In my main essay on this subject, I’m Observing Ramadan, I wrote a descriptive analysis of my personal experiences and reflections as a Westerner who stumbled across Ramadan, dusted it off, and gave it a spin. In that essay, I spent no time on what Muslims themselves think about Ramadan or what it is meant to do, and this was part of the point. As I emphasized in the essay, I am not a Muslim, and this fact is central to informing my experience of Ramadan.

However, when I forwarded this essay to a friend who is far more knowledgeable about Islam than I am, she pointed out that a central point of Ramadan is that it promotes charity for the poor by encouraging fasters empathize with those who fast against their will. She pointed out that those who cannot fast compensate for their fasting by donating food to the hungry, and she asked the question that will serve as the central thesis to this appendix:

Have you learned anything about empathizing with the poor during Ramadan?

Here I present my answer.

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This year, I am observing Ramadan.

For the unfamiliar (few, I would presume), Ramadan is an Islamic holy month during which Muslims around the world fast during daylight hours so as to clear their minds and enable them to better reflect on God, themselves, and the world. It is observed during the ninth month of the Islamic Calendar, and it begins with the observation of a crescent moon. Accordingly, exactly when Ramadan occurs each year varies, both between years due to the offset of a lunar calendar relative to a solar one and within years due to variable moon visibility. Just this year, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States began Ramadan two days before the rest of the Islamic World because they allegedly observed a crescent moon, whereas others did not.

This archaic-sounding dispute naturally introduces one concept which is central to informing my understanding of Ramadan, that being it is extremely old. In Islamic theology, Ramadan originates with Muhammad’s fast in the second year after his migration from Mecca to Medina in the early 7th century. During this fast, he observed all of the rituals that we today associate with Ramadan: a pre-dawn meal shortly before the morning prayer, the continuation of his typical daily life during daytime hours, and the breaking of his fast at sunset.

However, historically speaking, the origins of the fasting practices that likely inspired Muhammad’s fast are ancient enough that we don’t even know where they come from. Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights in the desert before he returned to civilization to begin his ministry. This fast would serve as the inspiration for Great Lent, a draconian forty-day-long fasting ritual which evolved into Lent. Moses fasted for forty days and forty nights as he awaited the Ten Commandments atop Mount Sinai. It’s unclear the extent to which Moses himself was a man or a myth, but his fast was almost certainly inspired by some even older tradition.

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All that being said, I am inclined to believe that traditions that last do so for a reason. Their practitioners get something that could not be gotten by any other means. If fasting were just starvation, then no one would do it. It would not have become mainstream, and it certainly wouldn’t have become a part of almost every major world religion. If it were generally bad, there would be some general taboo against it. I am particularly intrigued by the Islamic fast for two reasons:

1. It’s the most widespread: Muslims make up a little over a quarter of the world’s population, and a vast majority of those Muslims observe Ramadan by fasting.

2. Of the common fasting rituals in major religions, it’s the most extreme. No food, no water, and no sexual activity for an entire solar month during the daylight hours. For me, this has meant that I have begun fasting just before 6 AM and ended fasting a few minutes after 6 PM for the past week. Contrast this with Ta’anit in Judaism, where practitioners are only expected to fast a few days a year, or modern Catholic Lent, where practitioners are only expected to fast a couple of days and avoid certain meats on a few others.

As I have fasted, I have tried to figure out what exactly this fast has been doing to me and why some may find these effects desirable. So far, I have some praise for the wisdom of tradition, some critique for its perverse incentives, and some reflection on my own society.

To start, I do find some inner peace when fasting. I find it difficult to be excited, angry, anxious, or sad when I am most disposed to being hungry. Put simply, I do not have the energy to feel anything. Last week, I had to go to court to defend myself pro se against a citation. Normally, when I have gone to court, I have become quite nervous, and in the morning, when I had some energy to spare, I was nervous. But as the day dragged on and my appointment crept closer, I did not become more nervous, but less. Entering the courthouse, taking my seat in the crowded waiting room, and speaking to the prosecutor, I was supremely calm in a way that’s quite unusual for me, and I successfully argued for a continuance on the case. Do I think that the reason I ultimately prevailed was that I was fasting? Maybe, maybe not. There were certainly other factors at play here. But my sense of calm certainly helped me navigate this complex and unfamiliar social terrain.

Contrary to what conventional wisdom may suggest, I have not found myself getting hangry or grouchy, and I suspect that this is because, even if I am hungry, I do not mentally desire to eat. I know that, if I eat, I would be disappointed in myself and feel like a traitor to those friends who are fasting with me. Ramadan has made me more sympathetic to some notion of a mind-body distinction, whereas before, I would have been more inclined towards monism. When the gaps between what my body demands and my mind wants are so often magnified, the distinction becomes clearer, at least for a time.

One thing that fasting has certainly done is strengthen my relationships with certain people, namely my fellow fasters. You see, I am not fasting alone: both of my roommates and three of my closest friends also agreed to observe Ramadan so that we might feel less alone as we did so. While two of my treacherous friends dropped out quite quickly (one because he remembered he is merely a person of the book and the other because his desire for marijuana was too intense to wait for iftar), one of my friends and both of my roommates have stuck to it to the best of their abilities. If this were not a shared experience, I’m not sure that I would have been able to bear it, so I am extraordinarily grateful to those three who have stayed true to the holy word. While my detachment from Muslim social circles has prevented me from fully reaping the various social benefits that I imagine Ramadan provides communities, the mere fact of this peculiar shared experience has certainly drawn me closer to a few around me.

Moving on from mushy nonsense, fasting has also made me far more appreciative and aware of food. Now obviously, I didn’t need to fast to understand that food matters in the abstract. I have been hungry before, albeit never for any prolonged period of time and by my own will, and of course, we have reasons for appreciating food that are rooted in our biology and socialization. What I am referring to here is something more particular.

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Last Friday, I ate a lighter suhoor than usual. I had chosen to swap out a turkey sandwich for an apple and to cut my water intake from three bottles to two. Now, the reason I did this was that I felt quite full already and scarcely felt I could bear eating more food since I had eaten a large iftar the previous night. Well, perhaps I should have eaten anyway since I felt terrible for the rest of the day. By mid-morning, I was practically keeling over with hunger and by noon, I was beginning to feel feverish. It got so bad that my manager at the Home Depot recognized that I seemed ill and recommended I clock out a few hours early. Thankfully, when I returned to my apartment, I could take the necessary measures to assuage my pain as I waited for iftar and did not suffer anything worse than what I have already described. Nonetheless, it is incredible to me that such a mild dietary change could wreak such havoc on my body. To that point, I had not fully appreciated that different foods have physical effects on the body. I had not appreciated that, when you eat turkey, your body digests turkey, which is substantively, materially different from your body digesting an apple. Despite the pain I had to endure to understand this, I am glad that I now do.

One part of Ramadan that I’ve found questionable so far is its…incentive structures. Let me explain.

So during Ramadan, one is permitted to eat at night, which usually means one meal early in the morning and one in the evening. This being so, the natural thing to do is to eat two large meals to compensate for not eating throughout the rest of the day. After all, during Ramadan, one is expected to continue with their daily life, just as the Prophet did. While I will happily concede that the food after fasting is delicious in a way no food can typically be by its own right, it does feel gluttonous to see that the clock has struck 6:20 and immediately prepare an elaborate multi-course meal each evening. Now, perhaps habitually eating a big dinner each night is not in itself gluttony. Perhaps it is actually a mirror that reveals my own gluttony. I can see before my very eyes all the food that I would have otherwise consumed throughout the day, laid across my small counter from the fridge to the stove top. Perhaps this incredible feat of consumption only makes me feel bad because it reveals how much I depend on physical sustenance to sustain myself. I’m not sure. Regardless, it feels a bit ridiculous, and it certainly doesn’t feel pious.

But I digress, because if there’s one thing Ramadan absolutely incentivizes, it’s sloth. According to Islamic tradition, it is better to laze around than it is to break fast. Given the constraints on daily caloric intake, this can actually be quite necessary, and if not necessary, then certainly pleasant. So far, the two days of Ramadan which I have most enjoyed were two weekend days where I intentionally stayed in my room playing video games to avoid needless energy expenditure and thus hunger. Now I am sure that, as my body adjusts to the demands of Ramadan, this sort of behavior will become less necessary, but it will nonetheless remain obvious that, to hedge against the worst side effects of fasting, avoiding physical labor is desirable.

Now this certainly flies counter to many notions that we have in the United States, where the Protestant work ethic is as entrenched as Ramadan is in Dar al-Islam. We have holidays where we take time off work, to be sure, but we have no holidays around which we are expected to work at a lesser rate. This was not always true: prior to the Industrial Revolution, manor lords would habitually cut the hours worked and sometimes even the wages offered outside of the harvest season because the demand for labor simply wasn’t there.

Today, such a notion is highly unusual, and abiding by the fast while being expected to adhere to the same social norms as everyone else in a non-fasting society can lead to some discord. It appears quite bizarre, for instance, to my coworkers at the Home Depot that I would choose not to eat or drink water even if I felt discomfort or put my own health at some risk. I imagine that my fellow Muslim fasters in Western societies will find this sympathetic, and it’s certainly something that makes me think about how the social norms of my society inform the ways in which I am practicing Ramadan. I cannot help but ponder how much different this experience would be if I had grown up Muslim or if I lived in a Muslim country, where organizations establish specific accommodations to make Ramadan more bearable, whether through earlier work start times, breaks during high noon, or public iftar events.

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However, to get back on track, my concerns about gluttony and slothfulness during Ramadan are not purely hypothetical. The periodic gluttony of Ramadan is widely recognized as contributing to potential health risks, especially for diabetics whose bodies struggle to accommodate the massive variations in blood sugar levels. For this reason, many medical professionals advise diabetics against fasting, though many participate regardless.

Slothfulness meanwhile contributes to slower economic growth in Muslim countries during the fasting period. While GDP growth is hard to appreciate in the abstract, it bears remembering that GDP is literally the sum of all goods and services produced in a jurisdiction. If GDP is growing slower, it indicates that people are not getting their wants and needs met as quickly as they otherwise might have. Differences in GDP growth, over a long enough period of time, are the difference between rich countries with rich populations, and poor countries with poor populations.

But perhaps, these are sacrifices worth making. Even if productivity declined by a truly massive amount during the month of Ramadan, it’s only one month, and while it’s certainly wonderful that consumerist Western holidays contribute to GDP growth rather than stifling it, the profane consumerism of holidays like Halloween and Christmas has become a central element of these ancient celebrations, so often criticized that criticism has become a cliché. Maybe there’s something to this low productivity. Maybe it’s the price of keeping holy-days holy. In the West, we have no days where discipline and restraint are placed above desire and indulgence. We have Valentine’s Day for sex, St. Patrick’s Day for beer, the Fourth of July for blowing stuff up, Halloween for candy, Thanksgiving for eating, Christmas for materialism, New Years Eve for staying up late, and the rest are just a day off work. We have no holidays in this country that ask that we do anything but lower ourselves to our basest desires. Ramadan asks that Muslims raise themselves above them.

Needless to say, I have found Ramadan so far to be an interesting and insightful experience. Given I am a kafir, I must concede that I am ending my Ramadan early: I have a flight to Finland on 16 March that I don’t wish to starve through, and it seems silly to make-up just two days of fasting at some later date. However, until then, unless there is some extenuating circumstance that demands I conclude my fasting early, I will continue to abide by the peculiar rules of this strange and ancient tradition in hopes that I may learn something about myself, grow closer with my friends, and better appreciate this marvelous diverse world in which I live. Inshallah, anyway.

If you enjoyed this essay, then I would highly recommend checking out my supplement to this essay, Ramadan and the Marginalized. I’ll be publishing it tomorrow in The Journal, so it will be behind a paywall. But hey, the best things in life aren’t free.

Happy Snow Day!

I’ve decided to expend this snow day on productive end, namely, launching a new format for the blog. Provisionally, I’m calling it The Journal. I have a lot of ideas, some more fully formed than others, but I’ve consistently been frustrated by a lack of somewhere to put them. Ironically, of course, this was meant to be the problem that this blog solved, but because I have published works to a certain standard of editorial polish in the past, I expect myself to publish works to a similar or superior quality in the future. Additionally, given that I am one day interested in having a career, I would prefer not the publish a piece containing some controversial idea without having given it apt space to breathe and then lose out on future opportunities. Accordingly, my editorial goal on this blog has evolved from “anything goes” to “definitive statement”— again, not a model suited to regular production.

These are the problems that this new format is intended to solve. I will be publishing more regular works containing less filtered takes on a greater variety of issues than I would normally feel comfortable discussing. The catch? Given their regularity, these essays will only be lightly edited, and given they will be lightly edited, I don’t want just any rando stumbling around looking for dirt to just be able to access them at will. This new column will have a paywall.

To the extent that I publish anything like what I have been publishing, I will continue to post these essays free of charge. But in a world where people are so often and so easily misunderstood based on the blurriest facts, I am simply not at a point in my life with my reputation where I feel comfortable exposing myself to a degree any greater than I already have.

Anyway, with that out of the way, if you choose to throw a dollar at me, enjoy the essay!

22 January 2026

This semester, I am taking a gender studies class, whose works and arguments will undoubtedly be the subject of many a column for the next few months. I took one gender studies class a few years ago when I began university, and I thought it would be interesting to return to WGS to conclude my time at university. I genuinely enjoyed my introductory class a few years ago, and I have little doubt I will enjoy this one as well, especially insofar as it is a glimpse into a discipline about which people on both sides of the political spectrum often epouse views that are as strident as they are irrational.

Today, I am reading Defiant Memory as Disability Justice: An Interview with Patty Berne of Sins Invalid by Alison Kopit and recording my live reaction to it as I read.

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Today, a friend and I are launching the NORMIEMETER, a first-of-its-kind quiz that compares your political opinions to those of the median American to determine how “normal” they are.1

The quiz is 40 questions long, though there is a more comprehensive 120 question available for all you sickos out there as well. The quiz asks about a variety of political issues in a manner that has been empirically demonstrated to tease out more accurate answers than traditional issue polling. It then sorts users into one of five typologies, assigns a “normie score,” and generates a comprehensive table illustrating where they agree and disagree with the American public. If you would like to learn more about our methodology, you can look at the about page.

This quiz can be a useful tool for learning about the views of your fellow Americans. People tend to systematically believe that their views are more common than they actually are, and Americans in particular tend to exaggerate the radicalism and homogeneity of their political opponents. Simply put, we aren’t naturally great at intuiting how weird our views are. So why guess? This quiz is a fun way for people to get a better, more objective idea of how close they are to the median— a difficult task in an era when it’s easy to algorithmically curate both one’s news exposure and social circle.

We’re looking forward to future work on this project should it prove popular. If you have any feedback on the quiz or its website, as always, feel free to leave a comment under this post or to send me an email at bwj@onlytothinking.com.

Click here to see the Normiemeter!

Additionally, I plan on posting a more typical piece next Monday. I’ve been working on it for a hot minute, and. Well. I hope I’m happy how it turns out. It should be interesting nonetheless!

~ BWJ

In the past forty-eight hours, I have been bombarded by media and punditry relating to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Some people from across the political spectrum had good answers to his assassination.

Ezra Klein, a liberal columnist for the New York Times, wrote an analysis of Kirk's life and legacy. Kirk's longtime political rival, Klein acknowledged that he does not know Kirk and that he makes for a poor eulogist, but he conceded an intense respect for the organization he had built and its effectiveness in rallying the long-out-of-reach young conservative. "A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy," he comments. And Kirk certainly had a taste for disagreement. He ends on a harrowing note about how liberal democracy is threatened when anyone's ability to participate is threatened. "We can live with losing an election because we believe in the promise of the next election; we can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument. Political violence imperils that." His concluding sentence: "We are all safe, or none of us are."

This is a good response to Charlie Kirk's death: poignant, tempered, and startling.

J.J. McCullough, a centrist YouTuber, takes a more skeptical view of Kirk and his death, questioning the extent to which he was unique or even interesting. A culture critic first and foremost, McCullough argues that the interesting thing about Kirk's assassination has been the melodrama of the reaction and the extent to which it has been defined by a fashionable apocalypticism and based on the assumption that American democracy is uniquely fragile. He sees this reaction as cynical and opportunist, questioning the extent to which political rhetoric contributes to political violence and points to rising rates of mental illness as a more probable cause.

