The National and Local Dangers of MAGA Incompetence and Extremism
For years, former House Majority leader Nancy Pelosi endured withering insults – even death threats -- from MAGA Republicans. It turns out, however, that Nancy was able to do three things recent Republican Majority Leaders cannot do: (1) Lead, (2) Count, and (3) Win.
Two interrelated events during the week of February 5th highlighted both the incompetence and the extremism of the MAGA crowd.
First, the GOP lost their first vote to impeach Deputy of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, claiming that he was not protecting the southern border.
Second, they then refused to vote on a Senate-passed border bill that included virtually all the requirements they had been demanding for decades! Why? Because the former president told them to kill it; he wanted to use the border issue as a cudgel during his election campaign. And they sheepishly obeyed him.
Ranking member of the House Rules Committee, James McGovern, summarized the issue the day before the House impeachment vote, when he said: “We are here because Marjorie Taylor Greene and the chock full of nuts caucus wanted us to be here.” He went on:
“Marjorie Taylor Greene. She's the leader of this charade, and she said it herself: ‘this is the beautiful dessert [I get] in exchange for my vote on that s**t sandwich debt ceiling bill.’” McGovern could not contain his chagrin:
This is who is dictating the house floor schedule? Is she now the Majority Leader? Marjorie Taylor Greene? Someone who proudly speaks at white supremacist rallies, someone who promotes Holocaust deniers, someone who compares Joe Biden to Adolf Hitler, and who says COVID mask requirements are the same thing as Nazi gas chambers, someone who says wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers and that 911 was an inside job? That's the person that you put in charge of this whole Republican agenda? Right now, the clowns are running the circus around here, and we're wasting hours and hours of time this week on Marjorie Taylor Greene, because what she wants us to impeach somebody.[i]
McGovern predicted that, come November, the voting public is “going look at this Republican majority's record, and they're going vote you out of office, because of your total incompetence, your extremism, and your refusal to work in a bipartisan way to try to get anything done around here -- including the border.”[ii]
Sadly, the incompetence and extremism that James McGovern denounced in the Republican House majority has been replicated in Moore County’s School Board (MCSB), stockpiled 6-1 with Trump-supporting election deniers.
Moore County School Board (From Right to Left: Philip Holmes, Ken Benway, Robert Levy, David Hensley, Shannon Davis, Pauline Bruno, and Stacey Caldwell)
Elected in 2020, Philip Holmes is a local mortician with no background in public education. Following the MAGA playbook, however, he launched a crusade to remove books from school libraries that he found vulgar, even though he hadn’t read the books, and even though they weren’t part of the curriculum. After an agonizing $14,000 review process, the board somehow thought removing only four books was a fair compromise.[iii] One of the books was Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Ken Benway, a retired army officer, started with absolutely no experience in public education. But he did have a very precise political agenda. He told The Pilot that “school boards across the country have become flashpoints where Judeo-Christianity and Marxism are facing off to-to-toe, and only one side is going to win, and whoever wins gets the kids.”[iv] His recent efforts to learn on the job, however, are encouraging. Perhaps they will moderate his MAGA agenda and his Manichean mindset.[v]
Robert Levy, retired divorce lawyer and late-in-life substitute teacher, joined the board after acting as chairman of the Moore County Republican Party. He assured voters he was “motivated to represent all citizens,” regardless of parents’ politics. He insisted that he wanted “to take politics out of our schools and replace it with meaningful educational opportunity.”[vi] Sweet.
Then, holy cow! The truth came out: he “would not tolerate such philosophies as ‘critical race theory’ and ‘social justice,’” favoring instead “the prerogative of our parents and their churches to teach our children morality.” Nonetheless, he still promised to work with parents and teachers to bring excellent traditional education to all our students.” His “working with teachers” promise, though, must have surprised those teachers he once described as “Socialists” and “Marxists.”[vii]
Then there is MAGA extremist, David Hensley, a successful arms dealer, again, with no prior background in education. He famously sent a message to MAGA philosopher, Steve Woodward, “to kick ass and come back with a collection of severed ears,” as Woodward and other January 6th “enthusiasts” prepared to overturn the 2020 election results. Hensley is running for a second term, despite being labeled a “bully” and censured by his fellow board members for his “vile conduct,” his “inappropriate behavior,” and his “lack of civility.”[viii]
Shannon Davis also had no prior experience with public education. Even as a child. She attended religious schools and, as a parent, she chose to homeschool her three children. GED in hand, however, she is “committed to education reform” and “uncovering the ‘woke agenda’ in Moore County.”[ix] In a recent meeting, Davis floated the idea of requiring school uniforms like those worn in charter schools. It didn’t float very far.
Pauline Bruno is a retired teacher and does have experience with public education, but she entered the race roaring like the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse. Bruno campaigned for the Board in 2022, falsely claiming the schools were teaching Critical Race Theory and that socialist teachers were “grooming” students. Her battle cry was that the schools “will not indoctrinate our children” and “divide our babies.”[x]
As President of the Women’s Republican Party, she organized the Moore County bus trip to D.C. on January 6th to “stop the steal.” She later posed for a photograph wearing a “Miss Insurrection” sash. Not shy at all about posting her political agenda, she has accused non-MAGA people of “destroying America,” and intending to “destroy an entire civilization.”[xi] Bruno, oddly enough, has become a peacemaker on the board, refereeing angry outbursts and recriminations among her colleagues.
The one board member who does have the relevant education and experience with public education happens to be the only non-MAGA person on the board. Stacey Caldwell, a military spouse, a parent, has a bachelor’s degree and an NC state certification in K-8 Education. Furthermore, she confessed: “I am not a politician. I have no hidden agendas. . .I am in this position for the children.”[xii]
Caldwell, incidentally, is the only board member who voted against what she considered an otherwise acceptable “Parents’ Bill of Rights” because she felt the Bill was unfairly “targeting the LGBTQ community.”[xiii]
Caldwell has chosen not to run for re-election, no doubt exhausted by the continuous name calling, bickering, and general hostility.
