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“Why do they fear you? Why do they hate you, ma’am?” Steve Bannon asked Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee for North Carolina’s superintendent of public instruction, in an appearance on his podcast, War Room, last month. It’s a version of Meet the Press for the far right, with special cachet because Bannon was one of former President Donald Trump’s closest advisers.
Three weeks earlier, Morrow had defeated incumbent Catherine Truitt in what was widely regarded as North Carolina’s most surprising primary result. The win drew national attention; CNN covered Morrow’s thoroughly archived social media habit of calling for the execution of “traitors,” including Gov. Roy Cooper, President Joe Biden, and former President Barack Obama, whom she said she would like to see shot by a firing squad on pay-per-view.
Morrow had been busy defending herself using the can-you-believe-it tone that marks much of her online writing. On X, she’d responded to a CNN reporter’s post: “The insanity of the media demonstrates the need to teach K-12 students real history and critical thinking skills.” Her campaign manager posted an image of comedian Kathy Griffin holding a bloody mask resembling Trump, writing “Now they clutch pearls.”
A spokesperson told The News & Observer that Morrow’s past statements were “taken out of context, made in jest, or never made in the first place.” To The Assembly, they said that voters are “angry about the media’s attempt to change the subject of our failing education system.”
Morrow offered another take to Bannon, the godfather of the MAGA movement and probably its second-most consequential influencer, after Trump: “CNN has been the media arm” of the Democratic National Committee. “They have lied and smeared President Trump in an effort to destroy him, and I think I’m just next on the hit parade.”
“I think that the Democrats know that North Carolina is their top swing state, because we have so many unaffiliated voters,” she told him. “And the other thing is, I’ve been speaking truth.”
Morrow’s truth is peppered with lies, according to leaders in both political parties, but it coincides with ideas Bannon loves to hammer on War Room: that there’s a “radical agenda” in public schools that is “poisoning our children’s minds and keeping them from getting a good education.”
Her ascendancy has also neatly aligned with Bannon’s political prescriptions. He has promoted the “Precinct Strategy,” urging MAGA true believers to take low-level leadership positions in the GOP to fundamentally transform the party. Around the time that effort was heating up, Morrow told a local podcaster she was involved in a plan to turn the Wake County GOP into a “gathering of patriots.”
When Bannon called his listeners to Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021, to experience “living history,” Morrow showed up and live streamed.
And after Bannon proclaimed that the path to save the country is “through the school boards,” Morrow ran for a seat in North Carolina’s biggest school district, Wake County, with a Moms for Liberty endorsement.
She lost that race, but not the drive to purge her foes, be they within the party or employees of a state school system long under Republican control.
With Bannon urging “action, action, action” toward the end of the “uniparty”—the neocons, neoliberals, big donors, globalists, and elites he thought seemed to come out on top no matter who won an election—Morrow invited new activists into the GOP.
She wasn’t just a “homeschool mom” with a history of inflammatory online posts, as she has so often been characterized. Morrow was part of Bannon’s vanguard as he seeks to cast off the “establishment” and reconstitute a Republican Party to dominate for the next century.
#SAVETHECHILDREN
Ten years ago, Morrow and her husband, Stuart, moved with their five children from a remote Christian camp in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado to the affluent Raleigh suburb of Cary, where they bought a magnolia-shaded ranch house.
The family plugged into the homeschooling support network affiliated with the evangelical church where Morrow’s parents worshiped, Colonial Baptist (now The Shepherd’s Church). Some of Morrow’s children had attended public schools when they lived in Texas, but she took them out after feeling frustrated that one child, who had an individualized plan related to a disability, was not progressing. By the time the Morrows arrived in Cary, they had been homeschooling for years.
Through the church program, Morrow’s eldest son began studying with Steve Noble, a Christian talk radio host who also teaches history, civics, and ethics—subjects he says have been “hijacked by a secular worldview.” Morrow studied alongside her son. “I never remember hearing all this,” she recalled in an interview with Leah Marie Carson, host of Lens of Faith.
