Bless her heart

Michele Morrow is doing her own research again.

Poor Michele Morrow has been doing her own research again. Bless her heart.

This time, CNN has found a video she recorded on the night of January 6, 2021. In it, Morrow explains how Trump can use the military to lock up his political enemies and stay in power regardless of the outcome of the election. In other words, she was advocating for a military coup.

Of course, Morrow is blaming the liberal media for her video. She says they will “twist anything to stop [her] momentum on the campaign.” She calls it “gaslighting” Again, bless her heart.

She’s right, though. We should have the proper context. So here’s the context. The video was shot in a hotel after she attended the Trump rally on January 6, marched to the Capitol, and stood outside cheering while it was ransacked. She believes the election was stolen without any credible evidence.

Morrow looks into the camera of her phone wearing a slightly conspiratorial smile, as if she’s letting her audience in on a juicy secret. She begins, “President Trump is still the president until the 20th of January…And now he has every player in his sights and they can all be arrested for treason.” She goes on to explain that if the police and Department of Justice won’t arrest Trump’s political opponents, then Trump will have to “enact the Insurrection Act, which puts the Constitution to the side and says now the military rules all.” She goes on to explain that the military will fall in line because they supported Trump’s campaign for president and they will make sure he is inaugurated again.

If that sounds like a description of a military coup to you, well, you would be correct. Using the military to subvert the Constitution would be treasonous. That’s clearly what Michele Morrow wanted to happen, only in her world of alternative facts, it would be patriotic.

I don’t know where she got her bogus information, but the fact that she believed it doesn’t speak well to her cognitive abilities. She apparently has difficulty discerning blatantly bad information from good information. She also has trouble defending what she believes because the media only released the video. She recorded it. Those aren’t great traits for somebody who wants to oversee our public schools.

Michele Morrow homeschooled her kids. She believes that the President of the United States has the power to set aside the Constitution and have the military lock up his potential enemies. You can only imagine what else she might have taught her children. Republicans in North Carolina subsidize home schools with vouchers. If Michele Morrow is any indication, they are taking us on a race to the bottom, producing misinformed adults who lack critical thinking skills.

Morrow and her fellow Republican Mark Robinson are having a difficult time living in the age of social media. Back before about 2007, they could have held their ignorant beliefs and nobody would have been the wiser. But once Facebook came along, they felt compelled to share their foolishness with like-minded audiences. Unfortunately for them, the rest of us could see them, too.

Now that they’ve decided to run for office, their words are coming back to bite them. They like to claim that it’s the liberal media or that they’ve been taken out of context, but the calling for a military coup or calling gay people “filth” is news. And the videos and social media posts are available from start to finish. What they say and what they mean is perfectly clear to anybody who watches them. They’ve shown us exactly who they are, but now they want to pretend that they are other people.

They showed themselves to the Republican Party and the GOP embraced them anyway. The party is a dumpster fire of frauds, conspiracy theorists, narcissists, and extremists. They’ve refused to police their own and this is what they get—bone-headed fantasists detached from reality and promoting sedition.

Now, I’ve got a few other thoughts beyond North Carolina. The news media is demanding that Kamala Harris sit down for a formal interview. I’m sure she’s going to do interviews, but why would she do that right now? Her opponent is damaging himself with unhinged news conferences and working himself into a tizzy because Harris is drawing much larger crowds than him. She’s attracting massive audiences in swing states across the country, building momentum for a very contentious election. Why would she do anything to change the conversation?

And if the media really wants the cover this presidential election correctly, they need to be telling the public what Trump is saying on Truth Social. He’s spouting bizarre fantasies like Biden is about to swoop into the convention and take back the nomination. He’s lying obsessively about his crowd size. He’s even claiming Harris is using AI to exaggerate her crowds. Why isn’t the media asking him to elaborate and find out where he’s getting his misinformation? If anybody else running for president was saying the insane stuff Trump says on his website, the media would be covering it like the major story it is.

Finally, the Trump campaign is not going to let up falsely accusing Tim Walz of stolen valor. They’ve got an army of people tweeting clips where they claim he’s lying about his military record, but none of it adds up. In clip after clip, he says he “supported the war in Afghanistan,” which is exactly what he did when he deployed to Italy. They claim he abandoned his unit by retiring before he could be deployed to Iraq except that he put in his retirement notice before the unit knew it would be deployed. And finally, he reached the rank of Command Sergeant Major and held that rank when he retired. His rank was reduced after his retirement to “master sergeant for benefit purposes.”

Numerous news outlets have thoroughly investigated the claims of stolen valor by the Trump campaign and found them to be either false or misleading. The AP, PBS, Factcheck.org, and Military.com have debunked the accusations. Even Fox News reported, “Walz's unit was not given deployment orders to Iraq until July and he had put his retirement papers in five to seven months prior to his retirement in May 2005.”

These accusations aren’t new to Walz. Republicans have been making the same noise ever since he first ran for Congress in 2006 and none of it has ever stuck because none of it’s true. The only people pushing it now are people with a political agenda and people who are doing their own research by reading and watching disinformation in their feedback loop. I’m sure Michele Morrow believes it.

That said, the Trump campaign is made up of people who specialize in lying and pushing disinformation. They know that if they say it loud enough and long enough, the story might get legs. We all need to push back on the lies when we hear them.

The truth is that Tim Walz served in the national guard for 24 years, became the highest ranking enlisted soldier in Congress, and paid for his college with the G.I. Bill. Donald Trump took five deferments to keep from serving in Vietnam. So, Tim Walz served. Donald Trump deferred.

Anybody still arguing that Democrats are somehow more dangerous for the country than the miscreants running on the Republican ticket have no more grip on reality than the crazy guy posting Truth Social.