*Disclaimer*

I wrote this to share my perspective regarding Senators Brian Helton and Rollan Roberts’ recent claims of fighting utility companies and advocating for clean water through Senate Concurrent Resolution 7 and Senate Resolution 32.

After months of observation, it has become clear that these actions may be more about influencing the primary election than achieving substantive change. I believe the public deserves to know the true intent behind these legislative efforts.

There are two things a legislature can do with a policy problem.

It can pass a law that allocates money, compels action, changes who is legally required to do what, and creates something you can measure later. Or it can pass something that looks like action, sounds like action, and gets covered as action — but doesn’t actually require anyone to do anything differently.

Political scientists have a name for the second thing. Murray Edelman called it symbolic policy in his 1964 book The Symbolic Uses of Politics — still the foundational text on why governments so often respond to problems with statements rather than solutions (Edelman, 1964). Edelman’s argument was that political systems produce two kinds of output: material outputs that reallocate resources and power, and symbolic outputs that reassure constituencies, signal values, and manage public anxiety without changing underlying conditions (Edelman, 1964).

West Virginia’s 2026 legislative session produced good examples of both, and some of the most instructive are also among the least discussed. Two resolutions — one on coal, one on drinking water — illustrate how symbolic policy works, why it’s more common in election years, and how to spot it before you confuse it for a win.

The Four Questions That Separate Action From Announcement

Before getting to the examples, here is the evaluative framework. When you see a bill, resolution, or legislative action, ask four questions:

1. Is there money behind it?Did the Legislature actually appropriate funds for implementation, create a dedicated revenue stream, or attach a binding fiscal mechanism? Authorization without appropriation is a hallmark of symbolic policy. A Legislature can “establish” a program, “create” a fund, or “support” an initiative without spending a dollar.

2. Does it say “shall” or “may”?Binding policy uses mandatory language: shall, must, is required to. Symbolic policy uses discretionary language: may, encourages, supports, affirms, requests, recognizes. That single word — “may” versus “shall” — is often the difference between a policy that changes behavior and one that expresses a preference.

3. Does anyone have to do anything differently?Who is the target actor — an agency, a utility, a provider, a school, an employer — and does the measure require that actor to change its conduct? If the answer is no, the policy is communicating a value, not mandating a result.

4. Can you measure it later?Does the measure include a deadline, a reporting requirement, a compliance threshold, a penalty, or any mechanism that lets the public determine whether it worked? Policy without accountability is policy that cannot fail — because there is no standard against which to judge it.

You can score these on an 8-point scale (0–2 per criterion). A score of 0–2 is symbolic. A score of 7–8 is substantive. Most legislation lands somewhere in between, which is why you need to look provision by provision rather than judging a bill by its title.

Senate Resolution 32: “Protecting West Virginia Coal Jobs, Coal Power, And Coal Families”

SR 32 was adopted by the Senate on February 18, 2026 (Senate Resolution 32, 2026). Sponsored by senators Rose, Chapman, Taylor, Roberts, Barnhart, Hamilton, Phillips, Garcia, Hart, Oliverio, Z. Maynard, Thorne, Charnock, Clements, Rucker, Bartlett, Tarr, and Helton. The title alone generates a headline.

The resolution declares that coal miners, coal-fired power plants, and coal communities are “vital to West Virginia’s economy, energy security, and way of life”. It says coal plants should operate at a minimum 69 percent annual capacity factor. It states that the Senate “affirms” six commitments — to protect coal operations, defend coal jobs, guarantee coal remains in the energy mix, put West Virginians first, prioritize local jobs, and stand with coal families. It “commits to supporting legislation, regulation, and oversight” that serves these ends.

Now run it through the four questions.

Is there money behind it? No. SR 32 appropriates nothing, creates no fund, and attaches no fiscal mechanism to any of its six commitments.

Does it say “shall”? No. Every operative verb is expressive: affirms, commits, defends, stands with, opposes, prioritizes. There is no enforceable command directed at any utility, regulator, or agency.

Does anyone have to do anything differently? No. Appalachian Power does not have to change its dispatch decisions. The PSC does not have to alter a rate case. No mine owner, no energy company, no federal agency is legally bound by anything in this resolution.

Can you measure it later? No. The 69 percent capacity factor is named but unenforceable. There is no deadline, no report, no compliance mechanism, and no penalty for ignoring it.

That does not mean the resolution is meaningless politically. It means something very specific: it reassures coal workers, coal families, and coal-adjacent voters that the Senate is on their side — without obligating the Senate to do anything that costs money or generates opposition. Every senator who voted for it can run a campaign ad saying they “voted to protect coal jobs,” and every word of that sentence is technically accurate.

Edelman would recognize this immediately (Edelman, 1964). The resolution converts a real and painful economic anxiety — the future of coal employment in communities that have no economic alternative — into a formal legislative statement. The anxiety is real. The response is symbolic. The political benefit is captured at zero fiscal cost.

Senate Concurrent Resolution 7: “Requesting A Study Of The Water Crisis In Southern West Virginia”

SCR 7 is a different animal, and the contrast is instructive.

The resolution was reported from the Senate Workforce Committee on March 9, 2026 (Senate Concurrent Resolution 7, 2026). It was sponsored by Senators Roberts, Fuller, Hamilton, Tarr, Thorne, Weld, and Woodrum. It addresses the drinking water crisis in McDowell and Wyoming Counties — contaminated water, discolored water, service interruptions, aging infrastructure, and a January 2026 PCB contamination event in the Town of Wayne and Clear Fork that made national news. It requests that the Joint Committee on Government and Finance conduct a formal study, report findings to the 2027 Legislature, include draft legislation with the report, and pay study expenses from legislative appropriations.

Now run it through the four questions.

Is there money behind it? Partially. Study expenses are covered from legislative appropriations. But there is no infrastructure funding, no emergency repair allocation, no capital investment for treatment facilities or distribution systems.

Does it say “shall”? Partially. The Joint Committee is directed to conduct the study and produce a report. But utilities, the DEP, water authorities, and other relevant agencies are not required to take any remedial action.

Does anyone have to do anything differently? Partially. The Joint Committee must study and report. But the utilities serving McDowell and Wyoming Counties are not required to repair anything, test anything, or change any operational practice as a result of this resolution.

Can you measure it later? Yes — to a degree. There is a deadline: the 2027 regular legislative session. There is a deliverable: a report with findings, conclusions, recommendations, and draft legislation.

SCR 7 is meaningfully more substantive than SR 32. It creates a process, assigns it to a specific body, sets a deadline, and authorizes payment. Those are real procedural commitments. But notice what it does not do: it does not fix one pipe, test one water sample, repair one treatment facility, or require the DEP to take any enforcement action.

For communities that have been asking for clean water for decades — Mountain State Spotlight reported in March 2026 that clean water was a top issue in McDowell County in the 2024 election and remained unresolved two years later (Mountain State Spotlight, 2026) — a study resolution is cold comfort. The residents of McDowell County already know there is a crisis. They don’t need a study to confirm it. They need pipes, funding, and regulatory enforcement.

What SCR 7 does is create an official record that the Legislature knows about the problem and has directed someone to look at it. That is not nothing. It creates a political accountability trail. The 2027 Legislature will receive a report, and at that point, voting against action will be much harder to explain. But the resolution’s substantive value is entirely contingent on what the 2027 Legislature does with the study — which is to say, it is deferred and uncertain.

Why This Is More Common In Election Years

Both of these resolutions were passed in a session that ran through March 2026 — about ten weeks before West Virginia’s May 12 primary election and eight months before the November 3 general election (West Virginia Secretary of State, 2026; National Conference of State Legislatures, 2025).

That timing is not a coincidence.

David Mayhew, in Congress: The Electoral Connection (1974), argued that the primary motivation of legislators is reelection, and that this motivation shapes their behavior through three activities: advertising (building name recognition), credit claiming (associating themselves with good outcomes), and position taking (going on record on politically salient issues regardless of outcome) (Mayhew, 1974). Symbolic resolutions are almost perfectly designed for position taking. They are low-cost because they require no appropriation and generate no fiscal opposition. They are low-risk because they cannot fail in any observable way — no implementation means no accountability. They are high-visibility because they produce a vote record, a press release, and a headline. And they are infinitely adaptable to whatever the dominant constituent anxiety happens to be.

