Within hours, Shaw’s 21-second video post on X, commencing with, “So, this was my day today…” and exposing the specifics of House Bill 3660, had received hundreds of thousands of views, now sitting at 800,000 views, perhaps the most viral piece of social media in the history of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and by the end of the week the story was being broadcast through national media sources from The Daily Wire to The Blaze, with Shaw capping off the week as a guest on Sean Hannity’s radio show.
Last week was a legislative deadline in the Oklahoma House of Representatives—one of the most dangerous times of the year. It is when legislators abandon the pretense of sober, thoughtful parliamentary protocol and regulate late into the night, while the people sleep. The politicians call it “working hard.” In truth, it is an antiquated ritual of the political class: a fake world, disconnected from the real, yet at the cost of those who live therein—the hard-working taxpayers forced to finance it, and who, by means of that requirement, simply don’t have the time or ability to know what is going on.
But this week, the man the leaders of the House have worked to put on ice just demonstrated how all of that is set to change.
That’s because, despite the machinations and self-congratulatory back-patting—on full display in the countless House press releases claiming to solve just about every problem in society, usually through the creation of some new pointless government program—the most notable moment came from the Iceman, whose effectiveness the establishment politicians have worked so hard to limit, in what has now been revealed as a futile effort.
In just 21 seconds, House District 32 Representative Jim Shaw calmly and coolly asked a simple question, understood the implications of the shocking answer, and then, due to the magic of Elon Musk’s X, and Shaw’s real-world awareness of how shocking that answer really was, showed the real world exactly what was happening. The state and even the nation quickly took notice—and rightly so.
Within hours, Shaw’s 21-second video post on X, commencing with, “So, this was my day today…” and exposing the specifics of House Bill 3660, had received hundreds of thousands of views, now sitting at 800,000 views, perhaps the most viral piece of social media in the history of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and by the end of the week the story was being broadcast through national media sources from The Daily Wire to The Blaze, with Shaw capping off the week as a guest on Sean Hannity’s radio show.
As one wise observer noted: “that House chamber was filled with politicians who are aspiring to greater heights, many of them set to take to the June primary ballot in the various campaigns for statewide office and/or Congress, and they would have killed for the free earned media that Shaw received last week.”
These same politicians have propped up an establishment regime that, through the administrations of two powerful House speakers—McCall and Hilbert—has conspired against Shaw from day one. First, they did whatever they could to keep him out of the Capitol. Then, once he made it in against all odds, they attempted to put him on ice, trying to bottle up his legislation, table his rules reform proposals and freeze him out of the system.
And now, even as “the empire strikes back” and their establishment-backed opponent moves to replace Shaw in the upcoming House District 32 election, they face the humiliation of being exposed on a vote they clearly never expected would be broadcast to the wider public.
But it was so much more than just incredible irony.
It’s the fulfillment of a vision dating back two decades.
It’s also, once again, confirmation of an eternal truth, often communicated by these articles, and regularly ignored by the scoffing legislators—in this case, literally chortling legislators—of the secret to avoiding these types of traps. What appears normal in the fake Capitol world is often very offensive in the real world and there’s one clear prognosticator of the difference: the vote of House District 8 State Representative Tom Gann.
It’s also perhaps the official end of a nascent campaign for lieutenant governor.
And, most of all, it’s the future: how the people from the real world will defeat the political class, and their dark money financiers.
Read on.
There’s a reason this one was so meaningful, to me, your writer.
As I campaigned for state representative, I was heavily motivated by advancing a platform of using technology to once again put the people back in charge of government.
My foundational theory goes like this: in the era of big government, larger in size and scope than ever dreamed by its creators, it has become impossible for the people to hold it accountable. Thus, it is the money of special interests that confuse and deceive the people, giving them just enough information to lead and guide them to their preferred candidates, who all too often win the day—leaving very few government officials actually working for the people, and instead mostly working for special interests, in this now unique blend of a corrupted capitalism, integrated with socialism and technocracy, that threatens to destroy the greatest republic in the history of the world.
Our only chance is technology—and the education it enables—not just to find the truth, but to share it.
A key part of that strategy, and a foundational one, was the live broadcast of all government in a form and format that would be accessible to everyone, from any location, and better still archived and placed into the record for all to see at whatever time and place they are able to see it from.
As a city councilman, at a time when it was cutting edge to do so, I had sponsored the resolution that put city council footage available for all to see, and as a candidate for state representative, I campaigned on doing the same for the House.
My first legislation got bottled up, but Speakers Lance Cargill and Chris Benge eventually endorsed the idea and made it happen, and soon thereafter, the State Senate—not allowing the House to show them up for what they were, a closed, secretive chamber of the era of Stipe—followed the example.
When Jim Shaw took a clip from that feed and went viral, rightly outraging the populace, I enjoyed that comforting satisfaction of realizing the fulfillment of the vision, as I do each time I see someone from the wider public, from outside the Capitol, clip, share and analyze legislative footage.
This was the intent: chasing away the shadows, allowing the truth to be seen, and placing the ultimate judgment in the hands of the public—the same public who pays the bill for all of the nonsense, nonsense that, though born in the fake world, has so many real-world implications.
In an era when the very foundational precepts of modern-day governmental transparency are under attack, specifically open meetings laws, seeing part of our Transparency 2.0 platform doing its thing is very comforting and quite validating.
A majority of those who were in the House chamber as Shaw asked his question and received the shocking answer chose to ignore the obvious, cast the wrong vote, and likely assumed the whole thing would simply die away.
But make no mistake: once Shaw had the foresight to create the 21-second clip, and with the aid of Elon Musk’s free speech platform, that bill was dead! It was forever destined to reside in the compost bin where it belongs, not technically dead just yet, but by the next legislative deadline, it will have dissolved away into nothingness. Shaw didn’t kill the bill at the time of the vote, but he did just hours later, with a single tweet. Magical!
