The Oklahoma State Capital

John Echols had a problem.

He had accumulated a garish set of conservative policy betrayals: from ramming through the largest tax-hike package in the modern-day history of the state, to authorizing the pilot plan for turning every Oklahoma road into a toll road — the infamous track-and-tax plan — to going all in on the shocking era of green corporate welfare on steroids, to forcing Oklahoma prenatal nurses to take implicit-bias training, to signing on to the infamous press release that directed Oklahoma teenagers to the gender-affirming “Trevor Project” — you name the policy, and Echols had a liability profile to match.

Now Echols had his sights set on statewide office, but his opponent, a political unknown, had little to exploit. Jeff Starling was a clean-cut, hard-working professional boasting of a resume that made him eminently more qualified for the job of supervising a large team of legal professionals than Echols.

But the savvy Echols had one great advantage: he’s a skilled politician. Echols has thrived in the sleazy world of Oklahoma politics with a manipulative mastery the likes of which were unmatched by other Oklahoma politicians, a mastery developed over a decade and a half, ever since he was the monied establishment’s choice to replace conservative state Rep. Mike Reynolds.

To defeat Starling would take the work of the darkest of muckrakers, their skill set now highly honed after more than a decade of practice in the new world of unlimited, anonymous money.

Team Echols would recreate the state’s original dark-money operation: the now-infamous machine that kicked off the dark-money era in 2012 with the state’s original dark-money operation in the Paul Blair v. Clark Jolley campaign for Senate District 42.

There, Echols’ general consultant headed up the dark-money group that did a deep dive on Blair, finding a small, five-dollar-ish franchise fee assessment against one of Blair’s past business endeavors years earlier — an assessment that Blair likely didn’t even know ever existed. By the end of the campaign, the group had spent many thousands of dollars trying to convince Edmond, a community in which Blair had been a sports hero, successful businessman and church leader, that Blair was, in fact, a tax cheat.

Today, Team Echols has duplicated that model, though flipping it, with his dark-money group being operated by the successor firm to Jolley’s general consultant, Oklahoma’s leading political consulting firm, CAMP.

The subsequent attempt to destroy Starling has shot straight to the top of the nomination pile for the first-ever Oklahoma State Capital Most Deceptive Political Ad Award.

This award is the Capital’s endeavor to memorialize and preserve the most shameful of the dark art used by the state’s worst-of-the-worst candidates to grab power.

It’s only when the public thoroughly understands and shows that it will reject those who get power by these means that this will stop. As such, members of the newly emerging and evolving independent media must step up and do our part.

This ad campaign provides the most fascinating study of this dark art: impugning an opponent by crafting what, for all intents and purposes, according to the rules of common sense, is a big lie — but which, in a very technical sense, when viewed through the most skewed of interpretations, is technically defensible in a court of law.

Now, if you are the normal, honest, hard-working Oklahoman who believes in being truthful and treating others as you yourself would like to be treated, and who knows the great danger of violating the Ninth Commandment, then this will be a hard exercise for you. But in order to understand just how sick this art is, we must climb our way into the minds of its practitioners.

In this mind exercise, let’s imagine the hypothetical scenario of the grandma who has lived the cleanest of lives.

How can she be destroyed?

Well, perhaps a quick review of her social media reveals that she worked at McDonald’s one Christmas season to earn money for her grandkids’ presents.

The smear merchant will do deep-dive research not only on the grandma, but on her employer, McDonald’s: “Didn’t McDonald’s spill hot coffee on their customer back in the day?”

Yes, they did. The target for destruction, the grandma, is now guilty by association with “them” — the fiends who burned their victim so badly with that dangerous, albeit delicious, McDonald’s coffee.

Now, in no way, shape, or form is the McDonald’s grandma responsible for spilling that coffee on that day so many years ago, but that won’t stop the black-and-white ads, with the deep-voiced voiceover and the ominous music.

McDonald’s grandma: a real menace to society. She was with “them,” and she must be stopped.

This, of course, is trivial to the point of absurdity.

But the analogy is quite apt.

Using the same decontextualization techniques, just as the McDonald’s grandma is guilty by association of burning a victim with hot coffee, so too must Echols’ opponent be guilty by association.

Second, of course, it’s not enough just to decontextualize one single fact. In order to convince the viewer that this is a trend, a supporting fact must be established.