In West Virginia’s 2026 session, coal insecurity and water contamination were both dominant constituent anxieties. SR 32 addressed the first with six affirmations and zero dollars. SCR 7 addressed the second with a study request and no repair funding. Both generated positive coverage for their sponsors. Neither changed a material condition in the state.

This pattern is not unique to West Virginia or to either political party. It is structural. When elections are near, the cost-benefit calculation of substantive policy worsens. Substantive policy requires picking winners and losers — funding one county’s water system over another, imposing costs on utilities to keep coal plants running, raising taxes to expand childcare access. Each of those choices generates organized opposition. Symbolic policy generates only organized support, because the constituency for the declared value benefits without anyone bearing a cost (Mayhew, 1974).

The result is a predictable election-year pattern: more resolutions, more “support” bills, more “study” mandates, and fewer measures with actual teeth. The legislative calendar fills up with position taking. The structural problems — water infrastructure, workforce development, childcare access, coal community transition — get another twelve-month deferral.

How To Read Resolutions Before You Share Them

The most practical takeaway is this: when you see a legislative action, read the “Resolved” clauses, not the “Whereas” clauses.

The “Whereas” section tells you the political story the bill is telling. It names the problem, identifies the victims, establishes the stakes, and frames the urgency. It is often accurate and sometimes moving. But it does not tell you what the legislation actually does.

The “Resolved” section tells you what the Legislature is actually doing. If the resolved clauses use “affirms,” “commits,” “stands with,” “supports,” or “requests,” the Legislature is making a statement. If they use “shall,” “must,” “is appropriated,” “is required to,” and “by [date],” the Legislature is making a commitment.

SR 32’s resolved clauses: the Senate “affirms” six commitments and “commits to supporting” future action. No command. No funding. No target (Senate Resolution 32, 2026).

SCR 7’s resolved clauses: the Legislature “requests” a study, effectively directs a report to the 2027 session, and authorizes expense payment. Procedurally binding, but no remediation (Senate Concurrent Resolution 7, 2026).

The severity of the problem named in the “Whereas” section is irrelevant to the classification. Coal employment is a serious issue. Drinking water contamination is a serious public health issue. The question is not whether the problem is real. The question is whether the policy instrument is capable of changing it.

When the answer is no — when the Resolved section says, in various phrasings, “we agree this is bad” — that is symbolic policy. And when symbolic policy is reported as a win, the public loses the ability to hold lawmakers accountable for the gap between what was said and what was done.

A Note On The Right Use Of Symbolic Policy

None of this means symbolic policy is always wrong. Study resolutions that actually lead to funded legislation — like SCR 7, if the 2027 Legislature follows through — are legitimate precursors to substantive policy. Resolutions that name an injustice for the first time create official records that advocates, courts, and future legislatures can cite. Sometimes the symbolic act of recognition is itself meaningful to a community that has been ignored.

The problem is not symbolic policy per se. The problem is symbolic policy that is presented as if it were substantive — as if “protecting coal families” through a resolution means coal families are protected, or as if “requesting a water study” means southern West Virginia will get clean water. When that substitution happens, it displaces the accountability demand that would otherwise follow a real problem left unsolved.

The four-question framework is not a cynicism machine. It is a clarity tool. It helps you ask, specifically and without rhetoric: what does this actually require, who is required to do it, when must it happen, and what happens if they don’t?

If you can answer those questions, you have substantive policy. If you can’t, you have a statement — and you should keep asking for the real thing.

References

Edelman, M. (1964). The symbolic uses of politics. University of Illinois Press.

Mayhew, D. R. (1974). Congress: The electoral connection. Yale University Press.

Mountain State Spotlight. (2026, March 28). Two years on, water still an issue in McDowell. Mountain State Spotlight. https://mountainstatespotlight.org/2026/03/29/clean-water-mcdowell/

National Conference of State Legislatures. (2025, December 7). 2026 state primary election dates. https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/2026-state-primary-election-dates

Senate Concurrent Resolution 7, West Virginia Legislature, Regular Session (2026). https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=scr7%20org.htm&yr=2026&sesstype=RS&i=7&houseorig=S&billtype=CR

Senate Resolution 32, West Virginia Legislature, Regular Session (2026). https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Bill_Status/bills_text.cfm?billdoc=sr32%20intr.htm&yr=2026&sesstype=RS&i=32&houseorig=s&billtype=r

West Virginia Secretary of State. (2026). 2026 elections calendar. https://sos.wv.gov/media/467/download?inline=

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What you’ve asked West Virginians to be “friends” with, for generations, is a system that treated them as expendable.

You built an economy that depended on people having no better options—and then congratulated yourselves for offering them one. You paid wages just high enough to keep people tethered, in places where opportunity had already been stripped bare. And when those wages cycled right back out—through debt, through company towns, through economic structures you controlled—you called it prosperity.

It wasn’t prosperity. It was containment.

You want credit for jobs. But you never want to talk about the conditions attached to them—the safety shortcuts, the long-term health consequences, the poisoned water, the flattened communities, the regulatory capture that made all of it possible. You wrapped it all in the language of heritage and pride, while lobbying to keep enforcement weak and oversight toothless.

And when things went wrong—as they inevitably did—you called it tragedy. Not policy failure. Not negligence. Not the predictable outcome of decisions made in boardrooms and backrooms.

Tragedy.

You’ve spent decades cultivating the idea that questioning this system is an attack on West Virginia itself. That criticizing the industry is somehow disrespecting the people who worked in it. That demanding accountability is equivalent to betrayal.

It’s a convenient narrative. It’s also a dishonest one.

Because the truth is, the people of this state were never the priority. The resource was.

And when the resource changed—when coal became chemical, when extraction became more mechanized, when fewer workers were needed—you didn’t pivot toward protecting communities. You doubled down on extraction. You fought regulations. You fought diversification. You fought anything that threatened the control you had built.

Then you turned around and asked the rest of us to celebrate it.

“Friends of Coal” isn’t a grassroots movement. It’s a message discipline strategy. It’s a shield. It’s a way to blur the line between an industry and a people—so that any criticism of one feels like an attack on the other.

But they are not the same.

West Virginians are not a brand. They are not a mascot for your lobbying campaigns. They are not props in your legislative testimony. And they are not obligated to keep sacrificing their health, their land, and their future so your balance sheets stay intact.

And let’s be clear about something else: this didn’t happen in a vacuum.

It happened with the full cooperation of elected officials who wrote the laws you wanted, ignored the violations you committed, and repeated your talking points back to the people they were supposed to represent. It happened because political power in this state has too often been aligned with industry interests instead of public ones.

That’s not heritage. That’s a system.

And systems can be dismantled.

So no, this isn’t about being “anti-coal” or “anti-industry.” It’s about being honest. It’s about rejecting the idea that exploitation—no matter how long it’s been normalized—is something we owe loyalty to.

You can keep the slogans. You can keep the billboards. You can keep the coordinated messaging campaigns.

But you don’t get to keep rewriting the story.

And on a day when we’re told to honor sacrifice, let’s be clear about the difference between service and exploitation. One is given freely. The other is extracted and repackaged as pride.

If we are going to invoke freedom, then let it mean more than a slogan on a bumper sticker or a decal on the back of a pickup paid for by a trade association. Let it mean freedom from companies and politicians who think our people are disposable, freedom from an industry PR machine that confuses loyalty with silence, and freedom from the idea that our children’s futures must be collateral damage for somebody else’s profit.

So let freedom ring—not as background noise to another corporate marketing campaign, but as a reckoning. Let it ring in the boardrooms and at the Capitol, in every office where decisions are made about our land and our lives. Let it ring until it drowns out the PR, outlasts the billboards, and breaks the grip of the “Friends of Coal” myth once and for all.

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On May 1, 2026, Jason Huffman — the West Virginia state director of Americans for Prosperity — logged on to X and wrote this, in his own words, under his own verified handle, about sitting State Senator Dr. Tom Takubo:

“For the record, @AFPWV isn’t involved in @DrTomTakubo’s race — as he seems to suggest in this interview. But our grassroots activists and staff across the state are deeply involved in defending our policy champions against the slate of center-left candidates Takubo recruited on behalf of the Hospital Cartels and their newly bought front group, the democrat-run @WVaChamber.

