Oklahoma schools chief shared misleading TikTok. It led to bomb threats

Oklahoma Democrats are demanding that Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters be subjected to an impeachment probe due to fallout from his hate- and disinformation-filled social media posts. In a statement, they called on the Republican speaker of the House to investigate possible charges against Walters, and said, ”The safety of Oklahoma’s students and families depends on changes to the current situation.”

Walters recently retweeted a selectively cropped TikTok video posted by the hatemonger and conwoman behind a social media account called Libs of TikTok. The video showed a Union Public School District librarian Kirby Mackenzie with an overlay reading, “POV: teachers in your state are dropping like flies but you are still just not quite finished pushing your woke agenda at the public school.” Walters retweeted the post, adding: “The liberal media denies the issue. Even some Republicans hide from it. Woke ideology is real and I am here to stop it.”

That led to bomb threats on six consecutive days.

Of course, Libs of TikTok had cropped the original video to exclude the caption, which provided crucial context. The excluded text read, “My radical agenda is teaching kids to love books and be kind hbu?? I think I’m going to make one of these every year until i die or end my teaching era.” Mackenzie also included an emoji showing two hands making the shape of a heart.

RELATED STORY: Oklahoma school head wants to leave race out of the Tulsa Race Massacre

Libs of TikTok’s account is operated by Chaya Raichik. There were good reasons Raichik’s account was suspended multiple times by what was then called Twitter, but it has found a new life being amplified on the X platform by billionaire Elon Musk. While Raichik’s bread and butter is spreading hate and endangering the lives of the LGBTQ+ community by harassing and doxxing educators she doesn’t agree with, she isn’t just homophobic: She’s bigoted across the board. Her recent work characterizing a get-together for families of color at an Oakland elementary school as some kind of attack on white people led to bomb threats at that school, as well.

The chances that the Republican supermajority in Oklahoma opens up an impeachment probe into Walter for helping provoke bomb threats against 16,000 Oklahoma children are nil. Republican House Speaker Charles McCall told NBC News, “Impeachment is not something that should be taken lightly, and the call by a group of House Democrats seems to be more of a ready, fire, aim approach.”

Before Walters sicced the world’s most grotesque social media account on Oklahoma’s children, he was openly posting about his intentions to defy Supreme Court decisions separating church and state in order to fund private religious schools. He recently embarrassed himself by trying to talk about Oklahoma history while pretending that race had nothing to do with the Tulsa Race Massacre.

He has spent his political career as a theocratic culture warrior. Unsurprisingly, he has been saving his biggest attacks for the predominantly Black Tulsa Public Schools system by threatening to take away its accreditation. Tulsa Public Schools is the largest school district in the state.

Here’s a video posted by davidhth showing Tulsa Public Schools Board President Stacey Woolley’s public statement about the matter.

Ryan Walters accusing teachers of a woke agenda is stirring hatred. Today, there was a third bomb threat after Walters retweeted a TikTok video made by a Tulsa librarian as a joke. Here TPS board president Stacey Woolley pleads with him to stop. A lawmaker wants him impeached. pic.twitter.com/JQNafK2SIj

— David Heath (@davidhth) August 24, 2023

And the posts that gave domestic terrorists a target for their anger.

OK’s state superintendent shared a doctored video of an OK librarian. who joked about pushing a woke agenda. The doctored video cut out the caption-“my radical liberal agenda is teaching kids to love books & be kind.” The district received bomb threats for 6 consecutive days. https://t.co/OtkRVYPyOp pic.twitter.com/dkh1RzI1GN

— Laura Burkhardt 🧡 (@LauraAnnSTL) August 30, 2023

Sign the petition: Stop book bans.

The far-right justices on Wisconsin's Supreme Court just can't handle the fact that liberals now have the majority for the first time in 15 years, so they're in the throes of an ongoing meltdown—and their tears are delicious. On this week's episode of "The Downballot," co-hosts David Nir and David Beard drink up all the schadenfreude they can handle as they puncture conservative claims that their progressive colleagues are "partisan hacks" (try looking in the mirror) or are breaking the law (try reading the state constitution). Elections do indeed have consequences!

Man who visited China during coronavirus outbreak says he’s more afraid of being in the U.S.

Most Americans are holding their breath while we wait for the incompetence of our current administration and their gutted health infrastructure to catch up and reveal—by way of more comprehensive testing—how much COVID-19, caused by the coronavirus, has penetrated our country. Every day news cases are reported, new people are being monitored, but anyone paying attention to the news should understand that no one can fully know how many people are at risk. The anxiety has led to runs on supplies across the country, and a general unease about what we are, and are not, doing to take preventative measures. Business Insider interviewed a 36-year-old Bay Area man from Cupertino, California, who has been self-quarantined since returning from Kunming, China, on Feb. 2.

The man, who wished to remain anonymous, explained that he arrived in China on January 25, when at least 217 confirmed cases of COVID-19 were publicly known. According to the man, the differences between his experience in China and in the U.S. are alarming.

Starting with the difference at the airports, the man explains that full-body screenings with infrared thermometers were performed at the Kunming airport while most people were wearing masks.* Upon his arrival at San Francisco International Airport, he says that no one was wearing masks and no one was taking temperatures. He waited for hours in customs before his temperature was taken, and according to the man, the paperwork he was asked to fill out was handwritten and photocopied. "They literally had no idea what they were doing."

He tells Business Insider that since he and his family were not experiencing symptoms of the virus, no testing was done. Instead, he was given a “verbal recommendation” to stay home for 14 days. If he were in China he would have been given a test and quarantined pending the outcome of that test. Most importantly, he said that the CDC never contacted him to see how he and his family were doing, and that the school where his son attended would not allow him to be excused, so the boy returned a day after returning from China. 

Luckily, it seems, he and his family were not carrying the virus. But the man has still considered returning to China simply because, "As someone who was in China during the initial outbreak/lockdowns and restrictions and seeing the situation develop here in the US I am 100x more concerned for my own safety during this crisis than I ever was in China."

Conservatives have held up passing much-needed funding in order to insure that pharmaceutical companies can price gouge. The president of the United States has continued to say stupid, misleading, and scientifically fictitious things in order to possibly keep the economy from going into a panic. Right-wing media has attempted to not directly communicate to their audience, instead they have pulled out their impeachment notebook to negate the problems we are facing in order to strictly attack the Chinese and Democratic leadership. Meanwhile, getting testing done, the first step toward figuring out the best way to handle containment of this problem, remains chaotic.

*While masks can help prevent the spread of the virus by individuals with the illness, it is not a prophylactic against infection.