After four years in Colorado with little access to the Internet, Morrow closely followed the news, particularly about the 2016 presidential primary and the surge in immigration from Mexico, where she and her husband had earlier worked as missionaries. She began to feel like the people around her were missing the truth. “I was meeting other moms at Bible studies and in sporting events—they really didn’t understand what was happening or what the intention of the enemy is,” she told Noble on his podcast.
The reality, as Morrow saw it: “Satan hates human beings, like he wants to destroy all of us because we’re made in God’s image.” Her kids encouraged her to share her perspective on YouTube. She called the channel Deception Detection 20/20.
When her son’s friend held a rally to encourage voting in the 2016 presidential election, she ended up with the microphone, Morrow told Noble. As the event wrapped up, someone invited her to a Republican precinct meeting. That’s where she met Sue Butcher, the founder of the local PAC Liberty First Grassroots, that offers training to conservative activists.
Butcher wanted to push the GOP further right, and she was well-connected. She invited Morrow to go to Washington, D.C. to advocate for the appointment of Neil Gorsuch as U.S. Supreme Court justice, Morrow said on the podcast. “I said, ‘Well, I have kids and I homeschool.’ She’s like, ‘Bring them along! And you know, FreedomWorks is paying for it, and they’ll buy you lunch,’ … So yeah, so that’s kind of where it all started.”
Morrow began attending Butcher’s church, the Southern Baptist congregation Grace in Willow Spring. She told Noble that she came to understand the GOP platform as “the platform of everything God stands for.”
By 2019, Morrow was experimenting with ways to connect to a wider audience. On Twitter, she engaged with groups like FreedomWorks, the organization founded by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, and MAGA influencers like radio host Dan Bongino and Turning Points USA’s Charlie Kirk. Butcher, the PAC founder who lives in Willow Spring, sometimes responded with social media strategy suggestions.
Morrow posted mostly about national politics, escalating from #ConvicttheCriminals to #KilltheTraitors as the 2020 election approached. In the rare instances she wrote about education, she portrayed public schools as “the indoctrination army of the socialist dems.” “This has been happening for decades and we MUST dismantle this army before we lose our nation,” she posted in February 2020.
It was the COVID-19 pandemic that drew her into the streets. On May 5, 2020, she stood outside the Governor’s Mansion wearing a powder pink Trump sweatshirt. “We, in six short weeks, have become a Communist nation,” she shouted into a bullhorn, alongside two dozen other protestors.
“Communist nations take their police force and they take their military force and they use them as a weapon against the people,” she said. In another speech, part of a series posted to Facebook, Morrow likened mask wearing to the yellow stars Nazis forced on Jews. “This is not just a mask,” she said. “This is a plan.”
Morrow’s speeches became a mainstay at protests calling for schools and businesses to reopen, and later opposing mask and vaccine requirements. A registered nurse by profession, she branded herself the “Rogue RN” and granted interviews to reporters in rapidfire succession that summer.
In September 2020, Morrow landed a spot on a CNN “Pulse of the People” segment. “The response to the pandemic has actually been President Trump’s greatest achievement,” she told the anchor. She claimed Trump “closed off all travel at the beginning of February,” which was untrue, but a favorite talking point for the president, and jabbed at Democrats: “So why didn’t they prepare for a pandemic?”
Trump tweeted a clip of the interview and wrote, “Thank you Michele!”
FreedomWorks celebrated the shout-out. Morrow’s friends congratulated her. “You’re famous!” a poster commented.
Butcher, likely seeing the opportunity, tried to direct Bongino’s attention to the Trump tweet, attaching a photo of the radio host and Morrow posing together. A few minutes later, she tweeted an image of an eagle in front of an American flag and the Declaration of Independence to Morrow, writing: “Your retweet has reached 1.1 million views.”
North Carolina’s top elected Republicans helped elevate Morrow’s profile, too. Dan Forest, then the lieutenant governor and Republican nominee for governor, shared a video of her explaining why she thought wearing masks for an extended period could cause brain damage, claims that were circulating in far-right media, but are untrue. The same day, she stood behind the lectern while Forest, Senate leader Phil Berger, and Truitt held a press conference to demand more in-person learning.