Ultimately, Team Takubo will fail to stop principled lawmakers from repealing the CON laws Hospital Monopolies use to keep competition out at the expense of better health care for WV families.”

Those are his words. Hospital Cartels. Hospital Monopolies. Aimed at the nonprofit, community-based, critical-access hospitals that serve the sickest, poorest, most rural population in the country. Eleven days before a primary in which $5.6 million of out-of-state money was poured into our state to remove specific lawmakers from office.

I would like to take Mr. Huffman seriously. I would like to hand him the dictionary definition of the word he keeps using, and ask him, in good faith, whether he has ever actually met one. Because I have. I collected ninety-four of them.

And before we go a step further, let me tell you who I am, because the political class in this state has spent two decades assuming people like me do not exist. I am a millennial parent. I have a daughter who graduates high school next week with high honors and the West Virginia Promise Scholarship. And I have spent the last twenty years watching the people who run this state lie to my face about what they were doing and why.

We are a different generation of parents, Mr. Huffman. We are not the audience your consultants imagine. We are not going to be tricked, we are not going to be focus-grouped, and we are not going to be talked out of what we can see with our own eyes. We have full information, full agency, and full control over our children’s futures — and we are exercising all three. That is the part you should be worried about. Not Tom Takubo, Greg Thomas, the “guy from Wheeling”.

What a Political Cartel Actually Looks Like

A cartel is a group of separate entities that coordinate spending, share resources, and act in concert to control a market they could not control alone, while maintaining the appearance of being independent. That is the definition. It is the definition Mr. Huffman uses when he points at hospitals. Let us apply it to his own organization.

I am not guessing at these numbers. They are on file with the West Virginia Secretary of State

* Americans for Prosperity, West Virginia chapter: $759,715

* Sugar Maple PAC: $1,177,676

* School Freedom Fund: $1,174,224

* Mountaineer Conservative Action: $539,910

* Make Liberty Win: $400,027

If coordinated, multi-entity spending designed to control a market while maintaining the appearance of independence is a cartel when hospitals do it, Mr. Huffman, it is a cartel when this does it. The mirror is right there.

The Hit List

If you want to know what the cartel was buying, the filings make it plain. They wanted four sitting Republicans gone before the next session:

* Vernon Criss, House Finance Committee chairman — $90,277 in opposition spending from Sugar Maple PAC alone, plus AFP, School Freedom Fund, and Make Liberty Win. His sin: proposing a $5,250 cap on the Hope Scholarship voucher to save the state $20 million.

* Clay Riley, House Finance Committee vice chairman — $35,524 from Sugar Maple, plus four other groups. Same sin.

* Scot Heckert — $86,246 from Sugar Maple, plus four other groups. Same sin.

* Tom Takubo, a sitting state senator and practicing pulmonologist. We will come back to him in a moment. His was the single most expensive head on the wall.

This is the part the “hospital cartel” rhetoric is supposed to obscure: the political cartel running the rhetoric is itself a coordinated, multi-entity operation buying state legislators wholesale, in cash, while accusing the people who treat sick West Virginians of being the real monopolists.

What is the biggest problem for a coal company but the best friend of a coal miner? A pulmonologist in the State Senate with significant leadership power.

Senator Dr. Tom Takubo, is a practicing pulmonologist at WVU Medicine. He treats lungs. In West Virginia, that means he treats coal miners.

Through the day before the primary, the cartel spent $438,000 opposing him across 36 separate independent expenditures, from four coordinated out-of-state-funded PACs: Sugar Maple PAC, Mountaineer Conservative Action, Make Liberty Win, and School Freedom Fund. It is, by a comfortable margin, the most expensive opposition spend against any sitting lawmaker in the 2026 West Virginia primary.

And here is where Mr. Huffman’s May 1st tweet and May 7th interview becomes evidence rather than rhetoric. He wrote, on the record, that “AFPWV isn’t involved in @DrTomTakubo’s race.” That is technically accurate as a single-entity statement — AFP-WV did not file a single independent expenditure naming Takubo, even as it spent $759,716 on other races in the same primary cycle. Which is, structurally, exactly how this kind of operation works. You do not need your own logo on the mailers when allied PACs in the same network are already running them. You issue press releases. You publish op-eds. You hold rallies. You call sitting senators front men for “Hospital Cartels” on X eleven days before the election. And then you point at the disclosure filings and say, with a perfectly straight face, that you were not involved.

That is the cartel structure I see. Whether or not the lawyers can find a coordination violation is somebody else’s problem. The pattern is the pattern. I do not need a subpoena to read it. I just need eyes.

The mailers they paid for did not mention coal. They did not mention lungs. They did not mention silica, or dust, or black lung, or the federal safety rule that died six weeks before the primary.

This is the video and mailer that gives the entire game away — quoted Takubo directly from a 2023 Charleston Gazette-Mail article.

The quote they printed as proof of his guilt reads:

“We, as a Legislative body, I feel are taking a dramatic overreach when we’re stepping into a field of medicine.”

That is not a politician pandering. That is a physician, on the floor of the West Virginia Senate, under his own name, telling the legislature they are practicing medicine without a license. It is one of the most honorable things a doctor-legislator can say. And four out-of-state PACs spent over $438,000 to punish him for saying it.

Why?

Look at the timing.

* April 11, 2025: The Eighth Circuit stays the federal MSHA Silica Rule — the rule that would have cut permissible silica dust exposure in half for coal miners.

* April 9, 2026: Federal regulators indefinitely delay the rule altogether.

* April–May 2026: The cartel network spends $357,000 to remove a pulmonologist from the West Virginia Senate.

NIOSH and the University of Illinois School of Public Health have confirmed a 900% increase in progressive massive fibrosis — the severe form of black lung — since 2000, driven by silica dust. Miners are getting sick younger. They are dying younger. And the cartel decided that the worst possible person to have in the state senate, six weeks after the federal silica rule was killed, was the one man in the chamber who can explain in clinical detail what coal dust does to a lung.

You do not run culture war mailers against a pulmonologist because you are worried about girls’ sports. You run them because you cannot run the actual mailer, which would read: “Tom Takubo knows too much about what coal dust does to a man’s lungs, and we need him gone before next session.”

That mailer would not poll well. So they ran the trans athlete and puberty blockers mailers instead, and they trusted that nobody would connect the dots

Protecting coal miners from black lung disease is deeply personal to me.

My grandfather — we called him Jiggs — had black lung. I will not forget the sound of him trying to breathe at the end of his life. It is not a sound any West Virginia family forgets, because there are tens of thousands of us who have heard it, going back four generations. The donors funding the Takubo mailers have never heard that sound. They never will. To them, the lungs of West Virginia miners are line items on a profit-and-loss statement, and a pulmonologist in the state senate is a cost on that statement. $438,000 to remove him is a bargain.

The Pattern, Across Every Issue

Once you see the cartel, you see it everywhere.

On vouchers: AFP demanded the legislature kill a $5,250 Hope Scholarship cap that would have saved the state $20 million, while Pennsylvania’s nearly identical voucher pipeline has funneled over $30 million in tax credits to firms tied to a single Republican megadonor, Jeff Yass (Jacobin, Washington Post). The same Yass who pours tens of millions into the same national “school choice” network AFP exists to advance. Meanwhile the West Virginia Promise Scholarship — the merit-based award designed to keep our own kids here — has been quietly eroded from full tuition in 2002 down to a flat $5,500 today, covering roughly a third of WVU tuition (CFWV). The cartel will fight to the death for vouchers that subsidize private religious schools and route profits to Pennsylvania. It will let the program that actually retains West Virginia kids wither on the vine.

On healthcare: AFP wants to repeal Certificate of Need so out-of-state, for-profit operators can cherry-pick the highest-margin procedures, cannibalize our nonprofit hospitals, and route West Virginia patients across state lines for complex care (West Virginia Hospital Association). The 21 critical-access hospitals that serve our rural counties would lose the cross-subsidy that keeps them open. Maternity wards close. Mental health services close. And the cartel calls that“freedom.”