This is a good response to Charlie Kirk's death: heterodox, critical, and thought-provoking.

Mark Antonio Wright, the executive editor of the famously conservative National Review, focuses his pen on his own faction, exhorting conservatives to consider the best outlet for their anger over Kirk's assassination. Beginning with an excerpt from a poem by William Butler Yeats, he argues that America is facing a crisis of political violence that treads in both directions and that we should remind ourselves that extremism remains a marginal position. Americans are not violent lunatics, and now is the time to be Christ-like, the time for Lincoln's party to follow in the path of Lincoln and seek friends, not enemies. "Tell me a more efficacious path, and I’m ready to listen. But I doubt you’ll find one," he says.

This too is a good response to Charlie Kirk's death: necessary, clear, and moral.

I would recommend all of these articles, each good in its own right, but I would also point out what these authors do not do. They do not:

• Turn a contentious political commentator from a man into a saint.

• Make thinly veiled justifications for the murder of a person who did little more than practice those same rights that every American practices every day.

• Attempt to deploy some rhetorical sleight of hand to distract from the event.

• Use this event as an opportunity to make tangential arguments or shill for a cause.

In the lesser political commentary of the past forty-eight hours, I have seen too many engage in these sorts of arguments. I spent yesterday evening convincing an acquaintance not to “arm up” to protect himself against the radical left. I woke up this morning to a conservative commentator yelling at an NPR host for daring to call the recently deceased controversial. I spent much of this afternoon scrolling through the Instagram stories of friends and acquaintances who indulged in justification and apologism for murder.

I’m going to take a moment here to be uncharacteristically forward: If your first reaction to this guy's death was to say that this will make a convincing argument for conservatism, gun control, or the children of Palestine, I think you're a smug moron. If you just happened to awake from a long social media slumber today to post about a random school shooting in Colorado or your favorite Bible verse, I don't believe you’re acting in good faith. If you think that “Live by the sword, die by the sword” is an appropriate aphorism to apply to a man who never wielded a sword against another man, I think your stupidity might border on evil.

My mom always told me that I ought to stand for something lest I fall for anything. My stance is simple: I don't care who Charlie Kirk was. I don't think it makes an inch of difference whether he was a nice guy, a mean guy, a family man, an abusive patriarch, a good Christian, or a shallow puritan. I am selfish. I want to live in a nice, safe middle-class society where random acts of violence are rare, despised, and persecuted to the fullest extent of the law, as created by an elected legislature and as enforced by an even-handed justice system. I do not want to live in a society where life and death are decided by roving vigilante moralists, unconstrained by democratic processes. In a word, I want a society where everyone is treated equally. I want a society where everyone knows where the red lines are and what will happen if they cross them. I do not want a society where giving a speech on a university campus is a dice roll.

When someone does something unexpected and heinous to another, it undermines this basic equality. Crime creates fear, insecurity, and paranoia. It undermines the social bonds that make life meaningful, and it makes life worse for everyone.

When people make bad arguments about Kirk's murder, when they turn him into a martyr, a villain, or pretend to dodge the matter altogether, they miss this more essential point. They miss that we live in a society bound by certain rules that ensure that we can live amongst each other without killing each other. They miss that we live in a society that strives for legal equality independent of each person's individual judgments. They miss that this beautiful, flawed thing we have is tenuous and rare.

Globally, there are astonishingly few societies that work as well as ours. We live in the oldest significant republic in the world, and one that has successfully reformed itself to become more democratic over time.1 We are wealthy beyond most people's wildest dreams, with a majority of Americans falling into the global upper class. Nearly a fifth of all immigrants come here as opposed to any other country. Our government, our wealth, and our prestige are exceptional, and it is our privilege that we can vote in the world’s most important elections, order whatever we want to be delivered to us at any time, and watch all the most popular movies without subtitles.

Let's not soil this thing with petty violence.

I came out in my sophomore year of high school. It was September 2019: a transitional period in my life, as all periods somehow are.

Just prior to my freshman year, I moved to Lawton, Oklahoma. In the ensuing school session, I experienced a deep and prolonged depression that involved multiple suicide attempts and climaxed in a brief institutionalization at a mental hospital. I only slept a few nights in the hospital before I was able to charm my way out, or at least that's how I tell the story. The reality is more that I told my parents about the pills they tried to put me on after one night, and they pulled me out. The myth isn't entirely a lie, though: it seemed that I had left a positive impression on the staff, which seemed to give them license to expedite my departure. In the hospital, I was happy, though I wouldn't have admitted it, for it was the first time in a long time that I had a purpose for my strife: to get out.

So I got out, and I returned to the miserable environment from which my imprisonment had liberated me. I returned to a school where I hated my peers, and my peers regarded me strangely. I hated my classes, for they were largely remedial, boring, or both. I hated its culture, defined in most classrooms by the chronic laziness of instructor and student alike. Today, I call it a first-hand lesson in the failures of public education in Oklahoma. Back then, I wouldn’t have been so sharp.

Of course, I denied my misery. After my institutionalization, I began going to therapy, and my therapist, lovely as she was, hardly got through to me. For every point she raised on how I might improve my life, I had a counter. I didn't need friends at a school I despised — I had online friends in communities reflecting my intellectual interests. I confidently asserted my satisfaction with my life. She didn't buy it, but what could she do? I was a stubborn horse in a deep lake.

The man to whom I owe my eventual rise from misery is a classmate who would become my closest friend. Taking an irrational interest in me in a nothingburger class on "ethics" that primarily served to fill seniors' schedules and give them a field trip to OKC on the school's dime, he invited me to a Discord server with a plethora of largely LGBTQ people who attended our school. Initially, I exploited the server's security vulnerabilities to send everyone vulgar messages. After they patched the holes and I realized they weren't bothered by my childish games, I relaxed. Over the summer, I came to know the people who used the server. When I returned to school in August, I was able to meet them. Suddenly, I had friends. One of them was another boy whom I'd been uncomfortably eyeing for the previous year. We got to know each other and started to like each other, and a mutual friend intervened to play matchmaker. Suddenly, I had a boyfriend.

That is why, in September 2019, I came out. I suppose I did, anyway: by implication. What other message is a mother supposed to derive when her fourteen-year-old son waltzes out of his therapist's office and declares that he'll be going to Homecoming with his boyfriend? She asked if I was gay. I said bisexual. My parents were accepting, as accepting as they would ever be of any of their children's decisions, anyhow.

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                                                                          II.

Born in 2004, my political memory begins around the time of the 2008 election. I remember watching election day coverage on MSNBC with my parents. The talking heads called it a "Race for the White House", and I believed them. I imagined McCain and Obama dashing through the woods, catching glimpses of a white manor obscured by dense, green forest. A few months later, I watched on TV as the United States inaugurated its first Black president. When my grandparents came to visit, they gifted me with a globe, an atlas, and a book on Presidential history, featuring the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama. They gave my mom a commemorative plate for the occasion of his victory, emblazoned with gilded text reading:

                                                      "CHANGE HAS COME"

My liberal, middle-class, suburban family was happy to embrace this change. Amidst chores, my mom passed the time watching Oprah Winfrey, The View, and Dr. Phil.1 When the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that there is a constitutional right to marry without discrimination, I remember my parents using Macklemore's chart-topping hit SAME LOVE to explain what this meant and why it was right. I remember when the studio audience on The View applauded wildly at the news that Caitlyn Jenner had come out as a transgender woman as her Vanity Fair cover feature filled the screen. I remember one evening, Nickelodeon interrupted its regular programming to play a documentary about how schools had been addressing the bullying of LGBTQ adolescents.

During this period, public attitudes towards LGBTQ people liberalized substantially as this once marginalized, ghettoized population became a part of the mainstream of American civic life. Same-sex marriage turned from a concept widely maligned to one widely endorsed. By 2010, student-led Gay-Straight Alliances had become a mainstay in public schools. In 2014, TIME Magazine declared the transgender tipping point. In 2016, Netflix's most-watched show of all time was an LGBTQ dramedy set in a women's prison. The list of LGBTQ firsts in the 2010s is so long that Wikipedia felt obliged to make it its own article. As I began to regularly use the internet in 2017, I stumbled into a world saturated with rainbows, a digital youth culture constructed in the image of a generation increasingly willing to identify with their sexuality first. Bisexuals, transgender people, and young queers chasing gender in the clouds, congregating in online spaces untethered to geography and bound by common ideology.

This was the social and cultural environment in which I was raised, and its notions shaped how I interacted with my sexuality.

In 2011, Lady Gaga released "Born This Way." A self-described "freedom song", it has become the most prolific LGBTQ+anthem of all time, selling 8 million copies worldwide. In 2023, Rolling Stone listed the song as the #1 most inspirational LGBTQ anthem of all time: a testament to its cultural footprint. Per the title, Lady Gaga argues that one should take pride in their identity, whatever it might be. She says we were born this way. "We are all born superstars," she tells us. "God makes no mistakes," she insists. "I must be myself, respect my youth/A different lover is not a sin."

In more legalistic, scientific terminology, she argues for immutability, the idea that some predisposition compels LGBTQ people to identify and behave as they do, and that if this compulsion is suppressed in any way, it is a form of oppression. This is a theme so common in LGBTQ discussions that it's become a trope: “I always felt that something was different about me”. Transgender figures discuss how they had been discreetly trying on clothing from the opposite sex since they were children. A father says he had suspected his son was gay since the time the boy, as a toddler, told his mother that he would like to marry him.

This belief has become embedded in how we discuss LGBTQ identity. To refer to "self-discovery," for instance, implies the existence of a coherent, unchanging, and immutable self. It implies something tangible, a hero's journey with a treasure at the center of a jungle temple. It's very useful. If sexuality is immutable, then discrimination based on sexuality is no different than discrimination based on race or sex, and non-heterosexual identification is not a moral failure, but an inevitability. In our society, we regard it as just to punish moral failures, but to punish a birthright? Unconscionable. At worst, homosexuality becomes a disease with no cure, a plight for which humanitarians should offer sympathy, not condemnation. At best, it becomes a queerness in which one can take pride.

                                                                          III.

Following the cues of society and my friend group, I took pride. When referring to this period, I often use the term "aggressively bisexual", and it was defined by excessive PDA, a disproportionate interest in (rumored) closeted figures from world history, and a fascination with bisexual symbols and stories. Lasting from 2019 to 2021, it coincided with the era when my politics were most left-wing and, not coincidentally, when my rhetoric was most vulgar. My favorite book was "It's Me, Eddie", a semi-autobiographical account of a bisexual, Trotskyite Soviet expat attempting to cope with his divorce by relying on the kindness of strangers. An avant-garde, stirring, yet edgy work, it featured radical leftist idealism, intense pessimism, and masturbation: a perfect summary of my philosophy in this era. As much as my parents might have embraced my bisexuality, it was nonetheless a rebellion against their authority, their ideas, and my suburban upbringing, which had become all too normal for my increasingly radical tastes. I watched video essays on queer liberation and hung out in Discord servers with Eastern European teens who romanticized the USSR and freely used slurs. I glorified anarchism, the 1980s English gay clubbing scene, gender-bending fashion innovations, and political violence.

I was under the impression that this is who I was and who I would, in large measure, always be. After my lost freshman year, I was thankful for what I perceived as being the stable ideals of the radical left. I was impressed by clip compilations wherein Bernie Sanders would advocate for the same policy positions in the 1990s, the 2000s, and the current year. I was similarly enthralled with "BreadTube", a loose cohort of far-left YouTubers who provided counterarguments against liberalism, conservatism, and right-wing populism. They exuded a confidence in their beliefs that left a strong impression on me, and so I too became confident in mine, uninformed and juvenile as they might have been. I didn't perceive a need for growth beyond refinement of the person I already was. In a deeply adolescent way, I figured that I had found the truth and myself, that this was not a phase, but it was who I was.

Of course, this misconception is a common delusion. Beginning in mid-2020, accelerating after the January 6th riots, and reaching its zenith during my first years in university, I began to unevenly moderate in my disposition, rhetoric, and ideology. Part and parcel with this process, I became straighter. In my sophomore year of high school, I performatively flouted that I would "fuck whoever I pleased [sic]". By my junior year, I identified as a bisexual who leaned in one direction. By senior year, I increasingly dodged the question, recognizing that my preferences were so heavily tilted towards heterosexuality that the label was awkward. By university, I was half-jokingly referring to myself as an ex-bisexual.

Underfoot, I was slowly realizing that I had bought into a series of half-truths about society and identity because I had never bothered to seriously interrogate my biases. I grew up in a strongly left-leaning household, and during my teenage rebellion, I only ever took my instilled beliefs to their most extreme. My parents supported the Black Lives Matter protests, so I supported the riots. My parents supported gay rights, so I supported gender abolition. My parents favored progressive economics, so I favored the abolition of capitalism. I increasingly came to recognize a simple truth: that while I may have been born with some bisexual potential, it was the society of which I was a member that permitted me to explore this potential, and I alone who endowed this bisexuality with its aggressive character. I endowed it with meaning. I made it a part of my identity.

I have often remarked that, if I had not found social spaces so stridently in favor of LGBTQ people, I likely would not have come out. I would have skipped over this phase of my life with some degree of repression. Today’s youth culture is extraordinarily tolerant of LGBTQ behavior and identification. Today, nearly a quarter of all high schoolers identify as LGBTQ. As grateful as I am to have grown in a garden so accommodating of variety, I am compelled to wonder if our narrow conceptions are sufficient to account for the growing range of sexual experiences that today’s young people have. They weren’t for mine.

Contrary to Lady Gaga, modern scientists recognize that sexual identity is not immutable. While there is no consensus as to what causes sexual orientation, there are few who still cling to immutability. Genetic predisposition, prenatal hormone exposure, childhood socialization, and individual preferences all play a significant role in determining sexual orientation. The emerging consensus is that, while certain immutable traits predispose people to certain preferences, these immutable traits are no guarantee of an immutable identity. To the contrary, numerous studies over decades have found that bisexuals in particular tend to move towards the poles over time, adopting either entirely homosexual or entirely heterosexual preferences, identities, and lifestyles as they mature.

I am a case study of the latter camp, but as I joined this camp, I didn't realize it even existed. All I had been taught was immutability. All I knew was immutability. I felt shame and awkwardness around my changing preferences, for what room does immutability leave for the typical bisexual? In a framework of immutability, a bisexual with changing preferences is either repressing part of their identity or, worse, was lying about their preferences all along. I knew I wasn't a liar. I figured that what I had felt with my boyfriend was real. It is difficult to argue for the unreality of one's own experiences. But could I have been oppressing myself? And if so, what self was I repressing if I could not see it or feel it?

One evening in my freshman year of university, a handsome gentleman insisted on joining me in my room one evening, and the next morning, we went on a date. Was I repressing myself when I felt repulsion? When I rejected his polite advances? When I zoned out during the date, intentionally answered inquiries in the most off-putting ways, and then declared that I was going to take an eight-hour walk into the middle of nowhere, and then did so? Why should I have felt guilty?

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                                                                          IV.

At the beginning of last June, Pride Month seemed like a recommendation. Eerily absent from many corporate logos that would have once flown the rainbow flag, its arrival was greeted with little fanfare, the least that I can recall since I began using the internet in 2017. Corporations have retreated from explicit marketing towards LGBTQ people and ceased sponsorship of Pride events. The new President has declared that the United States will henceforth only recognize two genders, and he has prohibited transgender military service. 2025 has been the year of the vibe shift.

At the time, I was in Mexico City taking a class on history and politics, and we had the opportunity to sit down with a professional advocate for LGBTQ issues in that country. A trans woman in our group asked about how he copes, as a homosexual male, with living in such a culturally conservative country. He answered that "we resist by existing." The trans woman offered emphatic agreement with this sentiment. In my teenage years, I would have found such a sentiment inspiring. Today, I find it annoying.

In his 1995 book on the gay rights movement Virtually Normal, Andrew Sullivan defines four factions in American queer politics: the prohibitionists, the conservatives, the liberals, and the liberationists, criticizing each in turn. He defines the liberationists as a faction of zealots, a near-perfect mirror image of the prohibitionist right, with whom they see themselves as locked in an existential ideological war.

