Republicans must decide on March 5th between Catherine Truitt, the incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction (and a total weak-kneed RINO to some of the MAGA crowd), and Michele Morrow, failed school board candidate and Scourge For God who intends to return Christian and Nationalist "morality" to the school system. The winner of this primary will face the winner of the Democratic primary (about which, more later) this November.
Truitt seems a lot less liberal than Brant Clifton alleges. I'd say she's standard-issue Republican, the weakest tea on the whole philosophical proposition that a country must educate all its children. She takes money from the people she's supposed to regulate, namely out-of-state, for-profit charter schools, and has refused to challenge the credentials or record of such companies as American Leadership Academy Monroe, recently approved for a new charter (after two previous failures over issues like "conflicts of interest in the school’s governance, rapid expansion of [the home company] into North Carolina without sufficient evidence of academic success, and drawbacks of giving public tax dollars to an out-of-state corporation").
Truitt is being challenged for the nomination by the candidate who will bookend perfectly with Mark Robinson.
She made quite a spectacle running for seat #9 on the Wake County School Board in 2022 (getting just under 36% of the vote against the winner's almost 56%). Though the Wake School Board technically runs without party labels, everybody usually knows, and Morrow was endorsed by the Wake Republican Party. She was also endorsed by Moms for Liberty.
Morrow, 53, a former nurse, has home-schooled all five of her children, and has been an effective spokesman for her side because she can be non-kooky and makes perfect sense on some issues, like the need for more trained school nurses, yet the extreme views she's learned to dampen in public came out in the open after she established herself as a flashpoint presence on social media, famously labeling public schools “socialism centers” and “indoctrination centers” and urging people not to send their children to them. During a candidate forum in September 2022, 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.” (There's always a conspiracy, no?) She also pushed conspiracy theories on 2020 election fraud and COVID-19 vaccines and posted about “taking out” the enemies of her people. She hates "social activism" in school. Social activism apparently belongs entirely over the barrier at Capitol Hill: Morrow took her oldest children to the January 6th Capitol riot, said on a live Facebook feed that she was there to teach her children "a lesson about citizens’ role in a democracy," but also claimed later that she had tried to dissuade rioters from pounding on and breaking windows.
Watching her current video introduction for Superintendent of Public Instruction, we see a very nicely turned out candidate -- lovely, really -- saying some pretty standard stuff at first about guaranteeing a good education for every child. Then things change, perhaps when she wields the word conservative, and here they come, the dreaded spew of ominous initials -- DEI, CRT -- as she drills down into the horrors of children coming to hate their own white skin because of confronting unpleasant facts in history. Morrow's game is barely contained fright. And make no mistake: Morrow is the Iron Woman who is gonna put a stop to all of it, reinstating "the true history of our great nation." She's intense under a surface of apparent calm, rigid in posture, animated in face, remembering to smile on key words. You can almost hear her gritting teeth.
Here's Morrow in action in front of the Wake County School Board on June 6, 2023:
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