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Last summer, David Hensley’s former allies turned on him.
Since 2020, Hensley had spearheaded a campaign to seize control of Moore County’s school board, which he and other hardline conservatives believed had been captured by an establishment too focused on promoting racial equity and liberal ideology.
In two years, his faction had won six of seven seats. But at the peak of their power, the coalition frayed.
In regular appearances on local talk radio, Hensley began attacking his board colleagues as harshly as he had their predecessors. He believed the insurgents had become the very establishment they campaigned against, prioritizing their ideological agenda over problem-solving.
“I didn’t fight hard to reform schools and move things from left to the center of viewpoint neutrality just for that pendulum to swing the other way,” Hensley told The Assembly. “Because just like it’s unacceptable for the left to impose their viewpoint on students, that’s not acceptable for the right either.”
Hensley believed he—and he alone—was staying true to his principles. Most of Hensley’s colleagues believed he was the problem.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think that he works well collaboratively,” board chair Robert Levy told The Assembly. Levy, an attorney and former county GOP chairman who was elected on a slate with Hensley in 2020, has become a bitter adversary.
A simmering tension boiled over after Hensley called Levy, who is Jewish, “a Nazi” on the radio. The board hastily called a special meeting in July 2023 to censure Hensley—who was out of town seeking medical treatment—and strip him of his committee assignments and role as vice chair.
“He has continuously and flagrantly attacked individuals, constituents, teachers, and members of this board,” said Philip Holmes, a funeral home manager elected with Hensley and Levy. “His words are harsh, unwarranted, and disruptive.”
“We now have chaos in public meetings and the toxic stew of antagonism and character assassination of the elected chair of this board, as well as the gratuitous attacks on the superintendent,” echoed Ken Benway, a retired military officer who won with Hensley’s support in 2022.
But being ostracized only steeled Hensley’s resolve. Ahead of this November’s election, he said he’ll “expose” his fellow board members as captives of the “uniparty”—which he defined as a coalition of Republicans and Democrats who want to maintain power.
Moore County has become a vanguard in an effort pushed by key players in former President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement to capitalize on pandemic-fueled anxieties and reshape public education in a more traditionalist, conservative mold.
“The path to save the nation is very simple—it’s going to go through the school boards,” Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist who owns a home in Moore County, said on his podcast, War Room, in 2021.
With Bannon’s encouragement, protests against masking morphed into calls to ban lessons related to race, gender, and sexuality—and in Moore County, the election of right-wing crusaders who often had little or no experience in public education.
Moore County’s hardliners have accomplished many of their goals in the last four years. But chaos has gripped the board, illuminating divisions within the MAGA coalition. The discord among school board members threatens to tear apart the local Republican Party, which has been undergoing a similar transformation.
Critics argue that a movement that campaigns on grievance and venerates combativeness will inevitably struggle to govern.
“This is what happens when a party focuses on ideology—right-wing culture ideology—and not on who’s the best candidate to get the job done,” said Cheryl Christy-Bowman, who co-founded the group Public School Advocates and runs the blog Moore Voices. “Everybody wanted to be king.”
‘The Coup’
Hensley, 60, relocated to the Sandhills area from Northern Virginia in 2008 at the suggestion of former U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes, a North Carolina Republican who served on the House Armed Services Committee and later became the state GOP’s chairman. A retired Marine, Hensley had founded Quantico Tactical, which has sold at least $611 million worth of weapons and equipment to the Department of Defense.
He bought a 5,400 square-foot house along the fairway of the Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course Pinehurst No. 9.
Moore County is stacked with Army soldiers and veterans connected to nearby Fort Liberty, as well as wealthy retirees drawn to its top-tier golf courses. The county of 105,000 typically votes for GOP candidates by a 2-1 margin and boasts the largest Republican women’s club in North Carolina.
“This is what happens when a party focuses on ideology—right-wing culture ideology—and not on who’s the best candidate to get the job done. Everybody wanted to be king.”
Cheryl Christy-Bowman, co-founder of Public School Advocates
Hensley says that when he moved, the school board was apolitical. He believes that changed in 2015 when the board abruptly voted 5-3 to fire its newly hired superintendent, Robert Grimesey, for reasons that were never disclosed publicly.
Grimesey proved more popular than the school board members who ousted him. Less than a week later, after an intense public backlash, the board reinstated him. Four of the five members who fired him resigned, allowing the remaining board members to appoint ideological allies to fill those seats—“the coup,” as Hensley calls it.
Republicans still dominated the board. But Hensley contends that they made a sharp left turn. They became “woke,” he said.
Hensley objected to policies designed to ensure that Black students were equally represented in gifted courses and discipline statistics, which he thought undercut meritocracy and excused misbehavior.
He also opposed a controversial school reassignment plan in 2019. The district sought to shift students away from crowded schools while creating “demographic balance,” which sometimes meant busing kids from low-income areas to richer ones.
Hensley allied with the group Moore Families for Quality Education, conservative parents and activists who complained about school officials in sharp, sometimes conspiratorial tones. They, too, were upset by the reassignment plan. And like him, they were incensed that the district had hired Panorama Education—a company that right-wing media tied to critical race theory—to administer student well-being surveys.
