who consistently voted according to deeply held conservative values, thought, and principle.

The sender was a knowledgeable insider named Robert, whose identity I have until now never publicly disclosed, operating deep inside Oklahoma’s political scene, and he was letting me know that I was the target of the first round of Oklahoma special-interest purge of conservative thought and principle from the Legislature.

Today, for the first time, I am publicly sharing that story, to expose the big excuse often told by those who hold office touting a conservative platform, but who want to serve two masters whose goals are in complete conflict: the conservative people of Oklahoma, and the monied special interests.

That excuse?

It’s the excuse incumbent politicians and candidates offer when the grassroots ask them to raise the standard — to adopt a basic ethical rule common in the real world: don’t take money from people whose financial interests depend on how you vote. In plain terms, refuse contributions from those the state officially labels “special interests.”

Of course, politicians live by a very different standard. They routinely take and benefit from this money — a fact that best explains the big grift. Most Oklahoma politicians campaign one way when needing the voters, and then they govern a very different way.

It’s a phenomenon best explained through the wisdom of the following quote: Motivation is the master of reason.

An office holder will often twist their brain into a pretzel, attempting to justify their many bad votes, attempting to convince themself that

(1) the bad vote isn’t in fact a betrayal of conservatism, and

(2) it isn’t motivated by the money that comes with it.

Though more candidates than ever before have made the commitment to raise the standard — to refuse this money — there are, of course, still a vast majority who insist on the old way: playing the game and taking the money.

Those who refuse to raise the standard — how do they explain this refusal to the determined grassroots who know that this is the solution that restores the balance back in favor of the people? They explain their refusal using the following logic: “I will not be able to win re-election without taking this money.”

Is that true?

Is it possible for a state representative to refuse the thousands of dollars of lobbyist grift, raise the standard, and still win election?

What should you think, as a member of the grassroots who asks your incumbent or candidate to raise the standard and embrace the abstinence-from-impropriety approach, only to be met with this particular line of resistance?

Allow me to illustrate by referring back to my story, the first time I have told this story in public.

After being tipped off by an insider whistleblower that I was one of two grassroots legislators the powerful State Chamber of Commerce intended to defeat — using, after the recent Supreme Court ruling, an until-then unimaginable amount of money — I had the forewarning needed to immediately activate my re-election effort.

I had taken the no-lobbyist pledge, and so on paper I looked like a prime target for the special interests, because I simply didn’t have a cache of thousands of lobbyist dollars designed to deter any challenges and ensure that those foolish enough to challenge me would be easily defeated.

I didn’t even have a consultant.

I was simply a citizen legislator, in the truest and classic sense of the word — like in the days long gone, before money ruled the day — simply casting votes in accordance with the campaign platform I had espoused, my contract with the voters.

But could I survive in the modern world — a world in which there were suddenly no longer any limits on how much the special interests could spend?

Yes. I sure could.

That’s because The State Chamber faced a big obstacle: could they find a candidate who would surrender their integrity to become the agent of Darth Vader — the tool of the special-interest dark money empire attempting to strike back against one who would not take their money?

Over the next few days, time and again, I received reports of the Chamber and their agents attempting to recruit a candidate.

While I was activating my campaign, due to the courage of that insider, they were stuck in neutral, as their recruiting agent toured the district, House District 31, he struck out, time and again. In fact, not only were those being solicited not taking the bait, they were either telling me or a common contact about the recruitment.

The Chamber’s delay in getting a candidate, combined with my pre-knowledge due to that whistleblower, allowed me to activate my door-to-door campaign and get on the ground while the forces of the special interests were still trying to find a flag bearer.

But the question is: what was it that was causing those being recruited — even when likely being made aware that tens of thousands of dollars would be spent on their behalf — to refuse all of that money and say, “No thanks?”

I would suggest that it was due to the fact that, on even cursory review, they realized that they were in fact going to be the tool of dark forces, and few people want to carry the flag of dark-money forces against an incumbent who has taken the exceptional commitment of refusing that money.

But it was more than that. In one case, word reached me that one of the Chamber’s targets had refused to run after he asked around and found out that I was writing regular weekly updates back to the constituents. These weren’t the weekly updates that most legislators release — likely written by the same House staffer ghostwriter, full of boring, self-serving, unreadable details that send the eyes to glazing — but unique content describing actual insider happenings that the constituency needed to, and appreciated, knowing. I had been giving the local constituent, the opportunity to become the best informed constituency in the entire state, and they appreciate it.

