By Jason Murphey

Time and again, ambitious legislators now seeking higher office run what I have termed “The Great Grassroots Gaslighting Gauntlet.” One by one, they appear before Republican grassroots groups, attempting to convince audiences – hopeful and eager to support those who share their values – that they are the true conservative candidate of choice.

For the most part, that gaslighting hasn’t worked.

The grassroots are becoming more sophisticated. With the rise of a freer, more open X following Elon Musk’s purchase, and the availability of tools such as the Oklahoma Constitution’s Oklahoma Conservative Index, the OKGrassroots.com Republican Platform Scorecard, and The Oklahoma State Capital’s People’s Audit, they now have the means to both expose the betrayals, and educate the wider public on the size and scope of those betrayals.

There has been, in fact, just one very noticeable exception: a termed-out legislator whose liberalism was repeatedly and frequently documented by the Oklahoma Conservative Index, who averaged a 57 percent score, firmly in official RINO (Republican In Name Only) territory, in his last nine years of officeholding.

It’s a cautionary tale, as this lawmaker held one of the best scores, a 90, in his first three years; but, unfortunately, this is what made him so dangerous: he never lost the ability to talk conservative and to make conservatives believe he shared their values. But after those first three years, his scores tell a very different story. By 2017, his first year in leadership, as he advocated for tax increase after tax increase, his score plummeted to a 10 – an all-time low that, until then, would have been inconceivable for a Republican legislator.

During the last nine years of the legislator’s tenure, I would challenge anyone to point to a time when the House Republicans did what they did best – betraying the conservative, free-market principles of Bastiat’s The Law, or the special law principle in Crockett’s Not Yours to Give – and when this legislator could be found on the right side of the vote.

Put simply, the system changed him. Like so many who play the game, he became something entirely different from the officeholder voters first believed in.

But he never lost the talent for talking the talk – and that made him dangerous. Because with it came the ability to erase his own record, to explain away reality itself.

In the Capitol, that kind of skill earns a reputation. In his case, he was so good at it, that it earned something more: his name became a verb.

“You’ve been echoled.”

Attorney general candidate Jon Echols has filled his campaign coffers with the generous donations of the liberal scions who led the transformation of the House to its modern-day configuration of institutionalist domination. That list includes liberal former legislators Carol Bush, Marcus McEntire, and the great purger of legislative conservatives himself, Chris Kannady, while still expecting, and worse, receiving, the very public support of far too many grassroots conservatives.

And it’s the legislator who didn’t just, time and time again, vote for both the tax increases and the biggest corporate welfare giveaways in the history of the state, in the era of Corporate Welfare on Steroids, but who, as majority floor leader, ran the floor, facilitating the process by which all of this happened in the least transparent of ways, moving from concept introduction to final approval in the tightest of windows of public purview - an abuse that Tom Coburn took to the State Capitol to rightly express his dismay at and likened to the corruption of Washington, D.C.

Echols’ political mail portrays the scope and scale of this incredible willingness to gaslight, as he now purports to have “stood with Trump when it mattered most.”

While, in fact, Echols was in very public opposition to Trump when it mattered most: as the Biden Justice Department and the radical left sought to bankrupt Trump and put him in jail, establishment Republicans recruited Ron DeSantis to stage the coup that would move the party past Trump.

The federal government indicted Trump on June 9, occurring almost coterminous to Echols’ endorsement of DeSantis as well as other Oklahoma politicians to include Chris Kannady, one of Echols’ most prominent supporters, just as Trump faced the very real possibility of federal prison on charges that, on their face, were political and an outrage to the concept of American jurisprudence – something any conscientious attorney would have been quick to decry.

There is no doubt in this writer’s mind: establishment Republicans knew the indictment was coming, and DeSantis red-state strategy hinged on Oklahoma becoming the first domino to fall into his camp, as those establishment personalities expected the Republican electorate to run away from Trump, who now faced the very real possibility of federal incarceration.

DeSantis went so far as to quote Echols in the press release, putting Echols in the driver’s seat should the coup have succeeded.

And, that would be one thing, if Echols were willing to admit to it. But, today, with Trump still polling strongly with Oklahoma Republicans, and his bet on a political wind shift having failed in 2023, Echols’ political mail rewrites that history with seemingly no sense of shame. Instead of admitting that he got it wrong, Echols gaslights.

And, as the era of social justice peaked, and appeared to have public momentum, Echols was on that train too, voting time and again to diminish our values.

This included the notorious HB 1835 – perhaps the Democrats’ greatest wishlist item of choice – which aligned Oklahoma’s counseling standards with woke national groups. It was an unconstitutional restriction on free speech that would have allowed the state to take away the licenses of Christian counselors who sought to save the lives and souls of innocent children whose corruption is the obsession of the woke left. It is something one would expect in the atheistic Soviet Union, but never in the United States.

And then there was HB 3088, another Democrat initiative-the implicit bias training mandate-designed to force Oklahoma’s health professionals to be trained on their “implicit bias.”

And in 2020, as the Democrat establishment conspired on making a joke of the election system, it was Echols who voted for the Democrat effort to more than double the notary cap on mail-in ballots, HB 3317, that analysts have rightly attributed to be the Democrats’ foremost tool for election fraud.

From the proposal that appeared set to enable FedCoin, to the proposal to allow legislators to stay in office for 20 years instead of the current limit of 12, to the $3.8 million waste of taxpayer dollars to study turning every Oklahoma road into a toll road – tracking and taxing Oklahomans for every mile they drive – to his repeated authoritative performance on KWTV, where, as a guest panelist throughout the COVID era, he repeatedly instructed viewers to “wear their mask,” an authoritarian order that this writer refused with an extreme prejudice. Letting authoritarian politicians on TV tell you what to do, well that’s not the type of life anyone should live.

Now, as I review what I affectionately call the “insane votes” document, I have found this legislator to be not only on the wrong side of history, having only scratched the surface of the betrayals in this article, but to have demonstrated a judgment so bad as to disqualify him for the support of any thoughtful conservative who has the intellectual honesty to care about principle and to put that principle above personal relations – because, at the end of the day, that’s the only skill which will allow one to withstand the advances of this incredibly savvy politician.

For to fail in this task-well, it’s to become the victim of that previously mentioned verb, and to find oneself in a state of having been “echoled.”

If you’ve been “echoled,” don’t feel bad. You are far from the only victim of Oklahoma’s most savvy politician. But now, you know the truth. The question is, do you have the courage to recognize it?

Because if not, one can certainly make the case that no consistent, objective standard remains by which future legislators can be held accountable. And expect that those legislators, as they constantly betray our values on behalf of the monied special interests, will take notice. They won’t need to adjust their liberal voting, monitor their Oklahoma Conservative Index score, or risk making the tall-building crowd mad; rather, they will just need to hone their gaslighting skills, to practice and improve in the fine art of “echoling.”