Just when you thought the Oklahoma GOP couldn’t get more absurd, it puts out a new platform and enthusiastically boasts about the egg on its face. The 2025 Platform of the Oklahoma Republican Party includes new policy positions on hard-hitting issues breaking the backs of working Oklahomans, such as school funding, gay people, and… 5G? Let’s start with that.

“We support the elimination of all 5G technology.”

— 2025 Platform of the Oklahoma Republican Party (Section I.B)

I thought we as a society left fearmongering about 5G behind, but here we are making its elimination a party policy. Honestly, as someone with intimate knowledge about wireless infrastructure I was pretty confused reading this. It truly shows that the GOP has long strayed from being the party of fiscal conservatism and free markets and had instead become the party of conspiracy and denial of fact.

5G — the fifth-generation cellular network — is the successor to 4G that started a nationwide rollout in 2019. Since then it has brought higher internet speeds, better call reception, and stronger resilience against congestion during sporting events or other large crowds. Higher speeds come with higher frequencies and — though unfounded — fears of adverse health effects. You’ve surely heard your fair share of people blaming 5G for everything from headaches and impotence to cancer and spreading COVID-19. These claims all lack one thing: fact based evidence.

While 5G does use higher frequencies in more dense population areas, it uses frequencies and power levels far below those needed to damage DNA, cause cancer, or make your dick limp. You get higher exposure to the same non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation 5G uses by heating up food in your microwave. So, Republicans, make sure you throw that out alongside your new iPhone, WiFi router, and all other electronics in your house. In fact, if you’re so scared of benign technology that improves your quality of life, maybe do all the rest of us a favor and move to a remote island in the Pacific!

I can personally vouch for the economic, educational benefits of 5G. In September 2020 the U.S. Cellular rollout reached the sleepy little town I grew up in. Chattanooga, Okla. isn’t particularly known for its robust telecommunications infrastructure, and it wasn’t bearing the brunt of remote work and distance learning well. Having then started my junior year of high school, I was heavily dependent on the internet to attend my classes and often had to hotspot my laptop using a phone when the landline connection dropped out. It was unbearably slow using the older 4G standard, barely able to load a Google search. Thanks to the greater bandwidth and further coverage afforded by 5G I was able to get work done during time I was otherwise blocked from my education. Thousands of Oklahoma students still depend on 5G for access to reliable, high-speed internet for school.

On that topic, hopefully the OKGOP is doing better on the education front. The next generation is going to need all the education in the world to undo this mess.

“We oppose any increased state funding for the government schools.”

— 2025 Platform of the Oklahoma Republican Party (Section II.C)

Oh… Nevemind.

If there’s one thing the OKGOP seems to fear more than 5G, it’s the idea of adequately funding public schools. Buried in the 2025 party platform is a laughable declaration: “We oppose any increased state funding for the government schools.” Not “monitor how money is spent,” not “increase accountability” — just a flat-out refusal to invest another cent. It’s a telling admission that they’ve all but given up on public education as a public good.

Instead, the platform champions “parental rights” as a Trojan horse for gutting curricula, banning books, and pushing religious indoctrination in classrooms — never mind that many Oklahoma schools can barely keep the lights on or retain qualified teachers. You can’t pay a math teacher with a Bible verse, and no amount of Pledge of Allegiance recitations will fix the roof or keep mice out of a school cafeteria.

This obsession with privatization and moral panic comes at a cost: a generation of Oklahoma kids is being handed the short end of the stick. I would know, having spent all of my schooling years under the thumb of the Oklahoma State Department of Education. It was a regular occurrence for my classrooms to have roof leaks, textbooks without covers, and broken desks that there just wasn’t budget to fix.

When lawmakers treat public education as a threat instead of a cornerstone of democracy, what they’re really opposing is opportunity — especially for rural, low-income, and marginalized students. The platform talks a big game about “freedom,” but seems allergic to the idea of freeing anyone from ignorance. Silly liberal, freedom is for straight white men!

“We believe that there are only two sexes/genders, male and female, determined at conception.”

— 2025 Platform of the Oklahoma Republican Party (Section I.A)

“We believe that any person performing or assisting someone under 18 years of age in obtaining a sex change operation or alteration to their reproductive organs, be guilty of interfering in the reproductive rights of the child, extreme mutilation the child, and of extreme child abuse on a felony level.”

— 2025 Platform of the Oklahoma Republican Party (Section I.A)

“We support the right of state and local government to prohibit displays of a sexual nature, including pride parades and drag shows, in view of the public regardless of public or private property.”

— 2025 Platform of the Oklahoma Republican Party (Section I.A)

“We oppose the teaching of non-chromosomal gender and LGBTQ+ lifestyle, history, and
demonstration.”

— 2025 Platform of the Oklahoma Republican Party (Section II.B)

For the ruling party in a state with crumbling infrastructure and bottom of the barrel schools, they seem quite obsessed with what gay and transgender Oklahomans are up to. And when it comes to LGBT issues, the OKGOP proves itself to yet again be a party of government overreach, censorship, and the erosion of personal liberties.

