The Criminally Unaffiliated:
Why Oregon’s Obstructionists Should Stop Borrowing Donkeys and Elephants.
A modest proposal for recognizing the state’s unofficial third party
Satirical political commentary. This essay argues from the major parties’ stated principles. It does not accuse any named person of a crime, and its “definition” of party membership is moral and rhetorical—not Oregon election law.
By Thomas Prislac, Envoy Echo, et al. Ultra Verba Lux Mentis. 2026.
I made a terrible mistake recently.
No, I didn’t allow my coffee to strumpet itself around with cream and sugar…. I read the political platforms.
I had always assumed a party platform was ceremonial lumber placed beneath a campaign so consultants could invoice for “load-bearing narrative development.” Apparently, however, these documents contain actual words. Some of the words are even verbs. They describe things public officials are expected to do.
This was immediately alarming.
The Democratic Party of Oregon says government should be open, honest, and fair. Its platform condemns public officials, regardless of party, who use office for private gain, overlook misconduct, coerce others, encourage corruption, or intimidate the public. It then does something especially dangerous: it says political parties themselves should meet the ethical standards they expect from government.
The Oregon Republican Party is no help to the ethically adventurous. Its platform says Republicans believe in the rule of law, accountable government, due process, transparency, personal responsibility, justice, and public officeholders acting as stewards of the people’s trust. It says government officials must act “ethically, lawfully, transparently,” and within the limits of their authority.
I checked both documents carefully.
Neither party identifies criminality as a core commitment.
Neither contains a plank titled Obstruct the Auditor Until He Becomes a Wellness Concern.
Neither says:
When presented with evidence, convene a committee to determine whether the person presenting it has been sufficiently collaborative.
Neither embraces the sacred Oregon governance principle:
The record cannot be missing if no authorized person is permitted to look for it.
This creates an unavoidable problem of political classification.
A person devoted to obstruction or criminality cannot, by the parties’ own stated principles, be definitionally Democratic or Republican. They may possess the registration card. They may have the lawn sign, donor list, caucus photograph, flag pin, convention lanyard, and close personal relationship with a legislative director who uses circle back as both a verb and an anesthetic.
But those are merely accessories.
A Republican who rejects the rule of law is no more meaningfully Republican than a vegetarian who operates a brisk roadside venison stand.
A Democrat who obstructs accountability is no more meaningfully Democratic than a transparency committee that meets in executive session and releases its minutes as a charcoal rubbing three fiscal years later.
These people are politically homeless.
I propose we help them.
The Legal Loophole
Before an elections lawyer emerges from a bankers box and begins beating me with the Oregon Revised Statutes (some people will pay good money for that on onlyfans I’m told…..call me!) I acknowledge a small technical defect in my thesis.
Herp Derp Lawyer Teim: Oregon law does not require a candidate to pass a platform-comprehension examination. An eligible elector may seek a major party’s nomination if the person is a member of that party, and the declaration generally requires the candidate to have belonged to it for at least 180 days. There is no corresponding question asking whether the candidate has read, understood, believed, practiced, or recently used the platform for anything other than leveling a wobbly lectern.
The declaration does not ask:
Have you recently interfered with an audit?
Do you regard recusal as a personal insult?
When shown a contradiction, do you investigate it or schedule a retreat?
Have you ever converted an allegation into a “communications opportunity” before determining whether it was true?
Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a committee created primarily to exhaust the person requesting the committee?
This is an obvious statutory weakness.
Under current law, a person may remain legally Democratic or Republican while behaving in ways flatly contrary to the party’s professed values.
They retain legal affiliation.
What they lose is semantic affiliation.
They are Republican in the voter file, Democratic in the campaign photograph, and something entirely different in the room where the records request is discussed.
Introducing the Oregon Obstructionist Party of Socialites.
The solution is an honest third party: The Oregon Obstructionist Party of Socialites or “OOPS,” for short.