That individual, upon finding this fact, quickly realized what was going on: a hardworking legislator had been doing a job that was far above and beyond the lazy work product of most institutionalized legislators.

The articles, written each and every week, both in session and out, were just one component of an ongoing effort to create a new standard for constituent contact and interaction. Other components included town-hall meetings — one of which had hundreds in attendance — and constant and conscientious door-to-door visits, even when there wasn’t an ongoing primary campaign, bringing them, their state representative, to where it mattered most, where the voter lived.

In short?

Yes, I was able to win re-election, each and every time, while bypassing tens of thousands in special-interest contributions, because I put in the sweat equity of governing the old-fashioned way: hard work and constant contact with the voters.

It’s a formula that can be replicated in most Oklahoma districts.

So when a candidate or politician tells you that, “I can’t win re-election without that money,” what they are really telling you is, “I am taking the lobbyist money so that I can buy the election, and I won’t have to earn it through hard work.”

And that’s the problem: laziness.

As this story illustrates, refusing the dirty money means having to work harder and to actually stay consistent with the values of the people. When a legislator refuses this commitment — even those who have a foundational set of conservative principles — they are willing to put all of that at risk, to live dangerously, in order to avoid the hard work of leading the right way: as a true citizen legislator, of the mold envisioned by our Founding Fathers.

As a reader of this publication — and as someone whose hopes and aspirations are rooted in those foundational values — my strong advice is this: except in the rarest of circumstances, your time, money and efforts are best invested in those courageous candidates who are willing to raise the standard and represent their constituents the right way — through hard work, not dirty money.

And when you find one of those courageous candidates, provided that they are working hard to build that support within their district, by going door-to-door where the people live, then it’s here where you should invest your efforts.

Oh — and that insider . . . Robert?

He was the owner of the state’s foremost political consultancy, a consultancy that was set to make many thousands of dollars in the age of dark money.

But, on that day, he was the one who quietly chose principle over profit, to warn a friend of danger.

The one who was willing to watch many thousands of dollars in Chamber political money slip through his fingers rather than be used to take down one of the Legislature’s foremost conservative office holders.

The one who, at the very dawn of the dark-money era when the new rules had barely dried on the pages of Supreme Court precedent, decided that warning the target mattered more than protecting his own business model.

The one whose experience would have informed him that in a dark, unseemly, political world increasingly governed by calculation and self-interest, acts of conscience can carry a very real cost.

And yet . . . he still made that call.

Because sometimes history turns on the actions of individuals who simply decide that right is right.

You might know that man today by another name.

Fount Holland.

And that, my friends

— in a political age so often portrayed in stark lines of heroes and villains

— is a reminder that not everything is so neatly drawn.

That even in the dawn of dark money, someone was willing to risk thousands in personal benefit to do what they believed was right.

And now you know . . .

. . . the rest of the story.

Exposing the Great Excuse: Do Politicians Really Have to Take the Dirty Money?
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




March 16, 2026 at 11:25PM - J Murphey

Just as Trump’s challenge so nicely exposed what some rightly view as the unpatriotic treachery of national-level leaders on the political left, Stitt’s comments did the same to the state’s legislative leaders.

In all of 21st-century American politics, it’s by far the most fascinating of all observable political phenomena: the Trump effect, and as an observation opportunity of 2nd order effects: watching local politicians attempt, with varying degrees of success, to emulate the actions of Donald Trump.

For example, DOGE. For about two or three months at the start of 2025, it was hard to find a state politician who hadn’t adopted the precocious Shiba Inu into their lexicon — a fascinating case-in-point illustration of the power of the meme in the social media era.

Of course, as we know now, that particular canine disappeared from politicians’ lexicons almost as fast as it arrived, as soon as those politicians realized that actually cutting government inefficiencies and waste, though not unlike shooting fish in a barrel, actually requires principle, intelligence, and effort — at great reputational risk, as those who benefit from the long-set status quo — the lax oversight of policymakers — obfuscate and push back, Most importantly perhaps, in the era of ADD social media, it requires the ability to focus on a single project, for more than a few weeks as the project falls off of the trending list and social media moves on to the next viral sensation.