Morrow kept up the drumbeat on her own social media accounts. There were dispatches from outside the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center when Trump was treated for a COVID infection and his first public appearance after he was released from the hospital. She broadcast from Washington on January 6, 2021, but told the Charlotte Observer she didn’t go inside the Capitol.
Her followers urged her on: “You should run for office!”
Morrow in the Middle
When Morrow launched her campaign for a seat on the Wake County school board in 2022, she invited a special guest: Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.
She had volunteered for his campaign when he managed to translate a quick rise in online celebrity to a successful run for elected office. His booming voice, comedic timing, vigorous promotion of Christianity, and knack for saying the once-unspeakable—á la Trump—had made him a sought-after public speaker.
“We’re tired of sending our children off down to the schoolhouse to learn how to read, write, and do arithmetic and having them come back to us as godless Communists, we’re tired of it!” Robinson said, standing in front of a white board in a suit and shiny leather shoes. “We’re trying to figure out why in the world people in our schoolhouse think two plus two equals transgender!”
The crowd laughed.
Morrow and Robinson were in agreement about a lot of issues when it came to schools, though Morrow made the arguments in more muted tones. Her campaign materials talked about “protecting parental authority” and “politically charged, racially divisive and sexually mature content.” The race was nonpartisan, and Morrow didn’t make a big show of her affiliation with Republicans. The area of Wake she sought to represent included the affluent, Democratic-leaning Raleigh suburbs of Cary and Apex.
Morrow had two opponents, though only one really campaigned. Voters could look at their campaign websites and not see a huge philosophical difference.
Nancy Haywood, an active PTA mom, was one of them. She thought Morrow and her main opponent, Tyler Swanson, both looked great. She liked that Morrow had worked as a nurse and that Swanson had been a special education teacher. Special education policy was important to her as the mother of a student who has both autism and a high IQ.
Haywood went to an election forum and came away thinking Morrow and Swanson were “vastly different candidates.” She wanted more people to have the chance to hear from them directly, and decided to host a debate for her neighborhood.
She rented space at Frank G. Bond Metro Park and invited people to submit questions. One of her most conservative neighbors helped her sift through them; Haywood threw out questions about January 6, which seemed off-topic, but kept some asking about Morrow’s social media.
Morrow arrived looking polished. She introduced herself as a mom of five, including a child with “learning differences,” another with dyslexia and dysgraphia, and another considered gifted and talented. She said they had done a mix of public, private, and home school. “So I have really been fighting in the school system for the best education for every single person regardless of their ability level, for about the last 18 years,” she said.
Morrow said she had been consulting with dozens of local teachers, attending school board meetings, and connecting with state legislators. “For the last seven years, I’ve actually been going up to the legislature and speaking not just at education meetings, but also with people on both sides of the aisle to try to make the educational system the best that it can be here in Wake County,” she said.
High school students read the questions—some directed at both candidates, some at just one. “Do you believe that the public school system is a socialist indoctrination program, as you’ve publicly said?” one asked Morrow.
She pressed her lips together, then raised the microphone. “Yep, I do.”
Exasperation crept into her voice. “When our scholastics are declining, when we have children that cannot read, write or do math, and yet we are promoting over and over again that we must discuss with them how they feel about things, and culturally that the United States is systemically racist, and we’re telling teachers that they have to apologize for their whiteness, they need to get to the depths of who they are and and apologize for their white privilege, and we need to put people into homogenous groups by either the color of your skin or by who you are attracted to or by, you know, what your culture is, which is what is happening in our schools, then that tells me that the the goal is not the individual,” she said. “The goal is the group, and the group-think mentality is exactly what it is.”
To Haywood, Morrow’s response sounded uneducated and out of touch. She had experienced none of that in her son’s classrooms, where she volunteered regularly.
