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Republican statewide candidates Gentner Drummond and Robert Franklin got frank with government employees during closed-access presentations at the 2026 Oklahoma Summit, newly obtained audio reveals.

Drummond called for the defeat of the constitutional voter ID proposal and introduced an education agenda, based on a new New Mexico law, designed to reach children at birth. Franklin recounted his former responsibility for administering corporal punishment, including a recent encounter in which a former student told him, “Mr. Franklin, you hit me so hard.”

The unusually candid and specific comments came as both candidates were competing in statewide Republican races ahead of the immediately impending Aug. 25 election.

Speaking before a packed crowd of government employees, Drummond boasted that 45 legislators were supporting his campaign in “direct opposition to the president of the United States” and explained that, as governor, he would assemble a coalition capable of holding the line on education funding.

He then encouraged attendees to oppose both legislatively proposed state questions appearing on the Aug. 25 ballot, explaining that he loves the legislators but does not trust them.

“So, we have to vote no on both state questions,” Drummond declared. “Just don’t tell any legislator I said that, okay?”

Drummond never explained the specific basis for his opposition to State Question 846, the proposal to enshrine a voter identification requirement in the Oklahoma Constitution; but he suggested lawmakers had selected the August election date for the state questions because “traditionally Republicans are not as strong in education as they should be.” He called on Libertarians, Democrats and independents to turn out and help defeat the proposals.

Drummond then introduced what he described as his top priority as governor: an education initiative beginning with children in the cradle.

“We’ve got to start at the zero-year-old, that little newborn, to the five-year-old,” Drummond told attendees.

He said 60% of the brain develops during the first years of life, while contending that 60% of Oklahoma children live in households where they are not being properly stimulated, fed or disciplined. As a result, Drummond said, Oklahoma kindergarten teachers are receiving “feral children” in their classrooms.

Drummond pointed to New Mexico’s newly universal subsidized child care program, suggesting that Oklahoma initially subsidize child care for families earning $58,000 or less—up from what he described as the current income threshold of $15,000 or less.

He appeared to suggest that the program, like the recent expansion in New Mexico, could eventually become universal, allowing children to enter quality child care centers where they would be fed, their minds would be stimulated and they would learn the discipline required to sit in a classroom.

Drummond also spoke of his desire to incorporate CareerTech into the plan, saying Oklahoma has a deficit of 50,000 skilled trade workers.

“Now, folks, that’s an education policy from that newborn to the 19-year-old into your system so that we can meet the needs and the demands of Oklahoma in the future,” he explained.

Drummond told attendees that, if elected, his wife, Wendy, would focus on mental health, drug addiction and homelessness as part of her platform as first lady.

Wendy Drummond became a focus of the governor’s race after taking responsibility for a $1,000 contribution to Joe Biden during the 2020 election cycle that had been attributed to Gentner Drummond.

The Oklahoma State Capitol also reviewed audio of Franklin’s presentation.

Franklin recounted his former service as an assistant principal at Sand Springs, where he was responsible for administering corporal punishment to students—something he said he was “not really proud of,” while adding that “it didn’t hurt them too bad.”

On one occasion, Franklin said, a parent instructed him to paddle a male student, telling him, “You better make it count,” and to “save some of that A-double-S-S for me when he gets home.”

“Okay,” Franklin recalled responding.

Franklin said the former student approached him very recently at a wedding and told him, “Mr. Franklin, you hit me so hard.”

Franklin said he apologized, telling the former student, “I’m so, so sorry.” According to Franklin, the student responded by acknowledging that he had needed the punishment.

Franklin’s comments emerged as his campaign was responding to renewed scrutiny surrounding a separate 2014 incident at the Guthrie-based Make Promises Happen summer camp. In its account of that incident, the campaign acknowledged that Franklin scratched a camper with special needs behind the ears.

Franklin also informed attendees that he had encouraged current Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Lindel Fields to break a commitment to Gov. Kevin Stitt.

Franklin said he originally encouraged Fields to seek election to the office. Fields, who had been appointed by Stitt, demurred, saying he had made a “promise to the governor” not to seek election to the position.

Franklin responded by telling Fields that “people in politics break promises all the time.”

Franklin hinted at a possible future role for Fields, telling attendees that Fields had made himself available to provide “consulting help” if Franklin could “get through this window.”

Franklin also appeared to have picked up Drummond’s support who told attendees that, while Drummond was not endorsing Franklin, he was supporting “the person in the picture”—an apparent reference to the large banner promoting the presentations of Franklin and Drummond.

The candid nature of the comments takes on added significance because of the closed setting and the circumstances under which the candidates were presented to government employees.

Concerns of politicization surfaced after attendees, upon credentialing into the official conference app, took note of “Meet the Candidate” sessions featuring Drummond and Franklin.

Neither appearance appeared to have been disclosed on the conference’s publicly accessible Summit website. Neither appeared in the organization’s public social media coverage reviewed by the Oklahoma State Capitol, leaving attendees to learn about the controversial presentations only after logging into the official conference phone application.

Once inside the convention space, attendees were directed to the presentations by a large, custom-designed sign prominently featuring the two candidates.

Drummond’s hourlong candidate forum received the prime speaking slot, beginning at 1 p.m. and concluding precisely as the conference-wide general session began.

“The house was like triple packed,” one attendee said. “And I gotta say, he was impressive.”

As the gathering got underway, Oklahoma Association of Career and Technical Education Executive Director Skye McNeil, a former state legislator, acknowledged having been made aware of the concerns. McNeil reportedly directed attendees to avoid emailing her about the political nature of the presentations, noting that the presentations would, in fact, be political.

Oklahoma CareerTech State Director Brent Haken also reportedly met the concerns with sarcasm, saying words to the effect of, “I can’t believe political candidates not being political.”

For many of the publicly employed educators in attendance, participating in the Oklahoma Summit was not optional.

The Oklahoma Department of Career and Technology Education describes Summit participation as “a required conference for all CareerTech teachers each year,” directs educators to register and attend annually, and says certain teachers under contract must participate.

CareerTech’s administrative rules also condition teacher salary supplements and program assistance for qualifying comprehensive school programs on attendance at the summer conference and other division-required professional development.

Oklahoma City’s Metro Technology Center documents show a set-aside of $94,000 for registration and fee expenses connected to the event. Metro Tech’s expenditure, representing just one of Oklahoma’s 29 CareerTech districts, provides an indication of the potential size, scale and scope of the conference.

Taken together, the audio and circumstances appear to show the candidates using the closed setting and a captive audience of government employees—an audience presumably more receptive to the government-oriented views of Drummond and Franklin than to the traditionally small-government positions of their Republican opponents—to provide unusually candid glimpses into their priorities.

Stay tuned. The Oklahoma State Capitol will continue following the circumstances surrounding the closed-access presentations.

If you were present and would share your observations or audiovisual evidence, contact the Oklahoma State Capitol tip line at [email protected] or call 405-260-9966, ext. 9.

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Newly Released Audio: Drummond, Franklin Get Frank With Government Employees at Controversial CareerTech Meeting
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August 17, 2026 at 07:56PM - J Murphey

I’ve been fielding requests for my views on the state questions, though not so much my picks for the statewide candidates. That’s likely because the grassroots ticket is fairly obvious to anyone even slightly engaged: Mike Mazzei for governor, James Taylor for state school superintendent, and Kevin West for state labor commissioner.

I am not sure I’ve ever seen such a distinctly defined ticket of runoff candidates, almost as distinct as the partisan divide itself.

Gentner Drummond heads the establishment ticket, having won the establishment primary over Charles McCall, while his ostensible running mate, the DEI-defending Robert Franklin, outpaced the other tools of the education establishment to represent the institutionalist wing in the August runoff for state education superintendent. John Pfeiffer long being a reliable yes-man for all things establishment in the State House, rarely, almost never, finding his red “no” button, represents that group in the labor commissioner race. The insurance commissioner race provides a lone example of where this line isn’t as clearly pronounced, and unfortunately, I have no guidance to offer in that race.

Make no mistake, a win by the establishment ticket would be disastrous for small-government conservatism in the state, giving full establishment control of all parts of Oklahoma government and, perhaps worse, ensuring that Oklahoma is governed by those who do not represent the values of the people they claim to represent. That’s always an eventual recipe for disaster: politicians who run for office purporting to represent the people’s values, but whose actual governing ethos is anything but.

Even with his many second-term policy inconsistencies—especially his significant missteps in education policy—outgoing Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt was not an establishment figure in the sense that he was not brought into office by the machinery of the political establishment. So, though his second-term instincts were absolutely awful in so many ways, he didn’t owe the establishment; and, that made a big difference.

Here’s a prediction: Mazzei will be a much better governor than second-term Stitt. Not a high bar, but starkly different from turning the keys of the whole taxpayer-funded operation of state government over to the forces of big-government darkness.

And there’s every reason to believe that Mazzei, as governor, would be open to an alliance with those in the Legislature who hold and believe in conservative values and policies, and that alliance, if implemented wisely, patiently, and consistently, would ensure the people’s voice is heard and even translated into policy.

As it regards the state questions: I will vote yes on State Question 846: constitutionally establishing a voter identification requirement.

I suspect that the subject of voter ID is universally embraced by the readers of this publication; however, many are very rightly concerned about the provisions of the question which allow the Legislature to update and modify the specific documents that will qualify as “voter ID.”