They claim to be the party of “freedom,” but only if you fit a very narrow definition of humanity — straight, cisgender, preferably church-going, and loudly obedient. The 2025 platform doesn’t just oppose legal protections for LGBT Oklahomans — it reads like a manifesto for erasure. From criminalizing harmless gender-affirming care for minors, branding it “extreme child abuse,” to banning Pride parades and drag shows on both public and private property, the OKGOP is on a crusade to scrub queer people from public life altogether.

Even classrooms aren’t safe. The platform explicitly opposes the teaching of LGBT history, and any mention of “non-chromosomal” gender identity. That’s not policy — it’s censorship. What they’re really saying is that queer people don’t belong in the story of Oklahoma, or America. It’s a message of shame, enforced through fear and silencing.

The overreach doesn’t stop at curriculum. The platform also condemns the existence of transgender youth, going so far as to oppose medical recognition of gender dysphoria and calling puberty blockers “child abuse.” It’s not about protecting children — it’s about policing them, punishing them for daring to exist outside a binary these lawmakers barely understand. Maybe if they would sit down and and speak with queer Oklahomans, they’d realize we have the same problems of everyone else — the problems they refuse to do anything about.

What’s most infuriating is that while Oklahoma faces real, urgent challenges: teacher shortages, healthcare gaps, and rural economic decline. This is what the ruling party chooses to focus on. Not potholes, not poverty — pronouns. It would almost be laughable, if it weren’t so dangerous.

The Oklahoma GOP’s 2025 platform isn’t a serious plan for governance — it’s a culture war fever dream masquerading as policy. It offers no solutions to the actual problems choking our state, only scapegoats and slogans. Whether it’s dismantling internet infrastructure, defunding education, or criminalizing queerness, their vision for Oklahoma is one of fear, regression, and authoritarian control. They are not conserving anything — not liberty, not opportunity, not even common sense. And the more they double down on this ideology, the more they make a fool not just of themselves, but of the state they claim to serve.

The clown car keeps rolling, and the rot continues to consume. I won’t tell you how to vote, but I encourage you to do so. Hell, run for office if you feel like it. Change happens from the bottom up. Be that change.

Abby Bigaouette is an aerospace technician at Blue Origin and former graphic designer for the Daily Press. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. You can reach her at abby@bigaouette.com.

On April 11, the Cherokee Nation posted a pair of seemingly innocuous pictures to their social media accounts, featuring principal chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. and deputy chief Bryan Warner as action figures. I recoiled when I saw it while scrolling Instagram in bed.

For the uninitiated, this is a part of a recent internet trend using the image generation featured in the latest version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT software in which you generate an image of an action figure of a person. While innocent on the surface, the use of AI image generation by a government that claims to support artists makes their claims ring hollow, in addition to setting a dangerous precedent about the use of tools by the tribe instrumental in the dissemination of misinformation and disinformation.

The ethical implications of using AI art may not be clear to most. The technology that underlies this trend works because large neural networks are trained on vast amounts of content scraped off the internet without consent of the people that created it. These image generators are good — often eerily good — but they come with baggage. When institutions trusted as being canonical sources of information start leaning on this technology for public-facing content, it opens a whole can of worms regarding authorship, censorship, consent, and where the line gets drawn between a fun internet trend and potentially misleading the public.

What stings most about this situation is that the Cherokee Nation should know better. We are a nation loaded with talented artists, many of whom are actively working to preserve and evolve Cherokee culture through their art. And yet, instead of commissioning one of them for a cheeky, stylized piece of leadership-as-action-figures content, the tribe opted for a soulless AI rendering.

It’s like skipping your cousin’s beadwork to buy a knockoff at Hobby Lobby. This isn’t just a missed opportunity; it’s a slap in the face to the very creators the Nation claims to support. We constantly hear about investing in the arts, promoting Cherokee voices, lifting up tradition—but that message starts to feel pretty hollow when the Nation’s own social media prefers mass-generated pixels over something created by an actual Cherokee hand.

What worries me most, though, is the dangerous precedent this sets. If the Nation is comfortable using AI to generate content for something as visible as its leadership’s Instagram feed, what’s next? Educational materials? Cultural storytelling? Doctoring a gaffe made by the chief? Once you open that door, it gets easier to keep walking through it — especially when it saves time and money and can serve to benefit those in power.

That kind of normalization sends a message, whether intentional or not: that it’s okay to bypass human creativity and integrity for the sake of convenience. The fast and flashy option overpowers the thoughtful and real. Coming from a government that should be setting the standard for cultural stewardship, it feels like it very well could be a slippery slope.

AI is inescapable if you participate in modern society. You can find chat bots and image generation tools in Facebook, Instagram, and even a normal Google search. An oft disregarded fact of the technology is that there is no intelligence. These systems don’t think, reflect, or understand — they remix. They’re sophisticated pattern recognizers trained on mountains of human-made content, and they spit out plausible-sounding results based on what’s statistically likely, not what’s true or appropriate.

We should all be thoughtful of how we use these tools. Truth is in the balance.

Abby Bigaouette is an aerospace technician at Blue Origin and former graphic designer for the Daily Press. She is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. You can reach her at abby@bigaouette.com. This op-ed was originally published in the Tahlequah Daily Press.