Oklahoma Plans to Test Out-of-State Teachers for Wokeness

Oklahoma’s Education Department has approved plans to force teachers from California or New York to pass an ideology test to ensure that they aren’t too “woke” before they hire them.

The test was created by right-wing think-tank Prager University, which has made headlines recently for developing education material that minimizes American slavery. It features 50 questions about the government, gender, and religion. The Education Department posted five sample questions from the exam, including, “What are the first three words of the Constitution?” and a question about the biological differences between men and women. 

Teaching applicants from California and New York were notified that they will not be accepted without completing the test.  

“We’re not bringing in woke indoctrinators into the classroom,” said Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters. “It’s a very America-first approach.”

Walters hopes to release the exam “soon.” He has also blocked Board of Education members from viewing the exam before potential teachers receive it. 

Oklahoma Education Association president Cari Elledge told USA Today that she believes the move will only exacerbate Oklahoma’s public school teacher shortage. The state teachers union wrote in a letter that Walters “has no legal authority to vet certified teachers based on political ideology.” 

Walters has made headlines previously for trying to force Trump Bibles and prayer into classrooms, reportedly watching pornography during a school board meeting, and inviting ICE to perform raids on the children of his state while they were at school.  

In short, he appears to be a loyal MAGA soldier who happens to have an alarming amount of power over the teachers and students of Oklahoma, and this test only reaffirms that. 

Summer recess is turning out to be a crude wake-up call for Republican lawmakers, who appear to be learning just how much their constituents hate the Trumpian policies they’ve voted for.

Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman had her own rude awakening at a Natrona County town hall on Monday when she was pressed to explain her ongoing support for Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff plan.

“Who is responsible for establishing tariffs in our country?” asked a male attendee.

“Well right now, the president has taken that authority,” Hageman said, cut off by a loud “boo” from the audience.

“Why did he take that authority? You guys gave it to him. The House of Representatives are responsible for establishing tariffs. You gave that to him,” the attendee continued, urged on by cheers and applause from the crowd.

“The next thing I’d like to ask you, when you look at the bigger picture—” he continued, before Hageman cut him off to claim that the tariffs had “raised over $150 billion.” But that only further incensed the crowd, who began to shout at their elected lawmaker.

“Who pays for them? Who pays for them? We pay for them,” the attendee on the microphone retorted.

“Inflation has not gone up,” Hageman said.

It was the third event in a matter of weeks that Hageman had bombed onstage in front of her constituents. In a heated exchange with a female attendee at a Casper town hall earlier Monday, the 62-year-old’s stated belief that mail-in ballots are not “foundational tools” of democratic elections was practically met with screams from the irate crowd.

The Wyoming Republican was also practically roasted in the rural town of Pinedale on July 29  when she justified the planned repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s landmark “endangerment finding,” which required corporations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. 

“The endangerment finding is absolutely based upon false science,” Hageman told the crowd, who jeered back at her. “Lie, lie!” they chanted over her.

“CO2 is not a pollutant,” Hageman shouted. “As far as the validity and the science that was the foundation for that, they cooked the books.”

Hageman isn’t the only MAGA legislator who has gotten scorched during the last few weeks for voting against the interests of her constituents. New York Representative Elise Stefanik was roundly booed by a feisty crowd when she emerged in Plattsburg Monday to rename a county building, and Nebraska Representative Mike Flood was excoriated during a town hall earlier this month for failing to protect SNAP benefits, veterans’ programs, and health care access, combined with voters’ simmering resentment for the GOP’s lagging on the release of the Epstein files.

In response to a perfectly reasonable query from a New York Times reporter, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday lashed out at the paper while dodging the question.

Earlier, President Trump—who, in recent days, has conducted a bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a multilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other European leaders, and a one-on-one phone call with Putin—told Fox News that he’d stepped away from his meeting with the European leaders to speak with the Russian president.

“I didn’t [call Putin] in front of them. I thought that would be disrespectful to President Putin,” Trump said. “You know, I wouldn’t do that because they have not had the warmest relations.”

At a press conference later Tuesday, the Times’ Shawn McCreesh asked an obvious question: If the current objective of ongoing Russia-Ukraine peace efforts is to “get everybody on the same page,” then, “why wouldn’t Trump just take the call from Putin while the other leaders were in the room? He said it would be ‘disrespectful’ to do that. Why is it disrespectful?”

