from the oh,-a-mystery! dept
It’s been a while since we checked in on Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Superintendent and all around assbag fascist. If you’ve read any of our previous posts featuring Walters, you know that he loves himself two things, and in this order of importance: Donald Trump and god. You can tell this because, while it was always very important for him to get teachers fired for showing such pornographic material to kids as well as — checks notes — books about race, he followed that up by attempting to install not only a Christian bible in every school, but specifically the Trump endorsed bible, thereby enriching a president of a secular nation through religious texts. And if you don’t understand why that is a problem, well, then you’ve missed a very fundamental aspect of what it means to be an American.
But again, the point remains, Walters loves him some jesus and hates pornography. Nevermind that his definition of pornography appears to be warped purely by ideology. Nevermind that what he calls pornography often is plainly not so. Walters is on a holy mission to worsen his state’s school system, which might just require divine intervention since Walters already presides over the state ranked 48th out of 50 in education.
So how did a recent board meeting go about addressing Oklahoma’s schools? Let’s ask Board member Becky Carson what showed up on the conference room display.
I was like, “What am I seeing?” I kind of was in shock, honestly. I started to question whether I was actually seeing what I was seeing… I was like, “Is that woman naked?” And then I was like, “No, she’s got a body suit on.” And it happened very quickly, I was like, “That is not a body suit.” And I hate to even use these terms, but I said, “Those are her nipples.” And then I was looking closer, and I got a full-body view…
I was so disturbed by it, that I was like—very loudly and boastfully, like I was a parent or a teacher—I said [to Walters], “What is on your TV? What am I watching?” He was like, “What? What are you talking about?” He stood up and saw it. He made acknowledgment that he saw it. And I said, “Turn it off. Now.” And he was like, “What is this? What is this?” So he acknowledged it was inappropriate just by those words. And he was like, “I can’t get it to turn off. I can’t figure out how to turn it off.” And I said, “Get it turned off.” So he finally got it turned off, and that was the end of it. He didn’t address it. He didn’t apologize. Nothing was said.
Now, as far as porn goes, this all seems fairly tame thus far, of course. But I’m still going to call it pornography because, after all, these are many of the same people who somehow think Magic Treehouse is pornography. To borrow a Gene Wilder line, “You know… morons.”
But relatively tame or not, this isn’t a story that is going away. And it’s not going away primarily because of a combination of rabid Republican bible-thumpers in the state legislature demanding to know if Walters was thumping something other than his bible, and Walters’ own incredibly defensive response to the whole thing.
State House Speaker Kyle Hilbert (R) is already suggesting that Superintendent Ryan Walters, the state’s hard-right head of education—the man who wants to put Bibles in every classroom—”unlock and turn over all relevant devices and fully cooperate with an investigation.”
Making the whole thing even wilder is the behavior of Walters, who was running the meeting and whose staff is now pumping out official press releases with gloriously deranged headlines like “Response to the Most Absurd, False, and Gutter Political Attack from a Desperate, Failing Establishment.”
According to his press release, Walters said that “any suggestion that a device of mine was used to stream inappropriate content on the television set is categorically false. I have no knowledge of what was on the TV screen during the alleged incident, and there is absolutely no truth to any implication of wrongdoing.”
He added, “I will not be distracted. My focus remains on making Oklahoma the best state in the nation, in every category.”
Oh, calm down, Scooter. Your job is to make Oklahoma the best state in the category of education, and you’re not doing a particularly good job of that. And this defensive reaction, while not proof of any wrong doing, certainly does have a smell to it. Perhaps one of desperation. Perhaps of inevitability. All I know is that when you start breaking out the “political attacks from failing establishment” lines right away, and against state representatives within your own party, well, something doesn’t smell right.
So we’ll see if Walters will turn over his devices to the law enforcement, which is reportedly doing an investigation. A refusal to do so would be telling, to put it mildly. After all, Walters has demanded the firing of individual teachers for much, much less than this.
Filed Under: hypocrite, oklahoma, pornography, ryan walters, school board