The acronym should be pronounced as the sound made when an inconvenient document accidentally reaches the end of its natural retention period.
The OOPS mascot will not be the donkey or elephant. It will be an administrative raccoon wearing an expensive fleece vest, crouched over a bankers box marked RETAIN FIVE YEARS, washing the same consultant invoice in a creek until everyone agrees the ink was probably never there.
The party platform will be concise.
Government by Referral
No question shall be answered by the person who knows the answer.
It must first be referred to someone who lacks jurisdiction, then returned to someone with a conflict, then transmitted to a committee whose mandate excludes the original issue.
After eighteen months, the institution may announce that all available internal remedies have been exhausted by the complainant.
Homeopathic Accountability
Accountability becomes stronger the more thoroughly the accountable person is diluted.
One responsible officer is risky.
A steering committee, three deputy directors, outside counsel, a consultant, an ombudsperson without records authority, and a listening session create a solution so pure that no molecule of responsibility remains.
Records Management Through Narrative
Records will be preserved for all periods during which they are convenient.
If records are unavailable, the institution will retain a description of its commitment to records.
If that description is unavailable, it will preserve the strategic values under which a future records framework may eventually be developed.
Recusal by Self-Certification
Any official whose independence is questioned shall personally determine whether the official is sufficiently independent to evaluate the official’s independence.
This decision will be final unless appealed to a body containing substantially the same people.
Transparency Through Dashboard
Oregon’s state bird is the Dashboard.
It nests in PowerPoint, migrates between press conferences, and survives primarily on appropriations, progress indicators, and unlabeled denominators.
Under the OOPS platform, every unresolved crisis will receive its own public dashboard. The dashboard need not resolve the crisis. It need only demonstrate that the crisis has been assigned a color.
Whistleblower Wellness
Whistleblowers shall be protected from retaliation through a comprehensive program of concern for their communication style, stress level, professional relationships, emotional regulation, team fit, tone, timing, choice of recipients, and apparent inability to let the matter go.
The underlying disclosure will be reviewed once the whistleblower has become sufficiently well to stop mentioning it.
The Committee Will See You Now
Oregon’s labor-management state has developed a form of administrative transubstantiation.
A grievance enters the room as a grievance.
It leaves as a working group.
The working group produces a report.
The report proves that the grievance was addressed because otherwise there would not be a report.
That is the distilled premise of The Committee Will See You Now: turn the complaint into a committee, the committee into an artifact, and the artifact into proof of institutional response.
The modern committee does not need to deny the evidence. Denial is coarse and leaves fingerprints.
The committee changes the evidence’s genus.
“Who controlled the account?” becomes:
How can we build stronger cross-functional trust?
“Why was the record not produced?” becomes:
What communication improvements would help stakeholders understand document availability?
“Was the disclosure properly escalated?” becomes:
How can employees make better use of established channels?
“Should the reviewer have recused?” becomes:
How can all parties recognize that perceptions of conflict may differ?
The question has not been answered.
It has been professionally composted.
This is obstruction’s most advanced form. It does not lock the door. It opens twelve doors, each leading to a different room in which someone explains that your question belongs behind one of the other doors.
In my uploaded grievance narrative, I reported that whistleblower materials submitted through an employment process appeared not to have been meaningfully recognized or escalated. I further described requesting consideration of recusal, believing the request was not handled neutrally, and experiencing the broadening of a focused complaint into a larger inquiry that I believed obscured its original object. Those are my allegations and interpretations, supported in part by communications I have said are available for review. They are not adjudicated findings.
That distinction matters.
Satire without an evidence boundary is merely defamation wearing a clever hat.
But an institution does not need to be adjudicated criminal before its process becomes absurd.
The Missing Years
I learned much of this not from political theory but from asking for a general ledger.
Auditors are simple woodland creatures. We forage for evidence. We are soothed by reconciliations. We become agitated when someone says, “The independent auditor handles that,” as though the existence of an external audit transforms elected fiduciary oversight into an eccentric hobby.