Per Sullivan:

“For the liberationists, the full end of human fruition is to be free of all social constructions, to be liberated from the condition of homosexuality into a fully chosen form of identity, which is a repository of individual acts of freedom. It is not only to rebel against the fiction of nature but to rebel against the rebellion against nature, to defy the ways in which human thought seeks to constrain and control human freedom.” (57)

Sullivan’s descriptions of the liberationist movement of the 1990s retain a certain timeless quality, for as that brand of radicalism has been imported to the digital medium, it has scarcely changed. He points out an obsession with language that can manifest itself in authoritarian behaviors, performative activism that exhibits a dangerous lack of interest in state power or institutions, and intramovement competition between rival oppressed peoples, each one seeing its strife as more essential and severe than the next.

He argues that, while liberationist movements can work, their function is highly particularistic. While the flamboyant, performative activism of ACT UP successfully raised awareness of the AIDs epidemic, which forced political action, liberationist movements struggle with reforming existing institutions since they see institutions themselves as oppressive. Liberationist movements struggled to successfully agitate for gay marriage or the end of “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. Why would a real queer wish to enslave themselves in such a normie institution as marriage? Why would a real queer wish to subjagate themselves to the imperialist army of the country that is oppressing them?

The liberationists play a significant role in defining the modern LGBTQ movement, especially in the eyes of young people. Today, these are its neo-pronoun users, its anti-gender contrarians, and its paranoid adolescents. Liberationist spaces are permeated with narcissism and childish infighting. At once, there are vapid calls for universal toleration, bad actors who take advantage of universal toleration, and those who call for arbitrary purity tests to evaluate people’s worthiness of being included within such spaces.2

This chronically online, immature movement is not interested in integration and normalization. It is not primarily interested in greater personal freedoms for all, but in gatekeeping and labels. It is interested in self-segregation under the guise of "community building," premised on the belief in some coherent self. Still perceiving itself in an existential battle against the forces of reaction, the modern observer will easily find widely-accepted arguments that the queer community in the United States faces an existential threat from without, generating a unique sense of xenophobic paranoia, that anyone outside the community is against it and wishes to destroy it.3

I fear that the movement for rights for sexual minorities, which began as a movement of people who were tired of being reduced to their sexuality and pressed to the edges of society, has boldly transformed into a movement of people who take perverse pride in reducing themselves to their sexuality and positioning themselves at the edge of society.

In modern liberationist media, fringe arguments to this effect are easier to find than a hook-up on Grindr. In a widely-viewed podcast interview of the social psychologist Dr. Devon Price by the prominent, queer video essayist Matt Bernstein, they make the argument that respectability politics is a form of self-imposed stigma deriving from insecurity rather than political strategy, as they seek not to understand, but to “psychoanalyze” their opponents. They argue that the LGBTQ movement should not seek to distance itself from fringe, unpopular sects such as polyamorists, neo-pronoun users, or scat fetishists. They make the slippery, fallacious argument that the only logical end of drawing red lines is that the only valid queer is Pete Buttigieg. They lament that people make decisions about their body and their hair based on how they want people to perceive them, and they characterize requests to explain one’s boutique identity as a “foundational queer trauma” and that, accordingly, being demisexual is “the height of disenfranchisement”.

In a discussion of an incident where someone leaked a sex tape of a man having sex in a Senate hearing room, the guest described the broad condemnation of his behavior in queer political circles as “the worst form of respectability politics”. The host smartly replied, "So what you're saying is we need to have more sex in the Senate chamber," to which the guest replied, with a straight face, “I do think so, yeah, because the Senate doesn’t have any respect for our bodies.” This is the same Senate that, at the time of recording, had passed the Respect for Marriage Act by twenty-five votes just two years prior. In the ensuing discussion of the Senate’s crimes against queerness (which, at this time, was controlled by the Democrats), the best the pair could muster was a renunciation of America’s policy towards Israel. This is not a politics of reason, but a politics of ambiguous resentment.

Does queer liberationism work to achieve those things sought by sexual minorities? I'm a skeptic. In the past few decades, it didn’t bring about the end of "Don't ask, don't tell", it didn’t bring about same-sex marriage, and it certainly didn't make any of these changes popular. These reforms were instead wrought through the hard and bland work of legal reform and coalition-building carried out by those who did not view the straight world from a straitjacket. This — combined with social changes like increased urbanization and, frankly, cohort replacement — was what made my childhood possible. Earnest, loud, concentrated pride will not be sufficient to liberalize gender norms to accommodate transgender and nonbinary people, the primary battleground for LGBTQ rights today.

No mere innocuous thing, liberationism may undermine the broader movement. Its dogmatism can lead to what Representative Sarah McBride derides as a lack of grace in LGBTQ politics, a sort of excessive confidence that leads to exclusionary practices, extremism, and self-righteousness in a system that rewards coalition-building, moderation, and humility. Maladaptive political performances do not promote acceptance and assimilation of queer people, but undermines it by its very design, for the point of liberationism is not to win arguments and change laws. It is to annihilate social constructs. It is to rebel.

On account of their counterproductive ideology, liberationists operate with incentives that put them directly at odds with the aim of full citizenship for LGBTQ people, for it is when people are disillusioned and isolated that they turn to extremists. Liberationism is a primary beneficiary of queer marginalization, and it is no wonder that they would defend or advocate for weird or even offensive behavior among their young followers. What better way to marginalize your followers than to convince them to marginalize themselves? It is likewise not surprising that liberationists habitually engage in fearmongering and spread misinformation like “Trans people are no longer allowed to leave the country”. The more awkward, maladapted, and lonely LGBTQ teens are, the more they are convinced that society at large violently despises the person that their biology or their soul compels them to be, the more the ranks of this movement swell. Liberationists benefit from miserable, misinformed teens.

I am not a revolutionary. I am sympathetic to Andrew Sullivan’s position that an objective of the movement should be to so thoroughly integrate its constituent identities into mainstream culture that they dissolve themselves as important markers: equality without distinction. This position has never been without controversy. Liberationists disliked Sullivan in the 1980s for his stalwart advocacy of gay marriage, a bland, conservative policy that would undermine the uniqueness of queer identity. For Sullivan, this is part of the point. One day, there should be a farewell to arms, a day when LGBTQ people are fully and unquestionably integrated into society on equal footing with equal rights. For me, rebellion is a means to an end, not an existential meaning in and of itself.

I am likewise sympathetic to J.J. McCullough’s position, whose primary gripe with being a homosexual in modern North America is that others insist on this fact’s centrality. I am annoyed that the mere revelation that I am or was once a bisexual will tint how others see me. I am annoyed that potential romantic partners may regard this irrelevant fact as a plus or a disqualification. I am annoyed that I feel compelled to disclose my personal sexual history to be taken seriously when discussing what is properly a matter of universal human rights.

After an adolescence defined in no small part by my emerging, shifting sexuality, I would prefer to live in a world where my sexual preferences play little role in the way that people think about me. I do not resist by existing. I resist by resisting, and I exist by existing. Sometimes, when I exist, I am also resisting, but other times, I am typing on a computer, eating a shawarma sandwich, stocking shelves, cleaning my room, or expressing my personal sexual preferences as I feel appropriate. I am not, by nature of my mere existence as a person who has fornicated with members of each sex, a rebel. My sexual preferences imply no other preferences.

My sexuality is not an immutable element of my identity, but one shifting trait that exists alongside a million and one other traits of greater and lesser importance. In a post-sexual revolution world where sex is primarily pleasurable rather than disproportionately functional, there's no reason why sexuality needs to be any more important than one's taste in music or cinema. There is no reason to define oneself in opposition to society on the mere account of one’s sexuality. There is no reason to position how one gets off at the nucleus of one's identity. Your preference for putting your fleshy parts in the fleshy parts of others of a given sex should not be the thing for which you are most proud in your life. In a society as liberal as the United States, where people are largely afforded the opportunity to define themselves according to their deeds rather than their identities, it need not be the first flag in your bio or your first introduction to a stranger. In a world of bravery, empathy, diligence, wisdom, creativity, and virtue, in a world of science, art, technology, industry, and commerce, there is no reason to base your identity on sexual preference.

                                                                          V.

If one should insist on having it, pride should come second to principles. John Locke was the father of liberal philosophy, and as it so happens, a leading inspiration for the Constitution of the United States, in whose preamble he is paraphrased. Anyone who believes in the concept of individual rights today owes that idea, in large numbers, to John Locke. In one of Locke’s seminal works, the aptly named Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Locke argues that

“The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.”

While even Locke was a hypocrite for his refusal to afford the same toleration to Catholics and atheists, the principle he describes has become embedded in America’s culture: liberal toleration. Practically every American argument is a liberal argument, a dispute between what types of rights and whose rights should take priority in any given case. The principles of individual rights, of toleration, of the freedom of peoples to associate and behave however they should so please are stable, unifying principles.

In a time of grand upheaval, as every period somehow is, it is on these universal principles that we should redouble our efforts, not bickering over terminology nor appealing for special validation, but ensuring that the basic rights guaranteed to all members of our society in theory are protected in practice.

When schools ban student newspapers for using students preferred names and publishing LGBTQ friendly pieces or shut down student-led LGBTQ groups; when LGBTQ couples face discrimination in the adoption process as they attempt to satisfy their duty to rear the next generation of our species; when legal adults with their full legal rights struggle to obtain medical care on account of an executive order that only applies to minors; when American citizens are subject to targeted permit denials, not for the time, place, and manner of their protest, but for their identity, everyone who believes in freedom, rule of law, and the noble cause of this nation should be incensed.

Pride, to the lapsed bisexual, is whatever I want it to be. It’s a quirk of the personality, a political tool, or an alien concept vested in others’ passionate souls. It’s an aesthetic, a fashion, a rhetorical turn of phrase. It’s a wisp of candle smoke or a burning cigar, a dewy morning fog or a puffy white cloud. It’s drips of water on a thin wooden paintbrush, or it’s an Indian Ocean tsunami crashing into a wooden hut. The only important thing is that I choose what it is, whenever I want. I choose whether to believe it, and I choose whether to use it: not for the ideologues, but for me.

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I’d like to offer a special thanks to my friend Nico W. for her help in researching this subject and editing the piece.

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To reach me for inquiry, just email braydenjohnson@onlytothinking.com

It is a grand irony of history that the conservative movement would make itself an enemy of self-segregation, but it’s no surprise that the University of Oklahoma would be part and parcel in this history. According to an anonymous source close to the administration, the university is moving to divest from identity-based student groups.

American conservatism as we know it today is a relatively new ideology that largely developed during the Cold War as a reaction to their perceived failures of liberalism. In its first major public breakthrough, the conservative movement rallied behind Barry Goldwater, a civil libertarian who opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act on practical grounds. Though he lost in a landslide, he became the first Republican in nearly a century to win over the white South. In the 1970s, the conservative movement supported President Nixon as he railed against unpopular busing programs that sought to forcibly integrate public schools by sending black students to racist white suburban schools, and white students to poor urban black schools.

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In its short history, the conservative movement has often defended those wishing to mind their business, even to the exclusion of others: ethnic minorities, women, and homosexuals. This idea was a central tenet of the so-called ”Southern Strategy”, which appealed to southern white racism by layers of abstraction: from racial slurs and Jim Crow to states’ rights and the “welfare queen”. While the conservative movement in its early years defined itself in opposition to populist Dixiecrats like George Wallace, it has scarcely favored explicit efforts to promote integration.

All along, the University of Oklahoma has found itself a stick in a flowing river. It was the defender in a landmark 1948 Supreme Court case that prohibited racial discrimination in admissions; it has since gone on to honor the memory of Ada Sipuel, the Black law student who sued them for their backwardness. A mere two years later, it was the defender in another Supreme Court case that prohibited segregation on campus.

Despite court rulings and changing policies, practical integration at the university has not been a lightning strike, but a molasses wave. Dr. George Henderson, an OU professor sometimes referred to as a trailblazer for his civil rights activism, has discussed this slow pace of change. When he began teaching here in 1983, interracial couples were still harassed, confederate flags still adorned many windows, and Black students were still called racial slurs on their walks to class. These were not rare aberrations, but a common indignity endured by generations of alumni for merely existing on this campus. In my freshman year, I remember donning a mask in the late hours of the night and wandering about the barren blue halls of the now-destroyed Adams Tower, once the university’s premier segregated dormitory.

Following a summer of tense, sometimes violent, racial justice protests in 2020, our social, state, and economic institutions responded. Weary of the slow tick of social change, a vanguard of increasingly left-wing, disproportionately white professionals tried to push forward the clock’s arms. The Great Awokening was in full swing. Overnight, video games, social media feeds, and football fields were consumed with black boxes as a symbolic show of solidarity. Major corporations made lofty promises to fight racism in their culture, hiring practices, and supplier relations. The newly inaugurated President Biden, an outspoken opponent of integrated busing in the 1970s, signed an executive order calling for a “comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all”. The University of Oklahoma launched mandatory diversity training for all students and staff in August of 2020.

Backlash from the right was as quick as it was decisive. Reformed from their days in the Nixon administration, when they advocated for the rights of racial groups to self-segregate, this new generation of conservatives took issue with what they branded “woke”. Rejecting a burgeoning status quo, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo wrote about the ghost of Jim Crow, criticizing racially segregated training programs, school events, and vaccination distribution in liberal domains. The Heritage Foundation chronicled incidents of resegregation in higher education, delivery apps, and government at all levels. Last year, noted conservative commentator Matt Walsh asked “Am I Racist?” in his comedic documentary on the excesses of liberal diversity efforts, questioning why white academics should feel entitled to benefit from anti-black racism and why white liberals would pay money to be told that they bear a shameful scar left by their country's racist past. The modern conservative movement looked upon the growing woke ideology, not as a boon to civil rights, but a threat to gains. “We have abolished legal distinctions based on race,” they said, “Why is it towards these concepts that this new social movement runs?”

But our university held firm to its program. In response to an executive order from Oklahoma’s Republican governor that prohibited DEI programs in state government, President Harroz defiantly stated that “Though we are obligated to comply with the governor’s executive order, we will remain committed to ensuring an education from the University of Oklahoma remains accessible and available to all.” He denounced the executive order as “a step backward” and declared that this university’s values “transcend political ideology, and in them, we are unwavering.” He declared that the university would continue along the charted course: “Together, we deserve nothing less.”

On January 20th 2025, President Trump signed an executive order prohibiting DEI programs in the federal government. This time, the mood seems different.

According to an anonymous source, the University of Oklahoma is preparing for the worst. A recipient of federal funding, the University is in consultation with its many self-segregating student organizations. Scrolling through a list of clubs at our university, there are Greek life councils and multicultural Greek life councils; student associations and Black student associations; trade associations and minority trade associations. In a previous piece, I observed that nine out of the top ten recipients of university funding are explicitly identity-based student groups.

These organizations are mainstays at the university, and the Student Government Association adores them. They have a long record of successful events under their belt: specialty dinners, historic commemorations, and welcoming programs for freshmen in their in-group. The common view among the SGA is that they win their large budgets through their deeds.

Per President Trump’s executive order, the university has told many of these organization’s leaders to prepare to rebrand, dissolve, or deregister.

There is a certain air of desperation, and hearts are heavy. For fear of retribution, President Harroz himself is conducting this business via his personal email account. Everything is hush-hush. When the governor issued his executive order, there was a certain sense that, if the university could weather this storm, it could retain its diversity programs. In January 2024, I attended a meeting regarding the future of funding for international student groups. There was a widely held belief that, while the mechanisms might change, the university’s policies would not. The siege would relent and the state would retreat. The university would retain its diversity programs under any other name, and the state would declare victory.

It’s hard to know what the future holds now.

While nothing is public yet, it seems that the university now feels compelled to act with a heavy heart. As of now, we don’t know who all is on the chopping block, nor do we know how severe the divestment will be. Undoubtedly, when they eventually issue a statement, the university will put on a brave face, but it will be that of a soldier permitted to bear his flag as he submits to his conqueror.

