MomLinks: NC's QAnon School Candidate

The leading candidate to oversee North Carolina schools has some interesting thoughts on public executions. That and more in this week's MomLinks.

When I was a student, in the early days of social media, every school year featured a presentation from a police officer warning us against various categories of social media post. 

Don’t share biographical details, don’t write things that might offend a future college or employer, and don’t post violent shit that would prompt further involvement from police. The last warning turned out to be in vain and police got involved anyway when a satirical MySpace page about my school district’s thriving emo subculture uploaded a picture of a gun.

I mention this not just out of nostalgia for emo and an earlier internet era, but also because a new wave of would-be school officials would fail to meet some of these basic requests made of middle schoolers. Here’s what I’m reading this week about keyboard warrior school candidates, and more:

-The leading candidate to become North Carolina’s next statewide school superintendent is a homeschooling mother who has called for the executions of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Republican Michelle Morrow unseated North Carolina’s current school superintendent in a primary race this year, in which Morrow accused the incumbent Republican of being insufficiently conservative.

A CNN investigation last week found that, in May 2020, Morrow repeatedly tweeted her desire for Obama to be shot to death on live broadcast, or killed in an electric chair. She urged similar executions of other liberal figures for unspecified treason, including Biden, ostensibly for suggesting that people wear masks during a Covid-19 wave, “Never. We need to follow the Constitution’s advice and KILL all TRAITORS!!! #JusticeforAmerica,” Morrow wrote of the president-elect in December 2020. She was present at the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but says she never entered the building.

A new Media Matters investigation today found that Morrow recently worked as a spokesperson for a far-right political action committee that, during Morrow’s tenure, claimed that “allegedly Hitler is Obama’s grandfather,” “Hilter’s father was a Rothschild,” “the ‘Stars’ are satanic, evil and controlled to groom as many children as possible into demons themselves,” “our schools have been systematically handed over to leftist/socialist/ Commies...to carry out the plan set up by the Illuminati to mold the brains of our children,” and that school shootings are “False Flags” orchestrated by the “Deep State.”

On social media, both Morrow and the PAC have promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely accuses Donald Trump’s opponents of engaging in a Satanic pedophilia and cannibalism ring. And Morrow has personally inveighed against tolerance (“#IslamIsEvil #ToleranceIsDeadly”), which she portrayed as part of a scheme “for the Deep State and the Muslim movement to destroy our Constitutional Republic.” She is currently leading her Democratic opponent, a longtime education professional, by one point in polls.

-Meanwhile in South Carolina, a state representative is pressuring a school district to fire librarians he accuses of “grooming” children by offering library books he deems inappropriate. Those accusations emerged from a Moms for Liberty campaign to characterize librarians as hiding books, based on emails in which a librarian appeared to discuss restricting guest access to an online card catalog listing. (The school district says the card catalog remains free for the public to peruse.)

-The Supreme Court is hearing a challenge this week to mifepristone, the pill frequently used in medication abortions. Mifepristone access is more important than ever, new data shows. Self-managed abortions (usually with a two-pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol, shipped from outside the U.S.) increased in the six months after the 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Those months saw a 332 percent uptick in average monthly abortion pill distribution. That figure complicates a statistic that found 32,000 fewer abortions after states enacted post-Roe abortion bans. People were still obtaining abortions during that time, the new data suggests, but they were seeking new means to get care.

-Weight-loss drugs like Ozempic are reportedly leading to unexpected pregnancies.

-People are making deep fakes of high school principals making racist comments now. The latest case is in Baltimore, but high schoolers in New York also made a deep fake of their principal threatening their Black classmates last year. Not great.

-As the right wages war against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies, special education experts are warning of the campaign’s “chilling” effects on their students. One expert told K-12 Dive that attacks on inclusion risk rolling back decades of progress on disability rights. “There’s the very significant concern that efforts that have been going on for decades are now going to be subsumed under the political machinations regarding the anti-DEI efforts,” he said.

-Children old enough to follow the news know about the ongoing massacres of children in Gaza. In the Guardian, parents discuss how to explain a genocide to children who want answers, and expect adults to have them. “Children are observing all this, and we don’t know the drastic effects it’s going to have on them,” one mother said.

-Anti-choice states are advancing legislation that would allow schools to screen a notorious, counter-scientific clip about fetal development. The video, “Meet Baby Olivia,” is part of an influence campaign to depict fetuses and embryos as more developmentally advanced and childlike. In tandem with book bans and lack of comprehensive sex education in schools, the video is worrying propaganda, medical experts warn.

-This is a great Chalkbeat podcast about (and created with!) New York City’s migrant students. The student journalists do a really deft job of unpacking the challenges facing classmates who’ve arrived in the city amid an xenophobic backlash. Newly arrived students need safe housing, dependable school enrollment, and community support. One student journalist, a high school senior who arrived in New York from Mexico, discusses building connections across cultures through a school group called the Dream Squad. 

“When you’re alone, you’re shy, and you don’t want to talk to anyone, you close yourself in your own world, and you don’t know more about what’s happening outside,” she said. She is now a leader in the group, which has started chapters in more than two dozen schools.