But particularly notable, Oklahoma Speaker of the House Kyle Hilbert’s House of Representatives failed DOGE effort might take the cake for the one that fizzled out the quickest, and by the end of the 2025 legislative session that particular acronym simply wasn’t to be found in the statements of just about any leadership member as they put their spin on the session. That point is driven home, as elite political consultants, as they churn out the endless bullet-point campaign mailers, apparently aren’t even trying to make the case that their establishment candidates “cut” wasteful spending.

Today, DOGE is just a distant memory, washed away in a flood of new spending, as the current House of Representatives continues to advance any number of big-spending monstrosities — from spiking the unfunded liability of the retirement-system to the creation of a massive new stand-alone IT bureaucracy, no doubt complete with its own team of lawyers and government liaisons, i.e., taxpayer-funded lobbyists, and every other costly item of overhead that accompanies the creation of bureaucratic bodies. Both of these types of abuses were dangerous precedents that first-generation majority Republicans were very wise to avoid, but this current generation indulges in with regularity; a sad story for another day.

It’s an understandable phenomenon: a local policymaker sees the latest Trump viral moment or meme and thinks, “You know, I could do that here.”

Such was clearly the case on the 26th of February when Hilbert took to the House floor following Trump’s State of the Union speech and attempted to duplicate Trump’s viral moment, attempting to have the members of the House stand to show support for American citizens.

However, Hilbert’s version of the poor man’s Trump hit a snag. In his presentation, Hilbert failed to ask the members of the House to stand, instead simply quoting Trump — thus no doubt confusing onlookers, as most of the members of the Republican caucus, clearly cued into the stunt and anticipating the moment, suddenly stood up without being asked. It was a significant misstep, because it offered an out to any member who remained sitting: “I never knew I was supposed to stand, and Hilbert didn’t ask me to stand.”

In other words, it was clear: you had to have been cued in on the plan for bad theater in order to participate in the bad theater.

The second problem was that while a House staffer was clearly positioned — likely at Hilbert’s direction — to capture cell phone camera footage of legislators who failed to stand, the official House camera feed, the closest thing to an enduring public record, ultimately undercut the entire production and drained the moment of whatever gravitas its architects had hoped to manufacture.

That’s because, though the moment had clearly been pre-planned, apparently Hilbert and his team failed to think through how it would appear on the official live feed.

As legislators unexpectedly stood, again without being asked, they commandeered the foreground of the feed, partially obscuring Hilbert and becoming the focus of the intended viral moment — with one legislator donning an unfortunately intense, specifically arrogant smirk, and another deciding that this would be a good time to take a drink from his Styrofoam cup, thus not seemingly appreciating the seriousness of the moment and the fullness of the dramatic opportunity to defend America through the action of expending the energy required to leverage himself out of his oversized, comfortable, mighty pricey legislative chair.

All of this was topped off by the dominating, oversized picture of former Speaker and modern-day political consultant Lance Cargill, pleasantly observing the failed stunt from a visually commanding position at the top of the feed.

Here’s what a wise leader knows: genuine moments like this aren’t staged. They happen naturally. A leader’s ability to demonstrate character in the spur of the moment — on instinct — occurs when the demonstration of that character isn’t expected. It simply happens when the leader is given that rare, unplanned chance to prove his character, and he does so instinctively, without thought and without hesitation.

And it is a great irony that one of these opportunities had actually just occurred days earlier, when Hilbert and many of those same legislators who participated in the stunt, had the actual, real opportunity to, on instinct, express their patriotism and real courage — and they failed badly.

That moment occurred during Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt’s February 2nd State of the State address.

One can’t help but have the sinking feeling that Stitt could very well be the last Oklahoma governor to, at great political cost to himself, represent the last dying ideals of the state’s founding fathers — of all races — who believed that Oklahoma would be one unified “American” state, as opposed to two separate states, Oklahoma and Sequoyah, or much worse, a confusing patchwork geographic area of sovereignty-nebulousness, partially American/Oklahoman and partially something else.

It was an ideal so vital to those founders, of all races, that they took great pains to forever institutionalize it into the zeitgeist of the people by incorporating a marriage ceremony into Statehood Day events. It was an ingenious move: by marrying a representative of the non-Indian world and a representative of the Indian nations, they deployed the analogy of the most sacred of commitments to represent that everyone would come together to form one state — with all of the optimism and great expectations that the unity of these elements brought with it: a shared pride in Indian heritage, coupled with a commitment to the distinctly American version of the Western tradition of Judeo-Christian-defined ethos of individual rights, a fascinating work product that was highlighted in the Oklahoma Constitution, initially drafted not for Oklahoma Territory but for Sequoyah, a would-be state consisting of Indian Territory.