Many advocates for DEI programs haven’t lost hope yet. Lawyers across the country are launching lawsuits to preserve their clients’ DEI programs, criticizing Trump’s executive orders on the matter as “vague and unconstitutional”. But it seems the University of Oklahoma will not be such a challenger. Change is coming to our university and it remains to be seen what this change will mean. Undoubtedly, this reform will become yet another chapter in our university’s storied struggle with history, identity, and equality.

An all-too-American debate: we are deciding what it really means when we declare that all men are created equal, subject to equal protection under the law.

I would like to thank my sources for their collaboration with me on this piece.

When I was a child, I played youth soccer as a goal keeper and, given my position, I spent most of any given game watching rather than playing. I observed passes from teammate to teammate to interception to dribble to pass to pass to missed shot to goal kick and round and round it went, broken up by the occasional drop kick. During these hours spent by a goal post, waiting for the ball, watching each player, I came to develop a consequentialist philosophy. After seeing the best laid plays collapse and the worst laid plays succeed by obnoxious means, I came to appreciate that what matters is the result of an effort, not the effort itself. An impressive drive that failed to bring the ball to the goal would be fast forgotten. An unimpressive drive that yielded a goal could be the pride of a whole team, the smile on a little boy’s face for a whole week.

I say this all because, last week, I began writing an article on three good things that could happen under the newly inaugurated Trump administration. In an early draft, I speculated on the possibility of a closer relationship with Canada, the abolition of tax on tips, and the revocation of China’s strangely favorable trade status. At the time, I felt that these three things were at least probable and would be broadly popular among the American people. However, as I’ve performed more research on each of these subjects and the political ground has moved beneath our feet, I’ve lost my confidence that I can make any reasonable predictions about what the new Presidential administration might be. There are enough people across America who deal in speculation. Accordingly, I will not deal in dice, but in analysis of the game. On the occasion of the inauguration, I will not judge something that does not yet exist.

Trump is the figure around which many of the greatest minds of a generation have oriented their efforts, either in subverting him or supporting him. He has fundamentally changed the political coalitions in this country, heralding a new era of politics. The Republican Party, once the electoral wing of a conservative movement that touted its rabid opposition to populism and the politics of celebrity, has succumbed to a populist movement led by a celebrity. A scion of Ross Perot’s Reform Party, an ardent critic of the Reagan administration’s record, and a Playboy who flouted his sexual prowess at the sunset of the Moral Majority era, Donald Trump has now twice taken the oath of office as a Republican who rejects abortion bans and touts support for LGBT rights. In 2016, he promised to turn the Republican Party into a worker’s party. In 2024, he narrowly won the support of those Americans making under $50,000 a year on an abandonment of many of the GOP’s traditional, fiscally conservative arguments.1 When was the last time you heard Trump really lambast federal debt?

All this to say that Mr. Trump, regardless of what one may think about him, is a slippery figure. He is a man who threatens nuclear war one day, and then proves the theory of nuclear peace the next. He threatens “hell to pay” on the whole middle east, and then plays a pivotal role in brokering the end to a brutal war. Throughout his first term, Trump threatened to pull out of NATO. The consequence? NATO became stronger than ever, with European nations bolstering their defense spending significantly in the pivotal years prior to the Ukrainian war. Trump presents a dilemma because it is impossible to tell whether he’s a liar, a lunatic, or a lord. He either lies in order to extract certain concessions, acts out because he is incapable of acting rationally, or has a consistent moral compass in every conceivable situation that permits his position on every issues to vary with the leverage he's afforded. I somehow doubt all of these theses.

After all the bristling and showmanship of the last campaign, a decade in the political spotlight, and decades on the public stage, I still have no idea who Trump is or what Trump 2.0 will mean for America. His initial declarations this evening have ranged from personal obsessions, to improbable legal theory, to quaint conservative red meat. You can read the whole list here. At a glance, I find certain orders objectionable, but importantly, nothing has happened yet.

Trump has declared birthright citizenship null. And? Now, it will fall to the courts to decide whether this declaration means anything. Trump has made promises to crack open America and “drill, baby, drill” while rolling back federal rules surrounding emissions. And? Norway built its green economy by exporting oil to its less green counterparts. I also doubt that the owner of the world’s second largest EV company is going to permit his business to get pushed to the shoulder on a highway that he built. Trump has declared the restoration of Schedule F federal employees, a key tenet of the Project 2025 plan to restructure federal bureaucracy. And? Trump’s intentions at any moment are nebulous at best, and they may be good here. Trump is hardly wrong to lament the inefficient firing processes in the federal bureaucracy— and that’s coming from an MPA student! In the worst case scenario for any of these orders, all it would take is one measly act of Congress, one federal judge, or one ill-conceived plan to send them kaput.

So here’s my advice: don’t cheer the dribble, the pass, or even the shot. Cheer (or jeer) the goal. Nothing has happened until it has happened. Soccer balls bounce off the post more often than you would think. As in November, I am entering this administration in good faith as a member of the loyal opposition for a government that has narrowly won the popular mandate. As before, I invite Americans to join me in this grand democratic experiment and to judge, critique, protest, and debate the merits of this new administration.

However, let us not engage with it based on what we think will happen, but on what happens. The odds are slim that every single one of Trump’s ideas are terrible and every one of his plans will entail disaster. If he's as cataclysmic as some of his opponents claim, then catalysm will begin to manifest itself in due time. As for now, I choose not to cry wolf. For the next four years, if the economy continues to grow, if democracy continues to function, and if the states and the people continue to attempt to address the ills that afflict our society, then we will all benefit somewhere down the line. As baffling a trilemma as he is, let’s hope that Trump has comparable ideals and fine ideas, constrained, as all presidents ought to be, by the heavy weight of the constitutional order.

Since election season is well and truly over, I thought I would sit down for a few minutes to tell you what you can expect from Only To Thinking in the future.

To my new subscribers: welcome to Only To Thinking! Here, I write about philosophy and politics with a specific focus on issues affecting Lawton and the University of Oklahoma. My most notable essays have been about a mayoral candidate making promises he couldn’t keep, the local results of the general election, and student government finances at the University of Oklahoma. In between, I’ve also written essays about a variety of subjects, from perceptions of crime in Lawton to an analysis of the vice presidency. I’m thrilled that you’ve subscribed. For you, it’s just an email, but for me, it’s a show of confidence in my work.

Since the election is over, I’m going to be changing tact from current affairs in politics to the sorts of larger, systemic matters that I find really fascinating. Here are some articles that I’ve either already started work on or that I’m going to start soon.

Local Matters

In the next couple of months, I plan on writing essays about:

• The stories behind Lawton’s street names (ex: Quanah Parker, Gore, Sheridan)

• The legacy of the New Deal in and around Lawton

• The history of Lawton’s downtown and, of course, Central Mall

• The oddities of Lawton’s zoning code

Of course, I will be also continue writing about current affairs as needed in Lawton and Norman. We are, after all, in the midst of a public spending boom in Lawton, and there will doubtless be things to discuss on that front. Due to a decline in local media in the past few decades, many communities don’t have professional news organizations to cover local events. While Lawton has KSWO and the Constitution, the former publication is bound to TV-worthy, current events, and the latter is locked behind a high paywall. While I do not begrudge either of these organizations for operating according to economic incentives, I want OTT to transcend the limitations of both of these projects.

Political Matters

In the next few months, I also plan on writing about:

• What “republic” means, from a historical perspective

• What a liberal democracy is

• Why monopolies are important— and often good

I expect the essays in this category to perform relatively poorly, but I think they’re important. For the past few decades, America has been engulfed by a populist wave, and this has been especially evident in the past ten years. As someone with a deep abiding interest in society who studies politics in an academic environment, I feel that intellectual elites are ineffective at communicating substantive ideas to the general public and that the general public is largely ignorant of how our system of government works. Again, while I don’t begrudge anyone for acting according to their interests, I do want to serve a role in correcting these discrepancies.

Beyond Brayden J

Only To Thinking sometimes publishes works from local writers, the most recent example of which is an avant-garde short story in the style of David Foster Wallace. I plan on publishing more of these works in the future. It’s a rare thing for publications to have a readership, so I have no qualms about sharing my good fortune with interesting Oklahomans who share my partiality for local art, local culture, and local politics. Currently, long-time contributor Emily Spotts and public policy researcher Daniel Zavala are cooking up some humorous pieces that, I think, might make for nice Christmas gifts in that jolly time of year.

Conclusion

To cap this little piece off, it’s been a fascinating few months working on OTT, and I look forward to writing more in the future to carry out what I perceive to be my responsibilities. If you enjoy OTT and would like to show your confidence in my work, I encourage you to subscribe. If you would like to reach out to me, I invite you to email me at braydenjohnson@onlytothinking.com. The important takeaway of this letter is that I’m not going away now that the votes have been cast. So long as OTT is the best way that I can use my knowledge and serve my community, I will continue to publish.


Best,

Brayden J

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On November 5th, the United States of America held our quadrennial general elections, during which over 150 million Americans showed up to polling stations across America in order to express their preference on who should fill hundreds, if not thousands, of elected offices across the country.

In Lawton, this year’s election yielded a few notable results with regards to our general partisan preferences, our views on state government, and our general social disposition. In this election, there was something interesting for anyone who cares about civic engagement. Here, I’ll be delving into a few of the highlights:

1. Low Voter Turnout in Comanche County

2. Local Presidential Election Results

3. State Supreme Court Retention Election Results

4. Lawton’s Oklahoma House of Representatives Results

5. Comanche County Ballot Proposition on Sabbath Liquor

#1 - Voter Turnout in Comanche County is Really Low.

As in previous election cycles, voter turnout in Comanche County has remained low. Among every county in Oklahoma with a population over 100,000, Comanche County has consistently had the lowest percentage of voters relative to its total population, with under 30% of Comanche County’s population voting in the last election. While the percentage of voters in a given population is naturally limited since not everyone in any given county is eligible to vote, Comanche County’s low turnout remains striking.

One reason why Comanche County may have such a low number of voters compared to its population is because of Fort Sill which, while providing a population bump, does not supply the county with many voters, with one study finding that military voter turnout in the 2020 election was 27 percentage-points lower than their civilian counterparts. Military voters are also likely to vote in their home state rather than the state their station is in. Accordingly, military voters also have more difficulty voting than civilians, with many voting via finicky absentee ballots. In 2022, around 43% of military voters who wanted to vote did not due to difficulties they faced in either receiving or returning their ballot.

Another reason why Comanche County has such low voter turnout is because of its demographics. In general, poor people, young people, non-white people, and people without a college degree vote at lower rates than rich people, old people, white people, and people with a college degree. Simply put, Comanche County, which is relatively poor and contains Oklahoma’s most diverse city, contains people who are less likely to participate in elections. Contrast Lawton with Rogers County, a wealthy Tulsa suburb where nearly half of the population voted in the most recent election.1

Regardless of the reason, low turnout means that Comanche County, especially Lawton, is poorly represented on the state level. Its citizens just don’t vote.

#2 - Like 2020, Trump Swept Oklahoma, but Lawton Remains a Purple Dot

As expected, Donald Trump won Oklahoma decisively, winning nearly two-thirds of the vote to Kamala Harris’ 31.9% of the vote. The last time the Democratic Presidential candidate won a single county in Oklahoma was in the year 2000, and the last time a Democrat won the state of Oklahoma was in 1964. While Oklahoma County’s early results looked blue early in the night, it was a mirage: by the time all the votes were tallied, Oklahoma County was light red, just as it was in 2020.

While this year’s Presidential results were very similar to 2020, the state as whole was slightly more Republican, reflecting national trends. Tillman, Oklmulgee, Seminole, Choctaw, Cherokee, Comanche, Coal, and Ottowa County all swung more than 2% in favor of the Republicans. However, not all was lost for the Democrats. They made gains of over two percent in Canadian and Ellis County. the biggest losers this election were the independent candidates, which lost almost half a percent statewide, only making small gains in Oklahoma County.

While Comanche County tilted more red this year than in 2024, it remained bluer than Oklahoma as a whole. Lawton itself remained a purple dot. While precincts in downtown Lawton, Pecan Hills, and the eastern suburbs favored Republicans, precincts south of Lee Boulevard overwhelmingly favored Democrats. The remainder of Lawton’s suburbs were the most competitive precincts in the county, favoring one candidate or another by slim margins. With a particularly strong Republican or Democratic ticket, it would be easy to imagine Lawton voting decisively for either party in future elections.

#3 - Moderates and Liberals Fend Off Right-Wing Power Grab

In the last two weeks before the election, dark money groups spent millions of dollars on statewide campaigns to retain or reject three Democrat-appointed Oklahoma Supreme Court Justices. After the failure of a contentious Republican effort to abolish the state’s Judicial Nominating Commission and grant elected officials the final word in deciding Supreme Court Justices, this election was a natural next step in right-wing attempts to democratize the judicial nomination process, or more cynically, to establish a partisan judiciary.

Despite this state’s overwhelming Republican majority in partisan identification, every elected branch of state government, and Presidential preference, this effort largely failed. Of the three justices Oklahoma’s right wished to remove, two were retained in office. While the right-wing OCPA was content to run a victory lap, this election is proof that, in Oklahoma, your vote can still decide an election. Each race was decided by less than one percent: only a few thousand votes statewide.

The vote on whether or not to retain Justice Gurich was the closest statewide race in Oklahoma this year. It was the only statewide election that partisan organizers regarded as competitive, and there are numerous ways you could interpret the results. Maybe this was a right-wing overreach, and the people of Oklahoma called them on their bluff. Maybe this is proof that, when the Democrats spend money to win in Oklahoma, they can and they do. Maybe it’s proof that straight-party voting undermines Democratic margins in Oklahoma by more than anyone could have possibly imagined. Maybe it’s just proof that voters don’t really care as much about these elections as consultants might hope, and many Oklahomans simply flipped a coin for each justice’s fate.

Regardless of what’s true, I think it poses a lot of interesting questions for Oklahoma’s two political parties and their futures. In a state that’s so thoroughly dominated by Republicans, I think that the Democrats should take these elections as a rare win and consider what permitted this anomaly. As for the Republicans, it may be worthwhile looking long and hard at these maps and wondering whether JNC reform is worth the potentially devastating political toll. In 2018, after almost a decade under a frankly hubristic right-wing government, ruby red Kansas elected a Democrat as governor, and that governor is now in her second term. Let these maps serve as a warning: it can happen here too.

For our part, in Comanche County, and in Lawton especially, voters split pretty decisively in favor of retention, supporting Justice Gurich’s retention by over ten points. For as much as Comanche County broke in favor of Trump, this map is proof that Oklahoma’s right is scarcely invincible.

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#4 - Pae and Sutherlin Outperformed Their Presidential Counterparts

As I discussed in a previous article, Lawton’s elections for the Oklahoma House of Representatives are generally competitive, and this was especially true in this election. In the end, however, literally nothing changed in the state legislature. Despite a modest shift towards Trump in the general election, this shift didn’t manifest itself in any Republican gains, and the Democrats were content to hold on to their sliver of state government. Lawton followed this statewide trend.

In House District 62, Representative Daniel Pae convincingly defeated Democrat Allison Offield by 14 percentage points in the most decisive election HD 62 has seen in at least a decade. Winning 5.1% more votes than Trump in his district, Pae has been extraordinarily successful at differentiating himself from his party and winning voters that Trump cannot. Nearly 10% of Pae’s voters came from ticket splitters who marked a non-Republican candidate at the top of the ballot. On the map, you can see that Pae most overperformed Trump in Lawton’s upper-middle class, White and Asian suburbs. In the precinct containing Grayson’s Mountain, he won 12% more votes than Trump, and in the precinct containing The Highlands, 16%.

The same is not true, however, for Representative Rande Worthen, who slightly underperformed Trump. In a seat that has leaned Republican in House elections by an average of 11.4 percent over the past ten years, Worthen only won by 7.6 over his challenger, Democrat Tom Sutherlin. This is a pretty weak performance, especially in a Republican-leaning year. It seems to prove that redistricting in 2020 didn’t help Worthen: his margins this year look similar those in 2018 and 2020. While he performed well compared to Trump in south central Lawton, he underperformed elsewhere downtown and in rural Comanche County.

