Audio of Karin Hardin's Secret Meeting
Gentle readers:
Karin Hardin is a self-proclaimed expert on OKGOP rules. She's also been on the news and claimed inaccurate things, but that's beside the point. The audio is long, but enjoy listening to it if that's your thing. The thing that we will highlight is that A) she makes inaccurate and misleading statements about the OKGOP rules, B) mischaracterizes the current application of the rules, and C) Karin makes inaccurate and defamatory statements about Charity Marcus. To be sure, we are not endorsing anyone for Tulsa County GOP chair, but also to be sure, Melissa Remmington would be a nightmare.
BTW, Kreeper Krems makes his return to politics in the audio. We missed writing about him. He still has lots of months left to pay his fine to the Ethics Commission and he had gone dark for quite some time because of it. But the audio shines light on his return.
The "Budget Committee" censure of Nathan Dahm is not
the OKGOP Budget Committee, but some small amalgamation of Action Figures that pretend to be the OKGOP Budget Committee. Please remember when you see Dear Leader Hill complain about budget committee transparency that the Oklahoma Ethics Commission and the Federal Election Commission require, under penalty of perjury, regular reports (monthly at the FEC) so you can see down to the cent what has been spent, and what has been brought in. If you doubt that this needs to be truthful and accurate, go ask former Chair David McLain about the investigation and incredibly large fine that John Bennett, A.J. Ferate, and Nathan Dahm have had to deal with. (No, none of these three did anything wrong, but they've been trying to fix the mess.)
New Candidate Announcements
are all around us! Yesterday former speaker Charles McCall announced for Governor. John O'Connor is announcing for AG soon. State Rep Jon Echols will announce for AG next week. Jeff Starling is also preparing his team for an AG Run. Stay tuned on all of the movements.
A few months ago we
were offered a private meeting with Scott McMahan when he came to Tulsa to talk about the national Action Figure movement. We declined. He was recently arrested for falsifying his residency on candidate forms in Michigan, and the Action Figures have been all over him about it. This doesn't mean that what he said about Action Figures was wrong, just that he's a bad messenger. What Action Figures need to recognize is that they are the ear that wants to be the eye (1COR 12:16). But what we want to mention here was a facebook post from Aiya Kelly about McMahan calling him a liar. The problem is that Aiya herself actually ran for a party leadership position when she didn't actually live in the district she was running for. Pot calling the kettle black, Aiya. Bad look. Bad look.
Bari Weiss is a
former Wall Street Journal writer, and editor at the New York Times that was fired for not being liberal enough. In Republican nomenclature, she was labeled a "Democrat In Name Only." So she went and started her own effort, called, "The Free Press" that has written critically of liberal efforts since its inception. Today she wrote a cautionary tale for conservatives after watching her former party devolve. In many ways, she provides a warning that could have been written by us. Today, we conclude with her thoughts. We added the bolding to certain paragraphs we think are important for this group:
BEWARE THE VANDALS
On Monday, I addressed the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship—or ARC, as it is known. Formed in 2023, ARC’s goal is to “develop a more hope-filled vision for the future and, ultimately, to relay the foundations of our civilization.”
This year, 4,000 people attended the London conference. It was an honor to be there—and to present alongside so many Free Press contributors, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, Konstantin Kisin, and many others. My remarks are below.
ARC is the kind of organization you eagerly cross an ocean to address. It’s an honor to be here with so many friends and so many people I admire.
I wasn’t able to make it last year, but I imagine the vibes are quite different now, in February of 2025, than they were when you all last gathered.
Perhaps another way of saying that is: Are you tired of all the winning?
In Argentina, Javier Milei wielded that chainsaw and declared that he would save his nation from hyperinflation—and he has delivered.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni said declinism in the West is not inevitable—it is a choice—and she chose differently.
In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele has turned his country from one of the most dangerous nations on Earth into one of the safest in the Western Hemisphere.
In Canada, Justin Trudeau has stepped down, and Pierre Poilievre has a nine-point lead over the Liberals.
In Germany, the election a week from now is a battle between the center-right and the right-right—the left is not even in the running.
Here in England the real contest of power, the real debate, is between Reform and the Tories.
And of course, there’s America.
