Posted by permission, original post by Jason Murphey at The Oklahoma State Capital.
Jim Shaw wasted no time in bravely taking on the swamp at the Capitol. But Kyle Hilbert, his special counselor Chris Kannady, and the Oklahoma City swamp aren’t going to make it easy for him.
Shaw’s expression in that moment, caught by the House cameras, said it all. Something wasn’t right. Would a state representative really stoop to such a blatant level of gaslighting? What was he missing? Shaw had earned his way into the State House of Representatives through hard work, integrity, and a commitment to serving his constituents—only to now be presented with a level of argument not suitable for even a high school debate team. The sheer absurdity of Kannady’s claims, delivered with an air of smug confidence, revealed a troubling reality: in this chamber, it wasn’t logic or principle that prevailed, but rather the well-practiced art of political theater. Shaw wasn’t just confronting bad arguments—he was facing an entire culture built around manipulation, where the goal wasn’t to inform but to confuse, and ultimately protect entrenched power.
A picture speaks a thousand words. And on January 7th, cameras in the Oklahoma House of Representatives captured the perfect illustration of the corrupt condition of that institution.
They captured the moment when the emissary of the people—a decent, regular, person who has succeeded in the real world and is accustomed to professionalism, reality, and best practices—entered the slimy arena of politics. There, he officially encountered the quintessential swamp creature, perfectly practicing a highly refined art: 100% pure gaslighting.
As he came to terms with what he was witnessing, that brief look of shock on the face of the people’s emissary perfectly embodied the current state of affairs in the Oklahoma House of Representatives.
Allow me to explain.
In 2024, the power of dark money in Oklahoma politics officially began to wane. The special interest forces that decimated the House of Representatives’ most conscientious and intelligent members over the last decade can no longer control the closed Republican primary voting electorate. In fact, dark money is now more likely to backfire, helping the victims of its attacks rather than benefiting the anonymous forces behind the expenditures.
The 2024 battle for the House District 32 Republican runoff vote in August perfectly illustrates this point. When voters in Lincoln, Logan, and Payne Counties rejected the pork-dispensing, long-term incumbent Kevin Wallace—despite his powerful position as House Appropriations Chairman and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on his behalf—they sent a clear message to the entire state: money doesn’t matter. Integrity and the values of the people will win the day.
They voted for Jim Shaw, a personable, well-spoken, real-world success story who inspired genuine excitement, enthusiasm, and a vision for a new government—one where policy, not money, is what is important.
Shaw became the emissary of the people, sent to Oklahoma City to represent the values of the average Oklahoman. He took that mandate seriously. One of his first observations was that for the people’s values to have any chance of being enacted into legislation, it was essential for the public to know how their representatives cast their votes.
Shaw quickly saw through the smoke-and-mirrors game played at the Capitol. An all-powerful Speaker of the House strategically assigns legislation to the control of select committee chairs, who can then singlehandedly kill proposals without fear of accountability. It’s a very bad system. At the very least, voters deserve a recorded vote on every proposal so they can hold their representatives accountable when those representatives don’t reflect their values.
For example, Shaw and a growing team of his allies are working on a series of proposals to crack down on federally subsidized green energy projects that are wreaking havoc on the property values of rural Oklahomans. These foolish projects are an affront to free-market principles and the rights of property owners who rightly fear the destruction of their most important assets.
There’s every reason to believe that legislative leaders will advance a token reform—one the multinational, DEI-touting, green energy industry, which has plied those leaders with thousands of dollars in contributions, and hundreds in gifts, can live with. This will give the pretense of reform without substance. Meanwhile, real reform legislation—feared by special interests—will be bottled up in committee, where a lame-duck or maybe an urban chairman, unaffected by the destruction of Oklahoma’s rural environment, can easily take the heat.
This plan, though effective, isn’t foolproof. When leadership’s faux reform proposals reach the House floor, reform-minded legislators will propose amendments. The all-powerful leadership will marshal their loyalists and table these amendments in unrecorded votes, keeping the public from knowing the identities of those loyalists and ensuring there will never be a day of accountability.
Up until 2011, two state representatives could have thwarted this plan by simply asking the presiding officer to order a recorded vote. However, that year, representatives logrolled a bad proposal—alongside an important reform—into the House rules package. The bad proposal stated that 1/15th of those present in the House must second a request for a recorded vote. Without that second, the presiding officer wasn’t obligated to record the vote.