On worker safety: Silica rule dead. Pulmonologist targeted for removal. No further questions.

The throughline is identical in every case. Public dollars and public protections are recategorized as “cartels” and “monopolies” and “captured markets” so they can be dismantled, and the savings — every time, without exception — accrue to a small number of out-of-state donors whose names appear on the disclosure filings of the PACs running the mailers.

That is a cartel. That has always been a cartel. And the political class that funds it has spent twenty years training West Virginians to look at the wrong building.

What the Political Cartel Forgot About Millennial Parents

Here is the thing the cartel did not budget for, and it is the reason this primary cycle is going to be studied for a long time.

This generation of parents already finished the math.

We are the first American generation to come of age while the credibility of every major institution collapsed in public, with documentation. We watched the Iraq War lies, the 2008 crash, Flint, the Sacklers, Enron, the Catholic Church, 81 million opioid pills shipped to a single county of 25,000 people in southern West Virginia. We watched DuPont poison the Ohio Valley with C8 and pay a settlement that worked out to pennies per affected resident. We watched the Elk River turn the tap water of 300,000 West Virginians into something you could smell from the street.

By the time we became parents, the pattern was not a theory. It was a data set.

You cannot focus-group your way out of a generation that has watched the receipts pile up for thirty years. The trust is not low. The trust is gone. And once trust is gone, ninety mailers in a single mailbox stop being persuasion and start being evidence — evidence that the money exists, evidence that the donors do not live here, evidence that the primary winner will not work for us, evidence that our vote is decorative, and evidence that the only remaining lever we control over our child’s future is the one no consultant has figured out how to buy: the decision about where she lives.

That is the part the cartel never priced in. Millennial parents have agency. We have control. We have a level of access to public records, comparative data, and lived-experience evidence that our parents and grandparents never had. We sit at our kitchen tables on a Saturday night and open the Secretary of State’s spreadsheet, and we do not need a press release to interpret it. We see the donor addresses. We see the vendor names. We see the dollar amounts. We see which lawmakers were targeted and which were defended, and we draw the conclusions ourselves — without focus groups, without consultants, without permission, and without apology.

My daughter graduates next week with high honors and the Promise Scholarship. She is leaving for the University of Kentucky pre-dental program in the fall. We are paying the premium over in-state tuition voluntarily, because the in-state institutions can no longer credibly promise her a future inside this state’s borders. Her best friends are running the same calculation. Thousands of West Virginia families ran this math at their kitchen tables this spring and arrived at the same answer.

That is school choice, Mr. Huffman. That is a parent with full information, full agency, and full control over her child’s life, making a deliberate, expensive, deeply-considered decision to send her child to a state where the institutions still function, the silica rules are enforced, the hospitals stay open, and the elections are not for sale.

You wanted a market verdict on West Virginia governance? Here it is. The verdict is Lexington. The verdict is Columbus. The verdict is Pittsburgh and Raleigh and Nashville. The verdict is a U-Haul rental and a change-of-address form. The cartel network can buy every state senate seat in the building, and it will still lose the only ballot it has not figured out how to purchase: the one cast at the closing table on an out-of-state house, by a millennial parent who finally has the receipts and the resolve to use them.

Final Words for the Class of 2026

To my daughter, and every kid leaving this fall: you did not fail this state. This state failed you, and a generation of us watched it happen, and we are sending you somewhere with a future because that is what parents do.

Go. Build. Become a remarkable dentist. Raise your kids wherever the water is clean and the elections are decided by the people who actually live there.

Come home for Thanksgiving. Bring the grandkids. Show them the mountains. Teach them the music. Tell them about Jiggs.

And do not, for one second, feel guilty about the address on your driver’s license. The guilt belongs to the political cartel that mailed me ninety pieces of cardstock and not one functioning idea for the place we raised you in.

We love you. We are proud of you.

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The Real Story Behind the Mailers: Dr. Tom Takubo and Dr. Mike Maroney vs Mark Maynard’s Lobbyist Talking Points

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I keep coming back to a simple question that feels harder to answer the longer I sit with it: if we aren’t taking care of each other, what are we even doing?

We like to talk about independence in this country as if it’s the highest form of strength. We celebrate self-reliance, grit, and the idea that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough. But beneath all of that is a quieter, less comfortable truth: none of us actually make it alone. Not really.

Every success story has invisible scaffolding. Teachers. Roads. Healthcare workers. Neighbors. Family. Even strangers who made small decisions that made your life a little easier without ever knowing your name. A functioning society is not a backdrop—it’s an active, ongoing collaboration.

And yet, we often treat care for one another like it’s optional. Like it’s charity instead of infrastructure.

We debate whether people deserve help, as if dignity should be conditional. We draw lines between “us” and “them,” between the “hardworking” and the “undeserving,” between those who made good choices and those who didn’t. But life doesn’t sort people that neatly. Hardship isn’t a moral failure. And prosperity isn’t always proof of virtue.

A prosperous society doesn’t just happen—it’s built. And it’s built on the idea that when one part of the community struggles, it eventually touches all of us.

There’s a reason people say a rising tide lifts all boats. It’s not just a nice metaphor—it’s a practical one. When people have access to healthcare, they stay healthier and miss fewer days of work. When children have stable homes and good schools, they grow into adults who contribute more fully to the world around them. When people aren’t constantly on the edge of crisis, they have the space to create, innovate, and participate.

Care isn’t just compassionate. It’s efficient. It’s stabilizing. It’s smart.

But more than that, it’s human.

What does it say about us if we build systems that only work for some? If we accept preventable suffering as the cost of doing business? If we measure success purely in individual terms, while ignoring the conditions that made that success possible in the first place?

Taking care of each other doesn’t mean erasing personal responsibility. It means recognizing that responsibility runs both ways—individual and collective. It means understanding that the health of a society isn’t measured by its highest achievers, but by how it treats its most vulnerable.

Because at some point, vulnerability comes for all of us. Illness, job loss, aging, unexpected crises—these aren’t rare exceptions. They’re part of the human experience.

And when that moment comes, the question won’t be whether we deserved help.

The question will be whether help is there.

So maybe the real question isn’t whether we can afford to take care of each other.

It’s whether we can afford not to.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

Greg Thomas has spent years being treated like some kind of dark prince of West Virginia Republican politics, the fellow you hire when you want to get mean, get loud, and get even. But strip away the whisper campaign, the swagger, and the expensive mythology, and what you find is something much less impressive: a consultant whose reputation was built in the long shadow of one billionaire’s checkbook. Before any candidate pays Greg Thomas a dime, they ought to ask the question people in politics are usually too polite, too nervous, or too compromised to ask out loud: how much of this man’s reputation was actually earned, and how much of it was bought by Don Blankenship?

For years, Thomas has floated around West Virginia Republican politics with the reputation of a hard-edged strategist, the kind of fellow people talk about like he has a secret map to the voter file. But take away Don Blankenship’s money, and what exactly is left? That is the question every candidate should ask before writing Greg Thomas a check: how much of his reputation was earned, and how much of it was bought?

Thomas is not a strategist who wins. He is a strategist who got very good at getting hired by one very rich man. His credentials are largely Don Blankenship’s checkbook dressed up as campaign genius.

Thomas’s legend begins with the 2004 “And for the Sake of the Kids” campaign, which Blankenship funded with nearly $2.5 million as Massey Energy was facing a $50 million judgment headed toward the West Virginia Supreme Court. Thomas ran that operation for Blankenship, and the campaign helped defeat Justice Warren McGraw and elect Brent Benjamin.

That race is still treated in some corners like proof that Thomas is some sort of dark electoral wizard. Honey, spending millions of a coal baron’s money to carpet-bomb a low-information judicial race is not wizardry. It is not political genius. It is a high-end personal shopping service for a billionaire with a grudge.

And the result was not some proud chapter in West Virginia political history. Benjamin later cast the deciding vote to overturn the $50 million verdict against Massey, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. that his participation violated due process because of the extraordinary campaign support Blankenship had provided.Thomas’s signature credential became a national case study in judicial corruption.

Do not confuse access to money with political talent.