Whatever you choose to call the southern Gulf, we seem to have a border again. Acknowledging our own sovereignty is a first step toward peace through strength, not only for the United States but our allies. Israel’s hostages are—at last—being liberated from torturous dungeons.
Meanwhile, J.D. Vance is reminding Europe of the necessity of free speech and political liberty. The DOGE boys are saving America billions. Our secretary of defense is working out in the snow with Green Berets. Google is dismantling DEI. Mark Zuckerberg is into masculinity. And everyone’s ditching seed oils.
Birthing persons are out; mothers are in. So is merit, natalism, techno-optimism, rocket ships, comedy that’s actually funny and, weirdest of all, the Village People.
The vibe shift has traveled so far, so fast, it has reached even our plastic straws.
So many of the things so many of us have been going on about for the past decade—the stigmatization of common sense; the shaming of those who suggested that crime should be illegal; the casting out of those who refused to parrot the mindless slogan of the day—are, at last, going out of style.
You could be forgiven for thinking it’s all gravy. Because the last thing anyone wants to hear when they’re flying high is that there’s turbulence ahead. The last thing you want at a great party is someone to turn up the lights and turn off the music.
But I’m speaking here not only to historians—and there are many at this conference—but to people with a sense of the past. People who are alive to the recent past not just as observers but because they—you—have been in the arena, fighting tirelessly with your words and your ideas to shape our present and our future.
So I hope you will forgive me for looking back to understand how we arrived here. It’s the story of how a political movement can lose its way with dizzying speed—and a cautionary tale about where we could be headed.
A few years ago, nearly every millennial in nearly every influential seat in America decided that police departments descended from slave patrols. So we were told we had to abolish the police. We had to abolish prisons.
They said the existence of America was a crime. That we had to do “land acknowledgments” before every meeting and declare our gender in our email signatures. They said that degrowth and socialism were the only way to go and that too many kids would kill the planet. They said that Marx, who none of these people actually bothered reading, must be revered, and that our founders, whom they had no interest in outside of a Broadway show, must be reviled.
There were riots. They tore down statues. What didn’t get renamed got transformed entirely from within.
Eventually, people got tired of this insanity. Normal people—the people who decide elections—have their limits.
But elections in America are only every four years. And in the meantime, this movement destroyed more things than it’s possible to capture in a single speech. It came after our largest companies, our media, our universities, our medical schools, our law schools, our hospitals, our local governments, our elementary schools. Our friendships. Our families. Our language.
They ousted good people for fake thought crimes and tried to ruin their reputations and their lives. Many of those who publicly refused—heroes, each one—are in this room. But others went to ground or left public life, traumatized by the experience of witch burning.
The other thing that it destroyed—at least for the time being—was the Democratic Party. It became unrecognizable. The Democratic candidate for president promised the American Civil Liberties Union in writing that her White House would pay for sex-change surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison for violent crimes. It became utterly detached from reality.
In a line: What happened was that the far left destroyed the center-left in America.
And so, a few months ago, Americans chose Donald Trump—who had just years earlier lost an election by some eight million votes—to be their president again. The left lost its mind. . . and Trump was the obvious reaction. The president won the popular vote for the first time in 20 years, and Republicans now control every branch of government. Trump is enjoying his highest approval ratings ever.
Looking back, it all seems so clear—the reaction entirely inevitable. But as it was happening—and even now some people still cling to this idea—the smart set claimed that it was just the fringe. Just some bizarre voices, probably many of them bots, online. That it would never manage to build true political power.
We know now how wrong they were.
So what can we learn from this recent history? Well, one big takeaway is that if a political movement does not police its ranks, does not draw lines, if it neglects to protect its borders, if it does not defend its sacred values, it cannot long endure.
What are those values? They include the rule of the law. The belief in the inalienable rights of each individual. That we are all created in the image of God and it is that—and not our ethnicity or our IQ score—that gives us our worth and that makes us all equal. It is a rejection of mob violence. It is the view that the West is good and that America is good, and that we deserve our heroes along with our whole complex history.
These values are not left or right. They are foundational. They are civilizational. And they have always required constant vigilance to preserve.
But that’s not the sense you get online these days—and some places offline, too—where power is celebrated instead of principle. Where power is quickly becoming the only principle.
If that continues without being challenged, we may wind up spending the next few years watching the same story we just lived through on the other side, as the far right (not the one defined by cable news, which includes most of us here today) devours what remains of the center-right.
