Maybe you didn’t look that close last time you filled out your ballot, and when it came time to vote for a Superintendent of Public Instruction, you just checked the box next to a name you liked.

But in a year when even the people who got the person they wanted as president are finding out the hard way that elections have consequences, one schools superintendent stands out as a curiously perfect example of how important it is to find out who you’re voting for.

Ryan Walters, the SPI in Oklahoma probably ought to be pretty single-minded in his job. If I took over Oklahoma’s schools, I’d make it my number one priority to get the state out of its bottom-three ranking for student success. Behind just Mississippi and Louisiana, Oklahoma students have some of the worst test scores in the country.

That’s not where Walters is using taxpayer money, though. Instead, Ryan is using it to make videos that he wants every schoolteacher in the Sooner State show to their students. It’s of him praying for Donald Trump, and you have to see it.

OK School Chief Ryan Walters directed all public school teachers in his state to play this video to students, where he says a prayer for Trump. pic.twitter.com/1UoLTS58vz

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 18, 2024

Okay, it’s not just of him praying for the felony factory that half of America just put back in charge. He’s also praying that all kids will become good little flag-wavers, and that America will finally eradicate the scourge of wokeism.

In that partial clip, Walters says:

We’ve also seen patriotism mocked, and a hatred for this country pushed by woke teachers’ unions. We will not tolerate that in any school in Oklahoma. We want our students to be patriotic. We want our students to love this country. And we want all students’ religious liberty to be protected.

I will now say a prayer. And to be clear, students, you don’t have to join. But if you so wish, I’m gonna go ahead and pray.

Dear God, thank you for all the blessings you’ve given our country. I pray for our leaders to make the right decisions. I pray in particular for President Donald Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change to the country. I pray for our parents, teachers, and kids, that they get the best education possible and live high-quality lives. I also pray that we continue to teach love of country to our young people, and that our students understand what makes America great, and that they continue to love this country.

Amen.

Shall we parse that a bit? Because that’s a whole lot of opinion that shouldn’t be a part of public schools.

A “hatred” for America is what conservatives call it if you dare teach anything that questions the perfect moral standing of America. Never mind that we enslaved Black people for hundreds of years, never mind the Trail of Tears, never mind interning the Japanese, never mind the constant colonizer behavior that we came here to get away from.

Teaching about bad or uncomfortable things means you HATE America, according to this guy. There are four conservative triggers in the very first sentence of this clip: Mocking patriotism, America-hating, Wokeism, and Teachers’ Unions.

Isn’t it funny how “we” won’t “tolerate” people calling for tolerance?

The part that gets me the most, however, is that bit about making sure kids understand what makes America great. See, when I was a kid, what they taught us made America great was our diversity. They didn’t say it was because we had cheap eggs or saluted the flag or liked Lynyrd Skynyrd. We grew up hearing the words “melting pot” as a good thing.

As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that whoever came up with the acronym DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — picked those words specifically because those are all good things.

As always, though, conservatives just love to turn positive adjectives into negative ones. The meanings of words are irrelevant to them. Woke doesn’t mean “awake to the suffering of others” as it was intended, according to conservatives. To them it means big hairy pedophiles in dresses read stories to your sons until they decide to become girls. Progressive doesn’t mean “thinking about and working to improve the future” to Republicans. It means “literally in league with Satan.”

A few teachers have ignored Ryan Walters’s idiotic directive. It’s unconstitutional, and he doesn’t have the authority to require anything like that anyway.

But maybe a story like this will make you look closer at your ballot next time.