This mistrust is quite indicative of just how bad it’s gotten: a Republican Legislature which does not have the faith and confidence of the most passionate and engaged Republican voters.

So why might frequently deceptive politicians want to reserve the right to dictate what those identity documents are?

Firstly, it’s important to understand the history of this policy.

In 2009, Oklahoma, as it continued its transition from a corrupt, old-guard Democratic state—one that had long struggled with issues such as voter fraud under Democratic rule—to a new era of Republican governance, found itself leading on this issue.

There were two questions: Could the Legislature enact voter ID by finding a way to bypass lame-duck Governor Brad Henry, the last of the Democratic governors and an opponent of the policy, and could the Legislature construct the issue in a way that would survive a court challenge?

The former was accomplished by sending the proposal to the voters, a very rare step, almost never taken by the Legislature when creating statute, but done to bypass the governor’s veto—a veto that couldn’t be overridden because there were enough Democrats in the State Senate, who had just been removed from power and were willing to take the hit for Henry, forever defining that group for what they were. However, few know that the Legislature can call for a voter referendum on a statutory proposal, and this effectively allows the people to play the role of governor, approving a measure that their lame-duck governor would not.

It’s been in statute ever since.

But, that was just the start. The many Henry-appointed leftist jurists of the courts were on deck, and the Legislature sent them a weak ID requirement. Likely seeking to avoid being invalidated as a “poll tax,” the statute allowed any number of documents, including voter registration cards, that not only didn’t contain the voter’s picture but could have been printed off on a personal printer.

And even though a constitutional amendment would have no doubt provided the imprimatur of that document on the policy, by doing this statutorily instead of putting it into the Constitution, the Legislature preserved some of the needed flexibility to stave off the left-wing courts. Hard-coding these specifics in the Constitution could have been problematic because, had a court invalidated that article based on the “poll tax” logic, then a new election would have been necessitated.

The state-level challenge of the law would go on for a painful eight years, not being finally settled until 2018, when the law was upheld by the state Supreme Court.

And in that time voter ID has since been widely instituted across the red-state universe as other states have joined in with actual photo id, not just id, requirements.

And it’s long been time for Oklahoma to update its provision as well. In fact, if you’ve been on social media long, you’ve probably seen one of those maps that shows the states with a photo voter ID requirement—a map that doesn’t include Oklahoma, much to the embarrassment of those who take great pride in representing their state as being on the cutting edge of good government.

So the question has been: could the Legislature advance a photo voter ID requirement, and should they allow the people to hard-code it into the Constitution? Putting a measure like this into the Constitution is generally good principle, as it makes it strong against future change, but in the context of voter ID there are still pitfalls.

First and foremost: tribal-issued ID.

A past Republican legislative proposal for a constitutional amendment that specifies the specifics of the ID documents have included tribal IDs.

That’s a problem.

It potentially offers leftist-minded tribal governments, of which there most certainly are an example or two the ability to issue identification according to their own standards, or lack of standards, and if that’s hard-coded into the Constitution, then future abuses won’t be easy to address.

Now, considering the influence of tribal governments over legislators, it’s going to be a problem no matter which poison is picked, but at least, if that provision isn’t hard-coded, then public opinion of any alleged and exposed abuses can certainly put pressure on policymakers in a way that couldn’t be as easily sidestepped.

So, in my view, this proposal is a win in that it doesn’t constitutionally hard-code tribal ID, while generally strengthening the state’s standing on voter ID, potentially setting the stage for photo voter ID, and, sixteen years after the original vote, giving the people the ability to once again validate this vital concept with their vote.

And when, next year, the Legislature presumably follows up with its legislation on this, it’s a matter which we should follow, with special attention to the tribal-issued ID component and ensuring that Oklahoma joins the ranks of states which strickly require “photo” voter ID.

Now, while I would generally suggest deference to the Legislature on State Question 846, I cannot say the same for State Question 844, sponsored by Oklahoma House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, which I expect will be defeated by a wide margin.

In Oklahoma there is a corporate welfare program. It allows the state to pay the property taxes for a select set of politically privileged entities. It’s all in the name of economic development, of course, as is the case with many of state government’s legalized corruption plans.

Here’s the problem: as with all things corporate welfare—designed by legislators from afar who, once they become motivated by appeasing the machine that keeps them elected, stop understanding human nature—nonsensical outcomes, as a matter of tried and proven course, naturally follow time and again. And those legislators? They never learn. They just keep making the same mistakes.

And now the Legislature finds itself in a position where the state is picking up a tab for nearly $88 million each year, with—get this—$34 million of that going to Google to cover the tab for their property taxes at their Pryor, Oklahoma data center.

Yes, at some point in the past, probably in the 1990s, the Legislature decided that data centers should qualify for this treatment, what is known as the five-year manufacturing entity exemption from the property tax, even though a data center isn’t a manufacturing entity, strictly defined. It’s pure, corrupt, politics.

By 2021, due to the Google project, that date center subsidy became so pricey that the Legislature cut off that part of the program: no more welfare for data centers; except, by then Google was clearly too politically powerful, and the local Pryor, Oklahoma schools so dependent on the subsidy, that the legislators, in what is an epic special-law-benefit territory—which, in my view, is an abhorrent, corrupt practice prohibited by the state constitution—received a special extension through 2036.

Now, instead of showing the courage to stop the Google abuse, Hilbert’s proposal would allow the abuse to continue. His solution? He would give the Legislature the ability to create a redistribution formula. Currently, when the state pays the property tax for the corporation, it sends that money to the local governments who are entitled to the taxes. Hilbert’s formula would change that, spreading the money out, instead of allocating to the Mayes County government entities where Google is located. So Google keeps their benefit, and the state picks up the tab for the taxes they aren’t paying, but instead of sending that money to that area’s governmental entities that would otherwise receive it, part of it will get distributed elsewhere.

Hilbert’s explanation suggests that this is a problem of the local county assessor, presumably in Mayes county, where he seems to suggest that the county assessor is over assessing that facility, knowing that the state will pay the bill, and Google, receiving a free benefit, won’t protest the assessment because they are not paying for it.

Now, the fix for this is easy. If this is an abuse, the legislature would direct the state’s Tax Commission, which both oversees the giveaway program and has a role in auditing assessors, to tweak its rules as needed to update the assessor auditing criteria and thus mitigate the harm.

But not content to just do an easy fix, Hilbert proposed the formula plan, a plan that puts the legislature’s hands in the till, empowers them to redistribute the money, and amends the state constitution.

But notably, Hilbert never explained the formula he would seek to implement.

And as he presented his bill in the Rules Committee, the handpicked committee that lives to rubber-stamp the Speaker’s every proposal, not a single question was asked to determine that formula; or, for that matter, any question at all.

Nor was a single question asked of Hilbert as he, in just a few seconds of time, won approval on the House floor.

Such is the state of the State House, as most know that asking the Speaker who holds all power a question is pointless, as it risks his wrath for no effective purpose, as his bills are guaranteed passage no matter how sketchy they are.

Now, it’s our turn, the taxpayers, to have our say.

Fortunately, unlike your state representative, we don’t have to live in fear of that tyrannical Speaker, and it’s my suggestion that until the specifics of the proposed formula are known, the voter is well advised to vote no.

One interesting side note: as Hilbert rose to make his proposal, he also introduced an amendment which set the proposal for the August runoff ballot. In the days since, likely not having a real understanding of this policy proposal, as few do, many of the institutionalist education crowd, on reading the bill, believe it to be a type of assault on education funding, which it isn’t—except perhaps for the potential impact on the Pryor school district which receives heavy funding, and maybe some of the Tulsa County districts which also receive some of the welfare—but that notwithstanding, it’s motivating the education establishment to turn out to vote against it. While at the polls they are also likely to support Drummond and Franklin. There have been suggestions that this may have been part of a strategy to elect establishment-minded candidates in the State Senate, to preserve their control of that chamber, and the timing of the state questions has become a point of concern in this regard.

Whether or not that concern is valid, Hilbert was never asked why he selected the August runoff as the target date for this proposal. It is also unclear whether he was asked to do so by Senate leadership. Those facts would have been helpful in assessing the validity of the theory that Oklahoma’s establishment politicians are purposefully scaring public education single-issue voters in an attempt to benefit from their votes.

All of which is to say that there would be enormous benefits for transparency, openness, and actual public policy discussion if the powerful Speaker were divested from that power, and House members could be bold and unafraid as they attempt to ask and discover the facts of important matters such as this.

But the neat part is this: in some small way, we as voters, by voting “No!” on State Question 844, can send that powerful Speaker a message—a message that, even if the establishment sweeps on election night, will offer one small silver lining to the electoral outcome.

If you have found this information insightful, and this is your first time receiving an OSC article, navigate to oklahomastatecapital.substack.com to subscribe. Much more like this is planned as part of a mission to educate an ever-growing readership on what is really going on and inspire readers to take action to reclaim their state government, and your engagement is needed if we are to be successful.

Jason Murphey's August 25 Voting Recommendations
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August 13, 2026 at 09:00AM - J Murphey

A few days ago, the taxpayer-funded communications apparatus serving Oklahoma’s state representatives—the same House press office that routinely issues self-congratulatory releases about Legislator A landing on yet another “most powerful people” list or Legislator B joining the latest hyphenated caucus group—decided that Rep. Tom Gann’s message, one that was actually, of all things, focused on actual policy issues, was not fit to be distributed.

