“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.
“Within twenty-four hours that speech was viewed more than twelve million times on Twitter alone, and was shared by Hillary Clinton, Better Midler, J. Smith-Cameron, George Takei, and countless others,” McMorrow writes, looking back on how her words resonated with Middle America. “Within days my face was plastered all over every cable news channel on repeat, and discussed by the women on The View, by Jimmy Kimmel in a late-night monologue, and in newspapers and magazines from coast to coast.”
The rest is, apparently, history. The media swooned. Things hadn’t worked out for Beto O’Rourke and Stacey Abrams, so they were delighted to have another obscure Democrat to fawn over. As is often the case, they got a little carried away. David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, quoted German playwright Bertolt Brecht while likening McMorrow to “dissident truthtellers” such as Václav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who was murdered in prison. New York magazine praised her as a “beacon for beleaguered liberals struggling with the right’s latest moral panic over equality for LGBTQ+ people—especially trans children.” McMorrow has been making headlines ever since. “Lawmaker explains why she brought a giant prop to her DNC speech,” CNN reported last year.
Meanwhile, normal Americans might be somewhat perplexed to learn that McMorrow is held in such high regard among the weirdos who follow politics professionally. She is a younger version of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), the candidate she endorsed for president in 2020. Warren, sometimes referred to as “Pocahontas” because she advanced her career by pretending to be Native American, was adored by people like McMorrow. (She represents some of the wealthiest suburbs of Detroit, and goes on yoga retreats to Nicaragua.) Pocahontas’s failure to gain traction in the Democratic primary prompted liberal journalist Matt Yglesias to write an article explaining “Why Elizabeth Warren is losing even as white professionals love her.” McMorrow doesn’t claim to be a minority, but she shares Warren’s lecturing schoolmarm vibe and vague policy views that favor emotion over substance.
McMorrow wrote this book because she’s running to join Warren in the U.S. Senate. She won’t have any trouble raising money or getting positive media coverage, even if she never gets around to filling out the “priorities” section of her campaign website, which is currently inaccessible due to a “404 Error.” McMorrow has star power. The back cover of Hate Won’t Win features approving blurbs from celebrity billionaire Mark Cuban and former pop icon Mandy Moore. She’s teamed up with Lis Smith, the Democratic operative best known for dating a disgraced New York governor (Eliot Spitzer) and helping another (Andrew Cuomo) navigate a sexual harassment scandal by getting an MSNBC host to repeat her talking points “verbatim” on the air. Smith previously succeeded in raising the profile of Pete Buttigieg, another formerly obscure Democrat beloved by liberal pundits and celebrities. Time will tell if McMorrow can handle an even brighter spotlight. The past few election cycles have shown that the media’s infatuation with a given candidate (always a Democrat, obviously) rarely leads to success at the ballot box.
The author’s dramatic rise is also what makes Hate Won’t Win an incoherent mess. It provides some useful advice for activists on how to effectively engage politicians at the state and local level. There’s even a workbook section for nerds. But the book is full of contradictory sentiments. “Ignore the federal level,” writes the candidate for U.S. Senate. “To build real power and make real change, start at home.” Congress, which she hopes to join, is a “dysfunctional nightmare.” McMorrow complains at length about how social media and cable news have poisoned our politics, and urges readers to abstain as much as possible. She also brags about how great she is at posting online and appearing on chat shows. “I’d imagined this must be what professional athletes feel like when they know they’ve done the training, they’re in the last quarter of the semifinals, and they are on fire,” she recalls feeling after reciting some Democratic talking points on CNN about how “it was not hyperbole to say” the 2022 midterms could be “the very last free and fair election we ever have.” (It was hyperbole.)
The celebrity politician laments the abundance of unsavory figures who are “held up and rewarded by our politics-as-celebrity system.” She warns of the dangers of “political fandom” and treating politics like sports, implicitly denouncing the elite virtue signalers who helped launch her career. McMorrow politely admonishes liberals, herself included, for their fangirl worship of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose refusal to resign during the Obama administration ultimately allowed conservatives to expand their majority on the Supreme Court. She also gently criticizes the activists in her own party who, for example, have shown up at lawmakers’ homes to protest the war against Hamas, and insist on using terms such as “birthing people,” which are “well-intentioned” but alienating to most voters. Nevertheless, she persists in painting those who oppose letting transgender athletes compete in women’s sports as bigoted perverts. This includes two-thirds of Democrats, according to a recent New York Times poll.
Good luck in the primary!
Hate Won’t Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It
by Mallory McMorrow
Grand Central Publishing, 288 pp., $30