The only legislator who doesn’t seem to realize the mortality of this proposal? Its author. He made the unfortunate decision to send out a press release defending the measure, speaking to its purported intent—not its significance in enabling potential abuses—a common strategy wielded by those reluctant to admit the far-reaching effects of new, unvetted policies, especially those more at home in atheistic, life-devaluing, blue-state America, where this specific legislation is a much nicer fit, than traditional, Biblical red-state America.
But as with all transformational moments, the beneficial effects of Shaw’s action didn’t end with the killing of bad legislation, or the subsequent, and very well-deserved, national media attention on Shaw and the bill.
By the end of the week, the second-order effects started to become apparent as Shaw made a key point: in previous weeks, as legislators had played the complicated game of trying to keep Shaw and his popular legislation on ice, they had a problem. Unlike last year, this year is an election year, and because Shaw’s legislation was so popular, any number of committee chairmen potentially faced a day of reckoning for bottling up those proposals.
This fact had caused the ice to begin to thaw, as Shaw, the Iceman—driven by his persistent, polite, cool, and collected approach of simply proposing popular ideas and presenting them professionally—brought the pressure.
As the chairmen started to crack, legislators were forced to actually vote on Shaw’s proposals in committee. But they still didn’t want to hand him wins, so they held long meetings where they desperately sought to poke holes in the proposals—a level of scrutiny rarely applied to the bills of other authors, whether Republican or Democrat.
To those familiar with observing the Legislature, the double standard was clear: when a member of the establishment, or one of their enablers, proposes a bill, that bill is often passed, seconded, and approved within just a few seconds. For the most part, public deliberation doesn’t occur in the House. Much of the public-facing action is merely the slightest pretense of parliamentary process, with real decisions being made behind closed doors.
Shaw pointed to the committee hearing on House Bill 3660 as an example. It had taken just seconds for that bill to emerge from committee.
Had there been true deliberation in committee, the 15 representatives who advanced the bill might have protected the wider House from taking such a bad vote—and they themselves wouldn’t now be on record with such a dead weight dragging down their re-election efforts, in an election year nonetheless, provided, of course, that courageous challengers step forward to hold them accountable. Stay tuned.
As Shaw explained this paradox, a popular grassroots social media account published the shocking footage from the actual committee meeting where House Bill 3660 had been initially approved. It showed the non-serious legislators chortling and guffawing as they quickly advanced the bill, slightly slowing down the rapid approval only by virtue of their non-serious desire to make a big joke out of the whole matter.
Leading the joviality was none other than lieutenant governor candidate Brian Hill—a man who, like so many other House members, has spent years brutalizing conservative values as a sitting legislator, yet now takes to the “gaslight the grassroots” speaking circuit in an attempt to win support for his next political endeavor.
For whatever progress Hill—the author of the now-infamous track-and-tax pilot program, part of the plan that would have turned every Oklahoma road into a toll road—had made with the grassroots in his gaslighting tour, it all likely faded away with just that one clip.
It’s yet another amazing validation of the concept of capturing live video. It’s one thing to see a bad vote on paper, but when the people can see and assess the actual demeanor of the policymaker as they engage in their malpractice on the people who pay their salary—their employer—well, that keeps the policymaker from being able to spin the truth. And for Hill’s campaign, already struggling for viability, it’s probably time to call the coroner. The cause of death? Transparency and truth—the two toxic factors to a politician’s ability to gaslight.
As the social media personality, who had the wherewithal to look at and then post the committee coverage, closed her clip, she sagely highlighted an oft-repeated eternal truth of this substack: in a room of the insane, there was one sane person standing strong—Tom Gann.
In that fake Capitol world, where 15 lemmings signed on to support the indefensible, one man from the real world was able to, as he has done time and again throughout the years, understand how the bill would be viewed in the real world, and to do the right thing, regardless of the fact that he was likely very lonely and alone in that room on that particular day.
It’s a fascinating observation of human psychology: what is it that makes one willing to hold firm even when all alone? In a world too often defined by the Asch experiment, what leads one to survive? What is it that allows a person to clearly state that they see four lights, not five?
And one must ask: how many times has Gann stood alone and done the right thing, never to be noticed?
Had it not been for Shaw’s tweet, and the social media influencers follow-up post, this would have joined the many other moments that very few even know about—times when Gann has shown the way, but few have followed.
And thus, once again, validation of one of the Oklahoma State Capital’s eternal truths: if you are a legislator, and you look up at the board and your name is in green, but Gann’s is in red, and you don’t ask yourself, “What does he know that I don’t know?” then you are in a perilous position. You are likely to be rightly victimized the next time Jim Shaw decides to tell the public, “So, this was my day today…” or, worse, destined to join the long list of less-than-notable politicians who will forever go down in history as betraying the foundational values of, and potentially contributing to the destruction of, the greatest republic in the history of the world.
One can only imagine the value the footage of legislative proceedings will hold for future researchers, should it survive—as we must hope and believe it will—if they are ever tasked with analyzing the decline of the American republic. And one suspects they will conclude that it was the actions of men like Tom Gann and Jim Shaw—their willingness to stand against the mob—that offered its best hope for preservation.
But with the advent of transparency technologies, and the ability of legislators like Shaw to recognize the significance of even the most fleeting moments, capture them, and communicate them to the wider public, perhaps that future historical analysis won’t be necessary.
The truth has a way of getting out, and good, somehow, tends to prevail—even as it requires great courage to do so.
The
The Iceman Takes Charge in the Oklahoma House of Representatives
Click the title to read the full report at Jason Murphey Blog
March 30, 2026 at 11:53AM - J Murphey
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