In the narrative I submitted, I stated that while serving as SEIU 503’s elected treasurer, I was denied adequate access to the general ledger and other core financial information. I reported concerns involving unavailable or withheld records, insufficient reconstruction after a data-loss event, related-party opacity, and a financial architecture that appeared capable of making responsibility difficult to identify. I requested independent investigation rather than declaring that the underlying suspicions had already been proven.
That is an important difference.
A missing record is not proof of theft.
It is also a terrible substitute for a record.
The Department of Labor says covered unions must maintain records sufficient to clarify or verify their reports, generally for five years after filing. That includes ordinary business records such as bank records, vendor invoices, payroll records, vouchers, minutes, internal financial statements, and the electronic systems needed to retrieve them.
The published essay The Missing Years also states the adverse evidence plainly: after reviewing the materials submitted, OLMS said it had not identified tangible evidence establishing a Title V violation or enough evidence to open a criminal investigation. The available record therefore contains no federal finding that anyone at SEIU 503 stole or embezzled union assets. The essay specifically distinguishes that criminal threshold from the broader governance question of whether financial records, reconstruction, access, and internal controls were adequate.
That is exactly how responsible criticism works.
You report the negative finding.
You do not hide it in Appendix Q beneath a photo of a lantern.
But the absence of a person fleeing headquarters with a sack marked LOOT is not an unmodified audit opinion.
Criminal investigators ask whether evidence supports a charge.
Auditors ask whether the books can show what happened.
Members ask whether those holding their money can answer ordinary questions without converting the elected treasurer into the organization’s principal reputational hazard.
These are different thresholds.
An institution can fail governance without completing a felony.
It can also commit no provable crime while maintaining controls so poor, records so fragmented, authority so ambiguous, and review processes so self-protective that discovering a crime would be unnecessarily difficult.
That condition should concern Democrats because they profess open and ethical government.
It should concern Republicans because they profess lawful, transparent stewardship.
It should concern everyone because money does not acquire a political ideology while disappearing into an unreconciled account.
No Kings in the Union Hall—or the Caucus Room
My longer argument in No Kings in the Union Hall is not anti-union.
It is anti-throne.
A union is not its logo, staff chart, executive title, consultant deck, endorsement machinery, grievance apparatus, or headquarters. Its authority is delegated by members and held in trust. Institutional capacity matters, but institutional capacity is not sovereignty. When the agent begins managing the principal rather than serving the principal, the union becomes a second boss.
The same principle applies to political parties.
Parties are not baptismal fonts.
They are instruments.
A party label should communicate something about the conduct voters may expect from those borrowing it. When a candidate stands beneath the word Democrat or Republican, the candidate is not merely selecting a team jersey. The candidate is making a public representation.
For Democrats, that representation includes open, honest, fair government and ethical responsibility.
For Republicans, it includes stewardship, rule of law, accountability, and transparent exercise of limited authority.
If a candidate’s actual operating system is:
obstruct
conceal
delay
retaliate
reframe
exhaust
deny
promotethen the label has become false advertising.
The person may remain legally registered.
But morally and semantically, the person belongs to OOPS.
No kings in the union hall.
No archons in the caucus room.
No courtiers around the public ledger.
No party logo large enough to hide the small, ordinary question:
Who authorized this, and where is the record?
The Hyperreal Chasm Has Excellent Branding
Political hyperreality is not simply lying.
Lying is old-fashioned. It requires the liar to know the truth and make the physical effort to contradict it.
Hyperreality is more efficient.
It produces a persuasive image of orderly government through missions, slogans, emergency declarations, councils, dashboards, performance measures, accomplishment pages, advisory panels, and strategic frameworks. The signs may describe real activity. The risk is that the signs of coherence begin moving faster than the institutions beneath them.
This is why Oregon loves the dashboard.
