The Oklahoma State Capital

It may seem like a lifetime, but it was just a short 36 months ago—the term of a rapid-payoff car loan. The close of the 2022 election cycle had arrived, and those who predicted doom and gloom for Oklahoma’s Republican candidates had once again been proven wrong. The Stitt Derangement Syndrome crowd and their pollsters of preference had put their eggs in the Hofmeister basket, only to watch them crack open on election night. And what many viewed as the Democrats’ second-best chance—holding on to their control of the state Department of Education—collapsed as well, as Ryan Walters, running on a platform of defending the innocence of children, re-took the office for the Republicans and won election by an even larger margin than Stitt.

The strength at the top of the ticket had trickled down, and the large Republican majority in the House of Representatives had been preserved.

The recipient of this political strength? It was the long-term Speaker of the House, Charles McCall. Now set to forever cement his legacy as the self-described “Speaker Maximus,” McCall had a decision to make: how to allocate perceived power in a way that could keep the massive Republican partisan caucus happy.

With approximately 80 individuals with whom to divvy up power, that wasn’t an easy task. Now, for whatever it’s worth, that power is perceived only, as most real power had long ago been consolidated and consumed by McCall and his handful of close cohorts. However, positions such as committee chair and vice chair still carry the appearance of prestige, and McCall’s task was to divvy up that appearance.

So one can only imagine the angst within the caucus when McCall appeared to do the inexplicable: even as he was refusing to appoint the legislature’s conservative scion—and the most influential member of the House of Representatives—to a committee chair or vice chairmanship (that being, of course, Tom Gann, McCall’s conservative-minded foil), McCall extended an appointment not to a Republican but to a Democrat, naming Ajay Pittman, a foremost figure of the Black Lives Matter movement to the vice chairmanship of the House Tourism Committee.

Those looking for a motivating factor for this inexplicable decision could perhaps find a clue in the Facebook post from that committee’s chairman, Tammy Townley, who not only didn’t push back against McCall’s decision to tag her with a Democrat vice chair, but took to Facebook, posting a picture of herself—as she often does—with Pittman while declaring Pittman to be one of her “closest friends” and congratulating her on the appointment.

In other words, for Oklahoma’s uniparty legislative leadership, Pittman provided the ultimate virtue-signaling opportunity.

In a world increasingly driven not by one’s talents, skills, intellect, or merit, but rather by immutable characteristics, Pittman simply checked off too many DEI checkboxes to ignore, self-described as a “proud seventh-generation Native American with dual citizenship in the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma,” and “the first millennial female and second-generation female legacy member to serve in her district.”

In the DEI checkmark game, Pittman was near the top.

In an era when McCall and his leadership team—including current attorney general candidate Jon Echols and labor commissioner candidate John Pfeiffer—had endorsed Pittman’s suggestion of “implied racism” and attempted to require Oklahoma health professionals to undergo an Orwellian, regular, mandated training so as to realize their own subconscious racism, as described in last week’s article, this was no doubt a chance to both get in some additional, requisite virtue signaling—and to perhaps prove that they were doing their best to excise their own unconscious racial bias by betraying their own caucus and showing the world that they were fighting the racism demon that most assuredly, even if at the subconscious level, resided within them.

Pictured: Tourism Chairman Tammy Townley welcomes her new vice chair, Ajay Pittman, declaring her to be one of her dearest friends.

In making the appointment, McCall declared, “Representative Pittman has a unique perspective and positive attitude that will help her excel in this new role. I believe the Tourism Committee will benefit from her insight as the session progresses.”

Pittman’s appointment was rightly offensive to true conservatives. Throughout the 2020 election cycle, Pittman had emerged on the national stage—featured on CNN for her opposition to Trump—and was known as one of the state’s foremost representatives of Black Lives Matter. And by the time McCall made his appointment, BLM had already been exposed to anyone paying attention to public policy as a big-money grift of the worst sort: aggravating race relations for political and monetary gain and sabotaging the country’s ability to finally move past its racial trauma for another entire generation.

And notwithstanding the offensiveness of her public-policy positions, Pittman’s personal history—including credible allegations of shoplifting and a subsequent obfuscation attempt that defied belief—should have been seen by any wise principal as a tremendous warning sign: don’t spend your credibility putting this person into a place of authority, or you will get burned.

In short, with perhaps an exception or two, McCall couldn’t have made an appointment more out of touch with the values most of his caucus purported to endorse as they ran for reelection during the 2022 cycle.

McCall’s appointment took on even more meaning several months later when state officials allowed Pittman to enter into a consent agreement after it was discovered that she had allegedly used her campaign funds to funnel thousands of dollars to her own personal benefit.

If, even after this, there was any thought that McCall might require Pittman to take down Vice Chairmanship status from her office door, it was quickly disabused, as there is no evidence that McCall—quick to press release on any number of matters—issued any public reaction to Pittman’s settlement.

To anyone in the know, Pittman was untouchable.