All images are courtesy of the Brennan Center. Accessible here: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/buying-time-2004-west-virginia

October 28, 2004 - And for the Sake of the Kids: "McGraw Tired"

October 28, 2004 - And for the Sake of the Kids: “McGraw Clear Differences”

October 23, 2004 - And for the Sake of the Kids: “McGraw Powerful Family”

October 23, 2004 - And for the Sake of the Kids: “McGraw Ads a Lie”

October 23, 2004 - And for the Sake of the Kids: “Radical McGraw 2”

October 16, 2004 - And for the Sake of the Kids: "McGraw Car Insurance"

October 5, 2004 - And for the Sake of the Kids: "McGraw Misleading Ads"

September 21, 2004 - And for the Sake of the Kids: “Brothers McGraw”

September 20, 2004 - And for the Sake of the Kids: "Radical McGraw"

September 4, 2004 - And for the Sake of the Kids: "McGraw Too Dangerous"

The 2004 race was not a one-off. Blankenship kept writing checks, and Thomas kept showing up to cash the reputation dividend. In 2006, Blankenship spent $5.1 million on a legislative campaign Thomas managed, trying to reshape the Legislature with sheer financial force.

Then came 2018. Thomas returned to manage Blankenship’s U.S. Senate campaign even after Blankenship had served prison time for conspiring to willfully violate mine safety standards in the wake of the Upper Big Branch disaster that killed 29 miners. This time the campaign was not a proxy judicial race flooded with money. It was a real statewide Republican primary where voters had to choose the man, not just absorb the ads.

And what happened? Blankenship finished third in a three-man Republican primary. Third. That is not the resume of a mastermind. That is the record of a consultant who looked formidable only when Daddy Don’s money could drown out everyone else.

After the loss, Blankenship publicly threatened to work against the Republican nominee, and Thomas went on radio to say Blankenship would make sure Patrick Morrisey “does not become a U.S. Senator.” A winning strategist helps his side consolidate after a bruising primary. A hired gun living off one patron’s rage just keeps firing.

This is the real problem for any candidate tempted to hire Thomas now: his reputation has outlived the evidence for it. He is still treated as a major Republican operative, still appears as a political commentator, and still carries the aura of somebody who can move races. But aura is cheap. Campaigns are expensive.

When Thomas has had to show broad effectiveness beyond Blankenship’s patronage, the record is less impressive. As executive director of West Virginia Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, he spent years pushing corporate legal-reform priorities and attacking lawmakers who resisted them. Yet Thomas himself called the 2025 legislative session the “worst session ever” for his agenda, complaining that lawmakers he expected to support him instead broke away. That is what fading leverage sounds like.

Again: do not confuse access to money with political talent.

Any campaign considering Greg Thomas should think less about his image and more about return on investment.

* His best-known “win” was financed by Blankenship and ended up as a U.S. Supreme Court due-process scandal.

* His most prominent patron was Don Blankenship, whose money built Thomas’s name recognition and kept reviving his career.

* His biggest recent statewide campaign ended in a third-place finish.

* His later issue-advocacy work has generated heat, headlines, and enemies, but by his own account not the legislative results he wanted.

That is the case against Greg Thomas in plain English: not that he is mean, not that he is rough, not that he plays hardball. Politics is full of hardball players. The case is that people have mistaken one billionaire’s patronage for evidence of unusual strategic talent.

A big check can make a mediocre consultant look like a mastermind. Blankenship’s money made noise. Thomas called it strategy.

West Virginia candidates do not need another consultant selling them yesterday’s scandal as tomorrow’s strategy. They do not need a man whose defining campaign became a Supreme Court warning label. And they do not need a strategist whose reputation was built so heavily by one wealthy benefactor that it is hard to tell where the talent ends and the checkbook begins.

So before another candidate hires Greg Thomas, sit down and ask one simple question: if Don Blankenship had never opened his wallet, would anybody be calling this man a genius? Would he have a reputation at all, or would he just be another consultant with a Rolodex and a nice suit?

The answer matters. Because Greg Thomas did not build a political empire. Daddy Don Blankenship bought him one. And the difference between those two things is the difference between hiring a strategist and renting a myth that somebody else already paid for.

West Virginia deserves better than expensive nostalgia for a scandal. And any candidate still writing Greg Thomas a check is paying for a reputation that was never earned, only purchased, polished, and resold at a markup.

Sources:

* “This West Virginia election is full of twists and coal money influence” - Grist, May 8, 2016

* Caperton v. A. T. Massey Coal Co., 556 U.S. 868 (2009) - U.S. Supreme Court

* “Why Don Blankenship still matters” - E&E News, December 8, 2021

* “Can the Most Hated Man in West Virginia Win?” - POLITICO Magazine, March 26, 2018

* “Who funds CALA? Who’s ‘buying’ our elections?” - West Virginia Record, May 6, 2014

* “Blankenship to wage third-party bid after losing primary” - POLITICO, May 20, 2018

* “Blankenship wages war on GOP after losing Senate primary” - POLITICO, May 19, 2018

* “No real legal reform in ‘worst session ever’” - West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, April 14, 2025

* “Guest column: Lawmakers must remember to listen to the people” - Weirton Daily Times, May 29, 2025

* “Republicans battle over closed or open primary question” - WV MetroNews, January 8, 2026

* “West Virginia’s Republican domination” - WV MetroNews, November 6, 2024

* “CALA’s Greg Thomas Misleading Voters, Perpetuating a Fraud on West Virginia” - WV Association for Justice

* Brennan Center Archives

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

If you just made it through another primary election feeling talked at instead of talked to, this is for you.

If you found yourself watching ads, flipping through mailers, or scrolling past campaign videos thinking, none of this actually sounds like me, you’re not alone. And you’re not wrong for feeling that way.

There’s a certain hollowness that sets in after a while—when every candidate starts to sound the same, when every message feels prepackaged, when every sentence feels like it was written somewhere far away from the realities of your day-to-day life. That feeling? That’s not cynicism. That’s recognition.

Because your life is not a slogan.

You are dealing with things that don’t fit on a yard sign. You’re thinking about grocery bills that keep creeping up, rent or mortgages that don’t get easier, child care that’s hard to find or harder to afford, jobs that may or may not feel stable, health care that’s confusing or out of reach, and a general sense that everything just takes more effort than it should. You’re balancing responsibilities, making tradeoffs, figuring things out as you go.

You are already doing your own kind of fighting every single day.

Which is why it feels so disconnected to hear the same two phrases repeated over and over again:

“West Virginia values.”

“I’m going to fight for you.”

Let’s start with “West Virginia values.”

What does that actually mean?

Because when you hear it, does it make you feel understood—or does it feel like someone is trying to define you without ever asking you anything?

West Virginia is not one story. It’s not one belief system, one political identity, or one way of living. It’s people with different priorities, different struggles, different hopes for what this state could be. And yet, every election cycle, that complexity gets flattened into a phrase that’s vague enough to mean anything—and specific enough to make it sound like it means something.

But a slogan is not a substitute for an explanation.

When someone says, “West Virginia values,” what they’re often doing is skipping the harder part—telling you exactly what they believe, what they’ll do, and who those choices will actually impact.

And then there’s the other phrase:

“I’m going to fight.”

Fight who?

Fight what?

Fight how?

At some point, it starts to feel like the word “fight” is doing a lot of work to avoid saying anything concrete. Because governing isn’t a campaign ad. It’s not a constant showdown. It’s reading bills, understanding budgets, sitting through long meetings, making tradeoffs, and sometimes telling people things they don’t want to hear.

It’s work.

And when everything is framed as a fight, it raises a fair question: is this about solving problems—or just sounding tough?

Especially when you’re already dealing with enough in your own life.

So as we move past the primary and toward the next phase of this election cycle, I think it’s worth asking a little more of the people asking for your vote.

Not more noise. More clarity.

When you hear these phrases again—and you will—try asking:

* What do you actually mean by “West Virginia values,” specifically?

* What exactly are you planning to “fight,” and what does that look like in policy?

* Who is funding your campaign, and what do they want in return?

Because you deserve more than a message that’s designed to sound good.

You deserve answers.