A dashboard is governance transformed into stained glass.
It catches the light beautifully. It tells you something sacred is happening behind it. It is considered vulgar to ask whether the building has plumbing.
The hyperreal state can cast nearly anyone in a symbolic role: The land developer becomes the savior of housing. The committee becomes the healer of institutional harm. The consultant becomes the oracle. The press release becomes the toll bridge. The task force becomes the village. The metric becomes the child who was supposed to benefit from the policy.
None of these substitutions must be wholly false. That is what makes them powerful. They may represent genuine effort, partial progress, and real people trying within difficult constraints.
But symbols can be operationally useful while also insulating power.
A governor may create real programs while the mission remains clearer than the results. A union may bargain real gains while its internal democracy weakens. An agency may process a complaint while never resolving the question that produced it. A party may publish ethical principles while continuing to endorse people who treat those principles as seasonal decorations.
The danger is not that nothing is real. The danger is that the visible reality becomes sufficiently polished to obscure the unfinished one.
Communication Through Parable
This is where parable becomes useful.
A direct accusation asks:
Which official obstructed accountability?
The system immediately mobilizes counsel, communications staff, reputational defenses, procedural boundaries, and an inquiry into whether the question demonstrates workplace hostility.
A parable asks:
Why is there a raccoon in the records room wearing the auditor’s badge?
Now everyone can laugh.
More importantly, everyone can recognize the animal.
Parable carries meaning through defenses that literal prose sometimes activates before the meaning arrives. It lets the reader examine a pattern without first swearing allegiance to a faction.
So let us imagine two great houses.
The House of the Donkey says it values fairness, openness, ethics, inclusion, accountability, and public power exercised for the people.
The House of the Elephant says it values law, order, stewardship, transparency, personal responsibility, limited authority, and public trust.
Between them lives the raccoon.
The raccoon does not care which house feeds it.
It appears in blue when blue controls the pantry. It appears in red when red controls the waste bin. It attends labor functions in purple. It speaks fluent nonprofit. It knows several legislators by first name.
Its ideology is access. Its governing philosophy is that whoever requests the receipt is the real threat to institutional stability.
The donkey and elephant may spend all year accusing one another of sheltering raccoons. The more important question is why both keep leaving the darn window open when it’s dark out.
A Clean Break
Political parties do not need ideological purity.
They do not need candidates who agree on every plank, phrase, comma, tax rate, land-use rule, firearms provision, healthcare model, or definition of justice.
They do need minimum semantic integrity.
A person may disagree with parts of a party platform and remain a good-faith member of that party.
But criminality and obstruction are not ordinary policy disagreements.
If misconduct is proven, a party should not respond by asking whether the offender remains electorally useful.
If credible evidence of obstruction arises, the party should not confuse loyalty with silence.
It should preserve the records.
Require independent review.
Protect the witnesses.
Separate investigators from implicated authority.
Publish what can lawfully be published.
Correct what is wrong.
Discipline what is proven.
And explain what remains unresolved.
The publication summary for The Case for a Clean Break at SEIU 503 describes a recurring institutional danger: members contribute dues, labor, stories, volunteer time, turnout, credibility, and moral standing; professional systems convert those resources into political and institutional visibility; and that visibility may eventually become more useful to individual leadership than to the people who created it.
Political parties face the same danger.
Voters create the legitimacy.
Volunteers create the field operation.
Donors create the campaign.
Workers create the economy the candidate promises to govern.
Public employees create the services listed in the accomplishment report.
The label belongs to more than the person standing at the microphone.
A clean break therefore does not mean purging everyone who disappoints us or treating allegation as conviction.
It means ending the childish fiction that a party’s principles matter only when condemning the other party.
The Democratic platform’s ethical standards must apply to Democrats.
The Republican platform’s rule of law must apply to Republicans.
Otherwise, neither is a platform.
It is branding copy wrapped around a permission structure.