Gann wanted to tell Oklahomans that House Speaker Kyle Hilbert had refused to approve public hearings on three of the most important issues facing the state: the controversial industrial project that became the hottest issue in this year’s gubernatorial campaign; the continued rollout of an Orwellian surveillance network capable of tracking the movements of innocent citizens and how a recent U.S. supreme court decision that could invalidate Oklahoma’s criminal convictions; and a long-overdue examination of the House rules that Hilbert and his predecessors have used to consolidate power and shut rank-and-file representatives out of the legislative process.

That release was verboten—deemed unfit for public consumption by the taxpayers who pay the salaries of all involved in the affair.

The House censorship machine had made its decision and kicked into full gear, doing what used to be unprecedented: preventing a state representative from telling the Fourth Estate what they needed to know in order to do their job and properly inform the citizenry.

While Gann struggled to get the word out, Hilbert’s press office was earning their salaries sending out vital missives including, “Pae Helps Launch American German State Legislators Caucus,” and “Bashore Named to National Gaming Council Executive Committee.”

As a state representative from 2006–2018, I can’t remember a time when the House press office refused a member’s press release. In fact, House leaders expanded the office, giving the Democrats their own press person—a wasteful expenditure that now becomes, very ironically, a situation in which Democrats appear to have direct access to send out their mostly pointless missives, while the “out of favor” Republican members, who aren’t blindly following Hilbert and his team, are potentially censored from sending out their releases.

Unfortunately, during the eight very long years of the Imperial Speakership of former house speaker, Charles McCall, a generation of conservatives were purged from the house, and a new wave of institutionalist legislators were elected in their stead, and these new “leaders,” by nature of their propensity for representing institutions, were easily manipulated.

They likely have no real sense of just how much of their power they gave up as they stood by while McCall’s team began censoring, denying the right of representatives to communicate with taxpayers.

And this was effective. Deprived of access to the taxpayer-funded email tools and the list, a dissident state representative simply didn’t have the means or methods to easily break out of that censorship. That is, until a few days ago, when Hilbert failed to approve hearings on some of the hottest issues in Oklahoma politics, while his press office simultaneously refused Gann’s effort to get the word out.

That didn’t stop Gann. He simply bypassed them. He had collated and collected his own list of various press personalities, now large enough to matter, and given that the subject matter was so notable, it was tempting enough even for the most skeptical of press persons to realize they had something of value: an important story of secrecy and censorship, notwithstanding the fact that it hadn’t been endorsed by those who control that press office in the House.

Gann’s response was captured across the state, in both the Tulsa and Oklahoma City media markets, correctly framing Hilbert as the House’s Censor-in-Chief and memorializing what quickly became a public relations misstep for the speaker, neatly getting the word out to the wider public about how the House really “functions.”

From KFOR, which nicely worked in Gann’s description of Hilbert’s authoritarianism, enticing one Facebook commenter to an astute observation, “I don’t like to use the word ‘dictatorship’ but I don’t know what other word is appropriate in this particular case,” to the Oklahoma Voice blog, which noted Hilbert was “declining to comment or answer questions,” to Fox 25, which noted that they had been at Gann’s past hearing while describing Hilbert’s refusal, to the Claremore Progress, which not only reprinted the Oklahoma Voice article but wrote one of their own.

Gann even fielded an interview from the Epoch Times.

Gann’s example of breaking through the censorship set a strong precedent for the many lemming legislators, some of whom have enough situational awareness to realize that this isn’t how a parliamentary organization should be run, and that they too can stand up to the powerful Speaker and still be effective.

And, make no mistake, those House employees who work in that press office and elsewhere in the House likely know it too. And though they aren’t in a position to openly push back against the tyranny from above, one can’t help but suspect they are quite delighted to see Hilbert exposed in this way. No one enjoys living under or working under tyrannical leadership.

As an aside, those who wish to speak out, while preserve their anonymity, are invited to reach out to OSC’s tipline, specifically established for this purpose: [email protected].

And even within the ranks of the lieutenants, those House members who are enablers of Hilbert, there has to be a serious discussion going on. If dissenting House members are going to find a way to get the word out anyway, why censor? At this point, what is the point? Shouldn’t they just return to the days when every member, no matter whether they were on “the team” or not, by virtue of the fact that they were a member in their own standing, elected by just as large a constituency as the Speaker himself, had access to the press office?

Because, if the media is going to pick up on stories not sent by that press office, why even have a press office in the first place? That money could just as easily be spent on financing even more wasteful and unnecessary travel and junkets by the representatives.

Gann’s breakthrough marks a notable moment, made possible by his willingness to push past the House’s communications gatekeeping.

And, of course, the media play a role too. In the past, media members may have simply dismissed a dissenting “conservative” legislator’s press release distributed outside of the official channels of the House media office, but by picking up on this story, those media members have established that there are still multiple outlets who will fulfill their mandate as members of the Fourth Estate.

And even better, the technologies that enable the truth to see the light of day are only getting more powerful. In recent days, popular grassroots state representative Jim Shaw has announced his newest communications endeavor: Transparency Throwdown.

Shaw’s endeavor no doubt has those establishment forces who tried so very desperately to push him out of office this year—unsuccessfully—quite worried, as they should be. Shaw represents a future state where the voice of the average person is prioritized over those of the monied special interests.

The observant can’t help but realize that if the power of the House Speaker does indeed break, and the institution returns to one that’s truly of the people and their representatives, then this may be the moment—a notable moment on a slow summer news day—where the first crack appeared in the wall of authoritarianism.

Stay tuned; there’s no doubt, much more good news to come.

The Powerful Press Release Oklahoma's House Speaker Kyle Hilbert Couldn’t Stop
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August 10, 2026 at 08:33AM - J Murphey

Cogley appeals to the long progression of human law—from the Bible and the Magna Carta to the Constitution—and then states the principle at the heart of the case:

“Human rights! A machine has none. A man must. My client has the right to face his accuser.”

Cogley warns that elevating the computer above the right of confrontation will leave “humanity fading in the shadow of the machine.”

Perhaps the most important issue in Oklahoma’s 2026 governor’s race is one that has received nowhere near the attention it deserves: Gentner Drummond is an outspoken proponent of the Flock surveillance system, a system of automated vehicle scanners, and a fast-moving big tech company with a founder whose stated goal is to put a scanner on every street corner.

Will Oklahoma give in to Orwell and become a surveillance state, or will the next governor understand that individualism, privacy and protection from government intrusion have long been central components of Oklahoma’s political zeitgeist?

If you are reading The Oklahoma State Capital, you are likely already instinctively aware of the Fourth Amendment implications of empowering the government’s artificial intelligence product of choice with the ability to observe, record and reconstruct your every movement.

And in recent weeks, the United States Supreme Court provided another powerful reason for Oklahoma policymakers to stop closing their eyes to this abuse.

In its June 29 decision in Chatrie v. United States, the Court held that law enforcement conducted a Fourth Amendment search when it obtained a person’s cellphone-location history from Google—even though the information covered only a limited period and was stored by a third-party technology company.

The case did not involve Flock Safety; but the warning for Oklahoma policymakers is difficult to miss.

The courts are increasingly recognizing that there is a constitutional difference between a human officer observing a person in a public place at a particular moment and a government-accessible technological system capable of compiling, storing, searching and reconstructing that person’s movements on an immense scale.

It is the difference between observation and omnipresence.

That distinction makes this a vital issue for Oklahoma’s next governor.

Flock Safety and its well-compensated sales representatives are rapidly pushing their surveillance network into Oklahoma communities. In doing so, the company appears to have adopted the broader Silicon Valley ethos of “move fast and break things.”

But the legal system does not move fast. By design of the Founding Fathers, it moves deliberately and slowly.

By the time the courts fully establish the constitutional boundaries of this technology, Flock will have already become deeply embedded throughout the state’s law-enforcement infrastructure and the premature adoption of the technology by so many Oklahoma departments, even though it hasn’t yet been authorized by state law, creates an obvious danger for prosecutors as well as crime victims.

If courts eventually determine that particular searches of Flock’s vast database required a warrant, evidence obtained through warrantless searches could become the subject of suppression motions, appeals and collateral attacks upon convictions.

Not every challenge would succeed. Courts would still consider good-faith reliance, harmless error, procedural barriers and whether the disputed evidence actually affected the outcome.

But why would Oklahoma knowingly construct criminal prosecutions upon such an unsettled constitutional foundation?

As one can see, this same “move fast and break things” approach might work in Silicon Valley and in other areas of policy, but it has already damaged the credibility of many in local-level law enforcement and of the politicians who have stood by and pretended this is not a problem.

It not only threatens to compromise cases against the obviously guilty, but also, as all students of Orwell will know well, places the innocent at risk.

We have already seen how that can happen.

Just a few months ago a Colorado resident found herself accused of being a porch pirate.

The town’s Flock system had recorded her vehicle traveling through the area during the approximate time of the theft. A police sergeant soon appeared at her home, accused her of the crime and issued her a summons.

She had indeed driven through that area, on that day—but she had been traveling to and from an appointment with her tailor.

She was fortunate. Unlike most, she had access to a Rivian with the capability of recording her travels, and the vehicle’s cameras showed that she had passed through the area without stopping.

