The Lie That Won’t Die

Spectator

Be thankful your children don’t attend public schools in Oklahoma. Superintendent Ryan Walters has interesting ideas on what schools should be teaching and how they should teach it.

Walters has proposed, unsuccessfully, mandatory teaching from the Bible and required that every classroom have a Bible—but not just any Bible; Walters wanted Oklahoma taxpayers to foot the bill for the $60 apiece Donald Trump endorsed Bible, many times the cost of Bibles found on multiple online sites. He also suggested concealed carry permits for all teachers with some minimal training, an idea that displeased many parents and many in law enforcement.

Undeterred by his lack of previous success, Walters has now determined public schools must include in their history curriculum the “truth” about the 2020 presidential election because “students should know what really happened.” That Trump continues to perpetuate his 2020 delusions doesn’t mean they should be taught in school as fact.

So, the lie that will not die drones on in Oklahoma. Here is Walters, in his own description of what he expects to be taught: “Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of bellwether county trends.”

Oh, dear. Never mind that each of those concerns has been investigated ad nauseam by several states and the federal government.

Our national Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) did their own investigation and determined this was the safest and “most secure” election in U.S. history. (The head of that agency was subsequently fired and is now being investigated for his insolence at reporting actual facts.) Multiple congressional investigations found no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities of any kind.

It’s not as if the Trump campaign wasn't trying to convince the various states and courts that election shenanigans of all sorts occurred, changing the outcome. At least 60 lawsuits were filed by Trump campaign supporters and operatives and none, as in not one, discovered any kind of suspicious behavior or wrongdoing that would change the outcome of the election. In fact, 58 of those lawsuits were rejected by the courts for lack of standing, lack of facts, or lack of plain common sense. The two cases that succeeded were both minor procedural complaints involving poll watchers in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The “questions” Walters wants to ask Oklahoma students are really just a reflection of his own election-denying confusion; they have already been asked and answered multiple times in multiple states.

For example, here in Michigan, our Bureau of Elections, the Office of the Auditor General, and the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee all reviewed results and found them accurate. A recount in Wayne County found the same result—no fraud, no irregularities, no dead people voting, no illegal immigrants voting or imported to vote. The courts kept looking for evidence of something nefarious and found none.

Over in Wisconsin, state mandated recounts were undertaken, then an audit by their Legislative Audit Bureau, then an investigation via lawsuit by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty complaining the mail-in ballots, early ballots, and ballot drop boxes were all illegal (the courts disagreed) and a highly partisan investigation by former judge Michael Gableman that tried, unsuccessfully, to find something untoward.

In Pennsylvania, a recount mandated by state law took place in 32 counties, and another 45,000 randomly selected ballots were hand recounted finding no discrepancies. Their courts also sought actual evidence of voting fraud or irregularities and, none having been presented, the cases were dismissed.

Arizona might hold the record for the most scrutiny in any election ever, especially in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix and most Arizona voters. Those ballots were recounted by the computerized vote tabulators, then recounted by hand, then recounted again, then those recounts and ballots were audited, then a legislative investigation occurred. Finally, the infamous Cyber Ninjas were brought in by the GOP legislature with the intent of proving massive fraud; they fiddled with ballots for months before finally declaring they could find neither fraud nor any other irregularities…but they did find 99 more votes for Joe Biden.

All of these recounts and futile court cases were repeated in other states, the questions asked and answered, and some of those lawyers who chose to continue pushing the failed narrative of a rigged election completely absent evidence lost their law licenses.

Superintendent Walters is already leading a statistically failing public school system ranked 45th nationally in graduation rate and 48th on standardized test results by U.S. News and World Reports. If Walters’ fictional history curriculum is adopted, they’ll be taking the final steps to the bottom.

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