That’s what this publication is here to keep pushing for—not just what candidates say, but what’s behind it. Not just the slogans, but the structure. Not just the promises, but the money that makes those promises possible.

Because if you want to understand what’s really driving the message, you have to look at who paid for it.

Follow the money.

— Carrie Clendening

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

Mother’s Day is supposed to be a pause.

A day for family. A day for gratitude. A day when the noise can wait.

But today, a dear friend of mine had her Mother’s Day interrupted by a political attack text. And when she told me about it—when I saw what had been pushed onto her phone—it ruined mine too.

The message opened with a line so cynical it’s hard to believe someone typed it and hit send:

“Sorry to interrupt Mother’s Day.”

Then it did exactly that.

It went on to say “Breaking News,” accused State Senator Tom Takubo of “LYING” about an endorsement, urged people to “reject Tom Takubo” in the May 12 primary, and linked to an article on National File. The image attached to the message was worse—dark, dramatic, and branded with the words:

“THE FRAUD.”

“He said Trump endorsed him… He lied.”

“The West Virginia Deception.”

That is what someone decided to blast out to West Virginia mothers on Mother’s Day.

Not a policy argument. Not a serious disagreement. A smear.

The source matters. At the bottom of the message was the citation: “Source: National File, 5/9/26.”

Let’s be clear: National File is widely flagged by independent media-rating organizations as unreliable or low-credibility. Ad Fontes Media rates National File as “Unreliable/Problematic” and hyper-partisan. Media Bias/Fact Check rates it “Low Credibility” and categorizes it as conspiracy/pseudoscience.

So when a political organization bases its “breaking news” on a source that watchdogs have already warned the public about, that should raise a red flag for every voter—no matter who you support.

I’m Tired of the lies about Tom Takubo! I’m not saying elected officials should never be criticized. They should. Their votes, their statements, their record—all of it is fair game.

But what’s happening here isn’t accountability. It’s character assassination.

Tom Takubo is a pulmonologist—a lung doctor—and a longtime public servant. In West Virginia, lung disease isn’t theoretical. It’s real. It’s generational. It’s tied to our families and our history. And that kind of medical experience matters.

You can disagree with Tom Takubo. You can vote against him. That’s democracy.

But branding a man “THE FRAUD” in a Mother’s Day text—sourced to a low-credibility website—isn’t debate. It’s cruelty dressed up as campaigning.

This Was Personal—Because They Made It Personal.

My friend didn’t ask for this. She didn’t opt-in to spend Mother’s Day reading a smear on her phone.

And I didn’t ask to spend Mother’s Day hearing about it—feeling that familiar sinking anger that comes from watching politics stomp into private life and wreck what should be a peaceful day.

Nothing is sacred if this is what we’ve accepted as normal.

To My Friend—and to Anyone Who Got That Text: I’m sorry they did that to you. You deserved a quiet Mother’s Day.

And to Mountaineer Conservative Action: stop hijacking our holidays to spread ugly, last-minute attacks built on unreliable sourcing. West Virginians deserve better than that.

I’m tired of the lies being spread about Tom Takubo.

He is a decent man.

And I’m done staying quiet when political operatives decide Mother’s Day is just another target.

Note: I am not sharing the image or website because I refuse to lend credibility to such an outrageous claim.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

If you want to know how power works in West Virginia politics, don’t just watch the speeches. Watch the paperwork. The slogans are local, the candidates insist they are local, and the mailers are aimed at local loyalties, but a surprising amount of the machinery behind West Virginia’s 2026 Republican primaries leads somewhere else entirely: to Beverly, Massachusetts, and to a familiar circle of consultants, media buyers, and compliance men whose names keep surfacing wherever the money gets serious.

Even the names tell a story. West Virginia’s official state tree is the sugar maple, its official state animal is the black bear, its official state colors are old gold and blue, and it entered the Union as the 35th state. So when PACs and committees show up with names like Sugar Maple PAC, Black Bear PAC, Blue and Gold PAC, and 35th Inc., it is hard not to see the branding strategy: wrap the money in the state’s symbols and hope voters mistake symbolism for homegrown authenticity.

I can’t wait to see which symbolic object of West Virginia they name the next new PAC after.

Everybody is talking about Sugar Maple PAC’s spending, and they should be. The reports show a surge of money for digital and print advertising, including six-figure payments to vendors like Acquire Digital LLC and Matchstick Media, along with contributions from Jeff Yass, Richard UiHlein, and Thomas Klingenstein. That is the loud part of the story. The quieter part is the infrastructure behind it: the consultants, compliance firms, media shops, and nonprofit board members who keep turning up across the same political ecosystem.

Everybody is counting Sugar Maple’s money. Fewer people are counting the men who keep showing up to route it, report it, buy the ads, and sit on the nonprofit boards.

Blue and Gold PAC helps make that point plain. In the West Virginia campaign finance filings, Blue and Gold PAC appears not only as a donor to Republican legislative candidates, but also as a committee that paid Red Curve Solutions and made a payment to Team Morrisey. The same filings show candidates receiving contributions from Blue and Gold PAC using a Beverly, Massachusetts address tied to Red Curve Solutions. So the story is not simply that outside money exists. The story is that the same political-services infrastructure shows up on both sides of the ledger — taking payments as a vendor and sending contributions as part of the pipeline.

Once you look past the PAC names and into the people behind the entities, the pattern gets clearer. IRS 990 tax filings indicate that American Prosperity Group has included Scott Will, D.J. Eckert, Trevor Vessels, and Charles Gantt as board members, while West Virginia Prosperity Group has included Scott Will, Charlie Bailey, Rob Cornelius, and Charles Gantt. Those overlaps matter because Will and Bailey are tied to SW2 Political, Eckert and Vessels are tied to Matchstick Media, and Gantt is tied to Bulldog Compliance.

That is not a random collection of names. It is a small professional class of Republican political operatives appearing across strategy, advertising, compliance, and nonprofit-style governance. If somebody set out to build an apparatus that could raise money, route money, spend money, buy ads, file reports, and keep the whole operation looking tidy on paper, it might look an awful lot like this.

None of that, by itself, proves some grand illegal conspiracy. It does not need to. The point is simpler: voters are being sold a story about grassroots West Virginia politics while the plumbing looks highly professionalized, increasingly national, and populated by the same repeat players.

Bulldog Compliance and Red Curve Solutions sit near the heart of that plumbing. Bulldog markets compliance, bookkeeping, and reporting services for campaigns and committees, and it operates within Red Curve Solutions, a larger Republican political finance operation. In practical terms, that means treasurer work, disclosure reports, reconciliations, and the kind of paperwork handling that helps political money move without tripping over its own shoelaces.

That is why the compliance story matters. The public is trained to notice the ad, not the accountant; the television spot, not the treasurer; the loud independent expenditure, not the person who helps make it look orderly on paper. But if you want to understand who is really shaping a political operation, you had better pay attention to the people who keep the money moving as much as the people who keep the cameras rolling.

Federal records help explain why. In Federal Election Commission (FEC) Matter Under Review (MUR) 8002, the Commission sent formal notice in 2022 to an entity using Bulldog Compliance’s Beverly address in connection with a campaign-finance complaint, including instructions to preserve records. That does not prove every allegation in that matter, but it does puncture the fairy tale that polished compliance firms somehow sit above scrutiny.

And MUR 8002 is hardly the only time these names have surfaced in federal campaign-finance files. Charles Gantt appears as treasurer in MUR 7994 involving Make America Great Again, Again! Inc., and in MUR 8002 involving 34N22, Inc. Bradley Crate appears even more frequently in FEC matters tied to Trump-aligned committees and Red Curve’s world, including MUR 7094 involving Make America Great Again PAC, MUR 7339 involving Trump Victory, MUR 7540 involving Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., MUR 8139 involving Never Surrender Inc., and MUR 8251 and 8260, which directly named Red Curve Solutions, LLC and Bradley T. Crate in connection with reporting and contribution allegations involving Trump-affiliated committees.

An MUR is not a conviction, and not every one ends the same way. Some are dismissed, some end in settlement, and some simply record that the FEC thought a matter serious enough to open a file and notify the respondents. But by now the larger point is hard to miss: Bradley Crate, Charles Gantt, Red Curve, and the Bulldog compliance orbit are not occasional names in the federal record. They are recurring figures in the treasurer-and-compliance machinery behind major Republican political committees.