Only after she produced this extraordinary digital defense did the police chief void the summons. The account of the case shows how thoroughly the burden had been reversed: The government’s surveillance machinery helped accuse her, and she was left to build a surveillance system of her own to prove her innocence.

What if she had not owned a Rivian?

How many other innocent people, confronted with the supposed certainty of a big-tech surveillance product, have simply acquiesced to a false accusation because they knew they could not afford to challenge the system?

That brings us to the other, but overlooked constitutional principle implicated by these systems—the one that receives much less attention than the Fourth Amendment, but runs just as deeply through American jurisprudence and Oklahoma’s political character in particular:

The Sixth Amendment.

The Sixth Amendment provides that an accused person has the right “to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”

The state cannot ordinarily conceal an accuser behind a curtain, present his accusations as unquestionable fact and deny the defendant the opportunity to test those accusations through cross-examination.

What happens when machine-generated information becomes the prosecution’s most devastating witness?

Who does the defendant confront?

The police officer who searched the database but cannot explain its internal processes or the artificial intelligence model that transformed millions of observations into a purportedly authoritative conclusion?

It is this principle—being confronted by a human accuser—that has deep roots in Oklahoma and is undoubtedly part of the wisdom behind why the state has never embraced automated red-light ticketing in the manner seen in many others. Oklahomans are naturally wary of replacing the judgment of a human law-enforcement officer with the uncaring eye of a machine.

A human officer can observe context. He can distinguish between the reckless driver and the motorist who may have committed a technical violation but was in fact acting to avoid a collision or reduce the chances of one. A human can listen, exercise sound judgment, and be called into court to explain what he saw.

A machine records a predetermined set of inputs.

It does not understand necessity, context, prudence, or human judgment.

And it cannot be confronted—under oath, before God and the court—with the obligation to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

Those familiar with the original Star Trek series may recall the remarkably prescient 1967 episode “Court Martial”.

Captain Kirk is placed on trial after the Enterprise computer record appears to contradict his account of an emergency. The computer’s record is treated as objective, authoritative and nearly infallible.

Kirk’s attorney, Samuel T. Cogley, realizes that the most devastating witness against his client is not a human being. It is an information system.

Cogley appeals to the long progression of human law—from the Bible and the Magna Carta to the Constitution—and then states the principle at the heart of the case:

“Human rights! A machine has none. A man must. My client has the right to face his accuser.”

Cogley warns that elevating the computer above the right of confrontation will leave “humanity fading in the shadow of the machine.”

The computer record is eventually shown to have been manipulated.

The machine did not independently decide to frame Kirk. A human being corrupted the information, but the supposed infallibility of the computer transformed that human deception into seemingly unquestionable evidence.

That was science fiction in 1967.

It is an ever-growing part of public policy in Oklahoma today.

This issue becomes even more consequential in light of House Speaker Kyle Hilbert’s recent decision to deny Rep. Tom Gann’s request for a public interim study of automated license-plate readers.

Hilbert reportedly justified the denial by asserting that the subject had already been studied. But the Supreme Court’s Chatrie decision was issued only weeks ago. The technology continues to spread, the law continues to develop and new examples of abuse continue to emerge.

That is precisely why a very public hearing of this matter, one of the most important public polices issues of the day, was necessary.

Hilbert has in effect prevented legislators and the public from examining new constitutional developments affecting a rapidly expanding government-surveillance system while Gann has consequently accused House leadership of censorship.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Gentner Drummond, meanwhile, has emerged as one of Flock’s most prominent political defenders.

In a recent campaign statement, Drummond attacked his opponents for opposing Flock.

To those who are content to stand by while Hilbert prevents the discussion and Drummond promotes the technology, I would suggest considering the following.

Oklahoma policymakers in the modern era are unable to equal the historic achievement of the Founders, who designed the framework of protected, God-given liberties that allowed this nation to become the greatest republic in the history of the world.

But today’s policymakers have been presented with their own uniquely significant challenge.

They must apply those enduring principles to a new world in which technology promises extraordinary benefits that previously could have only been imagined while simultaneously giving the government powers of observation, collection, and control that will quickly trade away the institutional protections of our God-given human rights that so many have sacrificed so much to give to us.

If Oklahoma’s policymakers keep the AI-driven Orwellian surveillance state at bay—allowing citizens to receive the legitimate benefits of technology without surrendering their constitutional rights—even if every other state travels down the path of omnipresent surveillance, they can forever be known as the generation that preserved the American concept.

But if they stay standing by at this policy crossroads, while Orwellian tentacles set in and tighten, they will have traded away what so many sacrificed so much to give us.

That responsibility extends beyond the policymakers.

It belongs to you, the voter.

When you cast your ballot on Aug. 25, I encourage you to place this issue near the top of your criteria.

And I suggest that Drummond’s emphatic defense of Flock should largely disqualify him from your consideration.

Likewise, the members of the House of Representatives must realize the great harm Hilbert does to their institution by attempting to keep a lid on this discussion. They keep real discussion snuffed out while Flock’s salesman signs sole source contracts, after sole source contract all throughout the state, even though state law is very clear that this is not an authorized law enforcement activity.

They must exercise their right to vote in this November’s speakership elections and move the House away from Hilbert and his intemperate leadership team, and back onto the pre-2014 course the House previously followed, of reform and transparency.

Now, the good news.

Last week, we may have witnessed something remarkable.

For what may have been the first time since the era of re-concentrated power and institutional censorship took hold in 2014, a visible crack appeared in the House speaker’s ability to control and censor the messaging coming out of the House of Representatives.

Is this a sign of things to come?

Stay tuned for the next update from The Oklahoma State Capital.

And if you are a paid subscriber, you do not have to wait. You may read the next release now on the OSC article-preview page.

As always, thank you for your generous support. You are enabling a new generation of independent reporting and commentary capable of making a real impact on issues such as this.

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Is the Establishment’s Lead Endorser on Thin Ice?

I suspect that endorsements don’t move votes in Oklahoma politics the way they once did.

But during the recently concluded election cycle, there was still one political personality upon whom the state’s establishment candidates depended heavily: Markwayne Mullin.

If an establishment-backed candidate was running in your area, there was a good chance that, during the final days of the campaign, your phone lit up with a text message or social-media post featuring that candidate awkwardly attempting to shake Mullin’s hand.

The pictures were remarkably similar.

There was the candidate. Then there was Mullin, forced into awkward handshakes with an array of the state’s most slimy establishment politicians, set against a strange, placeless backdrop—one of those political liminal spaces that made the entire production feel more than just a little surreal.

It was an interesting dynamic because I have never been convinced that Mullin commands much more than a fraction of the organic grassroots enthusiasm once enjoyed by, say, a mid-2000s Tom Coburn—or even Kevin Stitt at the height of his popularity in 2022.

Part of that is Mullin’s temperament.

He has repeatedly involved himself in loud, unnecessary confrontations with prominent personalities from various parts of the Republican coalition, including Matt Gaetz and Rand Paul.

And even when Mullin’s anger was directed toward the left, as it was during his bizarre near-throwdown with Teamsters President Sean O’Brien in a Senate committee room, his intemperance mostly served to make socialist Senator Bernie Sanders appear to possess gravitas.

When Bernie Sanders must become the cool-headed adult in the room, something has gone terribly wrong.

Then there was Mullin’s prolific stock-market activity.

His transactions became the subject of recurring social-media discussion, and the controversy grew when it was reported that he had failed to disclose multiple stock purchases within the deadline required by the STOCK Act.

Thus, when President Trump elevated Mullin from the United States Senate to secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Mullin received a significant political upgrade.

He now had a Cabinet title. He had a national platform and frequent national television appearances, where he spoke directly to Fox News viewers who weren’t necessarily the same component of the state’s Republican electorate as the engaged grassroots who follow the day-to-day.

This was good news for the establishment, as during the closing days of the Oklahoma primary, Mullin’s image in that surreal political liminal setting dominated the establishment’s final barrage of campaign spam. Candidate after candidate wanted voters to know that Markwayne Mullin was his “friend.”

Trump’s appointment had given Mullin the opportunity to demonstrate his continued influence over Oklahoma politics, while candidates who might otherwise struggle to establish grassroots credibility received a little reflected Trumpian glow.

But there’s a pretty good chance this is the last time that Mullin will be able to bail out the establishment.

Just as Mullin’s temperament has already produced conflicts with Gaetz, Paul, and other well-known figures within the broader Trump coalition—and that was in the much less pressure-fueled environment of Congress—he has now entered the most demanding, high-pressure, and unforgiving political environment in America: the Trump administration.

Will Mullin eventually lose control of his temper, misread the president, or otherwise become involved in the type of confrontation that has sent so many previous Trump appointees into political exile?

A few days ago, we may have seen the first crack.

According to news reports, Mullin directed immigration officials to temporarily halt most ICE vehicle stops.

Aside from the fact that this was an inexplicably nonsensical decision—taking a foremost enforcement tool away from those already taking on the challenge of protecting the nation from invasion—there was one other problem: Mullin apparently had not briefed Trump before word of the decision began to leak. This led to the belief that Mullin had made a political decision, getting in the way of enforcement so as to benefit a Republican senator, and former Mullin colleague, who is up for re-election, in whose state the agency’s actions had proven controversial.

Trump promptly overruled him and ordered the traffic stops to continue. According to The Wall Street Journal’s account, the president had been caught off guard by Mullin’s action.