She was appalled by Morrow’s later assertion that students with special needs weren’t sufficiently separated from other children and were inhibiting “healthy competition.” Haywood’s son flourished after being put in mainstream classes, made honor roll, and aspired to be a college professor. “According to her, because of his diagnosis, he should only be taught life skills,” she said. She made up her mind not just to vote for Swanson, but to volunteer for his campaign.
Other people did too. “We were up to our ears with volunteers,” recalled Alyson Smith, Swanson’s campaign manager. “I got lots of calls where people were like, ‘Do you know how crazy she is?’”
Morrow’s neighbors had been archiving her social media posts for years, and they were spreading the word. Handwritten signs began appearing along major streets. One quoted Morrow on Facebook: “Thank you, Proud Boys.” Another cited a tweet: “Time to end teacher’s unions.” Others noted her tweets about QAnon conspiracies.
At in-person events and one-on-one, Morrow could be a skillful campaigner. Watching her work the lines at early voting sites is what spurred C. Michael Yates to action. He said he couldn’t sleep the night after he watched Morrow invoke her “private sector” teaching experience to relate to a voter who told her he was a retired school teacher. “Her spin was so tight,” he later said in an interview posted to Facebook.
The slogan Morrow and her surrogates used was “Morrow in the middle.”
Ultimately, she lost—receiving 36 percent of the vote to Swanson’s 56. But her campaign was just beginning.
Whispering Pines
Morrow strode into the Country Club at Whispering Pines on April 18 with an air of victory. Affixed to her dress was a tag that said, “Michele Morrow, NC Superintendent of Public Instruction,” as if the race for the state’s top education job had already been won.
Inside the banquet hall, members of the Moore County Republican Men’s Club doffed their Make America Great Again caps as they tucked into Jamaican-style chicken and mango rice. “She’s exactly what we need,” said club member Frank LoSapio, who was appointed to the county Board of Health last year after declaring at public meetings that he would rather die of COVID than receive the vaccine.
In Moore, where Steve Bannon gave the keynote address at last October’s Lincoln Reagan Dinner and bought a townhouse in February, Morrow’s vision for education was a perfect match. With the help of her campaign manager, a repeat War Room guest, the school board had flipped Republican and now led the state in adopting the “parental rights” movement’s priorities. Fifty-five percent of local Republican voters supported Morrow in her most recent bid for office, helping her unseat the sitting superintendent of public instruction.
It was the first time in state history that a Republican holding statewide office had lost in the primary, Morrow said from the lectern. She extended credit to the activists and officials in the room, including one of her early endorsers, school board Chair Robert Levy. “Really,” she said, “we made history all together.”
Morrow painted a dire picture of public schools. While Moore County’s were “absolutely wonderful” under their current leadership, she said, the state broadly faces a “cliff of destruction.” The workforce is unprepared to fill the jobs coming to the state. Literacy is at a “crisis point.” Charter schools and private school students are “so much more successful” than public school students, who are physically attacking each other as well as their teachers, prompting teachers to quit in droves.
While a video Morrow referenced of a student slapping a Forsyth County teacher has recently received attention, survey data and most state and local leaders point to other causes for escalating teacher attrition. State data show that although incidents of crime and violence in schools have risen, assaults on school personnel are slightly down from five years ago. Literacy indicators are also improving and a greater share of public schools are meeting or exceeding expectations than charter schools. (Private schools don’t release comparable data). At the luncheon, though, heads nodded in agreement with Morrow’s diagnosis.
For many of the problems Morrow identifies, she blames the U.S. Department of Education, which “has been pushing an anti-God, anti-American, anti-nuclear family, anti-take-responsibility for-yourself indoctrination into our schools for the last 60 or 70 years” and “purposely trying to destroy our country through our school system.”
(About 18 percent of the state’s education funding last fiscal year came from the federal department, which has been a Republican punching bag since its inception 45 years ago. Prior to COVID, that figure was about 7 percent. GOP leaders in two states, using rhetoric about “sexual indoctrination,” have recently taken steps to reject the funding.)