On the Democratic side of things, Allison Offield’s map looks exactly how one would expect a map to look if a candidate were defeated by a strong incumbent with maverick appeal, but Tom Sutherlin’s map is impressive. He overperformed Harris in nearly every precinct. In rural Comanche County, Sutherlin won 14% more votes than Harris in territory that’s traditionally unfriendly to Democrats, which is an optimistic indicator for his strength as a candidate. Overall, Sutherlin overperformed the top of his ticket by a respectable 2.7 percentage-points which, while not Pae-impressive, is certainly promising for a Democratic candidate in a red seat. While Sutherlin ultimately won a majority of precincts, a marginally better Democratic performance in a future election could easily turn east Lawton blue.

#5 - Comanche County (Mostly) Likes Its Sabbath Liquor

Ending on a light-hearted note, Comanche County voted to lift the prohibition on selling liquor on Sundays. While every precinct voted in favor of the proposition, the level of support varied heavily across precincts. One disproportionately Black precinct in south-central Lawton came within twelve votes of rejecting it, and some of Lawton’s rural precincts were lukewarm on it. I imagine that these results are a consequence of socially conservative attitudes, but, since there is no Lawton exit poll, there’s no way of knowing for sure.2

Fort Sill, however, was a veritable wet fortress, with nearly 80% of voters supporting the proposition in the base’s largest precinct. Given that active duty soldiers, families, and veterans can simply buy liquor at the PX, which is not subject to county law, their strong support for this measure is surprising. Maybe they wanted more options, or maybe some active duty newcomers were surprised to learn it was illegal to begin with. Regardless of the reasons, I find this vote pretty funny.

Jackson is a twenty-year-old Black man who lives in Oklahoma. He has a certificate from a vocational technology school for 3-D modeling though, on account of poor prospects in his field, he’s currently unemployed and living in his parent’s house. He spends his days in his room reading and watching YouTube, growing disillusioned with the world. “I'm pretty much just waiting to die,” he said. “I'm not gonna go out because what’s the point? It's not even out of depression, just objective reality.”

While Jackson exists far outside civil society, this year, he became politically engaged. From his cocoon, he has been voraciously consuming information about the world. While he did not vote in 2022, the registered independent felt a strong pull towards the ballot box in 2024. Inspired by Black conservative influencers and men’s rights activists, Jackson became the first person in his family to vote for a Republican for President.

“I voted for Trump, and Kamala quite consistently looked like a bumbling idiot.”

Jackson is one of many millions of Black and Latino men who dropped a ballot in the box for Donald Trump this election. As the New York Times has already observed, Trump saw massive gains among non-white voters this election, gaining more than 13% in Hispanic-majority counties, 10% in Native American majority counties, and nearly 3% in Black-majority counties. These gains have affirmed Trump’s strength in the increasingly diverse states of Florida and Texas, and they’ve made Democrats squirm in New Jersey, New York, and Illinois, where Trump overperformed many election models. Trump’s popularity among young Black and Latino men may well have won him the election in Philadelphia and Detroit, where he won 5% and 10% more votes than in 2020, respectively.

Jackson has been spending a good deal of time thinking about the world and deciding how he would vote in his first Presidential election. He took issue with what he perceived to be the Harris campaign’s excessive social liberalism. “I disliked the identity politics, so much ‘woman this’, ‘white that’, ‘black here’, ‘men there’. It was and still is very tiresome.” To him, the Democratic Party’s messaging this cycle was cynical and condescending. “Kamala's whole campaign, or at least the people around her, were all just shaming men, like when Obama basically called ‘brothas’ pussies for not wanting a woman president,” he said. While he also disdains what he calls “redpill s***”, he understands their grievances. “Sometimes, I watch [redpill content] for the funny TikTok compilations of crazy people and skip the garbage,” he commented. “I don't care what gender [the President] is, heck, I'd vote for Tulsi if she ran. I just don't see what Kamala would've done for America.”

While he acknowledged that he is probably in a social media echo chamber given the overrepresentation of right-wing influencers such as Amir Odom, Amala Ekpunobi, and Lauren Corbett in his feed, he said that he does go out and seek left-leaning content. “It's very hard to sit and listen,” he said, “because 9/10 times, it feels stupid, illogical, and feelings-based instead of factual.” While he did seek Harris’ policies, he said he always found them elusive, and when not elusive, then bad. He fears the expansion of state power, so he dislikes the idea of a tax on unrealized capital gains. He said he’s not sure whether, in all of Harris’ flip-flopping, she had suddenly adopted a reasonable gun policy. “When asked a question about her policies, she would just cite her site,” he lamented. He felt that Trump was always clear about what he believed. “A really big factor was the fact that a clip of Trump stating his policies at a rally showed up on my timeline more than once,” he said. “Trump’s appeal to young men really worked.”

While he doesn’t have any buyer’s remorse yet, he has been disappointed by the response to Trump’s victory that he’s seen on social media. “On Instagram, I’ve seen stories with captions like ‘to all the women-haters out there, f*** you’, ‘every woman lost a part of themselves today’, ‘if you voted for that man, you failed a woman’, and the like” he said. “I’ve been thinking about all the people whose stories I didn’t see, who will think that I’m ‘against them’. Of course, that isn’t the case.”

“The thought that someone I once called a friend, went to school with, and viewed in a positive light could learn I voted for Trump, and in turn dislike and judge me, is not very appealing.”

In the course of the past few days, I have seen arguments in a similar vein peddled by my more left-wing friends, seemingly operating under the assumption that one can be shamed into changing their mind. I have seen arguments that Donald Trump’s election is a direct cause of the suicide of over seven hundred transgender children on the day after the election, that Black men who voted for Trump are race traitors, and that every Trump voter is personally responsible for detrimental effects that a Trump administration will, apparently, inevitably have on the environment, public education, and human rights in America. I’ve seen posts that not only vigorously denounce anyone who supports Trump, but also anyone who believes that their relationships should be valued more than mere politics.

This notion that 51% of Americans are your enemies, and that anyone who disagrees that they are your enemies is also your enemy, is as absurd as it is improbable. Not only are such arguments not convincing, but they are divisive arguments that undermine the philosophical underpinnings of our democracy. If a majority of Americans are so deluded by their racism, misogyny, populism, and love of political theater that they are simply not capable of rationally electing a government, then the whole premise of self-government is flawed. If people are not fundamentally capable of electing their leaders, then we should really go ahead and call it quits on this whole democratic experiment. Our best regards to thee, Constitution, Federalist Papers, and every liberal treatise written in the past 400 years, but you all have it wrong. Man is a slave to his worst instincts, and any government that he creates will act accordingly.

I do not believe that this is true. I believe that, with the information that all the Jacksons of America had at their disposal, they made the decision that appeared best to them. This Jackson voted for Trump because he felt like Harris focused too much on identity rather than on more substantive issues, but another young, working-class Jackson in Detroit could have just easily decided that Trump’s tariffs would support the development of the types of well-paying, unionized jobs that NAFTA displaced. A young Chicano Jackson in Eagle Pass could have decided that he was tired of hearing local news stories about dead migrants’ bodies washing up on the shore of the Rio Grande. A young Cuban Jackson in Florida could have simply been annoyed that average inflation rates under Biden returned to what they were back in the 1980s, and that the Inflation Reduction Act didn’t seem to actually address that real problem. 

In 2020, the American public voted 51% in favor of Joe Biden, and this year, they have done the same for Donald Trump. Just as the American public had reason to elect Joe Biden in 2020, so too do they now have reason to elect Donald Trump. While many of us may not agree with our fellow Americans’ reasons, it is reason nonetheless. After four years on the back foot, a multiracial, populist coalition has elected Donald Trump’s Republican Party to resolve America’s ills. For those of you who supported Donald Trump, I hope that you are satisfied with your decision in four years’ time. For those of us who supported Harris in this year’s election, it is now our duty to serve as the loyal opposition: to judge, critique, protest, and debate the merits of this new government, not to destroy it, but to convince it to be better and its supporters to think critically on it.

In what looks like it will be a narrowly divided government, Donald Trump will be hard-pressed to pass his policy proposals through two houses of Congress and avoid getting bogged down in the courts, as happened in his first term. Then, in two years, it will be election time again. In 2018, after two years of an incompetent, embarrassing Trump administration, the Democrats won over 40 additional seats in the House of Representatives and swung the popular vote by over five points. It swept his whole administration out from under him, and it turned him into a lame duck, whose only real achievement thereafter was ramming through court appointees between impeachments.

If those who oppose Trump make the right arguments to appeal to the right people, there is no reason to believe that they cannot disable him again. As this election has shown, even today, Americans can be convinced. If Jackson and all his young, working-class compatriots can be convinced to vote for Trump, I can’t imagine why anyone should be off-limits when imagining who could be convinced to vote against him next time.

Yesterday, early voting started in Oklahoma, and citizens from across the state are lining up to do their due diligence. While much hullabaloo has been made of the Presidential election, we here in Oklahoma will have very little say over who actually becomes President. We are a red state, and our citizens will almost certainly be voting for Donald Trump.

While it’s tempting to give into political nihilism and decide not to turn out, many of us have a vote that will really count. A third of Oklahomans live in districts with contested elections to determine who will become their state representative. As per Article I Section 8 of the United States Constitution and the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, states have a great deal of power in the American system of governance, and the Supreme Court has been steadily returning many powers to the states, including the ability to legislate their own abortion laws. This is no mere consolation prize: states are the beating heart of American experiment, the laboratories of democracy.

Those politicians who we send to Oklahoma City will have a great deal of influence, and your vote could make the difference in your local election. Lawton is a particularly contested area this election, with three of our four state house seats being up for grabs. Local Democrats have been bullish, sinking a lot of time and money into campaigning for Lawtonians’ votes. Here’s what you should know about your local elections for representative.12

House District 62 - Daniel Pae v. Allison Offield

Democrats in Oklahoma have long had their eyes on House District 62. Encompassing the suburbs of Lawton west of 38th street, HD-62 is an extremely light shade of red, if it’s red at all. In the 2020 Presidential election, Donald Trump and Joe Biden practically tied in this district. Since 2018, it has been represented by Representative Daniel Pae, a moderate Republican who has sought to distance himself from his party in his campaign materials, which lack any mention of conservative, red meat issues.

Accordingly, the conservative Oklahoma Council for Public Affairs (OCPA) has given Representative Pae a lukewarm 51% lifetime conservative rating for his votes over the course of his tenure. He often abstains from voting on particularly contentious bills. During the most recent legislative session, he abstained from voting on the anti-immigration HB 4156. In previous sessions, he opted not to vote on bills that would prohibit gender reassignment surgery for minors, require individuals to use bathrooms matching their assigned sex, and ban the sale of property in Oklahoma to non-Americans.

The last time Representative Pae faced an opponent in 2020, he won by a slim margin: just over 1,000 votes. In his first campaign in 2018, he won by 42 votes. This year, he is running on his record. In his time in office, he has successfully shepherded the “Pae-Way” bill through the Oklahoma State House, which raised the speed limit on the Lawton-OKC stretch of I-44 to 80 MPH. He has also passed bills involving the rights of renters and the labeling of Kratom products. 

Representative Pae is facing a challenge from Democrat Allison Offield. Offield has won her kudos in the community as a local actress. She has strong ties to the arts and culture scene of the city, and she was the leader of an initiative to get Lawton designated as a film-friendly community. Like Pae, she’s running on moderation. She’s a committed bipartisan, and her main issues are public education, investing in healthcare— especially mental healthcare— and supporting a woman’s right to seek an abortion. She believes that, as a woman, she has a unique perspective on the problems that face Oklahomans today, and she laments Republican dominance of every branch of Oklahoma’s elected government.

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If she wants to win the coming election, she’s going to need to shore up support in Lawton’s purple suburbs. While HD-62 swung in favor of Biden in 2020, Pae overperformed Trump by five points. Pae appeals to moderate, ticket-splitting pragmatists. Pae is able to win in District 62 because he wins voters that Trump cannot. 

While the district has changed shape since 2020, the fundamentals of the race have stayed the same. This election will come down to whether Offield is able to capture that chunk of politically moderate suburbanites who voted for Biden and Pae in 2020. Whoever wins those Biden-Pae voters will certainly win the race.

HD 64 - Rande Worthen v. Tom Sutherlin

Like HD-62, House District 64 has long been a Democratic target. Encompassing downtown central Lawton, the district juts far into the rural extremities of Comanche County, far past city limits. Republican Representative Rande Worthen has represented this large, diverse district since 2016, though he’s always had a challenger. In the past four elections, he’s faced six challenges from famous local Democrats and eccentric writers alike.

This district is not a particularly safe seat for Republicans, and it’s unclear whether redistricting helped Worthen, given that he still holds a large swath of downtown Lawton. In the last election, the anti-Worthen vote was split between the Democrats and a left-wing independent candidate that significantly cut into Democratic margins in downtown Lawton, weakening their overall showing at the polls. This time, it’s a one v. one race, and Democrat Tom Sutherlin has stepped up to the plate.

While Daniel Pae is running a moderate campaign focused on local issues and the bills he has passed, Rande Worthen is taking a contrasting approach. His election priorities are national: inflation, illegal immigration, and law enforcement. The former District Attorney is clearly running from the right, and his reputation with the conservative movement reflects this, scoring a 69% lifetime conservative rating from the OCPA. While Pae’s campaign website lists specific bills that he has authored, Worthen’s campaign website largely alludes to various popular bills that Worthen has voted on over the years.

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Meanwhile, Tom Sutherlin is running on a center-left platform, pledging to support public schools, abortion rights, and access to affordable healthcare. A Vietnam veteran and a computer scientist who taught at Cameron University, he has criticized Oklahoma’s lack of funding for its public education system. In an interview with Justin Rose, he criticized Stitt’s handling of tribal relations and lambasted Republican complacency in addressing Ryan Walters’ increasingly controversial education regime.

Worthen has won his re-election bids by an average of less than ten points, and it would take less than 500 voters to change their mind for Sutherlin to flip the seat. While the district changed shape in 2020, it’s not clear that the new borders clearly favor either candidate more than before. If Sutherlin is to win, he’s going to need to run up the score in central Lawton and flip the city’s most urban precincts. Conversely, if Worthen is to win, he’s going to need to maintain his hold on Comanche County’s rural extremities, ideally making gains in on the east side to discourage future challengers. However, if the 2020 election is anything to go by, both of these candidates are tied to the fate of upballot elections, with Worthen’s support primarily deriving from straight-party voters.

House District 63 - Trey Caldwell v. Shykira Smith

Since redistricting in 2020, House District 63 has become significantly more rural and more Republican. Encompassing a small portion of southern Lawton, most of Fort Sill, and a swath of rural Oklahoma stretching from Texas to north of the refuge, the closest election this seat saw in the past ten years was in 2014, when the Republican candidate still prevailed by over twenty points. It is safe to say that Representative Trey Caldwell will maintain his seat.

Nonetheless, for a Democrat, voting still counts for something in this seat. Political upsets are, of course, always possible. Even if Shykira Smith merely performs better than expected, it may encourage the Democrats to invest more in flipping this seat in the future. 

House District 65 - Toni Hasenbeck won by default

House District 65— which taps on a small corner of Lawton northwest of the I-44-Rogers interchange before stretching north to Caddo County— will not be having an election this November. Representative Toni Hasenbeck won a close primary earlier this year against a right-wing challenger, and no Democrat stepped up to face her for the general election. 

For my two cents, I don’t believe that Democrats should be so bearish in this district. It was just ten years ago that Hasenbeck ran as a Democrat and came within a few hundred votes of flipping the seat. If that same election had been held today with the new district, a Democratic Toni Hasenbeck would have won the seat. Even as recently as 2018, a Democrat was able to win Caddo County outright and win over 40% of the vote overall. While not as obviously flippable as Lawton’s more urban seats, the right candidate in the right election cycle could give Hasenbeck a real run for her money.

Conclusion

While it’s easy to become disillusioned living in a state that is deeply inclined to support a given political party in a Presidential election, it is important to remember that America is decentralized like few other countries are. States have extensive leeway to make their own laws, and the reigns have become yet looser in recent years.

As it stands, the Republicans hold a veto-proof majority in the state House of Representatives meaning that, if the governor vetos a law and the Republican Party disagrees with him, they can always override his veto: Democrats need not apply. Democrats, in this state, have been forcibly reduced from legislators to speech-makers, wielding very little control over the state legislative process.