If all of that reporting is true—and as always when dealing with the big corporate media, that’s a big if—this wasn’t a minor issue.

Immigration enforcement is one of the defining policies of the Trump presidency. Mullin had attempted to halt a key enforcement tactic, failed to notify the president, and then watched as Trump publicly reversed his decision, revealing just how precarious Mullin’s position—and therefore his Oklahoma endorsement power—may be.

For Oklahoma grassroots conservatives, Mullin’s continuing popularity presents something of a worst-case scenario.

For whatever reason, he has shown little hesitation in spending that credibility on behalf of the consultant class and the monied establishment. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to identify an instance in which Mullin extended the same high-profile assistance to a genuine grassroots challenger running against the Capitol’s entrenched interests.

For the moment, Mullin may refill some of his depleted political reserves through his national position and frequent television appearances.

But much of that renewed credibility is borrowed from Trump.

If Mullin eventually suffers a serious break with the White House, the reflected glow disappears. He joins the long list of former Trump appointees whose national prominence proved intense but temporary.

And if that happens, Oklahoma’s establishment loses one of the few statewide political personalities whose name may still influence Republican primary voters.

That raises a larger question:

Who would take his place?

I would suggest that T.W. Shannon, the Republican Party’s nominee for lieutenant governor, will come under pressure to fill Mullin’s king maker shoes, but his relationship with establishment elements aside, I don’t believe he has the bad judgment to be used in this way.

And, there simply does not appear to be an obvious statewide personality with comparable endorsement power. Instead, we may have received a hint as to the future endorsement strategy, as the establishment increasingly relied upon a decentralized collection of local endorsers during this election cycle—most notably, county sheriffs.

Time and again, local law-enforcement officials loaned their credibility to the candidates of the consultant class and the monied special interests.

That does not necessarily mean these sheriffs understood what they were doing.

Many likely knew the candidate personally. They may be deceived like so many voters who are trapped in the Matrix, with no red pill to save the day. They see a seemingly conservative Republican asking for help. They do not see the sick, corrupt machine standing behind him.

That is why, if your local sheriff was one of those endorsers, it may be time to begin educating him about the reality of the Capitol.

Show him the votes. Show him the scorecards. Show him how powerful forces campaign as conservatives while governing as anything but conservatives. Show him how the machine spends the credibility of well-meaning local officials who do not realize that they are being recruited to play a small role in a much larger grift.

One need only look at Kevin Stitt to understand the danger.

Stitt possessed genuine conservative instincts and considerable grassroots credibility. Yet that credibility was repeatedly enlisted on behalf of establishment legislators who, once safely reelected, returned to the Capitol and obstructed his agenda, overrode him, and ran over him.

Stitt never seemed to understand the game soon enough to stop playing it.

And that is the larger story behind all those awkward Mullin photographs.

The establishment cannot sell its record on its own merits. Instead, it must sell associations:

Markwayne Mullin is my friend.

The sheriff supports me.

Every photograph is an attempt to borrow someone else’s credibility and paste it over a legislative record that the candidate would prefer voters never examine.

For now, Mullin remains the establishment’s leading statewide endorser—and the fact that it relies upon him so heavily demonstrates just how few establishment personalities retain meaningful credibility with Oklahoma’s Republican voters.

But after the ICE traffic-stop debacle, a crack has appeared.

Perhaps Mullin will repair it.

Or perhaps Oklahoma’s establishment just watched its last dependable statewide endorsement personality step onto the thin ice that has swallowed so many Trump appointees before him.

Is the Establishment’s Lead Endorser on Thin Ice?
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




July 29, 2026 at 08:42AM - J Murphey

And that’s the standard joke repeatedly told whenever someone shows the courage not to go along with the Speaker: “Well, I don’t know what he’ll do to me. I guess he can take away my parking space, my office, my legislative assistant, my committee chairmanship and committee memberships, kill all of my bills, and put me against the back wall—but he can’t stop me from voting.”

It is told as a joke because members need a way to cope with or even laugh at the indignity of their situation.

Regular readers of these articles know my view of the Oklahoma House of Representatives.

The institution is, by its nature, vulnerable to corruption. It sits at the center of enormous governmental power. It operates through an archaic structure that concentrates that power in very few hands. And it places ordinary human beings in an environment where they are subjected to prolonged exposure to perceived power—a toxic exposure that human beings, by design, are ill equipped to withstand.

As a result, far too many participants in this system give in to temptations that, if fully exposed to the public, would rightly shock the conscience.

What eventually becomes public, in my view, is only the tip of the iceberg.

Once in a while, however, the House machinery turns against one of its own—usually someone who is not entirely protected by the system. These members are the borderliners. They possess enough independent thought that they are never fully absorbed into the leadership machine, even though they still participate in it to some degree, often out of concern that stepping too far outside it will make them a target.

State Rep. Danny Williams of House District 28 appears to fit somewhere within this category. He has not been a full-scale rebel. In an environment so corrupted that one must play the game to hold even the perception of power, Williams managed it well enough that, until a few days ago, he chaired the House Children, Youth and Family Services Committee.

Not any more. The machinery has turned against him.

Powerful House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, who represents House District 29, has announced that Williams has been moved out of his fourth-floor Capitol office to a smaller upstairs office, denied access to a legislative assistant and removed from his committee chairmanship—all while facing potential “expulsion” proceedings over allegations of a “very serious nature.”

The findings from Hilbert’s investigation have now been referred to his handpicked Rules Committee chairman, lame-duck Rep. Mike Osburn—known most notably for having an acute case of TDS—to consider disciplinary action that could include expulsion from the House itself, an almost certainly superfluous consideration given the fact that the legislature isn’t even in session and Williams is on the ballot for re-election.

Those are the known facts.

What is not known is nearly everything the voters would need in order to judge whether those actions were warranted.

The specific conduct alleged against Williams has not been made public. The findings of the outside firm’s investigation—conducted at who knows what cost to taxpayers—have not been released. The standard used to evaluate the allegations has not been disclosed. Williams’s response to those findings—if he was even invited to provide one—has not been published. Nor has the public been given a firm timetable for the Rules Committee’s proceedings. In fact, there’s some reason to believe that Williiams may have been instructed by leading house officials, to not discuss the matter in public, a shocking fact, if true.

At first glance—on the sort of superficial read typical of the average social media user—the casual reader will simply offer a tsk-tsk—“the politicians are at it again”—before scrolling on to the next hit of dopamine.

But allow me, for a moment, to posit a patented Jason Murphey reframe:

One state representative—the representative elected by the people of House District 29—has, absent any factual explanation to the public, unilaterally taken away the methods and means by which Williams, the House District 28 state representative, serves his employers: the people of that district.

This occurs during an election cycle as Williams asks his voters to retain him for another term.

The smaller Capitol office is largely symbolic. Taking away the services of a legislative assistant is not. That decision directly diminishes Williams’s ability to communicate with constituents, research their concerns, navigate state agencies and perform the everyday work for which the people of House District 28 elected him.

What gives the representative from District 29 the right to diminish the representation received by the people of District 28 without first providing those citizens with a transparent explanation?

Notably, this comes at a time when Williams is on the ballot for reelection. One can only imagine Williams’s challenge in asking his employers to retain him when a set of publicly undisclosed allegations—of a nature so serious that Oklahoma’s most powerful politician deems him unworthy of accessing his customary Capitol office space—hangs over his head.

And this is the sickness of the House. The secrecy and concentrated power keep its members in a perpetual state of fear. At any point, they could find themselves on the receiving end of retribution from the powerful Speaker of the House, one of his intemperate lieutenants or perhaps his powerful “special advisor, — a position unprecedented in house history” at which point the methods by which they could be targeted are limited only by the imagination.

And that’s the standard joke repeatedly told whenever someone shows the courage not to go along with the Speaker: “Well, I don’t know what he’ll do to me. I guess he can take away my parking space, my office, my legislative assistant, my committee chairmanship and committee memberships, kill all of my bills, and put me against the back wall—but he can’t stop me from voting.”

It is told as a joke because members need a way to cope with or even laugh at the indignity of their situation.

If you have ever asked your state representative why he voted for something inexplicable—why he betrayed the values of his electorate—there is a chance he has quietly explained this system to you as justification for his cowardice. He expected you to understand that independence might cost his district its bills, its committee influence, its staff assistance and its access to the machinery of the House.

The Williams case demonstrates that those threats are not imaginary.

We don’t know what those allegations are, and that’s the problem: we should know.

The constituents of that district should know.

And the accused state representative should be given the opportunity to respond and tell his side of the story, allowing those in that district to decide for themselves well in advance of Election Day.

For every day that unknown allegations are allowed to persist, a disservice is done to those voters.

As for his customary office space and his ability to employ a legislative assistant like other members, are we really to believe that Williams’s normal presence at the Capitol and access to a single legislative aide represent a risk to public safety so severe that both must be denied to him?

If so, then that decision should be made in public, through a public process in which those who make it are held to a meaningful level of accountability.

This is why the House should not be administratively governed as the personal domain of one politician.

The House of Representatives, with its multimillion-dollar annual budget of ever-increasing size and scale, should be governed transparently. It should not be governed by a single politician acting behind closed doors, effectively installed through a secret ballot in a closed-door meeting: the politician, Kyle Hilbert. Instead, it should be governed by a committee of House members elected in a public vote of the institution.

