Category Archives: Tulsa Speaks

OK Must Follow Trump on Debanking

Oklahoma is one of the top states in the nation to do business. This is because, from energy to agriculture to small business, lawmakers have prioritized reducing regulatory burdens and allowing economic activity to thrive. As the state considers how to ensure fair access to banking, that same philosophy should guide our approach.

House Bill 3172, which is currently being considered by the Oklahoma Legislature, looks to create a new, statewide framework to prohibit debanking, the closure or limiting of a bank account for any discriminatory reasons, such as politics or religion.

The mission is right — no one should be turned away from a bank because of their political leanings — but the means to achieve it are wrong.

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DETRANS Awareness Day

Washington, D.C. hosted the largest gathering of Detransitioners to date March 12, 2026.

Detrans Awareness Day was never supposed to exist. Detransitioners wouldn’t need their own day unless something went very wrong. And this year, it’s getting harder than ever to pretend it didn’t. Across the country and in Washington, D.C., detransitioners are stepping forward in numbers that institutions can’t keep brushing off. At the Genspect “Life Beyond Transition” conference, more than 70 detransitioners gathered, the largest event of its kind. It was the largest gathering of detransitioners ever heldyoung women and men who trusted the script, took the blockers, swallowed the hormones, went under the knife, and woke up to the nightmare.

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Harold Hamm: Right Man for the Job

Analysis: Most of the conversation about Oklahoma’s vacant Senate seat has treated the appointment as a political reward. It isn’t. The worst oil supply disruption since 1973 is reshaping the global energy market in real time, and Gov. Stitt should choose accordingly.

Left: President Donald J. Trump, Photo credit: Gage Skidmore / Creative Commons. Right: Harold Hamm, Photo credit: David Shankbone / Creative Commons.
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Myth of Independence

The great English poet John Donne reminded us that no one is an island. We are all interdependent on one another. Even in the most solitary of activities, it takes a team to create success. As you read these words in a newspaper, magazine, or online publication somewhere around the world, there are many people to thank for creating the connection between you and me.

Recently, a woman who is losing her sight called me. As a blind person myself, she wanted my advice on how she could become totally independent. I told her that total independence simply does not exist, whether you’re totally blind or fully sighted.

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Totalitarianism: Kelley, Arendt, and Desmet

Comparative Analysis

The question of how ordinary societies produce extraordinary evil; how democratic nations slide toward authoritarian domination, how ordinary people become perpetrators or willing followers, has occupied some of the most important minds of the past century.

Three thinkers in particular have approached this question from angles that intersect in revealing ways: Dr. Douglas Kelley, the American psychiatrist who examined the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg in 1945-46 and published 22 Cells in Nuremberg in 1947; Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish political philosopher who analyzed the structural conditions of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism(1951) and its human face in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963); and Mattias Desmet, the Belgian clinical psychologist who argued in The Psychology of Totalitarianism (2022) that a psychological process he calls “mass formation” underlies totalitarian systems and remains active in the contemporary world.

Kelley, Arendt, and Desmet
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