Now, however, just as the institution of marriage has been so greatly reduced in value by modern society, as well as the commitment it represents, so too has the relationship between Oklahomans, who are increasingly being divided into a tug-of-war between state and tribal governments — forced to declare their allegiance, and often denoting that allegiance in a very real way through the choice of vehicle plates, picking sides without regard for the civil, criminal-justice, tax, and many other implications that will be so far-ranging and impactful that one can only begin to imagine the future consequences.

It was a stark video — a starkness matched only by its unprecedented nature. It was the next-to-last day of the 2025 session, and as Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt departed from a meeting with House Speaker Kyle Hilbert and the small handful of legislators who hold most of the meaningful power in the Legislature, he threw down the gauntlet.

Those dastardly legislators were preparing to override too many of his vetoes, and Stitt made his message clear: if the lemming legislators once again fell in line with their powerful overlords to overturn his vetoes, there would be consequences.

To be clear, upon reviewing Stitt’s vetoes, one could hardly be faulted for suspecting that, for the first time in history, each bill had been filtered through steady, stable criteria of conservatism. It was almost as if some sort of conservative-trained AI had been deployed by the Governor and was helping identify bad bills and maybe even writing the veto messages. Those messages made for great reading to those inclined to do so — inspirational, even — and if that were the case, it would have marked a historic moment: the use of AI demonstrating its ability to capture many of the Legislature’s betrayals of the conservative values they profess during election season and abandon thereafter.

In fact, if Stitt’s vetoes were to be graded — along with the numerous times he simply refused to sign legislation, allowing it to go into law without his signature — he would have ranked right up near the top among the best-voting conservative lawmakers.

Stitt, however — who should rightly go down in history as one of the state’s worst strategic tacticians in terms of interfacing with the Legislature — should have vetoed all of those many bills that he refused to sign but nevertheless allowed to go into law without his signature.

That’s because, practically speaking, Stitt has managed to maintain a support base of, well, practically zero legislators — at least in the view of this writer. With so little support inside the Legislature, his only realistic play to preserve the effectiveness of his vetoes would have been to flood and overwhelm the legislative calendar with override votes.

The goal would have been to force legislators to set aside more than a single day to process them, putting leadership — which in the House has already gone to great lengths to avoid deliberative floor process in the name of “streamlining the calendar” — into the difficult position of scheduling dozens upon dozens of override votes. Some of those overrides would inevitably fail, not because legislators suddenly felt an affinity for Stitt, but because he is not wrong about much of the logic behind many of his vetoes.

But on that day last May, as Stitt delivered his threat, it backfired. It gave the legislative leadership what they needed to play their trump card: legislative tribalism.

Legislative tribalism works like every other form of tribalism. Dull-witted lemming legislators are easily manipulated and whipped into a fury with an us-versus-them mentality, and clear-thinking, policy-minded voting goes out the window. Even those who normally know up from down in terms of policy are so under pressure from their frenzied, emotional, tribal-minded colleagues that many of them also cave and join the mob.

So if Stitt was going to take on the risk of sending the legislators into a tribal-minded vote-override fury, what exactly was he seeking to achieve? What was the benefit in the risk–benefit analysis of that action — assuming there was such an analysis?

Well, that was the stick in Stitt’s threat: he heavily suggested that he would be active in their 2026 races and would seek to replace those who joined in with the override votes.

Indeed, Stitt seemed to take credit for the effort that defeated powerful Senate Pro Tem-to-be Greg McCortney in the 2024 Republican primaries — an incredible political upset of the type rarely seen in Oklahoma primary politics.

So why didn’t Stitt’s threat work?

Why did his gambit fail?

Simply put, Stitt’s stick carried little weight.

Legislators: They simply weren’t afraid of him.

There’s no shared brand and no common base of political support to which those legislators must account when deciding whether to override a Stitt veto; to do so carries no political risk.

And,

They don’t have an affinity to him.