That committee should meet subject to open meetings laws and proper public notice, casting and recording public votes. It should be supported by a professional administrator with the skill set to oversee a large, complex governmental operation—not someone selected merely for political loyalty or a willingness to defer to a political Speaker whose resume suggests that he is in no way, shape or form qualified to oversee an operation of the House’s size and complexity with all of the associated human resource matters such as this one.

The governance committee could still, in a public vote, take action against the representative from House District 28, including removing his office space or staff. But it would do so with the counsel of a professional administrator and under a defensible, clearly articulated standard, ensuring that due process is followed and that the public hears both sides of the matter before action is taken.

And, importantly, the same rules should apply to everyone.

If one of Hilbert’s team engages in the same misuse of state resources alleged against a borderliner, the same investigation, restrictions and potential punishment should follow. Political loyalty should not determine whether conduct is ignored, quietly corrected or publicly converted into an expulsion proceeding (I suspect this particular inconsistency is very likely to reveal itself quite nicely once the specific accusations against Williams become known.)

This is how a professional 21st-century institution should function.

It is what the people of Oklahoma deserve.

And it is especially what the constituents of House District 28 deserve as they prepare to decide whether Danny Williams should continue representing them.

Williams serves at the pleasure of the voters of House District 28.

He does not serve at the pleasure of Kyle Hilbert.

Coming Wednesday: Is the Establishment’s Lead Endorser on Thin Ice?

He helped return a parade of establishment politicians to office this year. But was this his last election as kingmaker?

Did Oklahoma’s establishment just watch its last dependable statewide endorsement personality step onto the thin ice that has swallowed so many before him?

The full article will be released Wednesday.

Can’t wait? Paid subscribers may read it now at the OSC Article Preview page, a special benefit reserved for those who make this work possible. Thank you!

The Allegations Against Danny Williams Are Secret. His Punishment Isn’t.
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




July 27, 2026 at 11:09AM - J Murphey

There has been a theory floating around Oklahoma political circles: After the jungle-primary conspiracy collapsed in March, did Democrats quietly change their registrations to Republican so they could help determine the winners of the 2026 Republican primary?

It is a theory fueled, in part, by the prominent social-media pronouncements of those who proudly proclaim their RINO status—and their intention to influence Republican elections.

And these aren’t merely the garden-variety RINOs: Republicans in name only who affiliate with the majority party because that’s where the power resides. These are proud institutionalists and outright leftists whose worldview is rooted in collectivism rather than individualism. Were Oklahoma still a majority-Democrat state, many of them would blend seamlessly into the bluest corners of the Democratic Party.

On Monday, following the release of the most interesting map of the 2026 Republican primary, I was contacted by a state party official who wanted to know whether I had analyzed this phenomenon.

Specifically, he was interested in what we might call the Robert Franklin effect.

Franklin, a “Republican” candidate for state education superintendent, who for all intents and purposes appears to have been a political Trojan horse, was, until just months ago, a Democrat posting the usual left-wing talking points on social media—posts that have now, of course, been memory-holed.

He then emerged as the first-place finisher in a Republican primary, running far ahead of the more conventional faux Republicans who had spent years carefully cultivating and pandering to the education-establishment crowd.

Had those faux Republicans been outsmarted by an out-and-out leftist?

And had Franklin been carried into first place by an army of newly converted Republicans—Democrats who, following the collapse of the jungle-primary scheme, changed parties and invaded the Republican primary?

For that matter, had the same army helped propel John McCain-style “maverick” Gentner Drummond to his first-place finish in the Republican gubernatorial primary?

That question sent me scrambling into the OSC data library, which now contains an ever-growing collection of election files, voter-registration snapshots and other datasets of interest.

As it happened, the library contained the necessary files for, at least, getting close to answering this question.

These were the statewide voter-registration files bookending the 2022 primary cycle: one pulled in May 2021 and another in September 2022 matched against the files bookending the 2026 cycle: one from May 2025 and another just recently pulled after the final slowpoke counties had finally credited their voters with participation in this year’s primary.

Even Pawnee County has eventually checked in, finally revealing the identities of those dastardly Chuck Hall and Gentner Drummond voters in the strongest county for both Drummond and Hall—the foremost member of the Swampy Senate Seven on June’s ballot.

The premise of the analysis was simple.

Identify voters who had flipped from Democrat to Republican in the months leading up to the primary election, and, then, voted in that election. Then, see if the percent of party flippers was greater in 2022, than 2026.

If there had been a grand scheme to move Democrats into the Republican Party and swing the 2026 primary, this analysis should reveal its footprints.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be an OSC in-depth analysis without a new interactive map—an amazing visual that tells the story right down to the precinct level.

But before the statewide reveal, it may help to demonstrate the power of the map by allowing it to tell one fascinating little story: the story of Coal County.

Coal County has already provided one of the strangest chapters in Oklahoma’s great political realignment.

While the rest of Little Dixie turned red, Coal County stubbornly remained blue. It was not until 2024 that Coal became the last Oklahoma county with more registered Republicans than Democrats.

And when the dam finally broke, it broke fast.

Coal County Democrats began changing their registrations faster than Gentner Drummond deciding he had suddenly developed public objections to the state subsidizing a foreign-owned aluminum smelter—and that was fast.

But why?

Take a look at the Coal County portion of the map and try a little thought experiment: If you were asked to draw the county’s three county-commission districts based only on the colors, where would you draw the boundaries?

The boundaries are nearly impossible to miss. District 1 in the west, in dark blue, District 2 in the east, in light blue, and District 3 in the south, in orange and dark orange.

Blue means the Democratic-to-Republican switchers made up a larger share of the primary electorate in 2022 than in 2026. The darker the blue, the higher the percentage of party flippers in 2022, than 2026. Orange is the opposite. It means those switchers made up a larger share in 2026.

With that key in hand, the Coal County map suddenly becomes remarkably easy to read.

The deep-blue precincts outline County Commission District 1.

The incumbent commissioner in that district did not face an opponent in 2026. In 2022, however, he survived a genuine, serious Republican primary challenge.

That local contest appears to explain the deep blue. A comparatively large number of former Democrats in District 1 clearly changed their registrations before the 2022 election and then participated in the primary—more likely than not because that District 1 commission race gave them a reason to do so. There was no Republican primary in 2026, and thus, there was no reason for a new wave of party switchers to engage.

The light-blue precincts outline County Commission District 2. That seat was not up for election this year.

Then there is the orange section: County Commission District 3.

That district tells the opposite story.

In 2022, District 3 featured a heavily contested Democratic primary with five candidates. Voters who wanted to help select their next commissioner still had every reason to remain registered Democrats.

By 2026, the local political world had turned upside down.

The incumbent Democratic commissioner had changed his registration to Republican. One of his previous challengers had also become a Republican, and the two met again—this time in the Republican primary.

The challenger prevailed.

To compete in the new political environment, both candidates needed their traditional supporters—their clans—to be able to vote in the Republican primary. That meant those supporters had to change parties, too.

The result is the deep-orange concentration on the map: a dramatic increase in the percentage of District 3 primary voters who had recently changed their registrations from Democrat to Republican.

The District 1 race in 2022, and the District 3 race this year provide a powerful explanation for Coal County’s seemingly sudden Republican conversion.

For years, local political realities had kept hundreds of otherwise conservative, yellow-dog Democrats registered in a party they might have abandoned long ago. If the only meaningful contest for county office occurred in the Democratic primary, changing parties meant surrendering your ability to help choose your local officials.

But once those local candidates began moving into the Republican Party, their voters followed—and decades of delayed political realignment occurred almost overnight.

Coal County demonstrates just how sensitive the map is. It can show why those changes occurred, sometimes tracing them almost perfectly to the boundaries of a single county-commission district.

And now that we know how to read the map, we can zoom out.

If thousands of Democrats changed parties specifically to infiltrate the 2026 Republican primary, the statewide map should be awash in orange.

Orange would tell us that recent Democratic-to-Republican switchers made up a larger share of the Republican primary vote in 2026 than they did in 2022.

So, what does the statewide map show?

During the past week, something that had been bubbling beneath the surface for several years finally broke into full public view: The normies discovered Flock.

All across the social media world—from Facebook grandmas to the nostalgia traffickers—Flock is going to go mainstream.

These normies have suddenly discovered the specifics of those strange black boxes on the roadside: that the tentacles of an Orwellian, AI-powered surveillance network have already been planted throughout the nation—one camera, one community at a time.

Known by the brand name Flock, the technology photographs passing vehicles, records the time and location, and catalogs the make, model, color, and other distinguishing characteristics into what the company itself calls its “Vehicle Fingerprint” technology.

The resulting data is stored for 30 days. With a few keystrokes, thousands of governmental flock users from all across the nation can search across time and location and reconstruct the comings and goings of a particular vehicle across a vast, interconnected network.

The system also allows city public safety officials to add a vehicle to a customized “hot list,” generating a real-time notification whenever that vehicle passes one of the cameras. There is no warrant built into that process. For whatever reason, if a city official wants to track you and receive real-time notifications about your movements, they can. No warrant required.

In one instance described to this writer by a local whistleblower, an Oklahoma City-area department reportedly used this feature to receive a notification whenever a particular individual entered its city limits.

That is the future—except it is already here: real-time notification to a human today and perhaps an artificial general intelligence (AGI) tomorrow, of an individual’s every movement.

