New reports have been coming fast and furious over the past week about Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, Project 2025, and the connection between the two.
First, Republican lawmakers from Oklahoma demanded an investigation into whether Walters, a fellow Republican, should be impeached for “alarming” actions and “failures” at the helm of the state’s education department. Concerns the lawmakers cited included “budget performance, spending priorities, and transparency.”
Among the transparency problems the lawmakers pointed to: Walters’ department’s failure to respond to public records requests – something Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond also is investigating. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has direct experience with this problem: Walters’ department has continued to stonewall AU in our request for information on how the state approved the use of PragerU propaganda videos in public schools.
Even the U.S. Department of Education is investigating Walters: News broke this week that the federal agency issued a nearly 100-page report that indicated a myriad of problems with the Oklahoma Department of Education’s spending practices.
AU has repeatedly called out Walters for trying to impose his white Christian Nationalist agenda on Oklahoma’s public schools – trying to force schools to teach from the Bible, advocating for prayer in public schools, fostering a dangerously anti-LGBTQ+ atmosphere in public schools that has led to deadly consequences, supporting the creation of what would be the nation’s first religious public charter school, attempting to whitewash America’s history of racism and slavery, and denying the constitutional guarantee of church-state separation, to name just a few.
In a newly published column for Religious Dispatches, AU VP of Strategic Communications Andrew L. Seidel detailed how Oklahoma under Walters has become a proving ground for Project 2025, the 900-page playbook for dismantling the federal government and advancing a Christian Nationalist agenda that will upend democracy. Project 2025 calls for dismantling the U.S. Department of Education, diverting students and taxpayer dollars to private, mostly religious schools, and returning full control of public education to the states – states like Oklahoma, whose education system consistently ranks at the bottom of the barrel nationally.
Seidel noted the alarming connections Walters’ has to Project 2025 operatives. They include Walters using taxpayer funds for self-promotion by paying for a Washington, D.C.-based PR firm run by Mary Vought, who’s also in charge of communications for The Heritage Foundation – one of the Shadow Network organizations behind Project 2025.
Seidel wrote that Vought’s husband, Russ Vought, has been linked to her PR firm and is a major player in Project 2025; he wrote a significant chunk of the Project 2025 playbook. He also helms a Christian Nationalist organization called the Center for Renewing America, which is on the Project 2025 advisory board and whose mission includes to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God.”
Russ Vought’s name may ring a bell because it’s been in the news a lot recently thanks to a leaked video of him touting Project 2025 to undercover journalists posing as potential donors. Vought’s conversation with the reporters was meant to assure them that Project 2025 wasn’t going anywhere in the face of public backlash against its unpopular agenda, which Vought said included “rehabilitat[ing] Christian Nationalism.”
One thing we can agree with Vought on – Christian Nationalists aren’t going to stop trying to use the power of government to impose their beliefs on everyone else. “It’s clear that we are already living in a Project 2025 world right here in Oklahoma,” Oklahoma State Rep. Mickey Dollens (D-Oklahoma City) told Seidel.
But there is hope. The objections to both Ryan Walters’ Christian Nationalist agenda in Oklahoma and Project 2025’s anti-democratic plan for America are growing. You can keep up the drumbeat by speaking out against their extremist agenda. AU’s got you covered – our campaign to combat Project 2025 includes a toolkit and other resources for spreading the word about the harm Project 2025 would cause.