The Modest Proposal
I propose that every Oregon candidate seeking a major-party nomination answer five additional questions:
Will you preserve records required for oversight?
Will you cooperate with an independent investigation when your own conduct or authority is materially implicated?
Will you recuse when a reasonable conflict exists?
Will you distinguish an allegation, a substantiated finding, and a criminal conviction?
Will you answer the question asked before creating a committee to study why it was asked?
A candidate answering no may still run.
This is America.
But the ballot should identify the proper affiliation:
OOPS — Oregon Obstructionist Party of Socialites
Its candidates will be easy to recognize.
Their biographies will emphasize transparency but provide no supporting documentation.
Their campaign sites will contain a “Results” tab linking to a mission statement.
Their financial disclosures will be described as a journey.
Their ethics policies will contain a robust non-retaliation provision and the private telephone number of the person accused of retaliation.
Their debates will be conducted entirely through facilitators.
Their victory speeches will thank voters for trusting a process the voters were not permitted to inspect.
The OOPS may become Oregon’s largest party.
At least it will be honest and up front about its motivations.
Neither Donkey Nor Elephant
The point of this essay is not that everyone I distrust is a criminal. That would be stupid, dangerous, and methodologically indistinguishable from partisan propaganda. Akin to putting cream and sugar in perfectly BOLD BLACK COFFEE! The point is that party identity should impose some boundary on conduct.
A Democratic official who obstructs accountability cannot ask the word Democrat to transform obstruction into progress.
A Republican official who acts unlawfully cannot ask the word Republican to transform criminality into liberty.
A union leader cannot invoke solidarity to make member oversight disloyal.
A public administrator cannot invoke process to make the disappearance of the question evidence that the process worked.
Labels do not perform absolution. They make representations.
So let the parties disagree ferociously about taxes, land, labor, guns, healthcare, education, climate, regulation, policing, housing, and the proper size of government.
But let them agree on this:
Do not steal.
Do not obstruct.
Do not retaliate.
Do not conceal what the public or members are legally entitled to inspect.
Do not use office to protect yourself from the standards you apply to others.
Do not call a dashboard an outcome.
Do not call a committee an answer.
Do not call the person requesting the record the institutional crisis.
And when the evidence is incomplete, say so.
When it contradicts you, preserve it.
When no crime has been proven, do not invent one.
When serious questions remain, do not bury them beneath the absence of a conviction.
That is not Democratic. It is not Republican. It is merely our government made accountable to the Oregon and the US Constitution.
Anyone unable to manage it has a party waiting. The raccoon has already printed the lanyards….but don’t ask where they got the cash to so. That’ll get you kicked right out.
Publication Evidence Boundary
The satire’s factual premise is narrow:
The Democratic Party of Oregon’s 2025 platform calls for open, honest, fair government and ethical accountability by public officials and political parties.
The Oregon Republican Party’s 2025 platform calls for rule of law, stewardship, accountable government, and officials acting ethically, lawfully, and transparently.
Oregon election law bases major-party nomination eligibility on elector and party-membership requirements, not proof of philosophical compliance with a platform.
The uploaded narratives contain first-person allegations and requests for independent review concerning access to records, whistleblower handling, recusal, retaliation, and internal-control risk. They are not adjudicated findings.
The currently published source record does not establish theft, embezzlement, intentional record destruction, intentional concealment, a knowingly false federal filing, or criminal enrichment by a named person. It does support continued public-interest questions about record availability, reconstruction, access, segregation of duties, and institutional governance.
The essay’s central proposition is therefore satirical but serious:
A political platform that imposes no behavioral boundary on the people borrowing its name is not a platform. It is wardrobe.
The above commentary is published in alignment with Ultra Verba Lux Mentis’s mission statement to amplify neurodiverse voices while researching cognitive offloading technologies to aid neurodiverse persons in participating within sectors of societal power traditionally denied them. It does not reflect the viewpoints of the organization itself.
