Michele Morrow, a far-right figure who attended former President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, is projected to lose the election for state superintendent of public instruction in North Carolina to Democrat Mo Green, a former superintendent of Guilford County schools.
The position oversees the state’s more than 2,500 schools and an $11 billion budget.
Morrow, who ran for Wake County school board and lost in 2022, made headlines when CNN discovered that she had attended the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and where Trump lied about massive voter fraud. (There is no evidence that Morrow entered the U.S. Capitol building or committed any crimes.) She later made a video that has since been removed, saying that Trump should use the military to stay in power. In since-deleted social media posts, she called for the execution of prominent Democrats like former President Barack Obama and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper.
As a candidate, she routinely made disparaging remarks about the LGBTQ+ community, smearing them as abusers and linking her Democratic opponent Green to them. She attacked the teachers of North Carolina by claiming they were “sexualizing” and “indoctrinating children.” When the state’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy group endorsed Green, Morrow falsely claimed that the plus sign in the acronym stands for pedophilia.
Morrow’s campaign was a part of the so-called parental rights movement, which involves installing right-wing figures in key positions in public schools in order to promote a conservative agenda in classrooms. It has inspired an all-out assault on public education, with Republican candidates and elected officials leading the charge on banning books with racial justice or LGBTQ+ themes, restricting what teachers can say about racism and gender identity in their classrooms, and attacking transgender students.