In a crowded Democratic field, who’s the most fabulous fabulator of all? Is it Senator Elizabeth Warren (funny, you don’t look Siouxish)? Or Senator Cory Booker (with his tales of T-Bone)? Or is it Maryland Governor Wes “Less Is” Moore?
That seems to me one of the questions raised by Andrew Kerr’s Free Beacon story “Wes Moore Says the KKK Chased His Great-Grandfather Out of South Carolina. Historical Records Tell a Different Story” (“Moore’s great-grandfather preached at a South Carolina church held in high regard by the white community, before he was transferred to Jamaica to succeed a prominent pastor who had unexpectedly died”).
Moore’s “powerful family story” depends almost entirely on his own word, and yet:
Moore falsely claimed that he was born and grew up in Baltimore, which he did not; that he was inducted into the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, an organization that doesn’t exist; that he received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, which he had not; that in 2006 he was considered a foremost expert on radical Islam based on his graduate thesis, which he never submitted to Oxford University’s library and can no longer locate; that he was a doctoral candidate at Oxford in 2006, a claim he has no documentation to support and on which Oxford refuses to comment; and that he had “a difficult childhood in the Bronx and Baltimore” despite attending New York City’s elite, private Riverdale Country School—where John F. Kennedy went to school—as a child and not living in Baltimore until college, when he attended Johns Hopkins University, another elite private school.
The Free Beacon asked Moore for comment on the exposure of his oft-told family tale — oft-told by him, anyway. His comment is a classic nonresponse resonse:
Reached for comment, a spokesman for Moore, Ammar Moussa, accused the Free Beacon of being ignorant of basic history for daring to question Moore’s narrative. Moussa has responded to previous inquiries about Moore’s record by arguing that the Free Beacon is not “engaged in journalism.”
“The Free Beacon’s fixation on Governor Moore is mildly amusing,” Moussa said. “What’s more concerning is how casually they treat the reality of being Black in the South in the 1920s. Anyone questioning whether racial terror and intimidation were pervasive in that era should open a history book or, better yet, reach out to the KKK to ask what they were up to in South Carolina in the 1920s.”
Read Kerr’s deconstruction here.
