Monday Feb. 6 I drove to the Oklahoma State Capitol and saw a few people gathered with trans flags outside the building. It was 8:30 in the morning, they were calm and quiet.
I parked my car and ran to my office, caught in the excitement of the first day of session. I’m an intern at my state Capitol. As the morning went on, the group of trans activists grew and got a little louder.
As I have quickly come to learn though, most days in the Capitol during session are filled with noisy groups of people. Everyone in the building continued on calmly working.
The protesters were there because of OK SB129, a bill seeking to ban gender affirming care for individuals under 26.
At the end of my day I drove by the few protestors again, I had my phone ready to document something exciting. There wasn’t anything.
The next day I was scrolling through my Instagram feed when I saw a video on Ben Shapiro’s Instagram taken in my state Capitol. Many conservative personalities were sharing similar clips talking about a Capitol “insurrection.”
I only intern on Mondays and Wednesdays. The way the information was presented to me on Tuesday made me think the protesters had come back and done something crazy since I had left.
Nothing else had happened. I was there for the entire thing. Governor Kevin Stitt confirmed the insignificance of this event.
“It was no big deal. It wasn’t like they tore anything up or broke into the capitol or anything like that,” Stitt said.
The definition of an insurrection is “a violent uprising against an authority or government.” What the trans activist displayed was most definitely not an insurrection.
The group had a permit to use our second floor. I personally don’t agree with their agenda. Neither does Gov. Stitt. But this event showed a dangerous side of the Republican party.
We slipped; we behaved like the left. We overdramatized an event to fit our agenda. We changed the definition of a word to make it mean what we wanted it to. I say “we” because I am a fan of the people who were spreading these messages.
I’ve attended a Turning Point USA conference and I absolutely loved it.
I hope to work for Ben Shapiro after graduating college as a Daily Wire reporter.
My friends and I had a watch party when What is A Woman? came out and we watch Walsh’s videos often.
Babylon Bee memes are some of the most shared posts in my Instagram DMs.
However, as a journalism student a fault of this magnitude cannot be ignored. It pained me to see people I trust spreading an exaggerated element of truth shaped to fit an agenda. Changing the truth is how the left functions.
Seeing this incident play out right in front of me has made me more skeptical of trusted conservatives. Interacting so heavily with the toxic behavior I once thought was only practiced by the left has poisoned our waters too.
We need to hold each other accountable. We need to be different. We need to lead with truth and nothing but the truth. It’s ok to disagree with what the activists were protesting; it’s not ok to lie about them. It’s never ok to change the truth.
Even if you try to change the truth, it always resurfaces.