This created significant complications. Not only is the number of House members present in the chamber constantly in flux, but calculating fractions is tedious work for lazy politicians. Worse, with this new higher bar for requesting a recorded vote, leadership retained the power. While one or two courageous dissidents might be willing to put their colleagues on record with their terrible votes, finding 1/15th of the House with that much courage is probably a rare occurrence.
So, on January 7th, as House leaders brought their new rules plan to the floor, Shaw stood and clearly articulated why the House should revert to a stance more aligned with the pre-2011 rules, simply recording every vote.
Shaw was absolutely right on the merits of his proposal. With modern technology, and with immediate, electronic voting, there’s no reason every vote shouldn’t be recorded. The people of Oklahoma have a right to know how their representatives vote—especially when they’re playing games by tabling good proposals.
But what happened next perfectly illustrated the corrupt, rotten culture of the House.
House leaders weren’t content to simply table Shaw’s proposal, as they had just done to a series of important reforms proposed by State Representative Tom Gann. They had to make a dramatic point—an attempted public beatdown of the people’s newest emissary.
This was a moment of calculated contempt for the people of Oklahoma, who dared to send someone into the Capitol who had the tenacity to challenge and to beat the powerful House Appropriations Chairman. If this powerful politician could be beaten by the peoples’ candidate, then every one of the swamp creatures are potentially vulnerable. I think they are scared, fearful people.
What occurred next was an illustration reminiscent of The Parable of the Tenants from Matthew 21, only where the people of Oklahoma play the role of the master who sends his emissary to collect from the tenants, i.e., the swamp creatures—only for the emissary to be met with hostility and violence. That biblical story doesn’t end well for the tenants, just as I don’t think this one will end well for the swamp creatures.
In a great compliment to Shaw, the swamp creature who took on the task of trying to orchestrate the beatdown was none other than powerful, lame-duck, term-limited lawyer Chris Kannady. Fresh off his most recent appointment as “special counsel” to newly elected House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, Kannady—best known for leading the heinous purge of conservative members from the House in 2018—engaged in a display of sophisticated gaslighting that should never be considered acceptable in any deliberative body, much less a state legislative chamber.
Gaslighting works like this: A gaslighter seeks to manipulate perceptions by distorting reality. Instead of addressing arguments head-on, they employ tactics designed to make their opponents question their own reasoning, memory, or even sanity.
Kannady’s rapid-fire gaslighting went like this: He pointed out that the 1/15th language in Shaw’s proposal was similar to another rule—one that requires 1/15th of House members to second a motion to appeal a ruling of the presiding officer. He then implied that by eliminating the similar language requiring a recorded vote, Shaw was somehow undermining the members’ ability to appeal the ruling of the chair.
Of course, anyone giving this argument even the slightest consideration would realize these are two completely separate provisions of the rules. Despite the similar wording, they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. It’s like claiming that because a car’s speedometer and fuel gauge both use numerical values, adjusting one would somehow affect the other—they measure entirely different things.
While Shaw was working to empower the average member, Kannady’s twisted interpretation suggested the exact opposite—that Shaw was actually stripping members of their power. A completely absurd suggestion, yet one that leadership’s loyal followers appeared to accept without question.
Shaw’s expression in that moment, caught by the House cameras, said it all. Something wasn’t right. Would a state representative really stoop to such a blatant level of gaslighting? What was he missing? Shaw had earned his way into the State House of Representatives through hard work, integrity, and a commitment to serving his constituents—only to now be presented with a level of argument not suitable for even a high school debate team. The sheer absurdity of Kannady’s claims, delivered with an air of smug confidence, revealed a troubling reality: in this chamber, it wasn’t logic or principle that prevailed, but rather the well-practiced art of political theater. Shaw wasn’t just confronting bad arguments—he was facing an entire culture built around manipulation, where the goal wasn’t to inform but to confuse, and ultimately protect entrenched power.
Thus, Shaw’s expression. A fitting visual that sums up the entire situation in one single image.
Of course, as all skillful gaslighters do, Kannady barely gave Shaw time to process the first gaslight before launching into the next volley.
Kannady argued that Shaw’s proposal was unnecessary because Speaker Hilbert had just provided the House with six recorded votes when they tabled Tom Gann’s reform proposals moments earlier. This, of course, was another deceptive move. While the presiding officer has the ability to provide a recorded vote, if there is no rule requiring him to do so, he is under no obligation to continue the practice in the future. Even more egregious, Kannady’s claim wasn’t even accurate—Hilbert had not provided Gann with a recorded vote. Gann had requested it, and Hilbert appeared to comply by activating the voting machine, but he never directed the clerk to officially record the vote. To this day, no official record exists of those votes. It was never entered into the House journal.