The incompetence and extremism exhibited by this MCSB has enabled this chaos. This local circus mirrors the incompetence and the extremism among MAGA Republicans in the House and Senate. And the results are producing similarly dire and ominous consequences.
Nationally, as noted in the Washington Post, many Democrats and some few moderate Republicans have been vilified, even receiving death threats, causing some to hire private security. Others have resigned. And why? Because they dared to oppose Trump. Fearful for their lives and the welfare of their families, they decided it just wasn’t worth it.[xiv]
So too locally. Rollie Sampson is a military veteran and an Independent who “typically votes Republican.” After she resigned her job with Moore County Schools to run for the school board, some people accused her “of being a liar, a leftist, and a woke liberal.”[xv] She learned that running for the school board in Moore County is a risk “not just to your personal livelihood, but to your safety.” Understandably frustrated, Simpson said, “the children have become political pawns.”[xvi]
Furthermore, the MCSB is supported by a militant offshoot of the Moore County Republican party. “The Education First Alliance,” organized by a January 6th firebrand, wants local Republicans “to declare war on Leftist educators and their enablers in local and state government.” A target of this group, Samson said, “They say they are at war with us, and they’re not joking.”[xvii]
The group, in fact, wrote in an April Facebook post that:
“it has ‘moles’ in most teachers’ groups and will ‘pay $ to those who are willing to expose others who threaten children. Its leaders have asked people to submit names to a public list of Moore County teachers who are turning children into ‘woke mindless drones,’ including teachers who put their pronouns in their email signature. Moore County is less of an outlier than a case study.”[xviii]
Libby Carter, a retired educator, who served for seven years as an at-large member of the school board and loved her work, decided not to run for re-election. “I have found that negative attacks, threats on my family, threats on my home, lies about me by some members of the far right are just impossible to live with, and I’m not willing to continue to endure the stress upon my family and myself.”[xix]
Shameful is it not, that members of a once honorable political party are behaving like mafia thugs and storm troopers?
Nationally, MAGA adherents take their cues from their “master.” In their world, competency or expertise is not important or even necessary. The goal is to dismantle “systems,” i.e., the “administrative state.” Trump’s brain trust, Steve Bannon, believes this can be done by “flooding the zone with s**t.” By “zone,” Bannon, of course, means the media.[xx]
Bannon’s objective is an all-out disinformation campaign designed to create the illusion of national chaos. For the moment his “flooding” is problematic since low inflation, low unemployment, healthy job growth, low gas prices, roaring stock market, high GDP, resurgent manufacturing, and infrastructure funding, are blunting his efforts.
Undaunted, however, Bannon and other media merchants of chaos labor tirelessly to make illusion seem real to their followers, real enough to eventually find a pretext for dismantling institutions and norms. By conjuring a MAGA version of the Reichstag Fire, they believe they can justify replacing America’s “unworkable” republic with an authoritarian “illiberal” democracy like Hungary’s, or an authoritarian oligarchy like Russia’s.
A second Trump administration would certainly guarantee the success of Bannon’s utopia.
Locally, the Bannon agenda begins with the schools: hound competent licensed teachers, hobble teacher recruitment, gaslight local citizens, stoke the culture wars, and physically threaten opposition. Then, secure the ultimate prize: more MAGA approved charter schools – paid for with taxpayer money.
These charter schools would essentially be private, parochial schools, siphoning funds from the public schools while allowing MAGA ‘approved’ teachers and administrators to design some sort of curriculum unconstrained by common core guidelines, designed perhaps by Christian Nationalists or The Education First Alliance — further dividing students by race, class, and religion.
[See Robin Calcutt’s excellent article on this topic: “Public Schools, Teachers Are Being Undermined by Politics,” The Pilot, June 3, 2023.]
For the moment, at least, Moore County citizens have the fate of the MCSB in their hands. They can shut down the current circus by electing competent, experienced, civil, and non-partisan people to the school board on March 5th.
[i] Transcription from February 5th Hearing of the House Rules Committee
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] “Book Removal Plot Took Quite a Twist,” The Pilot, January 27, 2024.
[iv] Pilot article, quoted by Paige Masten in “’Whoever Wins Gets Our Kids’: Fiery NC School Board Race Mirrors National Fight,” Charlotte Observer, August 18, 2022.
[v] “Presentation Depicts Divergent Paths, The Pilot, February 6, 2924
[vi] Campaign Statement
[vii] In a 2019 article for The Pilot, Levy described a teachers’ rally as a “red-fisted Marxist spectacle — a “Communist International Worker’s Day.” He stated that the teachers’ red shirts suggested the “innuendo of socialism” and an evocation of the “Bolshevik banners displayed during the Russian Revolution.”
[viii] Sandhills Sentinel, July 19, 2023.
[ix] Campaign Statement: https://www.mooregop.com/gop-candidates
[x] Comments to MCSB, April 2021
[xi] Her “President’s Message” to the Moore County Republican Women, February 2021.
[xii] Campaign Statement
[xiii] “MCSB Approves Parents Bill of Rights,” North State Journal, April 23, 2023.
[xiv] Ellison, Sanchez, and Marley, “Violent Political Threats Surge as 2024 Begins, Haunting American Democracy,” Washington Post, January 9, 2024.
[xv] Paige Masten in “’Whoever Wins Gets Our Kids’: Fiery NC School Board Race Mirrors National Fight,” Charlotte Observer, August 18, 2022.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Ibid.
[xx] https://mediamanipulation.org/definitions/distributed-amplification