Under Morrow’s leadership, there would be no more training teachers to “apologize for their whiteness or uncover their unconscious bias,” she said. Schools would become “the safest buildings in our state” with a code of conduct and a security council.
Morrow appealed not just for votes, but financial support for what she estimated would be at least a $1 million race. She also asked them to urge hesitant GOP voters who might dismiss her as “a flamethrower” to speak with her. The coverage of her past commentary was “a smokescreen,” she said. “I am happy to talk with anyone,” she said, “because I believe I stand for what’s right.”
One club member asked if Morrow would debate Democratic candidate Mo Green, whom she had characterized in her speech as “100 percent a proponent of CRT, DEI and the whole LGBTQ agenda.” Green’s campaign had called Morrow’s charges against him, which focus on the grants provided by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, where he was executive director from 2016 until 2023, “a distraction.”
“I’d love to,” Morrow said, pausing while the crowd laughed. She didn’t mention that she had already declined at least two invitations to share a stage with Green, including one from the N.C. Association of School Administrators.
She learned a lesson from her 2022 school board race, Morrow said. “I was very naive and said, ‘I’ll go to anything that anybody wants me to go to,’ only to go to all of the left-leaning debates and to just be asked if I was an insurrectionist and book banner and if I wanted to, you know, destroy queer children,’” she said. So this time, she wanted conservative outlets to host.
Morrow’s campaign manager had promised The Assembly a short interview that day, but at the end of the luncheon, Morrow rushed away. Zack Mashburn, a podcaster whose father, Allen, ran an unsuccessful “parental rights” campaign for lieutenant governor, escorted her out the door and into a waiting car. Morrow said over her shoulder that she had only an hour and a half to get to an event that was two hours away.
Thirty minutes later, they were sitting in the parking lot. They were rerouting, a campaign worker explained. Morrow sped away.
Grassroots Darling
For weeks after the primary votes were tallied, Republican Party leaders avoided any public comment. They had been weighing changes to the education-oversight system that included enlarging the superintendent’s role, with Truitt in mind.
At least 46 members of the House and Senate had endorsed the incumbent, who amassed a war chest of more than $360,000, outraising Morrow 8:1.
Only House Speaker Tim Moore has backed Morrow since, and he stressed he did not support her past statements. Truitt has not endorsed her. And the N.C. Chamber of Commerce cautioned that wins by Morrow and other populist candidates threaten the state’s economy.
Larry Shaheen, an influential Charlotte-based political operative, gave his assessment on the We’re Just Sayin’ radio show hosted by state Sen. Vickie Sawyer. “I think the overwhelming message that got sent by the Republican primary voters was we don’t just hate the Democrats, we hate all of you former country club Bush Republicans, we want you dead.” He described Morrow’s supporters as “a wild, rabid pack of wolves.”
Morrow campaigned on having been an effective advocate at the legislature. She claimed a role in passing the Parents’ Bill of Rights, a bill banning transgender participation in women’s sports, and another banning gender-affirming care for minors. But the legislators involved either chose not to speak publicly about or dismissed the idea that Morrow had influence.
A spokeswoman for the Senate’s Republican leader, Phil Berger, said that he had had “very few interactions” with Morrow and none, to his team’s recollection, were about proposed legislation.
Former Sen. Deanna Ballard, who chaired two education committees and was involved in writing the Parents’ Bill of Rights, said she didn’t meet Morrow until recently, when she was campaigning to be elected lieutenant governor.
Erin Paré, a Republican House representative from Wake, said she had once listened to Morrow give a 15-minute presentation on behalf of The Pavement Project, a nonprofit that advocates for removing certain books from school and public libraries. But Paré said she had never worked with Morrow on any legislation.
Morrow’s support at the General Assembly likely hasn’t been helped by social media postings of her campaign manager, Sloan Rachmuth. Rachmuth has labeled some of the legislature’s most conservative members “RINOs”–shorthand for “Republican in name only.” She also once tweeted a grid of photos that she said represented teachers convicted of child sex crimes, but included an image of a Republican House candidate who was neither a teacher nor a convicted predator, recalled House GOP Caucus Director Stephen Wiley.
