Ryan Walters' TV displayed "nude women" during a meeting. Now he's blaming the media.

The Oklahoma schools chief who crusades against smut now faces an investigation into his own explicit screen time

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By now, we all know Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is a Christian Nationalist who wants to shove Jesus into classrooms, whether it’s by purchasing Trump Bibles for public schools, rewriting the social studies standards to indoctrinate children with revisionist pro-Christian mythology, or using public money to fund a religious charter school.

But there’s one thing about Walters we just learned yesterday: He enjoys watching porn at work.

During a meeting of the Oklahoma State Board of Education on Thursday morning, the members went into executive session in Walters’ office to discuss matters that may need more privacy for the sake of the individuals involved. When they were in his office, though, two of the board members, Becky Carson and Ryan Deatherage, said they noticed something unusual on Walters’ office TV (which was presumably showing what was on his personal laptop)—and they were the only board members in a position to see the screen.

… Deatherage said he noticed the video first while a parent was speaking about her appeal of a district transfer denial. As Deatherage weighed his options about how to bring the video to the room’s attention, Carson noticed the nudity.

“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,” Carson said. “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, and I was like, ‘That is pubic hair.’ Even right now, I couldn’t even tell you what I was watching.”

As Carson processed what she was seeing, she said “the mama bear and teacher in me came out” and she “stopped the meeting cold” by confronting Walters.

“I was so disturbed by it, that I was like — very loudly and boastfully, like I was a parent or a teacher — I said, ‘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,” Carson recalled. “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.”

It sounds like Walters was doing what I’m sure many people do during Zoom meetings: He had one window opened up for work… and another window opened up for his own private browsing. He didn’t realize that the entire screen—and not just the Zoom window—was being broadcast to the whole group.

It’s unclear what he was watching, though. Both board members said it wasn’t explicitly sexual; there wasn’t penetration involved. But there were definitely naked women on the screen. Deatherage told the website NonDoc that there were “multiple nude women” along with some kind of “chiropractic table.” (People online were suggesting a number of possibilities, including ones that involve sorority “initiations.” Carson said in an interview, however, that the video looked like it was made in the 1960s.)

The fact that Walters couldn’t explain himself in the moment, or just pretend it was a pop-up, and couldn’t even apologize later gives away the whole game. He was hoping this would all go away. The more appropriate course of action, if this was truly an accident, would have been to acknowledge the issue openly and discuss it immediately.

Carson knew what was up:

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

And then, much like Donald Trump dealing with the Epstein allegations, Walters’ office trashed the media for bothering to report on this:

“What an absolute joke of a story and this is embarrassing from you to write a junk tabloid lie,” [director of communications Quinton] Hitchcock wrote in an email. “Any number of people have access to these offices, you have a hostile board who will say and do anything except tell the truth, and now, ‘NonsenseDoc’ is reporting on an alleged random TV cable image. Rock solid truth in journalism.”

Neither Hitchcock nor Walters actually denied the allegation or offered up a realistic excuse.

For what it’s worth, both Deatherage and Carson were appointed to the Board of Education by fellow Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, who has criticized Walters in the past. But there’s no reason to think either board member made this up to sabotage him.

What makes this story especially juicy is that Walters has railed against porn in schools even though that’s not an actual problem. In a 2023 video calling for “porn free schools,” Walters pushed to ban books that included “radical sexual material.” But none of the books that ever make those lists randomly include a group of naked women just idling around. So it’s not like Walters was doing research for work…

Around that same time, when lawmakers were asking for examples of explicit material in books available at schools, Walters sent them a “bunch of graphic, sexually explicit photos”… but never said where they came from or which schools were making them available to kids. Which means this isn’t even the first time Walters has been condemned for sharing pornographic content with unsuspecting government officials.

The bigger issue is the hypocrisy. It’s nobody’s business what Walters does in his free time, but he’s the guy who routinely accuses everyone else of sexual perversion. If a teacher accidentally showed the same images in the classroom, there’s no doubt Walters would be first in line calling for that person to be fired.

So where’s the accountability this time around?

There’s none because Walters and other MAGA cultists like him refuse to ever admit any wrongdoing. By Friday night, Walters was claiming this was some kind of conspiracy: “Some of these board members are blatantly dishonest and cannot hide their political agenda. It is disappointing that they are more interested in creating distractions than getting work done for Oklahoma families.”

But it wasn’t dishonesty. Two different board members saw the footage while others were there when Carson confronted him in real-time and saw the look of shock on Walters’ face.

For now, an investigation has been launched by the state’s Office of Management & Enterprise Services. It’s not clear if Walters’ deleting his browser history—which you can assume he did the second everyone left his room—will affect that inquiry.

It should be noted that Oklahoma law now requires photo ID to look at adult content online. So if Walters was indeed looking at porn, he had to jump through hurdles to do it, whether that means downloading it in advance, using a VPN, or signing in to a website. It’s a Republican law that makes all of his possible excuses a little more difficult to pull off with a straight face.

It would be hilarious if this is the thing that finally brings him down given that it’s also the least offensive thing he’s done on the job. I always knew he enjoyed fucking over the people of Oklahoma; I just didn’t think his downfall would involve watching it from the sidelines.

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