Lawton is of essential importance for state-level Republicans, as they attempt to hold onto their supermajority in an increasingly urban state, and Democrats, as they attempt to overcome it. We have a voice.

If you support the Republican-dominated status quo and all that entails, then you should vote to protect it. If not, then there is hope yet. The last Democrat to have represented Lawton only left office in 2019. It is not only concievable that there will be another Lawtonian Democratic politician in the next decade, but likely. As I’ve described here, two elections this very year may come down to a coin flip.

In Lawton, Oklahoma, your vote counts. Use it.

Two weeks ago, the University of Oklahoma student body President Caden Glasscock signed off on two auxiliary budgets, allocating nearly $50,000 to various Registered Student Organizations (RSOs) across campus.

As with every budget, this one is likely to leave many dissatisfied. Over the course of previous years, many organizations have been growing increasingly frustrated with the Student Government Association’s burdensome budget procedures. They’ve become annoyed by their chronic lack of communication, broken promises to RSOs, and, now, their increasingly tight fist in delivering funds. Accordingly, our student organizations have suffered: many are experiencing severe budget shortfalls, and campus life is withering.

I’ve sat down with a wide range of RSO officers and student government officials to try to figure out how the budget works, how it's broken, and how to fix it. I’ve found that few RSO officers know even the basic information of the budget and that the SGA hasn’t told them the basics, and I’ve discovered a worsening crisis that we must seriously address. 

How Does the Budget Work?

The SGA budget begins with the activity fee, which is collected from all in-person students at the University of Oklahoma. Full-time undergraduate students pay $114 per semester in activity fees while part-time undergraduates, graduate students, and law students each pay $6-8 per credit hour. These fees are then all collected into the student activity fund, a portion of which is then given to the SGA.

The SGA then uses its portion of the student activity fund to allocate money to RSOs. This allocation is performed by a committee called the Ways and Means Committee, often shortened to WAM.1 The WAM allocates funds to organizations in two types of processes. The most significant type of SGA funding is the primary process. During last year’s primary process, the SGA allocated nearly 337k dollars to nearly 250 organizations over the course of deliberations that spanned weeks, involving public hearings, meetings, and evaluating RSOs’ requests for funding. There is one primary process each year, and it occurs at the end of each school year. The primary budget for the 2024 - 2025 school year was approved in May 2024.

The other type is the auxiliary process. So far, the SGA has passed two auxiliary budgets this semester. Funding for the auxiliary processes doesn’t come from the activity fee, but rather from whatever is leftover of primary funds from the previous year. If an RSO does not spend all the money it received in the primary process by the last academic day of the semester, the SGA reclaims its funds and spends them as auxiliary funding for other RSOs to use. Auxiliary funding is sporadic. Sometimes, it happens multiple times in a semester. Other times, just once a year. It all depends on how much money RSOs don’t spend.

The most important part of this entire system is request evaluation. In other words, if an RSO puts in a request for a certain amount of money, it is the WAM committee’s job to decide whether to grant that request. According to WAM committee chair Jacob Schonfield, the committee uses multiple factors in evaluating whether a request is valid, the most important of which are fiscal history and impact. If a club has a record of spending their entire budget, they are more likely to receive a larger budget in the future. If that club fails to spend their money or spends it on unauthorized items, they are unlikely to receive similar levels of funding.

Impact, however, is much harder to measure. "There's no way for us to genuinely check how many people are being affected", Schonfield explained. Nonetheless, the WAM likes it when organizations are visible on campus. If the members of the WAM an organization’s posters on bulletin boards, tables on the south oval, or pins scattered across students’ backpacks, they will be more likely to receive funding.

Some of this measurement comes down to membership, but participation is more important. While certain organizations that have a large membership that often attends events will receive more funding, organizations with a limited membership that can nonetheless draw large crowds to their events may also receive substantial funding. While relatively few students are members of the Colombian Student Association or the Afrobeatz Dance Club, their events are large enough and visible enough that both organizations were granted large budgets in the primary and auxiliary funding processes, respectively. WAM committee members might even measure impact by checking an organization’s Instagram accounts or even showing up to scheduled meetings to verify attendance.

Once the WAM committee has created the budget, it falls to the rest of the SGA to approve the budget. After an extended questioning session where members of the WAM were put in the hot seat, the Undergraduate Student Congress approved the most recent auxiliary budget by a vote of 27-1, the Graduate Student Senate approved it by a unanimous vote, and the SGA President signed it into law.

Who Receives SGA funding?

As it stands, the largest beneficiaries of SGA funding are those clubs that cater to international students or a distinct identity group. According to a statistical analysis I performed, any given RSO at the University of Oklahoma can expect a base of around $1,100 in primary funding. Umbrella organizations, which are clubs responsible for organizing other clubs, can expect to receive over $10,000 more from the SGA. Administrative organizations, that deal with organizing resident life at the various residential halls at the University, can expect to receive around $4,000 more. International clubs, which cater to various groups of international students, can reasonably expect to receive around $2,100 more. WAM committee chair Schonfield explained that this bias in funding is not due to favoritism, but rather because these types of organizations tend to have strong fiscal histories. 

Fraternities and sororities that receive funding, counter to popular misconceptions, are liable to receive up to $1,100 dollars less than any given organization, though this tendency isn’t as consistent as the previous assertions. Furthermore, of the fifteen fraternities and sororities that received funding in last year’s primary budget, a majority were oriented towards serving men and women from Black and Latino backgrounds. In 2024, the top ten recipients of SGA funding received more than half of all primary funding. 

How Does the Budget Fail?

There is a wide range of criticism of the budget process from those who are subject to it. In the course of my conversations with club finance chairs, I’ve observed a pattern of ignorance of WAM committee procedures and confusion over what the SGA’s standards really are. While there were some bright spots, RSOs are largely a morass of disillusionment and annoyance.

One club officer I spoke to was the president of a small organization for international students from a certain part of the world. After failing to receive primary funding last year because she filed the wrong type of paperwork, she filed for funding in the most recent auxiliary budget. After she made a detailed, line-item request totaling around $1,000, she received less than a fifth of what she requested, and of the money she received, most of it went towards paying off debt she had already accumulated in capital investments. She does not know why her request was rejected, and she said she no longer trusts the SGA to provide for her organization. In the future, she plans on relying on fundraising, namely by selling merchandise at the events of better-funded organizations. 

Another club officer that I spoke to is the finance chair for a large biosciences club. Last year, they requested $4,000 from the SGA, but received less than 20% of their request. “The only item that was approved, partially, was food,” he lamented. After working with them for two years, he said that he does not trust the SGA. “It's a taxing process to receive a refund through reimbursements, and direct requests can be denied for a variety of minuscule reasons,” he said. “While not explicitly stated, the SGA would much rather you purchase food and rent venues through OU services, where it suddenly becomes a much easier process.”

To maintain financial solvency, he described how his organization’s previous financial chair had drawn on her parent’s wealth to fund key functions, including a yearly conference for high schoolers interested in the biosciences. He suspects that her familial connections are at least one of the reasons she was appointed to the position. For his part, he lacks such lucrative connections, and he’s unsure of the fate of this year’s conference. He is currently registering his organization as a 501(c) to become eligible for tax-deductible donations.

Another club officer from a hobbyist club lamented the SGA’s lack of communication throughout the budgetary process. She complained that the SGA was deeply unhelpful when she attempted to apply for funding. Whenever she reached out to them, she said that the SGA administrators “just linked their guidebook instead of answering my questions– which didn't help because I didn't understand its language.” She said that, in lieu of a more helpful SGA, she had to learn how to file an effective budget form from other club officers.

She said that her biggest problem was when the SGA would contradict itself. During one interaction with an outside business, she said the SGA would not make clear how her RSO was permitted to spend its funds to pay this company.  “It makes it difficult to gain trust with businesses because it looks like we aren't serious about paying them money when the SGA is the one that complicates the process.”

Officers from one club told a similar story about their interactions with the SGA. While a party associated with the SGA had promised them that they would be reimbursed for their food spending, the organization then struggled to actually get the SGA to reimburse them. “We’re $600 in debt to Papa John’s,” reported one exasperated officer. He argued that, in denying his organization’s budget requests, the SGA had made recruitment near impossible and denied the club sufficient funds to maintain even a basic level of function. A fellow officer nodded in agreement, disappointed in the poor recruiting numbers that their organization has been able to front in light of their inability to buy food to drive attendance. “Last year, we would have had a pizza at every meeting.” Bags of fruit gummies sat scattered across the table. 

How Can We Fix the SGA Budget?

While not every club officer’s experience with the SGA is so negative and multiple club officers expressed respect for the SGA, it was hard to recognize these stories as individual failures. In interviewing so many club officers, including some whose stories I didn’t include above, I often felt deja vu hearing the same grievances repeated ad nauseam. While it would have been easy to become desensitized to each story, for each of these club officers, it was deeply personal.

In the 2024 primary funding process, the SGA granted funding to 250 organizations. For the SGA, that’s a number on a spreadsheet, but those hundreds of clubs represent thousands of individuals– their identities, hopes, and passions. When a club receives less than a third of what it asks for, it undermines trust in the SGA, but more importantly, it undermines our community. When club officers spend more time fundraising and haggling with vendors over debt, they spend less time tabling on the Soval, inviting speakers, and hosting meetings. They spend less time making campus interesting, diverse, and unique, and they spend more time on paperwork and emails. For this system to work, we need better communication from both sides. 

The SGA needs to communicate with RSOs

In my investigation, I learned a lot about the SGA and its budget that most RSOs do not know. For example, many RSOs received funding cuts this year, and most officers assumed that they had received cuts because the SGA simply had less money or that they were the only ones to receive cuts. In my interview with WAM committee chair Jacob Schonfield, I learned that the SGA has been running a substantial deficit for two years now, and it’s only this year that the WAM has decided to rein in excess spending. This year’s cuts are not an exception, but a reversion to the mean. As Schonfield said, the belt is as long as it always was: the SGA has simply decided to stop punching holes in it. RSO officers should not be expecting their funding to increase next year. The current funding deficits from the SGA may well represent a new norm.

Another thing I learned is that auxiliary funding is going to be substantially cut in the course of the next few years. As a reminder, the auxiliary budget comes from clubs not spending primary funds. However, for the past few years, the SGA has been receiving emergency funding to subsidize excess auxiliary spending. Furthermore, previous WAM committees have created inefficient primary budgets that have yielded extra auxiliary spending. In many ways, auxiliary funding has been steadily becoming less auxiliary and more primary for many organizations. Officers should know that this tap is about to turn off.

In general, RSO officers are out of the loop. My conversations with RSO officers were plagued with speculation on what the rules are, and few finance chairs or presidents demonstrated any in-depth knowledge of the SGA’s rules and protocols. Thankfully, the SGA knows this, and they want to fix it.

For the WAM committee, closing auxiliary funding, or at least limiting it as much as possible, will give the committee an opportunity to tackle the real problems. “In previous years, the committee and WAM chairs haven’t had the opportunity to work on communication because they’ve been too busy working on auxiliary funding every week,” Schonfield said. “Communication with RSOs has never been a conversation to be had.”

In our interview, Schonfield floated multiple ideas about various ways in which the WAM will be able to improve communication with RSO leadership once they close auxiliary. Alongside the WAM committee, he wants to set up budget request workshops to develop the skills of new RSO financial officers, create demos of good and bad budget requests, and send messages to RSOs when their budgets are finalized to allow time for those clubs to make appeals before the SGA President signs the budget. “Communication is something I want to make a priority.” Schonfield said, “but our hands have been tied."

These reforms are a start to a more participatory budget, and it’s important that RSOs and representatives are vocal about advocating for transparency and communication in the budgetary process.

RSOs Need to Communicate with the SGA

In the meantime, RSO officers are still anxious to protect their budgets, whatever little they have remaining. According to Schonfield, the best thing that an organization can do to protect its budget is to communicate with the SGA. "There's a tendency for people to throw their hands up in the air and say 'they screwed us'," he said, pointing out that organizations have a responsibility to advocate for themselves.

He told the story of a hobbyist organization that had successfully protected its budget. While their club had a uniquely poor fiscal history, so poor that the WAM committee was inclined to cut its budget entirely, that club’s executive team was proactive and arranged to have a meeting with Schonfield to explain the measures they had taken to ensure future fiscal responsibility. That group ultimately received auxiliary funding in the last process.

While the WAM committee can try to measure impact the best they can, they can only do so much when confronted with so many different organizations and demands. Finance chairs need to think of themselves as SGA lobbyists. They need to be greedy with their budget and advocate for their interests. If they want the SGA to be their partner, they need to talk to them like one, otherwise, they’re leaving themselves open to cuts by a committee that knows no better.

For his part, Schonfield said that the best way for an organization to achieve higher levels of SGA funding is to send him an email at sgabudget@ou.edu or to see him at his office hours.2

Conclusion

While many RSOs have been left behind in the SGA’s budgetary processes, there are numerous things that RSO officers and SGA officials can do to create more transparent, participatory processes in the future. For his part, Schonfield believes that the funding issues afflicting RSOs present a complicated issue and that it needs to be approached from multiple angles. “We're not going anywhere", Schonfield said, “but it's wise to shore up the ways in which you receive money because the committee only operates off the money that we're given.”

Unless the SGA receives an influx in funds from an increase in student activity fees, the SGA will not be able to approve every budget request. This can be a good thing: not every budget request should be approved, and a tight budget encourages fiscal responsibility just as a gastric bypass encourages healthier eating habits. However, with the number of clubs at the University of Oklahoma increasing at a rate that exceeds the growth of each successive freshman class, the SGA budget is only poised to become tighter.

In this sweltering climate, RSO officers need to be advocates for their interests, and they need to prepare for the possibility of cuts. In lieu of greater SGA funding, seeking private and non-profit sponsors may prove an increasingly necessary task in coming years, and the SGA should be there to support them in this endeavor. As for the SGA, they need to implement programs to ensure that RSO officers, many of whom will have limited or no experience with finance or government, are prepared to engage with student government in a productive manner. By doing this, the SGA and RSO officers can help to turn the budget into a greater asset and a lesser burden. 

Post script: I would like to thank everyone who volunteered to be interviewed for this essay, including WAM Chair Jacob Schonfield, Representative Michael Reynolds, and all those who anonymously volunteered. I would also like to give special thanks to Emily Spotts and Daniel Zavala for their assistance in the editing process.

For the next month, Americans will be bombarded with pleas from their politically engaged friends, family, and preferred media personalities to vote in next month’s election. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have raised a combined 1.7 billion dollars for their campaigns, and much of this money is going towards convincing Americans to go to the polls.

However, these campaigns fundamentally don’t care about most Americans. The incentives in our political system exist such that certain votes count more than others. While hundreds of millions will cast ballots, only a sliver of these ballots will actually affect who goes to Washington. According to 538, the Presidential election has a nearly 85% chance of being decided in one of just seven states: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Florida, and Arizona.

Down ballot, the same trend holds. According to the Cook Political Report, only seven senate elections are competitive, and three of those are happening in states that already have competitive Presidential elections. Similarly, 538 also projects that 85% of Americans live in districts with entirely uncompetitive elections for their Representative. It’s hardly a surprise that American elections have a famously low turnout: oftentimes, there’s nothing worth voting for.

At this point, one’s decision on whether to vote or not might come down to local elections. By all means, one should vote in state and local elections and engage with the issues that matter to their communities. While it’s practically a cliché, state and city government officials have more influence over your life than the weirdos in Washington. Your city council, your state representative, and your state officials are more relevant to you, and you have more of a say over who they are. For my part, I have volunteered for elections in my hometown in the past, and, were I registered in Lawton, I would be voting. 

