General Discussion

But now the radical activist is facing a different kind of problem. NBC News reported:

A sheriff’s office in Oklahoma is investigating an incident during a state Board of Education meeting last week that reportedly involved images of naked women on the state school superintendent’s office television. The images were seen during the board’s executive session, held in Superintendent Ryan Walters’ office, The Oklahoman newspaper of Oklahoma City reported, citing members Ryan Deatherage and Becky Carson, who attended the meeting.

....Indeed, Walters isn’t exactly benefiting from an outpouring of support from his fellow GOP officials. Two leading Republicans in the Legislature, including Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton, issued a statement late last week on a separate investigation into the matter.

“This is a bizarre and troubling situation that raises serious questions about the events and what took place during yesterday’s executive session at the Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting,” Paxton said. Board members’ accounts, he added, “paint a strange, unsettling scene that demands clarity and transparency.”

State House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, who’s also a Republican, called the allegations “serious” and said that “an expeditious third-party review is warranted.”.....

Waters has called an Oklahoma teachers' union a “terrorist organization.” He’s partnered with a far-right propaganda outlet, bringing its materials into classrooms. He pushed a social studies curriculum guidance that directed educators to push pro-Trump conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.

At one point last fall, as my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones noted, Waters even wanted to require schools to show children a video of him praying for Donald Trump — though the state attorney general’s office said that couldn’t happen.

It’s against this backdrop that the radical official is suddenly facing a new and unusual kind of mess. Watch this space.