MUR 7886 makes that point even more forcefully because it involved the pharmaceutical industry and because Black Bear PAC was part of the factual record. The respondent was Astellas Pharma U.S., Inc., a major drug company operating in a heavily regulated business and holding a Federal Supply Schedule contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs. The FEC found reason to believe Astellas violated the federal contractor contribution ban by making a $50,000 contribution to Senate Leadership Fund and two separate $5,000 contributions to Black Bear PAC in 2019 and 2020.

That Black Bear detail matters here. FEC records identify Black Bear PAC, Inc. as a super PAC using Bulldog Compliance’s Beverly address with Charles Gantt as treasurer, which places a Gantt/Bulldog-linked committee directly inside the MUR 7886 fact pattern. In the conciliation materials, Astellas agreed to seek disgorgement of the $10,000 in Black Bear PAC contributions to the U.S. Treasury if the contributions were returned.

So MUR 7886 is not just a generic example about compliance. It shows that a major pharmaceutical company with lawyers, contracts, compliance personnel, and every institutional reason to know the rules still wound up in an enforcement matter that included contributions to a PAC tied to Charles Gantt and Bulldog’s Beverly address. In other words, all the polish in the world — all the compliance language, all the expensive stationery, all the institutional sophistication — does not guarantee clean political conduct when the facts run the wrong way.

The federal pattern also reaches back into Patrick Morrisey’s own 2018 Senate run. OpenSecrets reports that 35th Inc., a single-candidate super PAC supporting Morrisey, received $15,000 from Global Energy Producers in 2018. And MUR 7196 sits inside the broader FEC scrutiny of the Global Energy Producers / Lev Parnas / Igor Fruman network, where the Commission addressed allegations involving foreign-national money and related solicitation activity. That does not mean every recipient was charged the same way or knew the same facts. It does mean a PAC supporting Morrisey was operating in the same donor ecosystem that later drew serious federal attention.

Then there is the media side. Sugar Maple’s spending has understandably drawn attention to who is buying and placing the ads, but the American Prosperity Group overlap points toward Matchstick-linked figures too. Public reporting has already tied D.J. Eckert to Morrisey-aligned outside spending, while Trevor Vessels is publicly identified as a founding partner at Matchstick Media Strategies. So again, the point is not just that one PAC spent a lot of money. It is that the same names keep surfacing across different stages of the process — strategy, media, governance, compliance.

The SW2 Political overlap adds another piece to the picture, and it matters even more once you look at the résumés. During his tenure as West Virginia attorney general, Patrick Morrisey rose to chair the Republican Attorneys General Association, the national group that helps Republican AGs raise money and coordinate legal and political strategy. Scott Will, who now shows up both at SW2 Political and on the Prosperity Group side of the fence, previously served in RAGA leadership before moving into the consulting world. Charlie Bailey, another SW2 figure linked to West Virginia Prosperity Group, comes out of that same broader Republican political orbit.

In other words, the network now linking SW2, the Prosperity entities, and West Virginia races did not spring up overnight. It looks like an outgrowth of the same national Republican attorney-general world Morrisey helped lead. Taken together with the Matchstick and Bulldog overlaps, that makes the whole arrangement look less like a loose alliance of friendly conservatives and more like an interlocking political-services network with different men handling different parts of the same enterprise.

If Governor Patrick Morrisey wants “fresh faces” in the Legislature, that is his right as a politician. But when the money around those races runs through Beverly, Massachusetts addresses, compliance firms tied to Charles Gantt, strategists tied to SW2, ad-buying figures tied to Matchstick, and boards populated by the same small set of operatives, voters are entitled to ask how fresh the operation really is. Fresh faces are one thing. Old wiring is another.

That is where the story stops being gossip and starts becoming public interest. A voter can shrug at outside spending and say that is just how politics works now. But no voter should be asked to pretend that this is merely a spontaneous uprising of local neighbors passing the hat around for a few worthy candidates.

The records point to something much more structured than that. Blue and Gold PAC sends money to candidates and to Team Morrisey while paying Red Curve. Sugar Maple PAC pours extraordinary sums into advertising. American Prosperity Group and West Virginia Prosperity Group include overlapping figures tied to SW2 Political, Matchstick Media, and Bulldog Compliance. The picture that emerges is not of one noisy PAC, but of a managed ecosystem — one capable of raising, routing, spending, and justifying money through a tight circle of professionals.

That is why the compliance story is the part the public and media should not skip over. If you only watch the ads, you miss the apparatus. If you only count Sugar Maple’s checks, you miss the men who keep appearing behind them. And if you miss the apparatus, you miss how power is actually being organized in West Virginia right now.

So yes, by all means, keep talking about Sugar Maple PAC. The spending is enormous, and it deserves scrutiny. But stop there and you miss the more durable truth: the real story is not just who paid for the noise. It is who built the system that makes the noise possible, who sits on the boards, who places the media, who handles the compliance, and why the same names keep turning up whenever you follow the paper trail long enough.

That is not cynicism. That is just reading the receipts.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wvpolicy.substack.com

My father once told me something that stopped me cold.

He said the coal miners of West Virginia were treated like property. That they were bought and sold, worked until they broke, and discarded when they had nothing left to give. And then he said something harder: that nobody cares about their suffering the way they care about others’.

It was a controversial comparison—miners to slaves—and I bristled at it. But sitting with his words over the years, I’ve come to understand something important. He wasn’t making a historical argument. He was articulating a feeling—a sense of erasure that runs bone-deep in Appalachian communities. The feeling that your family’s pain doesn’t count. That it doesn’t make the history books. That nobody’s coming to tell your story.

This essay is my attempt to tell it.

The Disconnect Isn’t About Policy. It’s About Pain.

If you want to understand the socio-political landscape of West Virginia, you have to stop thinking about policy and start thinking about wounds.

The white coal miner’s perception of being treated as property isn’t historically equivalent to chattel slavery—but the feeling of being used up, discarded, and forgotten is real. And that feeling has been deliberately exploited.

Here’s the dark irony: the coal companies themselves benefit from this resentment. By fostering competition between different groups over whose suffering matters more, they divert attention from their own practices. While miners argue about recognition, nobody’s looking at the company books. Nobody’s asking why the people who did the dying stayed poor while the people who owned the mines built dynasties.

It’s psychological warfare dressed up as culture war.

This Isn’t Ancient History

There’s a comforting myth that the worst abuses of coal mining are relics of a distant past—grainy photographs of child laborers, stories from the 1920s.

My grandfather, Jiggs McKnight, worked the mines from the 1950s to the late 1980s.

That’s not the distant past. That’s within living memory. That’s the man who bounced me on his knee.

The family moved between Fayette, Wyoming, and Jackson counties, chasing work. That instability—the constant uprooting, the chase for the next seam of coal—defined generations. You went where the work was. You took what they gave you. You kept your mouth shut about the rest.

In 1984, Jiggs survived a mine collapse.

Physically, he recovered. Psychologically, he carried it until the day he died. And he made one thing clear to his son, my father Bill: Don’t go into the mines.

That’s the real inheritance. Not pride in coal country. Fear of it.

The “Friends of Coal” Fantasy

You’ve seen the bumper stickers. Friends of Coal.Coal Keeps the Lights On. There’s a whole mythology built around the brotherhood of miners, the dignity of the work, the pride of Appalachian identity.

And look—there is something real there. The solidarity of men who trust each other with their lives underground. The skill and courage the work demands. I’m not here to mock that.

But for families like mine, the reality was different. It was fear when the men went down. It was injuries that never fully healed. It was lungs that gave out decades later. It was widows left with a folded flag and a settlement check that wouldn’t cover the funeral.

The “Friends of Coal” narrative is a story the industry tells about itself. It’s not the story the miners’ families lived.

Defending Your Abuser

My grandmother Carrie lived in Skelton Coal Camp in Raleigh County.

She defended the coal company until her dying day. They provided the house. They provided the store. They provided the doctor. How could she speak against them?

I used to find this baffling. Now I understand it as survival.