Unlike his predecessors Keating, Henry, and maybe even Fallin to some extent, Stitt hasn’t built a common bond with the legislators who share his point of view on issues in a manner that would lead one to develop personal loyalty or extend the benefit of the doubt. And while personal loyalties are extremely problematic in the political world — because they cause a legislator to vote on criteria that are not policy, and thus must be accounted for by the conscientious legislator — masterful politicians, of which Stitt is not, know how to use them to their advantage.

Stitt’s lack of having a big stick to wield can be tied to two facts.

All of the credit that Stitt built up with the people of Oklahoma, with his outsider status, and mostly strong stand for individual liberties during the insanity of the COVID era, has long been spent — burned off in a series of inexplicable public statements and actions that have time and again seeded an intense and deep sense of betrayal among those who were Stitt’s most loyal supporters, who had voted him in instead of an array of establishment politicians because they believed he, Stitt, was a man from the real world, with real-world values.

By May of 2025, Stitt’s inability to step back, think about things, then take action in accordance with a general strategy that kept his brand consistent and a base foundation of enthusiastic supporters intact had taken its toll.

Stitt had been an ADD governor, racing from impulse action to impulse action, appearing to try to replicate a poor man’s version of the Donald Trump formula, but without the marketing genius or charisma of Trump — an array of fascinating factors that only work for Trump — to ironically include joining with Jon Echols and a set of House legislators in endorsing against Trump at a time when, though perhaps for the data of a certain pollster who now works for Charles McCall, any wise-minded observer knew that it was the worst possible time to join in the D.C. establishment coup against the Republican frontrunner, essentially a bet on the success of the deep state in politicizing the justice system to jail Trump.

But it was exactly that type of bad judgment that was the hallmark of Stitt’s brand-destroying impulsiveness.

Stitt’s shotgun, ADD approach has had implications in every area of his governorship — from his inability to manage his own OMES office, an office designed to give him the power to right-size government, eliminating inefficiency and streamlining services, to his appointments, to, in recent weeks, perhaps his biggest mistake: his 180-degree pivot on education, walking away from the God-first, pedophile-punishing, innocence-defending, last-ditch-attempt strategy to save public education from the corruption of the woke, radical left.

In short, his ability to stay focused and deliver a consistent philosophy and approach was only there so long as circumstances dictated that it be so.

And that circumstance was the three-year insanity of the COVID era, which Stitt — though he never duplicated the magic of top-tier Republican policymakers such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis — did mostly hold his own, building his brand and a base of support that was enthusiastic and strong enough to translate into endorsement strength throughout the 2020 and 2022 election cycles.

And here’s where Stitt made perhaps his worst strategic error.

He frequently utilized, spent, and even wasted that endorsement strength for the very establishment politicians who continually bit him on the hand. And by the time he appears to have realized his error in May of 2025, it was far too late. He had misused and abused his endorsement so frequently, in district after district all across the state, delivering for the establishment politicians, until his magic, his grassroots, regular-person appeal, was beyond rehabilitation, leaving those of us who were so very grateful for his strength during COVID and who generally supported him throughout his first term, and well into his second, completely unable to put forward a credible defense on his behalf.

From day one, Stitt never got the art of building a veto-proof majority in the House in an environment that’s dominated by establishment — where legalized corruption dominates those legislative chambers — supermajorities.

The Democrats hated him, and Stitt, the candidate who defeated the establishment politicians, wasn’t ever going to easily fit within establishment powerbroker circles whether Republican or Democrat.

Stitt had two paths: he could work with legislative leadership in a way that neutered his veto threat — basically agreeing to many of their requests and playing the game, including the endorsement game — or he could attempt to build a veto-sustaining minority of conservative-minded legislators with whom he shared the same grassroots, regular-people, non-institutionalist support base: the state’s single largest voting block.

To be fair, due to the establishment’s 2018 purge of conservatives from the Legislature — using a dastardly dark-money attack-from-the-right, establishment-candidate-to-the-left strategy — Stitt simply didn’t have a lot to work with.

But that said, Stitt didn’t appear to realize that he needed at least a semblance of a loyal legislative base — legislators who share his values and his brand and who would have a strong, passionate affinity for a consistent philosophy of conservative government, which would translate into a personal loyalty and respect for Stitt himself, giving him the benefit of the doubt on even the deep-policy vetoes that are hard to understand.