But deception is the name of the game in the House right now, and it’s often difficult to tell who is deceiving whom. Was Hilbert deceiving Gann? And, thus also deceiving Kannady? Or did Kannady realize what Hilbert had done by calling for a division, but not a recorded vote?
Still, Kannady wasn’t done. His final tactic? He suggested that Shaw’s proposal was unconstitutional.
This was the ultimate gaslight. The Oklahoma Constitution explicitly gives the Legislature the authority to establish its own rules. No serious person would argue that it is unconstitutional for the Legislature to amend its rules to require a lower threshold than constitutionally required for recorded votes, especially when a very similar threshold was essentially the standard before 2011. That Kannady—a lawyer—would make such a baseless suggestion and expect House members to follow suit in tabling Shaw’s proposal tells citizens everything they need to know about the sick culture inside the Capitol. The truth is, leadership’s loyalists appear to vote for anything they are told to support, no matter how ridiculous.
And in an ironic twist of fate, they didn’t even record the vote on Kannady’s motion to table Shaw’s reform.
So how are you, a member of the public, supposed to know whether your state representative joined the mob in the attempted beatdown or stood with the people and their emissary?
There’s no official record. But if you look closely, you might be able to find an answer.
At the top of the screen, House cameras captured the unrecorded vote as it flashed on the chamber’s digital display. If you have a sharp eye for red and green lights, you can try to decipher who voted “no” (red), who voted “yes” (green), and who was missing in action (white)—either absent or too afraid to take a stand.
Now, as you can see it’s not easy to make out who voted what, but by my close review, I believe those voting the right way, against the tabling motion were: Crosswhite, Gann, Hildebrant, Jenkins, Shaw, West (Rick), Williams and Woolley.
And those not voting were: Banning, Caldwell (Chad), Dempsey, Humphrey, Lowe (Jason), Marti, Smith, Stark and Tedford. The journal seems to reflect that Dempsey, Lowe (Jason) and Marti missed all votes on that day.
If your representative’s vote was green, it might be time to start looking for a new one. They voted to table the Shaw amendment, to preserve a smoke-and-mirrors system that will impact every piece of legislation moving forward.
This was a litmus test vote. Are they with the people or with the swamp?
If they voted green, they showed a disrespect for transparency, an affinity for the opaque status-quo, and in tacitly endorsed the despicable art of gaslighting, they have insulted the integrity of the house, itself, the institution of the people.
The swamp creatures may have won this battle, but I think they will lose the war. Shaw represents the vanguard of a new generation of intelligent, well-spoken reformers who understand the inner workings of the swamp and how to dismantle it. And I don’t believe this new generation will be deterred or co-opted like so many of their predecessors.
At the end of the day, Kyle Hilbert made a tremendous strategic error in standing by as his “special counsel” went to war with the people’s representative. Hilbert needs Shaw—Shaw doesn’t need Hilbert. That’s because the green energy invasion, which has scarred western Oklahoma beyond repair for generations, is now approaching the east and entering Hilbert’s district. Those who live in that district will want to believe Hilbert as he tries to distance himself from the green energy policies and votes—an era labeled by insiders as the era of corporate welfare on steroids. But it’s instances like this, which are catching the attention of the average voter, where Hilbert’s lieutenant attacks the popular Shaw, clearly doing the bidding of Team Hilbert, that will open the eyes of those voters and put Hilbert next on the list of representatives likely to be “Wallaced”—and rightly so.
This was just the first in what will be a series of epic battles between two clearly defined sides in the coming months. If the voice of the people is to be heard, it will be because they stay engaged and follow the often-painful nuances of votes like this—votes that, in the past, the public couldn’t track or understand, but are perhaps the most important votes cast. With the rise of independent media and publications like this one, everything is changing. Enabled with these insights, the people will now be able to hold their representatives truly accountable, if they will stay engaged, and do it.
If you haven’t subscribed yet and want to join this fight, visit oklahomastatecapital.com/substack to stay informed on future votes.
And remember, if your representative voted green on this issue, it’s time to start thinking about stepping up.
Will you be part of the new generation of reformers who will finally drain the swamp?
If so, this might just be the calling for you to step up and to do your part to reinforce those who are on the front lines.
