Really, this is the scandal that takes down Ryan Walters? Oklahomans will take it

Ryan Walters, right, before naked woman were seen on his office television.

It is the scandal that never should have occurred because state superintendent Ryan Walters should have been out on his ass and off the public payroll a million times prior to last Thursday when state department of education members Becky Carson and Ryan Deatherage described seeing something that sounded a lot like vintage pornography playing on a television screen in Walters’ office.

“It looked like it was made in the ’60s, maybe,” Carson told The Oklahoman.

Wait, what?

That’s probably how each of us reacted to the headlines.

“Board members say naked women on TV in Ryan Walters’ office during closed session,” read the online head above The Oklahoman’s Murray Evans’ piece, the story that broke the story.

“Board members: TV in Ryan Walters’ office displayed nude women during executive session,” summarized the head above the story from Tres Savage and Sasha Ndisabiye for NonDoc.

Of course, Carson and Deatherage aren’t making it up because, even if they’d wanted to make something up to bring Walters crashing down, they’d never have come up with that.

Porn in executive session?

Come on.

“Quite frankly, I didn’t know how to handle it,” Deatherage said. “I was just in shock. I was being human and didn’t know what to think … I kept thinking that it was just going to go away.”

Nor would anybody trying to make something up to hurt Walters ever say that, fessing up to not stepping in and stopping it.

That took Carson.

“I was like, ‘What is on your TV,’” she said. “I was very stern, like I’d been a mother or a classroom teacher.”

The NonDoc story shared this wonderful detail.

“He was like,” Carson said, referring to Walters, “‘What is this? What is this?’

“So, he acknowledged it was inappropriate just by those words, and he was like, ‘I just 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.”

Carson added Walters appeared “Like a teenager when you walk in the room and they’re doing something they’re not supposed to be doing.”

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It’s kind of perfect.

We can pull our hair out, put our heads in our hands, clutch pearls or we can be serious and thank the heavens, knowing it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy, or that we’re even surprised it did.

Because we shouldn’t be.

Just as we shouldn’t have been surprised it was Baylor that allowed its football players to get away with sexual assault during the Art Briles era, rather than the rest of the conference, all public schools, committed to Title IX compliance.

Just as we shouldn’t be surprised every time a fire and brimstone Christian Nationalist jackass cheats on a spouse, embezzles, or is revealed to be a predator.

Projection, projection, projection.

I’ll be very honest.

Among my original thoughts was “THIS IS THE SCANDAL THAT BRINGS RYAN WALTERS DOWN?”

Not all the federal dollars targeted to be used toward educational purposes he pissed away — ClassWallet, hello!! — before he even became superintendent?

Not his failure to allocate appropriated school security funds, or maternity leave funds, or funds to deliver emergency asthma inhalers into schools?

Not spending tax dollars to raise his national profile, not keeping legislators out of state school board executive sessions where they have every right to be, not being heartless and cruel in the wake of Nex Benedict’s death?

Not bringing PragerU into our schools, not accusing teachers unions of being terrorist organizations, not slandering those who dare tell the truth about him, like, say, former Bixby superintendent Rob Miller.

Another high point?

The quotes Walters’ spokesman Quenton Hitchcock offered the Oklahoman were beauties.

Hitchcock called Evans’ story “a junk tabloid lie.”

So there were no naked images on Walters’ television screen and everybody’s lying?

Only to then sort of admit the images were on the screen.

“Any number of people have access to these offices,” Hitchcock said. “You have a hostile board who will do and say anything except tell the truth and now the [Oklahoman] is reporting on an alleged random TV cable image.”

Next time you think somebody’s really bad at their job you can wonder if they’re possibly worse than Hitchcock is at his.

Does he know that “hostile board” is made up entirely of Republicans?

Is he really saying, so what if there was vintage porn on Walters’ television, it’s just a random image on cable?

Oh, yeah, do “any number of people,” really have access to Walters’ office, because I remember it being described as a fortress by an ex-high profile department head who joined Walters’ cause a true believer only to become disillusioned and depart.

More on that in a moment.

Sunday, Walters shot back with a press release under its own headline:

“Response to the Most Absurd, False and Gutter Political Attack from a Desperate, Failing Establishment.”

Talk about a cry for help.

Does he not know “gutter” is a noun, not an adjective? And what is this “political attack” he’s talking about, because vintage pornography can be a lot of things: inappropriate, prurient, tone-deaf, wrong, arousing, dehumanizing, but a political attack?

Sorry.

“Any suggestion that a device of mine was used to stream inappropriate content on the television set is categorically false,” Walters said. “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.”

It’s a statement you can drive a truck through.

Walters, himself, eventually, turned it off and if it wasn’t objectionable why did he turn it off? Ergo, he has perfect knowledge of what was on the screen.

The incident is not alleged because it actually occurred. Every board member, even those for whom the screen was out of view was there for it.

Could “any number of people” have engineered the images Carson and Deatherage saw on the screen?

If it took place in the same office referenced by Pamela Smith-Gordon, who resigned her position as the education department’s program manager of grant development and compliance in early 2024 before going on the record about her decision to leave the agency, not likely.

In April of that year, Smith-Gordon told KFOR, Oklahoma City’s NBC affiliate, that after many attempts to meet with Walters failed, she tried going by his office.

“His hall to his office is behind locked doors with an armed guard,” she said. “You were not allowed to go down his hall, much less enter his office. Now there were a select few that were graced with his presence, but department heads were not.”

Smith-Gordon told KFOR the select few were “his chief of staff,” “his legal team” and then spokesman “Dan Isett.”

Hitchcock may have replaced Isett, but it’s a short, short list.

So, given three days to respond, the best Walters could come up with was a bunch of non-specific garbage that made no sense, nor even presented a sympathetic theory of the case?

“We are looking at some teachers, that we’re deciding if we’re going to remove their [teaching] certificate, and for some of them it will be a lifetime ban, for lesser offenses …” Carson told the Oklahoman. “We all have to be held to the same standards.”

“I believe that superintendent Walters should be held accountable just like we would any other school teacher,” Deatherage told NonDoc. “Which means, at this point, based on other things we’ve looked at in executive session, we would probably pull his [teaching] certificate and put him on his own list.”

Great idea.

If apparent vintage porn can do what failing to live up to the statutes, treating everybody like shit, misusing and failing to disperse appropriated funds, not to mention being preposterously horrendous at the job he was elected to perform, terrific.

Oklahoma will take it.

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