In response, Leavitt said, “With all due respect, only a reporter from The New York Times would ask a question like that, Shawn.”

Trump’s 27-year-old press secretary, who recently claimed that a Nobel Peace Prize for the president is “well past time,” went on to tout Trump’s diplomacy with Putin and the European leaders. (McCreesh’s question—however vapid Leavitt considered it to be—was left glaringly unanswered.)

Leavitt has a habit of verbally assailing reporters and condescending to them rather than answering their questions.

In March, Andrew Feinberg of The Independent asked about the government haphazardly classifying people as members of the gang Tren de Aragua based on their tattoos and clothing. “Shame on you,” she replied, “and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these individuals who have—this is a vicious gang, Andrew!”

In June, Jasmine Wright of NOTUS asked Leavitt whether Trump would tolerate peaceful protest during his then-upcoming military parade, in light of the president warning that “any protester [who] wants to come out … will be met with very big force.”

“Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question,” Leavitt said.

Fellas, is it “woke” to say slavery was bad? President Donald Trump seems to think so.

The president unleashed a lengthy tirade Tuesday against the Smithsonian Institution, and all museums across the country, claiming that they were “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’”

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” Trump wrote. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

Trump has criticized education efforts that focus on racism and slavery since 2020. Instead, he prefers a white nationalist vision of the future of history that focuses on the role of white Americans above all others and diminishes the sins of slavery, segregation, and violence as mere bumps on the path toward a future that Americans ought to spend a lot more time celebrating.

In fact, the Smithsonian Institute celebrates a wide variety of accomplishments by a range of historical figures from different backgrounds. For example, the Tuskegee Airmen are immortalized alongside Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon at the National Air and Space Museum.

But Trump can’t seem to see past the variety of skin tones shown in the backward-looking lens of a history museum, and wants to tell a different, “brighter” story. Trump’s efforts to rewrite history are not only despotic, they’re plainly racist.

“I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made,” Trump said in his post.

Earlier this month, White House officials laid out detailed plans to eliminate exhibits that they determined represented “improper ideology,” threatening to yank funding if they refused. The memo accused the Smithsonian directly of advancing a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” The White House had previously notified the Smithsonian of a White House initiative to ensure its museums’ “alignment” with a history-whitewashing executive order that Trump signed in March.

Clearly, the president considers teaching the reality of United States history to be fundamentally unpatriotic—when just the opposite is true.

The Trump administration no longer believes the crime statistics provided by the Metropolitan Police Department.

The Justice Department announced a criminal investigation into the Washington police department Tuesday to determine whether the law enforcement bureau had manipulated data to make crime in the city seem lower than officers have claimed, reported The Washington Post.

Donald Trump had highlighted the conspiracy the night before. “D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety,” he wrote on Truth Social Monday night, confirming the existence of the probe.

“This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing!” he continued. “Until 4 days ago, Washington, D.C., was the most unsafe ‘city’ in the United States, and perhaps the World. Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest, and getting better every single hour!”

Trump deployed 800 National Guard members to Washington and federalized the capital’s police department last week to combat what he described as a crime-riddled hellscape. To justify the government infringement, the president pointed to rising crime rates, immigrant populations, and homelessness—though the figures he used were from 2023, before violent crime plummeted across the country.

More recent numbers from the Metropolitan Police Department told a remarkably different story: Crime in the nation’s capital was actually down 35 percent in 2024 compared to the year prior. The decline tracked with a nationwide crime drop that saw homicide rates plummet across the country. They have continued to descend this year.

“According to local police data, violent crime is down 27 percent over this time last year, with homicides down 11 percent,” reported the Post.

Those digits were sunny enough that FBI Director Kash Patel used them to pat the Trump administration on the back during a press conference last week, claiming that the “plummeting” homicide numbers were thanks to the president’s policies.

“We are now able to report that the murder rate is on track to be the lowest in U.S. history,” Patel said at the time, unraveling Trump’s rationale for forcing MPD and the D.C. National Guard to take over the nation’s capital moments after the president announced the directive.

On Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the administration had made nearly 400 arrests since the beginning of the operation. At least 160 of those arrests were undocumented immigrants, reported ABC News.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is no stranger to manipulating data. Another branch of the government—the Bureau of Labor Statistics—is on its own quest to cook up flattering jobs numbers after its July report indicated that the job market had steadily lost employment since Trump announced his “liberation day” tariff plan.