Pandemic regulations and efforts to address racial inequalities following George Floyd’s murder supercharged school board races across the country in 2020. But Moore County had already been primed for a contentious election.
‘Moore County’s Donald Trump’
Around the time he declared his campaign, Hensley became a regular voice on WEEB-AM’s morning talk shows, following an invitation from host J.D. Zumwalt, an influential MAGA activist. Hensley quickly amassed a following for his pointed, often personal critiques of school officials and other politicians, channeling conservative angst.
Hensley accused the school board of overspending on construction projects. He raised alarms about a new elementary school being built between two contaminated sites, though the sites had been cleaned and an environmental assessment said the school was safe.
He argued that teachers were overpaid “for a part-time job” and warned of school officials pushing a Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ-friendly agenda. He repeatedly called a land trust’s proposal to redevelop district property into a Black community center a “crack deal” and speculated, without evidence, that the trust would build an abortion clinic on the site.
As Laura Sumrall, a local Republican activist, told The Assembly, Hensley became “Moore County’s Donald Trump.”
In early 2020, the Moore County GOP endorsed Hensley, along with the like-minded Levy and Holmes, for the school board, though they were running against other Republicans in nonpartisan races. (The seven board members serve staggered four-year terms.)
The party’s endorsed candidates were “running to decimate the status quo” and ensure that the school board is not “held hostage by Moore County Schools radical Superintendent Robert Grimesey,” the county GOP said on Facebook.
Hensley made signs touting the slate, which campaigned on promises to improve the district’s academic performance, rein in COVID restrictions, and reverse liberal excesses.
Many advocates for public schools argued that the insurgents were inventing problems to solve. There are no politics in the schools’ daily operation, said Robin Calcutt, a former Moore County teacher and principal who ran unsuccessfully for the school board in 2022 and is running again this year.
“We are not pushing a political agenda,” she said. “I never, ever thought about politics. The only politics I thought about was trying to get funding from our county commissioners.”
But Hensley and the hardliners won.
On the Attack
When they took office in December 2020, Hensley, Levy, and Holmes were in the minority, their ambitions constrained by more moderate colleagues and a board chair, Libby Carter, whom they believed improperly blocked their agenda.
Being in the opposition freed them to go on the attack. They protested when Carter moved board meetings online because of residents who refused to wear masks. Hensley promised to get rid of “leftist teachers.”
Hensley and Levy likened middle-school promotional videos to “Soviet” and “Nazi” propaganda. Hensley mocked the “purple-haired” mayor of Whispering Pines, a small town in Moore County, as a “racist heterophobe” after she opposed banning critical race theory.
And in a radio segment with Hensley, Zumwalt called out by name two teachers who signed a pledge to “refuse to lie to young people about U.S. history and current events.” (Hensley said he was “recusing myself.”) Zumwalt also targeted a sex-ed teacher who answered a question about semen.
Even though they were in the minority, the insurgents bent the school district to their will.
Levy proposed banning critical race theory—a key plank of their campaign platform. The board rejected his motion, with the four moderates arguing that they didn’t need to solve a problem that didn’t exist.
But two months later, after pointed criticism, the board reversed course.
Today, Levy concedes that critical race theory wasn’t prevalent in Moore County. He says the board’s action was preventative.
“I don’t think you can say that there was ever a lot of critical race theory being taught in Moore County schools, mostly because most of our teachers do not buy into that philosophy,” he said. “We’re very lucky in that regard.”
“We are not pushing a political agenda. …The only politics I thought about was trying to get funding from our county commissioners.”
Robin Calcutt, Moore County board candidate
Administrators were sensitive to the politics of the school board. In the summer of 2021, administrators chastised teacher Michele Cunningham for posting a picture of herself next to a student wearing a Human Rights Campaign mask that included her pronouns.
“I was told, ‘Well, you can’t wear that because it’s political,’” Cunningham told The Assembly.
Cunningham says she also came under scrutiny for a professional development presentation she gave to other teachers that included the Genderbread Person, an infographic designed to help people understand gender identity.
Moore Families for Quality Education alleged that “there is at least one elementary teacher (IN MOORE COUNTY) pushing to bring the Genderbread Person into their curriculum.”
“This is child abuse,” a group member responded.
Cunningham says she never showed the infographic to her kindergarten students, only to teachers. “Everybody is feeling this thumb on their back pushing them to be a certain way,” she said. “And teachers are feeling it, too. And then the students feel it.”
The atmosphere grew increasingly toxic. In September 2021, a woman left a profane voicemail for Moore County Schools’ human resources office, threatening school board members over masking policies. “We’re going to motherfucking come for you!” the woman screamed.
As the 2022 election neared, homemade signs appeared accusing the district of “pedophile grooming.”
Education First Alliance, an organization with Moore County ties that claims to fight the “radicalization and sexualization of children,” announced that it would pay money to “teachers who are willing to expose others.” Hensley donated $750 to the group, whose founder gave the Moore GOP a “boot camp” on how to “declare war on Leftist educators and their enablers.” Holmes and Levy attended.
