Catherine Truitt was no prize, a stalwart friend of the school privatization movement who served as a senior education advisor to Governor Pat McCrory, a chancellor of an online college, and most recently as North Carolina's superintendent of public instruction. In that role she was a friend to the wealthy, the privatizers, and the Trump crowd.
And yet, she apparently wasn't friendly enough, because in the primary she got her incumbent butt handed to her by a spectacularly unqualified opponent, who is now the GOP candidate for the state superintendent post.
That's bad news for North Carolina, because Michelle Morrow could easily be one of the worst state education leaders in the nation.
Morrow couldn't even win a school board election just two years ago.
Morrow has no background in education. She was a nurse. She's homeschools her own children and is virulently opposed to public schools, calling them "indoctrination centers" and "socialism centers" and urged parents not to send their children there. When running for school board, she said, “I think the whole plan of the education system from day one has actually been to kind of control the thinking of our young people.” She argued for more money for tutoring which could be paid for by cutting spending on "nonessentials items" such as "social activism," though she couldn't provide examples of such activity, but she'd, you know, heard stuff.
Morrow's board campaign also included complaints about books with sex acts in them. Just child porn she claimed, and was among some folks in Wake County who filed police reports against the board over naughty books in the library.
Morrow was at DC on January 6, though she says she stayed out of the capital- just there for a homeschooling civics lesson for the kids. Except that her video, which starts out "Hey patriots" and announces that she's at the capital "because that's where I President asked us to come" pans her surroundings, and there are no kids in sight. Maybe the educational experience was going to be delivered second hand. "If you are going to commit treason, if you are going to participatre in fraud," she announces, "We are coming after you."
In March of 2021 she was still out on the streets for Trump and MAGA (here's some video) for Liberty First Grassroots PAC.
CNN dug into her social media activity and found, among other things, that she would "prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad," in response to the notion of sending Barack Obama to prison at Guantanamo Bay. "Death to all traitors" she tweeted under a fake Time Magazine cover showing Obama in an electric chair. She also shared plenty of QAnon stuff. In one particularly thorough post, she wrote
Obama did it. Hillary did it. Schiff did it. Comey did it. Yates did it. Holder did it. Clapper did it. Gates did it. Fauci did it. Time for #WeThePeople to DO IT and #DrainTheSwamp!!!!! #NoJusticeNoCountry #DeathToTraitors #ProsecuteThemNow #TakeBackAmerica .@dbongino #KAG,
She has called Islam evil. She has ranted about Deep State Globalists. She has the backing of Moms for Liberty chapters in North Carolina.
Does she get the whole campaign as a public figure thing? In a video, she complains that CNN "stalked" her and tried to get her to answer questions after a gathering (questions like, Do you stand by your demand that Barack Obama be executed?) You can watch the video of what happened--it looks a lot like typical reporter asking a candidate questions that she would rather not answer.
Then she moves on to arguing that the CNN reporters don't really care about North Carolina students, or they'd be asking questions about the failing schools and the "74% of eighth graders that are not competent in reading, math, or science." So, more failure to understand what "proficient" means on the NAEP (it means above average, not competent). North Carolina voters are too smart to be fooled by "these people from other states and these left-wing media." She's a victim. Soon they will see how she returns the schools to awesomeness (though why it has failed terribly while the GOP has had control of everything in the state is not explained).
She's been on Steve Bannon's show. He asked why "they" are hating on her so much, and she explains that the Democrats know it's a swing state, and "the other thing is I've been speaking truth about how we want to get back to the basics of education and exposing what's been happening in our schools, the failures of the left in the radical agendas and the political and sexual and racially explicit stuff that's that's poisoning our children's minds and keeping them from getting a good education." And I will remind you that Morrow home schools and that North Carolina Republicans have enjoyed a well-gerrymandered majority for years (and a super-majority since 2023). Also, they lied and smeared President Trump and she's just "next on the hit parade."
Her own campaign video claims she is facing "the most radical extremists the Democrats have ever run" and accuses opponent Mo Green of spending six years "leading a progressive organization that funded efforts to destroy families, public schools, and everyone's safety in this state." She means, I think, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, a philanthropic group that does grants aimed at improving communities in North Carolina.
It goes on and on. There's the time she had a meltdown over being in a Dollar Tree with a bunch of people who didn't speak English. There's her desire to do away with the department she wants to run.
Or a week or so ago when her campaign spokesperson Sloan Rachmuch flipped out over a pride flag hanging on the wall in a school's administrative wing, posting, “Yet another example of the socialist indoctrination camps @MicheleMorrowNC talks about.” It's a diabolical plot. Rachmuch is the head of the Education First Alliance and Pen and Shield Media, a pair of right wing outfits that have their very own rabbit hole.
It appears that North Carolina, between Mark Robinson and Michelle Morrow, is about to field test just how much juice is left in the far-right Trumpian victimhood culture panic approach to politics. If it has enough to elect this woman, that will be bad news for folks in North Carolina who care about education (and also for those who don't, but it will take them longer to realize it). Let's watch this race.
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