Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is again receiving national attention, this time for attempting to buy 55,000 “Trump” Bibles costing $60 each for Oklahoma school classrooms.
As the nonprofit news organization Oklahoma Watch reported, the specifications in the $3.3 million request for proposal “seemed tailored to steer the state’s selection toward one Bible.” That Bible is country music star Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible.” Trump receives money from each sale of the Bible for having endorsed it.
One vendor offered 2,900 versions of the Bible, but the Trump-anointed Bible was the only version that met all of the requirements Walters stipulated in the request, including that it be bound in brown leather and contain copies of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Pledge of Allegiance.
The Bibles Walters is mandating are made in China for less than $3 each. Walters sees no problem with this, despite previously denouncing what he said is the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to influence learning in Oklahoma public schools through Mandarin language programs.
When Huffpost reported on Walters’s order, it reminded readers that he is a right-winger who started his career “in part by repeating the lie that students were identifying as cats in schools and asking to use cat litter in bathrooms.”
Since Walters issued the proposal earlier this month, state and national news outlets reported that an Oklahoma state agency amended the specifications in the proposal to allow for bids from vendors willing to include the historical documents separately from the Bible.
Walters’s actions here lead me back to a question I asked earlier this year: Why does he continue to pick fights he keeps losing—and move even further to the right as he does so? In June, when he tried to incorporate the Bible and the Ten Commandments into public school curriculum, he was already facing widespread resistance from educators, the courts, legislators, the press, and even his fellow Republican officials. Since then, he has become even more aggressive in advancing his political and personal agenda.
Throughout Walters’s political career, he has been investigated by the state auditor, the state attorney general, and the FBI for mishandling federal funds. In October, The Oklahoman reported that the grand jury declared, without specifically naming them, that Governor Kevin Stitt and Superintendent Walters were “grossly negligent” in the misspending of pandemic relief funds. This spending occurred before Walters became superintendent of schools, when Walters was making $120,000 a year as executive director of Every Kid Counts Oklahoma, a nonprofit funded in part by school privatization advocates like the Walton Family Foundation and Charles Koch. In administering a pandemic relief program, Walters allowed for parents to spend money meant for at-home learning supplies on things like kitchen appliances and entertainment.
In addition to facing bipartisan calls for an impeachment investigation, Walters is being investigated by the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency. When threatened with impeachment, he challenged state legislators to try.
He also faces challenges in court for his methods of firing and/or decertifying Education Department staff and teachers and disparaging a school superintendent. He has simultaneously been losing legal battles with school districts that resisted the book banning or defended students’ rights to privacy.
Whenever he faces pushback from parents and educators, Walters counters with statements about not allowing “woke Olympics” and “radical gender theory” in “our schools.”
Someone who shares these sentiments is Chaya Raichik, creator of the “Libs of TikTok” social media accounts, and Walters’s recent appointee to the Oklahoma Library Advisory Board. Raichik, a former real estate agent, uses her accounts to share rightwing and anti-LGBTQ+ commentary.
And Walters is still facing pushback regarding his Executive Review Committee to oversee a revision of Oklahoma’s teaching standards that would eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and “indoctrination,” and highlight “American exceptionalism.” The committee featured prominent conservatives, including Dennis Prager of PragerU, David Barton of the Christian nationalist organization Wallbuilders, and Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a sponsor of Project 2025.
In a television interview with NBC News, Walters said, “Oklahoma educators who refuse to teach students about the Bible could lose their teaching license.”
As The New York Times reported in July, “Walters sought to crack down on any resistance [to his Christian-centric policies], saying ‘We will not allow rogue districts and administrators to indoctrinate hatred of America by refusing to teach foundational Oklahoma standards.’ He added, ‘The left does not like it, but it will be taught.’ ”
In mid-October, a group of Oklahoma parents, teachers, and faith leaders filed a lawsuit in the hopes that the Oklahoma Supreme Court would block Walters’s mandate for public educators to teach from the Bible. In response, Walters said: “Oklahomans will not be bullied by out-of-state, radical leftists who hate the principles our nation was founded upon . . . . I will never back down to the woke mob, no matter what tactic they use to try to intimidate Oklahomans.”
There is a certain irony to Walters’s Bible mandate: After years of ignoring regulations and laws, why is he issuing such an unprecedented, detailed purchase order and expecting schools and educators to fall in line?
As The Oklahoman reports, due to the specificities in Walters’s proposal, “Legal experts also raised questions about the original vendor requirements, calling it dangerously close to bid rigging,” an illegal practice in which competing parties decide who will win a contract.
In August, the Associated Press reported that some districts have openly defied Walters’ mandate, but that it is not clear how many districts have complied or not. And a lawsuit to block Ryan’s Bible mandate has been filed.
Who knows if Walters really believes he can force the purchase of Trump Bibles in order to comply with his already dubious demand that schools place them in every classroom. Perhaps it is merely another public relations stunt for the purpose of being selected as the federal Secretary of Education if Trump wins, or being the Republican nominee for governor if he doesn’t.
Or, is Walters, like Trump, hoping to avoid criminal prosecutions by violating even more laws?
The next battles in either the courts or the court of public opinion will be shaped by the local and national outcomes of the November 5 election. If Trump wins or if the most extreme Republicans take control over the legislature, it is likely that Walters will become even more radical.