If this tickles the reader’s constitutional sensibilities, they are not alone. All across the nation, the public is waking up to the fact that the tentacles of a multifaceted, potentially omnipresent system have already been deeply embedded within their communities, and its potential for misuse has only begun to sink in—as witnessed by an array of ever-emerging online viral media, such as instances where an innocent person has been tracked by a system user for nefarious reasons, or effectively accused of a crime not by a human officer but by the Flock system, forcing them into a nightmare of trying to prove their innocence.

In one prominent online example, an innocent person was forced to prove her innocence after being cited as a porch pirate, relying solely on her Rivian’s recordings of her travels—without which she might very well have been convicted simply because Flock placed her in the area of the crime.

And, as often happens when individuals feel helpless, the result has been a type of vigilantism trending on social media, where the devices themselves have come under attack from a public eager to cut down the tentacles of the AI.

But there is one Oklahoma community where no such vigilantism is going to occur.

Logan County residents don’t need a saw, a can of spray paint, a laser pointer, a special license plate modifier or a midnight raid.

That’s because they have Marven Goodman.

Goodman lives in County One: Oklahoma’s officially recognized first county dating back to the organization of Oklahoma territory’s counties in 1890. Now it appears to have earned another distinction: It may be the first Oklahoma county to rid itself of government-operated Flock surveillance after the technology had gained a foothold within its borders.

But that was not the original plan.

When Guthrie, the county seat, became an early Oklahoma adopter of Flock, the company’s ambitions did not stop at the city limits. Records later obtained by Goodman from Guthrie City Hall revealed a much larger vision: the pushy Flock salesman proposed that Guthrie would work with other Logan County communities to create a countywide network of surveillance devices and blanket Logan County.

The person who uncovered that plan, Marven Goodman, is the former Logan County commissioner now turned publisher of The Sooner Sentinel, a substack publication that’s had a dramatic impact on public policy.

Guthrie signed a 24-month agreement with Flock in February 2023. A federal Department of Justice grant paid for the system, which initially called for 12 cameras.

The fast-moving big tech company, Flock, quickly benefited from Guthrie’s early adoption as the city’s public safety officials immediately became enthusiastic advocates for the technology, drawing fawning media coverage from the Oklahoma City corporate media, where Guthrie’s status as one of the first towns to adopt the cameras put it on the cutting edge of promoting it to the wider public.

The plan appeared unstoppable.

Then Goodman started asking questions.

He noticed something unusual along State Highway 33, the primary highway leading into Guthrie from the west. The city had placed mobile radar-feedback signs along the route—the familiar trailers that flash a vehicle’s speed as the motorist approaches.

But Goodman noticed something else; something very tricky. Mounted on the backs of two of those trailers were Flock cameras, positioned to scan the vehicles entering and leaving town.

Because of his experience as a county commissioner and his familiarity with transportation policy, Goodman could immediately recognized the problem: The devices were sitting on the state highway right-of-way.

Oklahoma law authorizes automated license-plate readers on state highway rights-of-way for a specific purpose: verifying vehicle insurance. ODOT’s position has been that general law-enforcement surveillance is not an authorized use.

The apparent workaround was clever. Because the Flock devices were attached to temporary trailers instead of permanent poles, perhaps no ODOT permit would be required.

Goodman did not accept that logic. He contacted ODOT, kept digging, and forced the question into the open.

The cameras quickly came off the trailers and Goodman then became a key figure in exposing the abuse at the state level, speaking to legislators as part of State Representative Tom Gann’s interim study and highlighting what had been taking place.

The removal of those two cameras mattered. Without the ability to place scanners on the state highway approaches, Flock could no longer so easily ring the city and capture the traffic moving through its most important corridors.

Unlike Edmond to the south, Guthrie did not keep testing ODOT’s willingness to enforce its position. And, when the federal grant expired, the city declined to pick up the cost of continuing the system.

The official explanation was funding. But, it would be a mistake to treat Guthrie’s withdrawal as budgetary.

It was clear that Goodman’s reporting and open records request built on what locals already distrusted, including at least one prominent city councilman. Goodman’s reporting was key. It exposed the larger countywide plan, brought public attention to the Highway 33 cameras, and raised serious questions about the process by which the city had entered into its sole-source arrangement with Flock, not ever appearing to have voted for the actual contract, simply the grant that funded it.

The grant’s expiration gave the city an exit ramp, and the city took it.

To Guthrie’s credit, officials did not replace the lost grant funding with local tax dollars. Nor did they accept a reported Flock proposal for new technology that could scan state-highway traffic from a distance while sitting outside the ODOT right-of-way.

The city did not bite.

It asked Flock to remove the cameras. The company took its time. City records later obtained by Goodman showed that Guthrie canceled the contract effective February 18, 2025, but Flock did not schedule the final uninstall until July 21—potentially giving the city months of additional service at no charge.

Eventually, however, the cameras came down.

And the impact extended well beyond Guthrie.

At one point, the effort had begun within county government to authorize the devices along county roads. That would have been especially consequential in Logan County, where the unincorporated population far outnumbers the population living inside any one city.

But by the time that push began, Goodman’s reporting—and the resulting public fallout—was well underway. The county commissioners demurred. They did not even agree to place the proposal on their agenda for consideration.

The plan to blanket Logan County had collapsed.

Now, as communities across America are only beginning to understand what has been placed in their midst, Oklahoma’s first county has been proven far ahead of the curve.

Logan County rejected both the technology and the questionable process by which it was being advanced—well before the national backlash.

And that provides yet another example of how much difference one individual can still make in public policy, especially at the local level of government.

Regular readers of these updates will know that I often focus on the difference an individual can make simply by running for office. Goodman’s story contains that lesson, too. He ran for county commissioner against long odds, won, and served for eight years.

But his example did not end when he left office.

Using the institutional knowledge he gained in government, the leverage provided by the Substack platform, and a natural curiosity about the specific actions of local officials, Goodman filled a void left by local media that all too often becomes too close to, too financially dependent upon, and much too deferential toward the very government institutions it is supposed to monitor.

Goodman has answered both calls: first, to run for office and make a difference from within; and then, after leaving office, to use independent publishing to hold government accountable from without.

His reporting brought public awareness to an area of policy that badly needed it. More importantly, it helped produce an actual policy outcome—one that has kept an entire county free from a government-operated, AI-driven surveillance network at a time when so many other communities are only now confronting its dangers.

Goodman can also point to his time in public office as the reason Logan County did not adopt a tax increment finance district during his eight-year tenure. TIF districts are a favored tool of the corporate-welfare crowd: They confer a government-created financial advantage unavailable to the average member of the public, and they are spreading across Oklahoma.

That Oklahoma’s first county has remained free of both this particular corporate-welfare tool and the Flock surveillance network is a powerful—and encouraging—example of what one person can accomplish by possessing curiosity, determination, and the willingness to try.

So many people see these wrongs, but then they simply go on with life, convinced that nothing can be done.

Goodman actually did something.

If this story inspires you, stay tuned. There are more like it on the OSC whiteboard—examples of ordinary citizens who like Goodman refused to accept that nothing could be done, and then proved otherwise.

Those stories matter.

Because the public does not merely need to be warned about what is going wrong. It needs to be reminded, through real examples, that one determined person can still make it right.

COMING NEXT FROM OSC: Did Democrats Invade Oklahoma’s Republican Primary?

Robert Franklin and Gentner Drummond both finished first. Were they carried there by an army of Democrats who quietly changed their registrations and entered the 2026 Republican primary?

The next OSC election analysis follows the party switchers right down to the precinct level to determine whether the rumored Democratic invasion really occurred.

Can’t wait for the answer? Paid subscribers don’t have to. Visit the OSC Article Preview Page and read the complete analysis now—one of the special benefits available to paid subscribers.

The Man Who Kept Oklahoma’s First County Free From the AI Surveillance State
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




July 15, 2026 at 08:40AM - J Murphey

It’s yet another aspect of the 2026 Oklahoma primary election that you’ve probably not read about anywhere else—and why you always make sure to read your OSC missive, to stay in the know: that Democrat blue wave, the type of blue wave that usually occurs in the off-year election cycle in response to the party in power in D.C.?

It’s looking as if it will be skipping Oklahoma this year. At least, that’s the conclusion one will reach upon analyzing the partisan breakdown of the 2026 primary election results in comparison to its most comparable recent election, 2018.

And it’s a story told by this map: the amazing decline of Democrat primary participation from registered Democrat voters when comparing 2026 to 2018.

While, at the time of this writing, three counties have yet to update their voter history files, based on data from the 74 that have, it’s become clear that the Democrat decline from 2018 is of epic proportion, dropping from 39% of the primary voting electorate in 2018 to just 28% in 2026.

That fallout is most pronounced in Coal County.

In March of 2024, Coal County became the last county in Oklahoma to officially flip the red switch, with the Republicans finally gaining the advantage in voter registration, meaning that all 77 counties in Oklahoma are now officially majority Republican.

In that county, 1,547 Democrats cast their primary ballots in 2018. In 2026, just 261 did, dropping Democrat participation from 77% of the county’s voting public in 2018 to just 21.5% in 2026.

In all areas of the state, with the singular exception of Oklahoma County, Democrat participation fell, in some cases to near-nonexistence levels, such as the case of Beaver County, where participation dropped from 13% to just 5%, with only 42 Democrats casting their ballots.