Third, having strung together two facts, the lie itself can be crystallized in the viewer’s mind by the use of imagery and a creative pregnant pause or two. That’s the legal protection: not directly communicating the lie with words, but with images and grammatical construction that create a narrative in the viewer’s mind that doesn’t represent reality, with the necessary disclosure relayed within text that flies by at a speed no human eye can process.

So, in this case, deep-dive opposition research on Jeff Starling reveals that after college, but before law school, in the late 1990s, he went on staff with his Republican U.S. senator.

Here Team Echols thought they had something: guilt by association.

The entry-level congressional staffing job? It was for Republican U.S. Sen. John Warner.

Yes, Starling’s crime was not having the clairvoyance to realize that his employer, many years later, wouldn’t support Republican President Donald Trump.

Of course, one might forgive Starling’s lack of clairvoyance on the fact that while he worked for Warner, Warner was voting to impeach the husband of Trump’s future opponent: Bill Clinton, on both impeachment counts.

But, of course, in the real world, anyone of fair mind would know that trying to hold Starling accountable for something Warner would do 16 years after Starling left Warner’s employment is an impossible standard, and those who attempt to apply it should rightly face public ridicule.

And every insider politician in Oklahoma politics with political ambitions of his own should ask himself: How would I feel if this deceptive standard were applied to me?

Tom Coburn was a prominent critic of Trump in 2016. Should all of the Coburn protégés be held to this standard?

Or what about the problematic anti-Trump comments of J.C. Watts, the scion of the Tom Cole machine’s protégés, whose anti-Trumpism came not in 2016, but after the 2020 elections? Should this tarnish the entirety of the Tom Cole political machine?

Or even Mickey Edwards, whose permanent case of TDS might to this day be associated with some of the old-timers still remaining in Oklahoma politics?

Of course not. The entire system of American fairness is built on the character of the individual, not guilt by association — especially when that association happened well before any reasonable person would have had any ability to foresee the problematic conduct of the person to whom he was associated.

But, of course, that didn’t stop Echols’ IE from creating the next component of guilt by association: Starling was hired at a prestigious law firm of a thousand lawyers and several thousand employees across more than 15 offices.

Years after Starling left that firm, the firm hired two attorneys whose past resumes featured legal work for anti-Trump interests. And in 2012, the year Starling left that firm, a subsidiary of that firm took on a lobbyist contract for a Chinese company.

Yes, back to our grandma analogy, our smoking gun: McDonald’s does business in China.

So not only did our McDonald’s grandma have the bad judgment to work for a company that burned its victim with hot coffee, she is now officially a “Beijing granny.”

So now, all that’s left is to string together these two facts with some creative comma placement and some sinister imagery.

Here’s how they did it.

Claim 1: Jeff Starling sided with the people who attacked President Trump.

Many years before Republican Sen. John Warner criticized Trump, Jeff Starling went to work for him in an entry-level job. So, should this go to court, the lawyers would argue that this is true: by taking the job, Starling “sided” with Warner, hoping that the jury will give them a pass on the fact that this occurred many years before Warner’s action.

But, of course, the ad’s sinister voiceover man doesn’t contextualize that fact to the timeline. Instead, to reinforce the claim, the text, represented in spooky font, declares that Starling “sided with THEM.”

Claim 2: Starling worked for a Never Trump senator who backed Hillary Clinton.

Again, the ad leaves out the context that this was “Republican” Sen. John Warner, and that Starling worked for him many years before Trump even emerged on the political scene. Or that as Starling worked for Warner, Warner was voting to impeach Bill Clinton.

Claim 3: “Called Trump unfit for office.”

Predicated by a pregnant pause, the claim referred to a comment made by Warner but most viewers almost certainly assumed it was a reference to something Starling said.

The spinmeisters provided themselves some protection here, though. The viewer won’t catch it with the naked eye, but as the claim is tendered, a scary-looking fake newspaper headline, accompanied by an ominous Starling picture, flashes by. It takes literally pausing the screen at just the right microsecond to realize that the fake newspaper text is attributing the quote to Warner, not Starling. And, of course, nowhere does it say that Warner made that quote in 2020, 20 years after Starling left Warner’s office.

Claim 4: “‘Starling’s’ law firm hired the prosecutors who targeted Trump.”

