Did Oklahoma Want To Tap Joe Rogan For An Education Committee?

CORRECTION: This story has been updated throughout to reflect that this was an assignment to someone outside the department.
Less than two weeks after Ryan Walters, the top school official in Oklahoma, came under fire for tapping the far-right founder of Libs of TikTok for an advisory committee of the state Department of Education, one of his top staffers appeared to discuss yet another committee appointee: Joe Rogan.
Rogan, a comedian, UFC commentator and host of the podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience,” has soared in popularity around the world for his brash, off-the-cuff long-form conversations with politicians, comedians and philosophers. Rogan, who has nearly 14 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) and 19 million followers on Instagram, has let anti-vaccine misinformation, conspiracy theories and transphobic and racist talking points run wild on his platform.
Internal emails HuffPost obtained via a public records request show that in early February, Dan Isett, a spokesperson for Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters, sent an “assignment” to someone outside the department tasking them with putting together a draft press release announcing Rogan’s addition to the department’s Library Media Advisory Committee — the advisory body at the center of the state’s effort to purge from school libraries all books that it identifies as “pornographic” or otherwise unsuitable for children. The committee reviews and makes recommendations about books and other materials available in libraries.
“Thanks again for your attention to this assignment,” Isett wrote. “It’s not meant to be a heavy lift.”
The draft release, which the individual sent back the following day, featured a picture of Rogan and touted him as a “huge addition” to the committee. And it included a fawning quote attributed to Walters, in which he described Rogan as a “giant in the national public square” who would “supercharge” the department’s efforts.
“Joe has warned against ‘woke, guilt-ridden ideology’ in schools, particularly in other parts of the country,” the statement attributed to Walters read. “Like Joe, Oklahomans want nothing to do with that. I look forward to Joe’s candor and ideas. This is a huge addition, not just for the purposes of the committee … but also for a free-spoken renaissance personality like Joe Rogan to elevate a larger discussion about real education reform, and ultimately improve student outcomes.”
The material also included a series of draft social media posts in which Walters would promote Rogan’s appointment, including one that linked to a clip of Rogan on his podcast railing against California schools, complete with a warning about profanity.
In the clip, Rogan complains that his children’s school was “indoctrinating” students to adopt “anti-racist” values and learning about pronouns.
“I didn’t like the woke shit,” he said. “I didn’t like that they were, you know, trying to ask kids their pronoun.”
Rogan has long railed against so-called “culture war” issues on his podcast and in his stand-up comedy. He has raised unfounded concerns about the advantage of transgender athletes in women’s sports and suggested that trans people are a sign of societal collapse.
The draft announcement was put together just weeks after Republican state Rep. Justin Humphrey, who has a long history of peddling sexist and anti-trans views, introduced a bill to allow animal services to remove students who identify as so-called furries from school. That legislation was inspired by repeatedly debunked claims about students identifying as cats and schools providing litter boxes — a myth that Walters, Rogan and the Libs of TikTok founder all helped give rise to.
It’s not clear in the documents that Rogan formally agreed to be on the committee or if he had any conversations with anyone at the department. In the end, the Oklahoma State Department of Education never announced Rogan’s appointment. A publicist for Rogan did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Isett, the Walters spokesperson, also did not immediately respond.
In October, Rogan welcomed both Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), on his show before sending off a powerful endorsement for Trump on X the night before the election. (Rogan invited Vice President Kamala Harris to his podcast but claimed her campaign had a list of “hilarious” requirements to be able to do the show. On Wednesday, a Harris aide said that the interview never materialized out of fear of backlash from progressives.) At Trump’s victory party last week, Rogan was given a special shoutout. With Trump standing behind him, UFC President Dana White thanked “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” along with several other male lifestyle podcasters and comedians.
Throughout his tenure, Walters has sought to require the Bible in all public classrooms, has mandated that schools ignore the Biden administration’s trans-inclusive Title IX regulations, and has issued an emergency rule to bar trans students from updating their school records with their name and gender marker, even after students have gotten legal name changes.
When Walters appointed Chaya Raichik, the Los Angeles-based founder of Libs of TikTok, in January, he applauded her for “showing the world exactly what the radical left is all about — lowering standards, porn in schools, and pushing woke indoctrination on our kids.”
Raichik’s account is meant to incite outrage among conservatives, including by frequently mocking videos of public school teachers and trans people. Her enormous following on X has inspired real-life violence. In 2023, more than two dozen public schools and libraries received bomb threats after they had been targeted in the days prior by Raichik’s account. One Tulsa school received two bomb threats in the summer of 2023 after Raichik posted about a librarian who jokingly wrote she wasn’t done pushing her “radical liberal agenda” of “teaching kids to love books and be kind.”
Dozens of youth and LGBTQ+ advocates have accused Walters and Raichik of creating a hostile environment for Oklahoma’s LGBTQ+ and two-spirit students. In February, Nex Benedict, a 16-year-old nonbinary student at an Oklahoma school, died by suicide one day after being beaten by their peers in a restroom. The federal Education Department, which investigated the school district after Benedict’s death, found this week that the district violated Title IX on several occasions by failing to respond to allegations of sexual harassment from students.
Immediately after Benedict’s death, more than 300 advocacy groups called for Walters’ removal, and noted that he “empowered anti-2SLGBTQI+ extremists” like Raichik, who in 2022 targeted one of Benedict’s teachers in a post, which prompted them to resign because of the harassment.
The batch of documents HuffPost obtained is more than 3,000 pages. It includes a log of numerous complaints that Oklahoma’s Eeducation Department fielded from angry constituents in the wake of Raichik’s appointment to the committee.
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One woman told the department that Raichik “should have nothing to do with Oklahoma schools,” a synopsis of the complaint reads. “She states that Ms. Raichik is a terrorist and insights violence on her TikTok feeds. She states that Chaya Raichik caused the Tulsa Public School district to receive the bomb threats last year. She states that Ms. Raichik doesn’t live here in Oklahoma and should not have anything to do with Oklahoma Public Schools.”