This low participation effectively had the impact of de-anonymizing the votes of Democrats voting in 48 precincts statewide, where the vote for governor was unanimous, usually due to low participation numbers.

My take: there’s simply no excitement in the Democrat base, outside of perhaps Oklahoma County, home to both Cyndi Munson and Connie Johnson, whose bases of support on Oklahoma City’s north side likely allowed Democrat turnout to hold its own in that county, where, contrary to the public narrative, Democrat Party registration, even in Oklahoma County, continues to fall further and further behind, having dropped from 37% of that county’s registration in 2018 to now just 33%.

As the Democrat nominee, Munson simply doesn’t inspire voters in rural Oklahoma, and thus, any Democrat gains in this election cycle will likely be limited to the small number of competitive legislative, urban-area seats, as a best-case scenario; meaning that, in the one year most favorable to Democrats, a once-in-every-eight-years phenomenon, there’s little reason to believe, even if a blue wave washes over the nation as a whole, that more than a few drops of that blue water will land in Oklahoma.

It gets worse.

There’s another map that also tells a very interesting story: as expected, the “yes” vote on the state question to raise the minimum wage was highly correlated with partisan voting. In areas where Republicans were strong, the state question was defeated, and likewise, that correlation reverses in the Democrats’ strongest precincts.

This would suggest that the state question, also as expected, and likely as intended, boosted turnout among left-leaning voters. To the extent that Democrat turnout was artificially higher based on this turnout, it paints an even more dismal picture for their enthusiasm.

Or, it may also suggest that the left-wing money machine, attempting to impact Oklahoma electoral composition through the initiative petition process, got its sequence of proposals out of whack, having mistakenly first advanced the medical marijuana proposition and then the minimum wage proposal instead of vice versa. Getting their electorate into a state of marijuana-driven non-motivation, then asking those voters to show the initiative to turn out and spike the minimum wage—well, that was perhaps their biggest mistake.

The Most Fascinating Map of the Election Cycle

It’s perhaps the most interesting map of the entire 2026 election cycle: the correlation map between GOP-voting precincts and the “no” vote on State Question 832. It’s the type of map one could spend hours analyzing; there are so many fascinating narratives to discover.

As expected, at the statewide level, the correlation between partisan turnout and the “no” vote is heavy: 583 precincts, with the most lopsided GOP turnout, also heavily defeated the question. Another 821 precincts with GOP-leaning turnout defeated the proposal. Meanwhile, the Democrat precincts shared the inverse correlation.

And don’t look now, at least if you are the State Chamber type, but let’s just say that your Keating/Merrick precincts tended to correlate more heavily with the no vote, and in a couple of key races, there’s a similar correlation between your Swamp 7 supporter, who voted “yes,” and the inverse with the grassroots challengers whose supporters appear to have defeated the state question.

It’s yet one of the small reminders of how corporate welfare has corrupted the soul of the State Chamber, turning it into just another tool to be used by those who would like to make some bank on the power of government, because at its core, when addressing across-the-board, pro-business issues, sans the legalized corruption of corporate welfare, the most free-market-minded voters are indeed the grassroots conservatives, not the sick establishment politicians who are playing the money game. And because those conservatives operate on principle, not money, the Chamber doesn’t have to spend a penny to pick up their support, so long as the Chamber’s priorities truly align with the free market, instead of a state-managed economy that’s more characteristic of a socialist scheme. But all of that is best analyzed on another day.

The geographic nature of the correlation is certainly intriguing.

Opposition to the question is a bit lighter in the east, where the Trump endorsement of Mazzei carried the day in the governor’s race, with, at my best guess, a certain, perhaps small subset of the MAGA Trump base appearing to cross over to support the plan.

But, notably, the “yes” vote fared much better in the suburban Republican precincts than the exurban and rural precincts, showing that government price fixing and socialist economics takes root in those urbanized areas and the wisdom of the founding fathers when they designed a government which gives balance to the rural areas first, with policies such as the electoral college, and state-based Senate seat allocation.

But, to the point of this article: even with a minimum-wage state question on the ballot, and even with an off-year election cycle that should favor the party out of power in Washington, and even with a Democratic gubernatorial nominee from Oklahoma County, the Democrats’ statewide turnout picture remains remarkably weak.

The blue wave may be forming somewhere else. But in Oklahoma, at least for now, it appears to be breaking before it ever reaches the shore.

The Vanishing Democrat Vote in Oklahoma
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




July 13, 2026 at 07:07AM - J Murphey

As this year’s Senate session came to a close, Sen. Dusty Deevers took to the Senate floor for what we now know was likely his final day in legislative session—at least for now. There, Deevers, the Senate’s leading advocate for opening up the rules and allowing senators to actually do their job, forever sealed the legacy of his first term on the side of transparency.

Deevers simply sought a vote on key legislation that no Republican senator would dare return home and tell their constituents they opposed.

It was a key part of the Trump agenda: a proposal to check for and expose medical welfare fraud by illegal aliens, which many senators had already voted to advance out of committee and place on the Senate floor for a final vote.

Deevers called the bluff of Senate leaders and exposed the smoke-and-mirrors game they were playing.

The courage of Deevers and his allies, and the dastardliness of the senators playing this smoke-and-mirrors game, have been widely analyzed within grassroots circles.

There is, however, a fascinating component of the now-infamous episode that has not received the analysis it deserves.

The Senate’s ability to bottle up the bill depended upon the Senate floor leader’s refusal to bring it to a vote, even though the Senate had voted to make the bill eligible for the vote, in what in retrospect was almost certainly a faux vote, purely for show so that those senators could claim to have supported the Trump plan, without having enacted it, thus keeping the monied special interests happy: i.e., eating their cake, and having it too.

As Deevers took to the floor, under the Senate leadership’s interpretation of the rules that day, in the most technical sense, one person—not the members of the Senate—held all the cards: Majority Floor Leader Julie Daniels.

This allowed just about every other member to play the smoke-and-mirrors game of helplessness: passing the buck, hiding behind Daniels’s skirt tails, and suggesting that it was her sole decision to refuse a vote on the bill.

Now, ask just about any voter in Daniels’ Senate District 29 if they support analyzing, exposing, and ending the healthcare welfare spending for illegal alien fraud, and time and again, they will say, “Yes!”

But Daniels—well, she’s a lame duck, not at all likely worried about the sentiments of those voters. So she won’t likely mind being the fall guy, the sole reason for it’s failure.

Allow me to suggest that those voters are the victims of the big grift, the same big grift that any number of other Oklahomans just fell victim to in recent days, as they re-elected members of the Swamp Seven on a platform of hardline opposition to all things illegal alien invasion, time and again sending out consultant-crafted messaging with Trump clip art, or shaking the hand of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the official in charge of the matter at the federal level.

But it’s Daniels who most clearly illustrates the grift. She could have easily said, “OK, we will hear that bill now,” albeit perhaps at great risk to her standing with Senate Pro Tem Paxton and the dark-moneyed special interests who ensure the survival of the Swamp Seven and Paxton’s position of power. And just two short years ago, she campaigned to her very conservative electorate, as did more recently the Swamp Seven, as an immigration hardliner.

Certainly, she did not campaign on a platform of single-handedly and in the most tyrannical of fashions refusing to give the Senate even the chance to cast a vote on key immigration reforms.

But it’s not as if the voters of Senate District 29 hadn’t been warned. They, unlike so many other districts, had their own Paul Revere—an individual of great courage and conviction. At great personal sacrifice, she spent substantial time traveling throughout the district, informing voters that Daniels had already betrayed them by supporting an official Oklahoma government identity for illegal alien invaders. This was the now-infamous driver’s license proposal brought before the Senate by a liberal Oklahoma City Democrat immigration attorney.

This modern-day Paul Revere has served her neighbors time and again, standing in the gap that no one else will fill, to take on the unthinkable: challenging an establishment incumbent with tens of thousands of dollars at their command and the ability to obfuscate any issue, any past transgression, and convince the voters that they are in fact the “conservative” choice.

Wendi Stearman knew she faced long odds, but she knew that voters needed the option of doing the right thing, even if they didn’t choose to exercise it.

As she sought to stave off Stearman’s strong challenge, and courageous truth telling, Daniels’ 2024 re-election followed the usual consultant-crafted formula: time and again, flood the mailboxes declaring herself to be a hardliner, make a very personal commitment to defending those values, and then attack the opposition for “misleading,” but of course never substantively answer the specifics of any of the opposition’s charges, because of course, they weren’t misleading—they were spot on.

It’s a flawed system, as shown by a glossy mailer claiming Daniels was protecting “state resources” on illegal immigration—an ironic claim given she just blocked the Senate’s ability to do exactly that, even after many senators voted to consider the bill.

The reader will also note how skillfully Daniel’s consultant sought to obscure her vote for the illegal alien driver’s license by a little-known amendment vote, that’s rather difficult to even confirm. This, in tandem with Daniel’s mailer declaring her opponent to be “mudslinging,” would no doubt create enough confusion among voters to give them the fig leaf they needed to keep Daniels in office, perhaps leading them to believe that Stearman was mistaken or, worse, intentionally misleading—which, of course, she was not.

Daniel’s content writer followed a familiar establishment playbook: obscure the issue, then attack and discredit. T

The Warning Senate District 29 Ignored: How Senate Majority Floor Leader Julie Daniels Proved Wendi Stearman Right
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog




July 9, 2026 at 08:31AM - J Murphey