But, since I wanted to vote in favor of marijuana legalization last year without requesting a mail-in ballot, I am registered in Norman, Oklahoma. This year in Oklahoma, forty-four state representatives won by default due to their lack of a challenger. My district in Norman has one such representative. While the Oklahoma’s far right is funding an effort to remove some of Oklahoma’s supreme court justices, this effort seems quixotic at best.1 Like many cities, Norman holds their local elections on random days in the middle of the year, meaning that their municipal elections already happened all the way back in February. All this means that, if I were to show up to vote next month, I would not be able to participate in any election where my vote has any likelihood of making a difference in the outcome.2

Oklahoma is one of nine states that does not permit write-in candidates, so I cannot protest my lack of meaningful options that way. Oklahoma also does not permit intentionally spoiling one’s ballot, so that more fun option is also out. The only reason for me to go out and vote would be to prove a point: that young people in Oklahoma turnout to vote, and accordingly, politicians should consider our interests. I don’t know. This argument is a little abstract, and I don’t find it entirely convincing. I could make an equally convincing argument that my not showing up to vote also proves a point: if you want my vote, you’re going to need to at least give me a chance to cast it in a way that counts. 

I tell you what: if I get off class on the afternoon of November 5th and decide that I’m not sleep deprived enough to bother with a nap, then maybe, I’ll mosey over to the University Lutheran Church and cast a ballot, but I wouldn’t make any plans to see me there. In any case, I look forward to the day when the value of my vote is obvious.

In a few months, our Anglophone cousins across the Atlantic are going to vote on the legality of assisted dying. If the bill passes, the United Kingdom would permit elderly individuals suffering from painful, terminal illness to end their lives with the assistance of a doctor. This issue is deeply controversial. Numerous columnists and politicians have written editorials, making impassioned pleas from across the political spectrum. Conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike are arguing for and against reform.

The matter of assisted dying is so important– yet so divisive and ethically complex– that the leaders of the United Kingdom’s political parties have chosen to leave this issue to each individual legislator. While each party’s leader has expressed his position on the matter, they all agree that it is not for them to decide.1 They argue that for an issue this personal, it only makes sense that members of parliament should be allowed to vote for themselves, to exercise their own moral discretion in casting their ballot. Assisted dying is a matter of life and death. It is an issue that is weighty enough to transcend mere partisan politics. 

In the United Kingdom, such votes of conscience are rare, but common enough. Previously, members have been allowed to vote their conscience on abortion, homosexuality, and the death penalty.2 While some votes have ultimately fallen largely on party lines, legislators were permitted to express their own opinions. Each vote has represented a ceasefire. In an act of incredible humility, the head honchos of each party set down their whips and acknowledged that some issues are bigger, more fundamental, and more personal than politics.

In the United States, we have similar arrangements from time to time, but not consistently and not as a concerted, multi partisan truce. The most significant vote of conscience in recent memory was in 2020, when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell declared that Republican senators were free to vote their conscience on Donald Trump’s conviction after impeachment. Democrats were not similarly liberated, though perhaps, this was for the best. While McConnell had expressed mixed opinions on whether Trump should be barred from holding office, his party didn’t buy his vision for a free vote. Of the seven Republican senators who voted for their conscience and against their party, three didn’t run for re-election or resigned before they could, three were well-established political mavericks, and one was censured by his state party for his vote.3 This “free” vote was a farcical declaration, an unmarked poison pill. 

Representative Liz Cheney offers a particularly harrowing description of what it means to vote one's conscience in modern American politics. In her memoir, she describes how dozens of Republicans, from the then-minority leader Kevin McCarthy to right-wing rabble-rouser Chip Roy, were in favor of impeachment on moral grounds, but neglected to vote for it due to practical considerations.4 They knew that voting for impeachment could put their careers, or even their lives, on the line. Following his vote, Representative Peter Meijer received death threats, and he began wearing body armor in his day-to-day life for fear of an attack: "I came out here to serve my country," he said, “regardless of the cost or of the consequences to me personally or politically.” Representative Meijer soon lost his re-election campaign to a Trump-endorsed challenger, as did Representative Cheney.

There are numerous systemic reasons why politicians are not often permitted to vote conscience in the United States. In the United Kingdom, political parties are much stronger than they are here. When party elites decide that a vote should be left to conscience, it is. America’s weaker political parties also give leeway for individual mavericks to rebel on an ad hoc basis while retaining good-standing. Senator Manchin’s refusal to toe the line for Biden’s Build Back Better Act comes to mind, as does Senator John McCain’s famous “no” vote on Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare. However, these incidents are sporadic and often as cynical as their party-line votes, and most legislators lack the individual political support necessary to overcome partisan pressures anyhow.5

The United States also has a much stronger judicial branch while the United Kingdom defers to a principle of “parliamentary supremacy”. In my time working at the Oklahoma House of Representatives, I heard representatives discuss how, although they personally opposed many bills they voted in favor of, they trusted that the Oklahoma supreme court would strike them down if they transgressed ethical boundaries. Because our system assumes that men are not angels, it does not demand that they act as such. Our politicians often act with regard to personal political ambition alone.

Regardless of why their government has formal conscience votes and ours does not, I lament. I like the idea that a politician would be so humble as to acknowledge that an issue is too much for them to bear. In an era where populists pretend complicated issues are simple, where politicians cram real moral dilemmas into the clothing of absolute moral rights, I can appreciate the simple virtue of saying “I don’t know.” By pretending that fluid moral questions are solid and that those who disagree are fringe fanatics, we deny ourselves the virtue of debate which gives way to human reason, the first prerequisite of a democratic system. Politics should not be and cannot be an all-encompassing, life-and-death discussion. There are virtues that exist beyond this game for which we are only accountable to ourselves and (perhaps) our Creator.

In coming years, as America hopefully begins to depolarize and “turn down the temperature” in our discourse, we should re-evaluate what we expect from our politicians on moral questions. As voters, we should be open to politicians having strong moral principles even if those principles may at times differ from our own. We should punish parties, not for being ideologically incoherent, but for being morally intolerant. We should reward politicians for being honest and not concealing their fundamental beliefs for the sake of political expediency. At times, we should permit our politicians to vote their conscience.

Yesterday, JD Vance and Tim Walz stood off against each other in this year’s sole vice presidential debate. It began with a brief statement from the moderators, describing the tumultuous state of the world and the country before asking Tim Walz about Israel’s recent attack on Lebanon. Tim Walz gave a policy-oriented response where he yammered a bit about the horridness of Hamas and the importance of Israel before clunkily shifting into a well-worn criticism of Donald Trump: that he doesn’t care about America’s allies and that he lacks the temperament to be president. He said Harris would protect American allies and American interests. Simple as.

The moderators then asked Vance for his response and his position on the conflict. He assured the moderators that he would get around to answering the question, and then he turned to the camera. He thanked the American people for caring enough to tune into the debate, and he began to talk about himself and his background.

In the moderators’ introduction to the debate, they described a solemn, important occasion where two powerful men would discuss their ideas for the future of the country and the world. The story of JD Vance, his humble origins, and his mom’s opioid addiction weren’t on the roster tonight, but these subjects were nonetheless crucial. Not only was it crucial for JD Vance to humanize himself to the voting public, but it placed JD Vance in a long line of vice presidents who were selected for the office not merely on the strength of their merits, but the uniqueness of their background. Objectively, the vice president has always been a diversity position.

A vice president’s diversity, defined here as the various traits that distinguish them from the president, has always been an important factor in their selection. The framers of our Constitution designed the office of the vice presidency in order to heighten the representative power of the executive branch, and the way in which political parties have used the office throughout history is a testament to America’s changing conceptions of diversity. 

1804 - 1960: The Twelfth Amendment and WASP Dominance

The Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution, passed in 1804, created the vice presidency as we understand it today. While there were vice presidents before the Twelfth Amendment, the office functioned differently. As the famous Broadway play Hamilton describes, the vice president was the candidate who came second in the presidential race. While the second-most-voted presidential candidate was theoretically the second-most-qualified person to be president and the most qualified person to take over on the occasion of the president’s death, in practice, the rise of political parties meant that this system created some uncomfortable arrangements. The Federalist Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton while serving as Vice president in the administration of Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican. 

Enter the Twelfth Amendment. Some legal scholars have argued that the Twelfth Amendment is among the most transformative, underrated amendments to the United States Constitution. It virtually guaranteed that the vice president would be subordinate to the president, unable to build political coalitions outside their own party or thwart the president’s agenda from the inside, as Jefferson and Burr did to their respective presidents. Another important problem that the Twelfth Amendment solved was that of the “Favorite Son” executive branch. The framers of the Constitution feared that the electors of the electoral college might favor presidential candidates from their own state, which would undermine the representativeness of the executive branch. The Twelfth Amendment solved this problem by explicitly prohibiting electors from casting their ballot for two candidates from their state. 

In effect, the Twelfth Amendment mandated that a presidential ticket should represent regional diversity. If two candidates from the same state ran on the same ticket, then one of those candidates would be ineligible to receive votes from their home state. This amendment gave rise to what we would later refer to as “ticket balancing”, or ensuring that the vice president would complement the president’s traits and bring something new to the ticket. In other words, party leaders would select the vice president based on how he or she could bring diversity to the ticket.

While nearly all the vice presidents of this era were white Protestants of English descent, they nonetheless represented diversity as American elites in that time conceived of it.1 In the 19th century, there were only five cases in which the president and vice president were not from different regions of the country. Political elites viewed the selection of the vice president as a way to unite their own political parties by appealing to their diverse regional factions and to draw out voters in key states.2 Richard Nixon was the last vice president to serve in this first era, and he was a true diversity hire by the standards of the time. While Dwight D. Eisenhower was an old, moderate outsider candidate from the east coast, Richard Nixon was a young, conservative with establishment credentials from California. While they were both white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, they had different philosophies from different coasts in different generations.

1960 - 2000: Inclusive Politics and Changing Diversity

As the vice presidency has evolved over the course of the previous two centuries, it has grown to accommodate our nation’s ever-growing recognition of its diversity. 1960 marked a watershed moment in the history of the vice presidency. When John Kennedy selected Lyndon Johnson as his vice president, it was the first time that a Catholic and a Protestant would serve together on the same ticket. Kennedy symbolized of the rising status of so-called “white ethnics”— those white Americans who don’t trace their ancestry to North America’s historical English elite, but to relatively recent migrants from Ireland, southern europe, and eastern europe. Johnson’s selection was an olive branch to the Anglo-Saxon established order. 

With the feminist and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 70s, American society began an unrelenting move towards a broader view of diversity. From 1960 to 1976, half of all presidential tickets included both a Catholic and a Protestant, and three included a white ethnic candidate. In 1984, Walter Mondale broke multiple precedents when he selected an Italian-American woman as his vice presidential nominee, and George H.W Bush kicked off a tradition of appointing younger people for the second slot when he selected Dan Quayle in 1988. In recent years, multiple vice presidential candidates have been elevated on account of their unique personal stories, including the working-class hillbilly JD Vance and Coach Tim Walz. Of course, no discussion of the increasing diversity of the American vice presidency would be complete without mentioning the 2008 Obama-Biden ticket, the first presidential ticket to feature an African-American.

The chart below documents the rapid evolution of the vice presidency and the rapid evolution in what Americans regard as diversity. With two exceptions, every vice president of the past twenty years has had at least three personal traits distinguishing them from the president, whether that trait is their age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, geography, or background. 

As seen on the chart, the expanded diversity of the vice presidency hasn’t merely applied to their personal traits, but their political traits too. Presidents have grown more likely to appoint a vice president who is not only from a different region of the country but also from a different wing of their political party. Moderates have begun to share the presidential ticket with ideologues, and radicals have grown to appreciate the virtues of a more measured running mate. While Barry Goldwater (1964) and Bill Clinton (1992) used their vice presidential nominees as an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to their principles, Michael Dukakis (1988) and Mitt Romney (2012) used their selection as an olive branch to other factions within their party.

Furthermore, as political outsiders have grown increasingly potent within federal politics, the vice president has also provided tickets with diversity in experience. When Georgia governor Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1980, he didn’t opt for a fellow peanut farmer, but for Walter Mondale, a veritable creature of Washington with years of experience in the Senate. The opposite goes for John McCain. A longtime fixture of Washington politics, McCain (2008) opted for an obscure, Alaskan governor as his VP pick to appeal to those who lamented the status quo.

2000 - Today: The Modern Vice President

Today, distinct difference exist between the Republican and Democratic Parties in how they select their vice presidents and think about diversity. While Democrats often use their vice presidential pick to appeal to various social groups, Republicans usually pick someone who brings different career qualifications and ideological diversity to the ticket. The 2008 election is a good case study in this regard. While the maverick Senator John McCain added the outsider conservative Sarah Palin to his ticket, the young, Black Protestant Barack Obama added the old, Irish Catholic Joe Biden to his. In some ways, these differences in vice presidential selection reflect increasing partisan polarization and the widening philosophical gaps between our political parties. While Democrats appeal to diversity of gender, race, and religion, Republicans are more likely to think of diversity as different ideas and life experiences. 

Our executive branch, more than ever before, represents the diversity of the American people. More than any other point in American history, the average American is likely to see themselves reflected somewhere on the presidential ticket. From the founding of the United States as a mere collection of united states, we have evolved into a more perfect union, elevating working-class people, racial minorities, immigrants, and women to the dignity of citizenship. When our country was founded, neither Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, nor JD Vance would have been considered valid candidates for vice president on account of their ancestry and their modest upbringing. Today, they are.

While our nation has changed, our values have not, and the vice presidency reflects our attempts to live up to our high virtues. It reflects the ways in which our social order and our politics has become more inclusive. While both parties have grown to think about diversity in different ways, our institutions have nonetheless grown more representative across every area of society. Once lamented as a powerless office, lacking in prestige and purpose, the modern vice president serves as the president's chief advisor and partner in administration, providing an essential asset to the White House: perspective.

The following is a story about a famous American author written by Diesel Johnson, a young writer based out of Lawton, Oklahoma. Our team hopes that you will enjoy this piece, and we look forward to publishing more guest features in the future.

~ Brayden Johnson, Editor of OTT

David Foster Wallace grips his steering wheel firmly, the weight of his arms pressed forward and down onto the wheel. There is a small pistol in his glove-box right now–about eight inches wide and six tall, 9mm–sleek, black, and rattling as David’s Ford Explorer barrels up and down the rollicking hilltops and only-kind-of-paved roads of flyover Middle America. Sweat is pooling on the sides of his nose, his glasses slipping right down the bridge of his oily, red nose every few seconds. The sweat collects in small pools around his neckline and some in the deep pockmarks that riddle his face. It is 3:32 AM on a Wednesday morning that feels no different from Tuesday night to David who has been driving for hours straight and is running on something very-quite-substantially less than fumes. Perhaps whisps or something. David is currently trying not to let his ex-everything, Mary, out of his sight, which has become an obsession so totally consuming as to reach the point where each blink fills David with a horrible dread, which makes him wish he could blink one shark-pupiled bloodshot eye at a time like a reptile or some strange insect.

David is driving NW and not entirely sure which state he is in. He is filled with some quiet fury– a righteous thing that, to him, makes his quest for Mary’s life feel less like vengeance than absolution for some great deal of wrongs that she never really committed. David knows but is still filled almost entirely with the fury anyways. He imagines the huge bloom of white fire inside the shell as he puts fatal pressure on the trigger. He can smell the smoke already whispering its way out of the end of the little pistol that still quietly rattles in his glove-box which could barely fit Mary’s faux-leather handbag, back when she was there to stuff it in the glovebox with a perfectly gruntled shove, much less a pistol. He bought it at a pawn-shop that hung a hand-stitched confederate flag in its window, which discretely sold him the pistol with its serial number scratched off for a mere 250 U.S. sweat-slicked dollars under a flimsy verbal agreement to a pale and visibly jonesing David who clearly was not in a good state physically or mentally on the condition that he would use it exclusively for home defense or whatever which David clearly was not going to, but who gives a fuck? Certainly not the guy in the wife-beater with his glazed-over yellow eyes and the scritch-scritch of his dull pocket-knife peeling the serial numbers off the damn thing.