Juxtaposed over a picture of Liz Cheney and Alvin Bragg, the naive viewer will conclude that Starling himself somehow hired or gave employment to the dastardly anti-Trump attorneys, presumably Alvin Bragg, as an ominous blood-red font declares, “Anti-Trump Prosecutors.”

Never disclosed: the fact that Starling left his employer — again, a firm of thousands of employees — in 2012, long before Trump even ran for president.

Also not disclosed: that the firm has a large government investigations division. One has to ask: with so many anti-Trump investigations, what are the odds that a prominent law firm, especially a large one that sports a government investigations division, would have two attorneys in its employ who were connected to one of those cases?

And also not disclosed is that “Starling’s firm” represented former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in the Georgia case — the case where the tenacity of the Trump defendants and their attorneys turned the tide on the Trump prosecutions in the months after Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and Echols himself prematurely pounced, clearly expecting that Trump was done for, by becoming what would have been the first red-state domino to fall against Trump, replacing him with Ron DeSantis as the Republican standard-bearer. So, while Echols was attempting to usher Trump off the political scene, “Starling’s firm” was turning the tide in Trump’s favor. How’s that for a different interpretation of these facts?

Claim 5: “His firm pocketed $1.4 million from China.”

Of course, here the communist flag of Red China makes its ubiquitous appearance, appearing alongside the term “Starling’s firm” — again, language clearly designed to make the viewer believe that Starling himself was the decision-maker and worked for “China.”

The reality: records show that starting in 2012, the year that Starling left his employment with the firm, a subsidiary company of that firm took on a client from China.

Now, in all likelihood, Starling had no idea what a subsidiary of his employer, a massive legal concern, was working on. But if he did, then his decision to leave that employer just as it took on its Chinese client could just as easily be a testament to his character, suggesting he didn’t want to work for an employer that was doing business with a Chinese client.

Claim 6: “They trust him.”

Who, exactly, are “they”?

Well, here, the naive viewer will conclude it is the shadowy figures presented behind Starling: Alvin Bragg, Hillary Clinton and Liz Cheney. Of course, not one of those three likely has the slightest clue who Jeff Starling is.

But the naive viewer is almost certain to conclude that Starling is the trusted attorney of these people, the one who provided them with jobs and attorneys to accomplish their Trump-derangement agenda.

In short, though this is the ad that has no tie to reality, unbeknownst to the naive Fox News boomers, they are staring into the very worst depths of the Oklahoma swamp, carefully crafted dark art from the elites of the swamp’s consultant class, who I believe, based on my personal experience, derive great satisfaction from how very skillfully they have pulled off this character assassination. It’s a type of gleefulness that is so very sick.

But Jeff Starling isn’t the victim of this dishonesty.

The victim is you.

Because when Team Echols embraces this type of operation, they are endorsing the art of tricking the employer in order to get a job.

You are going to be Echols’ employer.

Now, Echols isn’t, in any way, shape, or form, the best applicant.

His voting record is a ghoulish dumpster fire of policy betrayals, the likes of which I could, at the risk of being the anti-Echols guy, fill up many updates.

And you know the saying: fool me once . . .

By contrast, Starling, while largely unknown politically speaking, and thus rightly deserving of real scrutiny, has the requisite professional experience for the job.

But should one hesitate to vote for Starling based on the fact that he is a political unknown, one should take comfort in this: when subjected to the overwhelming scrutiny of the state’s most dastardly muckrakers, they have, in my view, invented an attack out of whole cloth. That, and one other thing: they found what appears to be an old Halloween party photo, exposing Starling for having a sense of humor — something he has no doubt relied on as he’s been forced to come to terms with just how sick the state of public affairs has become.

But June 16 is your decision.

Listen to your instincts and ask yourself: if an applicant for employment at your personal business applied for the job in this manner, using the resources of the Oklahoma City consultant swamp in this way, would you hire him?

No, you wouldn’t.

Because you would know that this sleazy operation is a complete reflection of character, and you wouldn’t trust them with your affairs.

Can you do any less for the affairs of the taxpayers?

Finally, I would encourage all of those who have been victimized by this operation in the past, either directly when running for office or indirectly by the victimizing of your grassroots candidate of choice, to make this year’s attorney general ballot a referendum on this dark art.