Pocahontas 2.0
11th May 2025
“What I didn’t like about becoming famous overnight,” Mallory McMorrow writes in her new book Hate Won’t Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It, “is that you might assume that I had always done this, that somehow it came naturally.”
Unless you’re a journalist or a celebrity (or some other form of partisan Democrat who obsessively follows politics), you’re probably wondering: Who the hell is Mallory McMorrow??? And why is she famous???
McMorrow is a two-term state senator from Michigan and a former Hot Wheels designer for Mattel. She was filled with “rage” after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, so she started writing mean postcards to Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education. When that didn’t work, she decided to run for office. In 2022, she became a liberal superstar after a Republican colleague accused her of trying to “groom” children. The angsty five-minute speech McMorrow gave in response, which the author proudly dubs “The Speech,” was a rousing defense of Democratic efforts to prevent the removal of overly sexualized content from kindergarten classrooms. It was the primal scream of a “straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom” who refused to let “hate win.” It was profound. “The room froze as those words hit the towering walls of the chamber like shots out of a cannon,” McMorrow recalls with Obamaesque self-pride. Naturally, this sent thrills up the legs of MSNBC employees and viewers alike. “I felt it in my soul,” Jonathan Capehart gushed.