But so, there wasn’t a whole lot of room in the glove-box and the pistol was sitting pretty snug when David, hands shaking violently, shoved it deeper and so does not know how it rattles with such consistency and fervor, as if there were not a nook or sweet spot for it to get lodged in so it would SHUT the HELL Up! so David could focus and David was DAMN Well Sure there had to be some nook somewhere that would catch it. And so the continuous rattle of the fucking thing was some unluck the Universe was using to convey that he was not at all in any sort of Right with any Higher Being–except maybe the wrath of an Old Testament God–which David already knew and did not need any further reminding of. The weight of all the dark head-clouds and That Fucking Rattle! made David conscious of his own weight, breathing, blinking, and etc. so David was not only having to endure the rattle, but now his body was on manual so to speak and his clothes suddenly felt like they didn't belong on his skin. Hell, his skin didn’t even feel like it belonged on his skin. David was thinking that his car couldn't make it another fifteen minutes no matter how much he could wish or how many positive psychic waves he could muster. He felt the very slight heft inside the jacket pocket of his puffy navy-blue windbreaker that contained a white flick-lighter that was maybe half used-up and covered in dark-gray fingerprints from David’s unwashed fingers, a dark, snot-green pipe that had snowflake-like yellow circles made of who-knows-what deep in the glass, and a fairly decently sized, now-half-empty baggie of methamphetamine, which was why David was not exhausted at all whatsoever. Far from it, or so he told himself.

It is 3:41 now. David’s anticipation of his next hit is certainly not helping his already shot nerves and if David was not white-knuckle gripping the steering wheel and trying to tune the harsh static of his mind to a cohesive image of Mary crying and supplicating and begging for her life before finally admitting that she really truly did cause everything and a little mental cut to her explaining she never should have left David between sobs while his hand (not shaking or scabbed over at all in his imagination), then he would be working his hands to that puffy navy-blue windbreaker pocket to start working on a few more hits which would be almost as perfectly sweet as Mary’s tears when he finally caught her… Needless to say, it would not be very good for his hands to leave the steering wheel to prepare a bowl. Even more so now because David was careening up these black hills like a tangent line and couldn't see more than 15-30 feet in front of him with his brights on, which was just far enough to see Mary’s sputtering, lurching blackish-grayish car ninety percent of the time, barring the ten percent when she would sail down the hill in front of him and he was filled for the briefest of moments with a dread that when he came down the hill, she would be gone. She would have disappeared into thin air. But of course, before David could even get down the hill, he would always see her headlights shining up the next one. And every time he would see the dented ass-end of her car carooming into view, a well-muscled hand that crawled out of his soul and into the deep, red insides of his chest would let go of his throbbing heart. The feeling was half because he knew then she could not get away from him but also because the sight of her always stirred something inside of him for a brief second which felt either like falling from a great height or a white dove soaring across a huge distance or maybe both. David was not entirely sure which.

The little thin-legged spider deep in the ancient-reptilian part of his brain was pulling on some string of neurons that was making him want that next hit almost more than he wanted Mary but Justtt…Not Quite There, Spider, and better luck next time. All the hills are so wide and huge. David thinks they must be in one of the Dakotas or something. David also thinks that having driven to the Dakotas is Impossible but he’s not certain. A Bump! made the gun rattle again and he had forgotten about That Fucking Rattle, GODDAMMIT! And now the rattle and the feeling of his own weight and skin and blinking was only punctuated by a feeling of some slime and grit on his teeth, the probing tongue in his mouth almost feeling one wiggle here and there which lead David to the fear of them f a l l i n g right out. Tooth decay is not an entirely unwarranted fear for a methamphetamine addict, but certainly an unwelcome one for David, especially now. He could see mental images of himself gap toothed or with those awful little black nubs and FINALLY!

Her car sputtered into a slide down the next hill and stopped finally when it couldn't coast up the next hill. Within seconds, her feet were already smacking the poorly-paved, desolate highway. David thought her huge eyes must be scanning for any sign of life to no avail, searching for anything else. David was leaning over, frantically scratching at the approximate location of the glove-box handle and not even looking as his car lurches forward and veers off the empty highway into the headlight-lit wastes all around him. He pretty much pries the glove-box open and he almost forgets to put the car in park before he’s crawling awkwardly over the center console, the pistol pressed into David’s sweat-drenched gut, which would not bloom into yellowish-purple bruises and howl and ache until much later when David was really coming off the meth. David throws the door open with his scab-covered arm and hops out of the passenger side and fires into the vast expanse of black sky in front of the still running Mary who stops so suddenly the inertia brings her to her knees before the scream fully leaves her throat and claws its way into the empty night air.

David can hear her sobs from 30 yards away as he runs best as he can, legs many hours stiff from the driving and muscles tense from the meth and the everything. His eyes bore into the cowering Mary, hands over the back of her tousled hair. His finger twitches just a little. David cannot do it. David has absolutely no idea what is going to happen now. David knows only that there is no scenario in which it is good or what he wants; only that he loves her.

Over decades, the city of Lawton has acquired a negative reputation across Oklahoma. When I first moved to Lawton as a teenager, my new classmates made sure to impress upon me how “ghetto” Lawton is and how there was gang violence on every street corner. When I interned at the Oklahoma state capitol last semester, there were people (emphasis on people, plural) who apologized to me as soon as I said I was from Lawton. A quick Google search can reveal a plethora of half-baked articles and unscientific polls indicating that Lawton is just a terrible, run-down city, incapable of supporting civilized life forms. 

However, the data tells a different story. While Lawton is hardly a crime-free city, it’s certainly not the “Little Chicago” that one might hear about online. Among its companion cities in Oklahoma, Lawton is on the low end as far as its overall crime rate goes. Lawton’s numbers look less like Chicago, and more like Norman or Moore. While violent crime remains a problem in Lawton, we experience an exceptionally low rate of property crime.

I call this disconnect between the raw numbers and our reputation the Lawton crime myth. It’s a tall tale, spun up over years through a combination of biased perceptions and idle chatter, despite its distance from reality. Here, I’ll present a few theories as to why Lawton has its poor reputation. I’ll explain how I believe unfair comparisons, personal biases, and deep-seated racism have perpetuated the Lawton crime myth, and I’ll explain why we owe it to ourselves to transcend it.

1. Unfair Comparisons

One explanation for the Lawton crime myth might be that many Lawtonians don’t think of Lawton as a city that can be compared to other cities, but as a small town. Depending on one’s measurement, Lawton has a population approaching or exceeding 100,000 people, and it’s surrounded by multiple suburbs with populations that often commute to Lawton for work, retail, and leisure. Even if it remains underdeveloped, Lawton has a large historic downtown, and it enjoys the presence of more business establishments than anywhere west of Oklahoma City. Lawton is a city, and it has city-sized crime.

However, speaking from personal experience, I’ve observed that people don’t think of Lawton in this way. If Oklahomans think of Lawton, they are most prone to think of it as rural. When my Normanite roommates were recently discussing their personal experience with Lawton, they both expressed surprise at learning that Lawton has such a population large enough to support multiple Walmarts, an airport, a multi-route bus service, and a regional university. I’ve found that this attitude is common among Oklahomans. Many know that Lawton has three high schools, but few know that these high schools have over a thousand students each. 

Accordingly, when Lawtonians and Oklahomans evaluate crime in Lawton, they may be more likely to compare the city to Medicine Park, Cache, or Elgin. Compared to these small towns, Lawton has exorbitant crime rates, even if these comparisons are logically unsound. Lawton is a city, and it cannot be fairly compared with its neighbors.

2. Bias from Personal Experience

A second explanation for Lawton’s reputation as a high-crime city is that some Lawtonians do legitimately experience high rates of crime. Like every city, crime in Lawton is concentrated in certain neighborhoods. If one lives in central Lawton, then they are more likely to experience many types of crime, including vandalism, burglary, and assault. Accordingly, residents of those neighborhoods may be more likely to judge Lawton to be crime-ridden as a whole.

Another personal bias derives from the dynamics of social groups. In 2022, nearly 80% of crime victims in Lawton were acquainted with their perpetrator before the crime. Most crime in Lawton is not anonymous and abstract, but rather, it is a pattern of antisocial behavior that’s more common in some social circles than others. On page 18 of one report by the National Network for Safe Communities, they described how 0.5% of any given city’s population is consistently linked with 60-70% of all crime. The odds are that Lawton functions similarly, with crime being concentrated among gangs, drug crews, and those otherwise affiliated with criminal social groups. Simply put, if one lives in a high crime neighborhood and has ties to that peculiar half a percent, then one is prone to assume that their personal experience reflects the whole.

To the extent that Lawton does have a real crime problem, these neighborhoods and these social groups are where one would find it, and this is where our city should focus its anti-crime efforts.

3. Racism 

Another explanation may be that Lawton is unfairly stereotyped due to its ethnic makeup. Pound for pound, Lawton is the most diverse city in Oklahoma, and its non-white population makes up a larger share of the population than it does for any other city with a population above 50,000. Even today, reputable studies find that people of every race tend to associate minorities with criminality. Case and point, in one 2023 study in a noted cognitive science journal, researchers found that individuals of all races were likely to identify computer-generated, black faces with violent crime.

In one particularly damning 2019 article in the California Law Review, two researchers evaluated crime perceptions among police officers in New York City. They found that police officers had grossly inaccurate intuition about what constitutes a “high crime area”, with one particularly striking map on page 383 showing how police officers had, at various times, reported the entire city of New York, from Orthodox Jewish suburbs in Borough Park to the alleyways of the Bronx, as high crime areas. Importantly, they found that police officers were far more likely to report that they were in a high crime area when dealing with suspects who were young, black, male, or some combination thereof. (see pg. 386) 

It is not unreasonable to believe that Lawtonians, and Oklahomans at large, are susceptible to well-documented biases like these in evaluating the prevalence of crime in a disproportionately minority city like Lawton. Racism towards Lawton’s large Black and Hispanic population likely taints numerous people’s views of the city. 

4. Acquired Reputation

My final, most simple explanation for why people talk about Lawton as if it is a crime-ridden city is simply that they have before. Lawtonians have repeated this myth so confidently so many times that it has become emotionally true. It is so widespread and so pernicious that I felt the need to write an entire essay to explain that this claim is built on false premises. As the oft-cited quotation goes, “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth”. 

Lawton does not suffer from a uniquely high crime rate as much as it suffers from a crisis of confidence. We will never be able to improve our city and tackle its real problems if we continue to tell ourselves self-pitying, unproductive myths like these. Lawton has the capacity to leverage its diversity, its natural beauty, and its high development to become one of Oklahoma’s premier cities, but we can’t do all these things unless we believe that Lawton is worth working for. Lawton must strive to be more than its suburbs, more than its worst neighborhoods, and more than its bigotry. We owe it to ourselves and our community to disavow the Lawton crime myth.

However, why Mayor Booker succeeded in his most recent campaign can’t be boiled down to simple issue polling. As with many political events, this election was less about the players and more about the game. Politics is not a soap opera drama, but a system, structured around rules that preference certain outcomes. In this case, Mayor Booker benefited from biases that affect off-cycle elections in Lawton, which helped to carry him to his overwhelming victory.

It is well-known among the general public that those who are already in office are more likely to stay in office, and political scientists have long recognized this fact in literature. In a 2018 study of over a thousand mayoral elections from 1950 to 2014, a political scientist at Harvard found that incumbents were twenty-five percentage points more likely to win a given election than their challengers. Lawton’s most recent election, in this sense, was no exception. 

However, in another sense, Lawton’s election was strange. In the same study, the Harvard researcher found that, in off-cycle elections like ours, voters are more likely to throw incumbents out of office. In general, during a November election, voters will be thinking more about the big ticket races for the Presidency, the Senate, and the House which means they will be less likely to think about who their mayor should be. In an off-cycle election, this dynamic is reversed: the only voters who show up are those who have strong opinions about local politics, and these informed voters are more likely to vote new candidates into office.

I argue here that Mayor Booker’s whopping success at the polls is evidence that the opposite trend might exist in Lawton. Mayor Booker did not win despite the date of the election. Arguably, he partly won because of it. Unlike most elections where low turnout favors the removal of incumbents, in this election, the sort of voters who were most inclined to support Mayor Booker were the sort of high-turnout voters most likely to vote in an off-cycle election. 

In a 2019 study, political scientists at the University of Boston found that Black and Hispanic voters were far less likely to turn out in off-cycle elections than their white counterparts. In three of the four major cities analyzed, Black voters were 6-10% less likely to vote in those elections, and Hispanics were 10-23% less likely to vote in all four cities.1 In another study, the authors described how off-cycle elections “reduce turnout among marginal voters.” As they put it, “the electorate in off-cycle races is older, wealthier, and whiter” than the median voter.

All this matters because, in Lawton’s mayoral election, supporters of Mr. Jacobi Crowley, the primary opposition candidate, were disproportionately Black. Mr. Crowley won two precincts in the election, both of which are majority Black, and he performed well in the disproportionately Black, low-income neighborhoods of south-central Lawton. Other, less significant candidates also performed well in the poorer, more diverse neighborhoods of central Lawton relative to the rest of the city. Meanwhile, Mayor Booker’s base of support,was strongest in Lawton’s primarily white, middle-class suburbs where he routinely trounced opposition candidates by up to forty points.

Mayor Booker’s supporters turned out in a way that the potential supporters of other candidates did not. His older, wealthier, and whiter supporters showed up in droves for a strangely-timed election, while other candidates’ would-be voters stayed home. 

Of course, this is not the only reason that Mayor Booker won. The opposition to Mayor Booker was fragmented around multiple, ideologically diverse candidates, meaning each candidate may have chipped away at the others’ vote share. Non-partisan elections like ours also favor candidates who can accumulate a large “personal vote” from voters who primarily support a candidate for their reputation or their relationships in the community. Incumbent candidates like Mayor Booker often win the personal vote precisely because they have been mayor, and they have the personal and political connections that come with the mayoralty. 

Regardless, in future elections, it would do Lawton’s mayoral candidates good to remember when the election is being held. Lawton’s low-turnout, August elections lend themselves to older, whiter, and more affluent voters. If a candidate wishes to win the election, they either need to appeal to high-turnout voters like that or, they need to make exceptional efforts to organize Lawton’s low-turnout voters and get them to the polls. 

In my research for my piece on the 2024 Lawton mayoral race, I found that Jacobi Crowley, one of the leading candidates, has made use of AI-generated campaign materials. While I don’t object to the use of artificial intelligence as a tool, I don’t believe that he’s always used this tool in good faith. Ethical debates about whether it right or wrong to use AI in any given circumstance are widespread in today’s world. Here, I will go over two examples of the Crowley campaign’s use of AI.

For my first example, I have a post that Mr. Crowley made on August 12th on Facebook and Instagram. The main feature of the post is a video where he asks the user to stop what they’re doing on social media and go to his website. The caption for this video is most likely AI-generated. QuillBot, GPTZero, and Scribbr are three widely-used, highly reputable applications used for determining whether a selection of text is AI-generated. Upon submitting the passage to these applications, they informed me that there was a 100%, 91%, and a 76% chance that the caption had been AI-generated, respectively. (See screenshots below)

Personally, I don’t take issue with this use of artificial intelligence. Very few people are going to read the caption to this video anyway, so using artificial intelligence seems reasonable, if somewhat lazy.

However, I do take issue with my second example. On June 19th, Mr. Crowley announced that he would be running to be the mayor of Lawton in a long Facebook post, detailing his promise to improve infrastructure, ensure law and order, and raise the minimum wage. This post, however, is almost certainly AI-generated. Using the same three applications as in the previous example, each one returned a 100% likelihood that the posts were AI-generated.

Frankly, this post is embarrassing. If one is so passionate about running for mayor, surely, it shouldn’t be a great ask that one should at least write their own campaign platform. Even if Mr. Crowley isn’t a strong writer, he could have consulted a co-worker, a fellow churchgoer, or a friend to help him write such an important document, one that supposedly reflects his deeply held personal convictions.

For me, this use of artificial intelligence undermines my trust in Mr. Crowley as a public figure. I find it hard to believe that someone is up to the task of taking on public office if they can’t be bothered to write what they believe for themselves. 

However, this all represents my personal opinion. The use and misuse of artificial intelligence remains a contentious subject, and we are still in the process of drawing the moral boundaries on what constitutes an acceptable use of artificial intelligence. For my part, I believe in a policy of discretion and honesty. If one needs help with writing something , I believe one should consider whether artificial intelligence is the right tool for the job. Oftentimes, seeking the advice of peers is a far more fruitful exercise and can result in an end product which is more reflective of the writer and their intentions. Regardless, if one is going to employ artificial intelligence, then they should be transparent about having used it. 

Note: Prior to publishing this article, I reached out to the Crowley campaign with a request for comment. He did not respond.