In the primary, Morrow declared Truitt a RINO and accused her of financial mismanagement as well as protecting teachers who commit sex crimes against children. Truitt’s campaign, guided by Jim Blaine, one of the GOP’s most in-demand political strategists, stayed relatively quiet—touting her endorsements and policy wins on social media and in online ads, but not matching Morrow’s packed campaign schedule.
At a meeting of the Western Wake Republicans, Morrow called Truitt “a superintendent who refuses to show up to the job that she is being asked to apply for.”
“I have traveled this state for the last two years,” she said. “No one had any contact with Catherine. You want to know why? She is not proud of the fact that she has put a rubber stamp on every bad idea that has come down from the Biden U.S. Department of Education.”
Truitt did address some of Morrow’s claims in a February interview with Charlotte talk radio host Brett Jensen, including the assertion that she was failing to protect kids from pedophiles.
She said Morrow was trafficking in misinformation and “outright lies.”
“My opponent does not have a grasp on reality, of what this role is, and how it can impact the changes that she wants to see,” she said. “She was annihilated in a local Wake County school board election and has absolutely zero chance of winning this election in the general.”
“Someone who has never participated in the public school system,” Truitt said, “has no business wanting to run public education in our state.”
Morrow punched back hard, demanding equal time from Jensen. She railed against Truitt, claiming falsely that hundreds of millions of dollars were misused or missing from the Department of Public Instruction and invoking a conspiracy theory about students filling toilets with kitty litter because they identify as cats.
David McLennan, politics professor at Meredith College, predicts that partisanship will win out over any distaste for Morrow’s rhetoric and elected leaders will line up behind her.
She already has the support of some big donors—John Kane, of the Raleigh development firm Kane Realty, and Bob Luddy, the CEO of CaptiveAire and an influential school privatization advocate.
The logic is simple, said Jim Womack, chairman of the Lee County GOP and a leader in the party’s right flank. “The one thing that unites Republicans,” he said, “is success.”
“She is a grassroots darling of the party,” an astute analyst of public sentiment, and a face the camera loves, said Womack, who was in Washington with Morrow on January 6. “There’s no way they’re going to sabotage her.”
Like Bannon, Womack views the “parental rights” message as ascendant, a chance for Republicans to draw votes from unaffiliated voters and even Democrats. He points to Glenn Youngkin’s election as Virginia’s first Republican governor in a dozen years as evidence. In 2022, similar rhetoric swept a Republican majority onto the Lee County school board. Two of the candidates spent hardly any money and just said they were against CRT, he said.
The results of similar campaigns across the country have been mixed, but the party’s center has undeniably shifted. More than two-thirds of the delegates at the state convention last year voted to censure Thom Tillis, who was a key player in building a Republican legislative majority in North Carolina, but gained a reputation in the U.S. Senate as a “bipartisan dealmaker.” In the eyes of the party’s growing right wing, that amounted to a crime.
In his interview with Morrow, Bannon said he was puzzled why her campaign was viewed as controversial. With all the state’s universities and Research Triangle Park, “all those folks and smart people and they want their kids to get ahead, why is this even a question?”
“It’s controversial because the Left understands that education is the most uniting issue in our state and around this country,” Morrow answered. “Regardless of your race, your religion, or your politics, people are concerned that our children are not getting the education that they deserve. And so the only thing that the Left has is to slander.”
She teed up her next attack.
Green is the “farthest left extreme candidate” Democrats have ever run, she said.
“The Left is desperate that the people of North Carolina not know that if he is put in power, if my opponent is given this position, our educational system and as a result, our state will be unrecognizable.”
“We will be California 2.0 before we can blink an eye,” she said.
Bannon wrapped the interview up with a signal that win or lose, Morrow would be back: “We look forward to having you back on and finding out how it’s going for you.”
Carli Brosseau is a reporter at The Assembly. She joined us from The News & Observer, where she was an investigative reporter. Her work has been honored by the Online News Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors, and published by ProPublica and The New York Times.