Oklahoma’s far-right superintendent of public instruction Ryan Walters announced Wednesday that he is joining Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Perhaps not coincidentally, Walters is looking to hire a national pubic relations firm to produce a minimum of three op-eds, two speeches, and 10 media bookings per month, reports Jennifer Palmer at Oklahoma Watch.
In announcing that he is joining Trump’s election bid, Walters gave no specifics about his role in the campaign, but he repeated the far-right rhetoric that has characterized his tenure:
President Trump will be able to end radical indoctrination in our schools. This woke ideology will be driven out of our schools, the cancer that is the teachers union will be driven out of our schools, and parents will be put in charge of their kids’ education. We will move from teaching kids to hate this country. We will teach kids the basics to understand how to be successful, and to love this country and what makes America great.
That agenda seems to run counter to assertions by far-right activists like Walters that the federal government should have no role in education. Walters says in the Nov. 1 video he posted on social media that he is excited to see Trump dismantle the Department of Education.
As Right Wing Watch reported in September, “Ryan Walters is a Christian nationalist culture warrior who is using his position as Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction to promote far-right propaganda throughout the state’s public school system.” He’s also been known to promote bogus conspiracy theories to advance right-wing political narratives.
That month, Walters spoke at the church led by far-right pastor-politician Jackson Lahmeyer, where Walters claimed, “President Joe Biden wants to destroy this country. He wants to destroy our schools. He wants to destroy your family. And he wants to destroy our Christian faith.”
For his part, Walters seems intent on using public education funds to proselytize Christianity, while falsely characterizing church-state separation as promoting atheism. Walters pushed state officials to approve a taxpayer-funded religious charter school, and last month he responded to a complaint about a public school teacher posting the evangelizing Bible verse John 3:16 in a classroom by sending teachers a memo declaring, “I do not want to see Oklahoma school districts becoming complicit in promoting atheism.”
Not surprisingly, Walters is a favorite of anti-public-education religious-right activists as well as the Moms for Liberty crowd that is pushing for right-wing takeovers of school boards across the country. Walters spoke at this year’s Moms for Liberty national conference, which he called “the most important conference to happen in Philadelphia since 1776,” and the Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand activist conference in September.
More from the Right Wing Watch preview of the M4L summit:
Ryan Walters, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction, is waging a scorched-earth campaign against teachers and teachers unions, which he called “terrorist organizations” at a budget hearing in May; he has been accused of lying to legislators at that hearing. At a state board of education meeting, Walters played a five-minute video savaging teachers unions, a video so hostile—it included insinuations that teachers supported pedophilia—that educators feared it would incite physical attacks on public schools. His agency banned sexually explicit materials from school libraries without defining the term. After Trump’s recent indictment, Walters put out a press release headlined, “Joe Biden Leading a Banana Republic Coup Against American Justice,” an indication of his focus on MAGA politics and promotion of Trumpish conspiracy theories.