Indeed, as Stitt’s understanding of free-market, economic conservatism seemed relatively shallow, he became the governor who became known for bringing the era of corporate welfare on steroids to the Legislature, desperately chasing large, DEI-touting international corporations with hundreds of millions of taxpayer giveaways — an effort that was only marginally successful and arguably didn’t offset the liabilities of McGirt and the negative impact of the state’s persistent and everlasting state income tax, as big companies continued to leave the state.

Sure, you can attempt to bribe international corporations to come to town, but if the C-suiters are going to have to pay that pesky state income tax, and if McGirt is going to cause long-term uncertainty on everything from public safety to tax policy, then no amount of corporate welfare giveaways is going to offset the negative implications of those two factors.

Worse, Stitt’s giveaway policy alienated him from conservatives and meant that there simply wasn’t any base of significance within the Legislature holding an affinity for his policies, thus leaving him hostage to the ever-changing whims of a directionless, minute-by-minute strategy of the ruthless establishment legislators, jumping from initiative to initiative without any particular ideological culture or predictable concept of consistent values.

In fact, in one year, those legislators went so far as to abuse the special session authority to simply lock Stitt out of the budget process altogether.

But Stitt, all the way through the 2024 elections, kept playing the game by endorsing those same arrogant, establishment legislators against their grassroots challengers, even though they kept overriding his vetoes and basically putting him on the sidelines — a mere figurehead on some of the most meaningful items of policy.

And this made a big difference. During the 2022 elections, there was a growing sense that the dark money had finally lost its power. Grassroots challengers — driven by the energy of a rising movement responding to the tyranny of the COVID era — began threatening establishment legislators who had sided with the institutions that trampled the rights and liberties of the people.

As those challengers brought the heat, however, Stitt sided with the establishment politicians. He endorsed incumbents who would almost immediately bite the hand that fed them in the very next legislative session. In several races, he even spent what little credibility he had left, helping make the difference in electing his own future adversaries — politicians who, in some cases, had been on the verge of embarrassing defeat at the hands of lightly funded grassroots challengers.

The great irony? Had it not been for those endorsements, there would have likely been more grassroots legislators in the room to uphold Stitt’s righteous vetoes at the end of the 2025 session.

By 2024, Stitt’s endorsement, like the dark money, had lost its power.

In fact, as candidates ask, “If Stitt endorses me, should I even use it?” I have to answer honestly, “Only in very limited circumstances, and only to a very targeted audience.”

Not only did Stitt’s endorsement of House Appropriations Chairman and big-pork-dispensing Kevin Wallace not save one of the state’s most powerful politicians from defeat, but the matter was really brought home when Stitt endorsed his local incumbent county commissioner — an unprecedented action in the modern-day history of that county, a governor endorsing all the way down to the county commissioner level — only to watch that incumbent commissioner go down to defeat.

If Stitt can’t elect his incumbent county commissioner, why would legislators fear his opposition? Stitt already gave them what they needed — his endorsement — when it had value, in 2022 and before. Now they have the power. He doesn’t. Neither does his endorsement.

It’s the perfect real-world illustration of the snake story often told by Donald Trump. Stitt fed the snake that is the legislative establishment while they together tried to give away the farm to the big international corporates, and now that snake has turned on him, doing what poisonous snakes do, and Stitt has few remaining options.

And so now, as Stitt enters his final session, instead of learning these lessons, he’s simply immolating any remaining chance of relevance.

Last week he responded to the widespread and quite righteous indignation regarding his ill-advised comments diminishing the clear and transparent actions of America’s left to seize power through the means of illegal immigration. His response strategy? Attacking the conservative members of the Legislature, known as The Freedom caucus, who, for obvious and very understandable, predictable reasons, had a visceral reaction to his comments.

It’s a bad judgment that simply couldn’t better illustrate the ADD style of Stitt’s government: attack those who are most inclined to defend Stitt’s vetoes in a session where the lame-duck Stitt is very, very weak.

Again, Stitt’s 2025 veto strategy was mostly sound, vetoing many problematic, government-expanding, free-market-mandating, exemption-granting proposals that offended conservative thought and policy.

If he is to deploy a similar strategy in 2026, it’s the conservatives who will uphold those vetoes.

Likewise, it’s the conservative lawmaker

The Cautionary Tale of Kevin Stitt: How His Attack on The Freedom Caucus Puts Him in a Weak Position for His Last Session
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




March 9, 2026 at 10:01PM - J Murphey