CNN couldn’t get the GOP nominee to run North Carolina’s public schools to comment on a boisterous report about her calls to execute several top Democrats—so the network confronted her directly.
CNN reporter Shimon Prokupecz approached candidate Michele Morrow after a Wake Country Republican Party event in the state, questioning her on her incendiary social media posts. CNN’s KFile reported how between 2019 and 2021 Morrow called for the deaths of Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as well as other prominent Democrats including Hillary Clinton and Andrew Cuomo—all while promoting QAnon conspiracies and disparaging public schools as “socialism” and “indoctrination centers.”
Morrow, an activist who homeschooled her children, defeated the incumbent superintendent in the GOP primary in a surprise upset earlier this month. Should Morrow win, she’d be in charge of the state’s public education system and its $11 billion budget.
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Prokupecz and Morrow began cordially before the reporter disclosed his affiliation, causing Morrow and an associate to button up and refuse to answer his questions. Prokupecz pressed her on the inflammatory posts, asking if he stood by her calls to execute Democrats and her comments on public schooling.
“Do you stand by what you’ve said about the public education system, that it needs to be destroyed?” Prokupecz directly asked.
Morrow tried to brush him off before erupting at the reporter, questioning why CNN, as a New York-based national news outlet, would bother covering a North Carolina candidate.
“Do you know that education is a problem in this entire country?” Morrow continued. “So maybe they need to focus on what’s going on in your state of New York which, by the way, is where I grew up. Maybe they need to focus on what's going on in California where children are not getting the education that they need. Maybe they needed to focus on what they’re doing in Michigan, because right now in North Carolina, I’m focused on helping the families of North Carolina for their children to get quality education for them to be safe.”
At one point, Morrow tried to feign ignorance about her own tweets’ authorship when pressed by Prokupecz. “How do you know those are my words?” she asked—a seeming attempt to suggest the tweets posted to her Twitter account were not written by her.
Still, despite Prokupecz’s best efforts, Morrow refused to acknowledge her hateful comments and moved along.