If you aren’t aware of the dangers that come with apparent victory, if you think, That’s impossible, I believe you are as naive as the professors at Harvard who still email me to say, “Can you believe what’s happening?!”
What does this group, which differs from the rest of the right in its open embrace of illiberalism, sound like? An awful lot like the far left.
This group says that we are in a war—a war here at home—and that because it’s war, because the stakes are life and death, the normal rules of the game must be suspended.
They say those who don’t go along are squishes or traitors or were secret leftists all along. Or they accuse them of being conservative or Republican in name only, which is a version of the “false consciousness” Marxists were so fond of telling people they suffer from.
They say that it’s not enough to return to normal—that returning to normal isn’t an option—and instead it’s time to give the other side a taste of their own medicine.
They say we were treated cruelly. And so cruelty is the necessary response.
They say that the thing we are trying to conserve has already been destroyed—and perhaps never even existed at all.
They say that reform is a losers’ strategy, and that the whole thing needs to be burned down.
Like the far left, they have no use for history, but judge people living and dead in the ideological light of presentism, or simply reimagine them from scratch. As the left defaced and desecrated statues of Churchill, the vandals on the right desecrate his name and his memory.
Again, it’s a question of borders. In this case, they actively erase the line between good and evil, and between past and present—looking backward to a place where “things went wrong,” as if it’s possible to turn back the clock.
While the left, long sympathetic with Stalin, today sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—this new right eulogizes the original ones. And in rehabilitating Hitler they are not merely demonizing Jews, but demonizing America, Britain, and the millions who fought and died to preserve our freedoms.
All of this seems as obvious to me as the notion that a girl cannot become a boy. But a lot of people seem to have a hard time saying these things out loud right now.
Partly it’s because of the bile that comes back at you. Partly it’s because so much that’s happening right now seems so good—the opportunity so huge—that no one wants to be the wet blanket. Partly because so many of the people disgusted with the illiberal excesses of the past administration, loving freedom as we do, are in the old liberal dilemma that hollowed out the middle back in the ’60s. Who are we to tell those kids taking over the library that nobody can learn if they do that? Or that the pseudo-history they are discovering, a “people’s history,” isn’t history at all, just a flattering extension of their present-day politics extended into the past.
Partly—and perhaps most of all—it is because we are humans. And human beings seek the warmth of being in the in-crowd.
For all those reasons, there’s a strong temptation to pretend this away or, as many now do, greet all this with a shrug. We get the feeling that it’s just too gross to engage with—and that the lies being told are so big and so obvious it will be self-evident.
And then suddenly your 16-year-old cousin is telling you that women like getting slapped around and that the Nazis were just misunderstood and eugenics got a bad rap.
I know it never seems like a good time to fight these people. No one wants to be bullied online. Every time these boys get criticized they call you a sellout, a traitor, a double agent. Because they’ve adopted the paranoia of Boomer hippies, they’ll always insinuate that you’re on the CIA’s payroll. Or the Mossad’s.
(By the way, if any of you are CIA, please see me after this. Renting office space in Manhattan is extremely expensive, especially after USAID cut our funding.)
But time is like luck. You run out of it faster than you think you will. The previous Tory government always thought it had time to address this or that issue, time to get immigration under control. Then there was no time left.
What I want to say is that this is a rare and precious moment. The freaks aren’t going to stay in their circus tent. They’re going to come after all of us, everyone in this room. And they’ll do it by lying to people. They’ll do this to your kids, your grandkids, your readers, your constituents. And they are doing it for a reason: By demoralizing us, by saying things are probably past saving, they become the only source of truth, even though they are the ones telling the lies.
Conservatives know two things above all else: that evil is real and that our precious civilization is human and therefore fragile.
If we have learned anything over this past tumultuous decade, it is that determined human beings are the only thing standing in the way of unraveling. People are the only ones guarding the border between civilization and its enemies from without and from within.
I know people in this audience know that. More than a few of you have taught it to me when you spoke up for America or Israel or the rule of law or women—or against groomers, terrorists, and the idea that our race, our ethnicity, is what truly defines us. You demonstrated what that guardianship looks like—and what it requires.
So thank you not just for listening to me today, but for leading the way.