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Touched a Nerve: Gov. Wes Moore Says The Free Beacon Can Ask the KKK About Its History

Brett T.
Brett T.  |  8:00 PM on February 16, 2026

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who expects to be elected president in 2028 and have the Francis Scott Key Bridge rebuilt by 2030, told CBS News' Norah O’Donnell at a town hall Sunday night that the Democrats need to be the party of fast and now. O'Donnell also asked him about a February report in The Washington Free Beacon accusing the governor of lying about his great-grandfather being run out of South Carolina by the Ku Klux Klan. Moore insisted he knew his family's history, and The Free Beacon could ask the KKK about theirs. 

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We're old enough to remember in 2021 when then-Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler dug into Sen. Tim Scott's claim that his family "went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime." Where's Kessler when you need him?

Someone touched a nerve, and that someone is The Free Beacon's Andrew Kerr, who wrote in February:

It's a story straight out of Hollywood, and it was a central feature of Moore's 2022 campaign stump speech, in which he described a version of American patriotism wherein "loving your country does not mean lying about its history." Moore first told the tale of his exiled grandfather in a 2014 memoir and has since retold it countless times as he seeks to reclaim patriotism for the Democratic Party and to contextualize his own unlikely rise to power.

But there's a problem with Moore's story: It's flatly contradicted by historical records and is almost certainly false.

Moore's great-grandfather on his mother's side, the Rev. Josiah Johnson Thomas, did preach in the 1920s at a church in Pineville, S.C., about 65 miles north of Charleston. But historical records housed at the archives of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of South Carolina undercut the three main elements of Moore's story—that Thomas suddenly fled the country in secret, that he was targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, and that he was a prominent preacher who spoke from the pulpit against racism.

Detailed church archival records, as well as contemporary newspaper coverage, indicate that Thomas, a Jamaica native, on Dec. 13, 1924, made an orderly and public transfer from South Carolina to the island of his birth, where he was appointed to succeed a prominent Jamaican pastor who had died unexpectedly a week earlier, on Dec. 6, 1924. Amid the copious documentation of the life and career of Moore's great-grandfather, there is no mention of trouble with the Klan, which operated openly in 1920s South Carolina but never had a chapter operating out of Pineville, according to Virginia Commonwealth University's Mapping of the Second Ku Klux Klan.

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Moore is so brazen that he posted the clip to his own X account. That was a mistake.

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Kerr also reports that "Moore’s press secretary, Ammar Moussa, told Fox News on Tuesday that the story was 'a family’s century-old oral history,' which had to be true because 'intimidation and racial terror were pervasive in the Jim Crow South.'"

Just like the Potomac River, under the watchful eye of Moore.

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