If Carrie admitted that the company was exploiting her family—that the company store was a debt trap, that the housing kept them dependent, that the whole system was designed to extract maximum labor for minimum cost—then she’d have to admit something unbearable: that she had no control. That her whole life had been lived inside a cage she couldn’t see.

It’s easier to believe your captor is your benefactor. Psychologists call it Stockholm Syndrome. Prisoners call it institutionalization. In coal country, we just called it life.

The Generational Toll

My great-great-grandfather died of typhoid.

That might sound like ancient history too—but typhoid doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It comes from contaminated water. From poor sanitation. From the conditions the coal camps provided for their workers and their families.

The company didn’t pull the trigger. They just built the conditions where disease could thrive, and then expressed condolences when it did.

Generation after generation, the pattern repeated. Men died underground or died slowly above it, their lungs full of dust. Women were left to raise children alone, to stretch nothing into something, to mourn without support.

What did the widows get? A folded flag, if they were lucky. A settlement that wouldn’t last the year. And the expectation that they’d be grateful.

The Insult of the Hall of Fame

West Virginia University has a Coal Hall of Fame.

Take a guess who’s in it.

It’s not the miners. It’s not the men who went down into the dark and didn’t come back. It’s not the widows who held families together with nothing.

It’s the coal barons. The owners. The executives. The men who got rich while other men got buried.

This is institutional memory laid bare. This is who we’ve decided to honor. And every time someone romanticizes the “coal rush”—every time there’s a cute game or a nostalgic exhibit—it lands differently for families who lived the reality.

You want to honor coal miners? Tell the truth about what happened to them.

What Was Really Stolen

The coal companies took a lot from West Virginia. They took the wealth buried in the mountains and shipped it out of state. They took the health of generations of workers. They took fathers and husbands and sons.

But they also took something harder to name: they took the narrative.

They convinced families like Carrie’s that the company was their protector. They convinced miners that their enemy was other workers—other races, other regions—anyone but the men signing their paychecks. They convinced a whole culture that exploitation was tradition, that suffering was heritage, that questioning any of it was betrayal.

And then they built a Hall of Fame for themselves.

Breaking the Cycle

I don’t know how to fix West Virginia’s economy. I don’t have a policy platform or a five-point plan.

But I know this: healing starts with honesty.

It starts with refusing to romanticize abuse. It starts with naming what happened—not as ancient history, but as recent trauma that still echoes in families today. It starts with recognizing that the resentment so many feel isn’t irrational; it’s the predictable result of being exploited and then erased.

My father’s anger wasn’t crazy. It was the inheritance of generations of men who were used up and thrown away. The tragedy is that his anger was pointed at the wrong targets—at other suffering people instead of at the systems that created the suffering.

The coal companies won when they got us fighting each other. They win every time we compete over whose pain matters more.

The only way to break the cycle is to see it clearly. To tell the truth about who did what to whom. To stop defending our abusers and start defending each other.

That’s the inheritance I want to leave.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be grateful if you’d share it. These stories don’t get told enough

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com

I am currently working on a new piece titled, “How PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) Lobbyist Organization, Novartis Pharmaceutical Corporation, and AbbVie Inc., destroyed West Virginians’ access to affordable healthcare and medication.”

As part of this project, I have been reviewing legislative committee meeting videos regarding the distribution of prescription medication to safety net providers, such as rural hospitals and pharmacies. Given my recent findings, I have decided to republish this article from January 2026.

There’s something about a decade in the legislative trenches that changes how you see things. I got my degree in Public Policy Analysis from the University of Charleston, but the real education started when I became a legislative liaison for the Kanawha County Commission in 2008. For ten years—through 2018—I watched how government actually works, not the textbook version, but the version with lobbyists, campaign money, and backroom deals that shape bills long before the public even hears about them.

That’s where I learned to tell the difference between real legislative movement and political theater. And honestly? Once you see the machinery from up close, you can’t unsee it.

The honest truth is that I’ve spent years working outside partisan bubbles, watching from the sidelines, and becoming deeply skeptical of both parties’ claims. What I saw taught me that the system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as designed. It’s designed to protect entrenched interests, not to empower new voices or respond to grassroots movements. That matters. That’s the whole ballgame.

People sometimes ask me what you learn in that role. It’s not glamorous work. You’re monitoring legislation, analyzing bills, serving as the bridge between local government and the state legislature. You have to stay ahead of policy changes, understand what they mean for your county, and communicate those impacts clearly to both the people running government and the people living in your community.

But here’s what it teaches you: priorities have to be rooted in both practical reality and long-term vision.

I learned to distinguish between bills that would actually affect people’s lives and those that were mostly about political messaging. Some bills sound good. They test well. They get people talking. But when you trace through what would actually happen when they became law—who would implement them, what resources would be needed, what unintended consequences might follow—suddenly that good-sounding bill looks a lot different.

I became obsessed with transparency, accountability, and community engagement. I saw how easily decisions made behind closed doors could reshape everything from school funding to healthcare access. The further you zoom out from individual bills, the more you realize that the real power lies in understanding how broader trends in policy, money, and power will ripple through your community.

That shifts your whole approach. You stop reacting to bills one at a time. You start anticipating. You build coalitions. You educate the public about how government actually works. And you learn—really learn—that lasting change doesn’t come from grand gestures or partisan victories. It comes from persistent, strategic work that nobody’s watching, done by people committed to process over personality.

Before that job, I thought about policy in a more theoretical way. Broad ideas, big principles. But when you’re actually responsible for how legislation lands in people’s lives, everything becomes concrete. Policy isn’t about what sounds good. It’s about what actually improves people’s lives on the ground.

I started asking different questions. Not just: “What does this bill say?” But: What will actually happen? Who benefits? Who gets hurt? What does it cost in real terms? And what resources do we actually have to make this work?

I learned to prioritize issues with direct, measurable effects on constituents—healthcare access, education funding, economic opportunity—over symbolic or partisan wins. That’s not to say symbols don’t matter. They do.

But symbols don’t fix broken things. Work fixes broken things.

This experience also made me strategic in ways I wasn’t before. I learned to anticipate implementation challenges before a bill even passed. I learned to see which policies were driven by evidence and community input, and which ones were driven by expediency and political calculation. The distinction matters because one kind of policy actually lasts.

Here’s what I’m certain about: loyalty must be to institutions, not individuals.

Politicians are temporary. They serve their terms, they make their deals, and they leave. Some are great. Some are terrible. But they all eventually walk out the door.

The institutions they inhabit—the legislature, the courts, the electoral process—those are what endure. They’re the scaffolding of our democracy. They’re the only things standing between organized society and chaos. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s just true.

My entire career has been loyalty to those institutions. I believe in the process, even when it’s messy. I believe in the rules, even when they’re inconvenient. Because I know what happens when you start bending institutions to serve people: you break the only thing that protects us all.

The opportunistic—the consultants, the fixers, the partisan warriors—they’re different. Their loyalty istransactional. They attach themselves to politicians like barnacles to a ship, riding the wave of power as long as it lasts. They don’t care if the hull is rotting, as long as they get to the destination. And here’s the scary part: they will burn down an institution to save a candidate, because to them, the candidate is the point.

But that’s backwards. The candidate is not the point. The candidate is temporary.

The point is the system that allows us to govern ourselves without violence. The point is the rule of law. The point is the promise that no matter who’s in charge today, the structure will be there tomorrow. That institutions are stronger than any single person.

I don’t see politics as red versus blue. I see it as a complex ecosystem where power, money, and influence intersect. Understanding that machinery—how bills get written, how elections get administered, how money flows through campaigns—isn’t about making you cynical. It’s about making you strategic.

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed. My hope is that by understanding that design, we can start to unrig it.

That’s what I’m thinking about when I write. I’m thinking about my children. I want them to see the system for what it really is—not to feel hopeless about it, but to know how to navigate it, how to push it, and how to protect the institutions that matter when people who don’t understand them try to break them for power.

That’s what “thinking out loud” means to me. It’s rigorous analysis grounded in real experience. It’s healthy skepticism of both parties. And it’s an unshakeable belief that understanding how power works is the first step toward wielding it responsibly.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit carrieclendening.substack.com