Pittman’s status as a committee official presumably lasted through the end of that year, when incoming Speaker Kyle Hilbert faced a potential revolt from a sizable segment of the Republican caucus if he dared appoint a Democrat to that position again. Hilbert was ultimately forced to stand down on any inclination he might have had to repeat McCall’s mistake, thanks to some courageous conservative caucus members who refused to let it happen twice.

Though she didn’t get re-appointed to the position, Pittman was effectively handed a “get out of jail for almost free” card—required to pay a fine, given plenty of runway to make the repayments, and spared both removal from office and any criminal charges. This stood in stark contrast to how other legislators facing similar accusations had been treated—though, notably, those others didn’t check many of the DEI checkboxes.

Now, however, after seemingly defying gravity and consequence for years, Pittman may have finally met her Waterloo: new accusations of forgery and of breaching her settlement agreement by allegedly presenting a campaign contribution from the Osage Nation as a personal payment under the terms of that settlement have now become public.

With these disclosures, one might think that McCall’s primary opponent for governor, Attorney General Gentner Drummond, would be well-positioned to capitalize on McCall’s virtue-signaling misstep.

But in an ironic twist of fate, Drummond has his own Ajay Pittman issue.

That’s because earlier this year, even after her settlement agreement with the state, Pittman still appeared to be the RINO Republican officials’ virtue signal of choice—as Drummond, known for consistently eviscerating Republican elected officials from Stitt to Walters to Oklahoma State Treasurer Todd Russ to Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner Glen Mulready, tweeted out kudos and highlighted the work of the Democrat, Pittman in passing a non-binding resolution.

Pictured: Occurring two days after Ajay Pittman signed a settlement with the state, Gentner Drummond—Oklahoma’s top law-enforcement official—issued a tweet praising Pittman.

Drummond’s tweet occurred just two days after Pittman signed the settlement, raising the question: was Drummond running cover for Pittman? It seems a stretch to suggest he didn’t know about the agreement. With this tweet, was he signaling to the world that there would be no criminal proceedings in the case?

The timeline worked out like this:

In March of 2024, without a recorded vote, Pittman’s resolution honoring the Tuskegee Airmen was approved by the House. It’s not an uncommon resolution—the kind routinely passed by politicians without so much as a recorded vote.

On May 21, one day after signing the settlement, Pittman issued a press release on the resolution. There may be an innocent explanation, but most politicians do not sit on a grandstanding opportunity for two months, and press releasing at the end of May—when the session is ending—is a sure way to get ignored.

On the next day, just two days after the settlement was signed, May 22, Drummond issued his tweet praising Pittman.

Of the many, many press releases he could have chosen, the fact that Drummond selected this particular one—two days after her settlement—was much more than a coincidence in the mind of anyone paying attention. For the knowledgeable observer, whether intended or not, it functioned as a clear signal: Drummond, Oklahoma’s leading law enforcer, was probably sending a message, Pittman was untouchable.

There’s something in the DNA of establishment Republican politicians that drives them to virtue signal. It’s a self-destruction instinct they simply can’t control. It’s the most bizarre thing, but it keeps the special interests and the highly paid consultancies in business as this cycle’s Republican primary battle descends into a morass of establishment politicians exposing and outing each other’s betrayals of conservative values—much to the entertainment of grassroots conservatives, who appreciate the irony: the Republican primary process forces these politicians to reveal the corruptness of the system, the candidates who campaign as conservatives but then betray those values repeatedly and with extreme prejudice.

Thus, perhaps the most important takeaway from this article: the value of a closed primary system. Those who wish to govern under the brand “Republican”—a brand built through the sweat equity of countless conservatives who sacrificed to preserve the greatest republic in the history of the world—must go before that very audience and prove their worth. And in doing so, they run the risk that another candidate will expose them for the deceptions of the past, even if that other candidate has their own closet full of values-betraying skeletons.

That is what we are now seeing as McCall and Drummond work to expose each other’s betrayals—and it is exactly what will disappear if the monied special-interest groups succeed in preventing Republicans from choosing their own nominees, as would be the intended outcome of the State Question 836 crowd and their proposal to convert Oklahoma’s election system into a “jungle primary.”

In recent days, Drummond has given in to the impulse to expose McCall. It’s a strategic error, as McCall presents Drummond with his weakest possible runoff-cycle opponent; had Drummond shown patience, Chip Keating would have been forced to expose McCall’s many values-betraying votes. Now Keating can sit back as six long months remain in the cycle, giving both establishment candidates plenty of time to spend their millions providing a tremendous service: exposing the deceptive world of Capitol politics.

Much more on that in the future, as well as the soon-impending release of the first-ever Oklahoma State Capital’s People’s Audit—that document designed to give the grassroots the power to unseat the future McCalls and similar co-opted legislators in the House before they too can claim the title of “Speaker Emeritus.”

So, stay tuned. If you have yet to subscribe, subscribe here—and to support this work and ensure its continued viability, if you have yet to do so, consider upgrading your subscription to a paid subscription.