The Moore County GOP, once the bastion of country club Republicans, has morphed into a MAGA party. It selected Cleta Mitchell, an attorney and Southern Pines resident who was at the forefront of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, to be the keynote speaker at its 2022 convention.
The message from their endorsed school board candidates was bellicose. “I am ready to fight,” said Pauline Bruno, former president of the local Republican women’s club who sent two busloads of Moore County residents to the January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, D.C.
“I despise critical race theory. I despise SEL,” she said, using the shorthand for social-emotional learning, or the soft skills children are taught in school. Right-wing commentators had begun to brand it a “delivery mechanism” or “Trojan horse” for CRT.
Voters added Bruno and two more MAGA candidates to the board, giving Hensley’s faction near-total control.
At the end of her final school board meeting in late 2022, Carter, a Republican first appointed amid the fallout over Grimesey’s firing, fretted about the board’s future: “The citizens of Moore County have created a Board of Education full of dissent, innuendo, and downright hostility toward one another, toward our students, and toward our employees.”
Parents’ Bill of Rights
The insurgents forged ahead with their agenda. The school board rewrote the district’s sex-ed guidelines and made it easier for parents to challenge books they deemed inappropriate. They changed the district’s mission statement to eliminate the term “global citizens.” They replaced Grimesey, who retired in early 2022, with a new superintendent whom Levy said was “more reflective of the values and goals of Moore County voters.”
They made good on a promise to focus on school discipline as a salve for flagging academic performance, doubling the number of school resource officers. Filling those positions has proven difficult, however. They also pushed out a middle school principal after videos of students fighting circulated online, prompting more than a dozen teachers to resign in protest.
Despite a teacher shortage, they refused to hire a handful of international teachers through an international program.
“How much of their culture do we want to bring?” asked Shannon Davis, a homeschooling mom elected to the school board in 2022 on a platform of putting God in schools and government.
The board also passed a Parents’ Bill of Rights that goes further than the statewide version the General Assembly passed last year.
Like the state legislation, it requires teachers to inform parents if their child identifies as transgender and restricts classroom conversations about sexuality. Unlike the state law, Moore County forbids discussion of “gender identity and gender fluidity” at any grade level, not just in elementary classrooms.
An LGBTQ rights group has since filed a federal discrimination complaint against the school district, alleging that the Parents’ Bill of Rights targets “LGBTQ+ content for censorship and removal from instruction.” The complaint objects to guidance from the district requiring elementary school teachers to remove any “book with homosexual parents or a student questioning their gender.”
Levy said that while the LGBTQ community pushed back against the Parents’ Bill of Rights, he thinks LGBTQ students are comfortable in Moore County schools.
“To the extent that there is any bullying or discrimination, as a board member, I want to know that. I have not seen or heard much of that,” he said.
He also suggested that improving academic performance makes those concerns less relevant. “If we have high expectations of reading, writing, math, and the like, we won’t worry so much about what a student’s preferences are,” he said.
Rebecca Beittel, a teacher who left Moore County schools last year, says that the school board has forced its priorities on administrators, who in turn have pressured teachers to fall in line.
“That means that books are being removed from classrooms and certain requirements are being asked of teachers that never used to be asked before,” she said. “Teachers are incredibly wary of saying anything at all. They feel endangered.”
Experienced teachers have been driven from the classroom, public school supporters argue. “It has been a toxic environment,” said Calcutt, the former teacher and principal who is now chair of the Teacher Education Department at St. Andrews University. The Laurinburg-based college has a satellite campus in Pinehurst at Sandhills Community College. “I had people calling me, like, ‘Robin, can you get me a job? We’re under pressure. We’re scared.’”
Levy insists that’s not happening. “I have never in the years that I’ve been on the school board ever heard of a teacher leaving because of politics,” he said.
Moore County has a teacher vacancy problem, but so do most school districts in North Carolina. Data collected by the state’s Department of Public Instruction don’t indicate that Moore County teachers are leaving at abnormal levels. The district’s 2023 attrition rate, 12.6 percent, is only slightly higher than the state average.
In addition, teacher surveys show higher-than-average levels of job satisfaction. In part, that’s because most Moore County teachers believe discipline is consistently enforced in their schools.
Levy also points out that academic performance has improved on the conservatives’ watch. The district had two F-rated schools in 2022, but a year later, they had both climbed to D’s. Student proficiency has also risen from 2021, though it’s not yet back to pre-pandemic levels.
A yawning gap between the test scores of Moore County’s white and Black students persists, however. Only 16 percent of Black students across all grades tested as proficient, compared with 50 percent of white students.
Levy said lessening that gap “is one of our most important goals. We’re working on that pretty hard.” But he argues that the board’s new strategic plan deserves credit for the improvements—specifically, its focus on American, rather than global, citizenship.
“The idea is that we need to be proud of the United States,” Levy said. “And that needs to be our No. 1 goal.”
How the mission statement—which did not change the curriculum—led to better test scores remains unclear.
“You’re not going to find that we do things necessarily different,” Levy said. “But we do give the students—it’s more or less a different ethos than you might find in other schools. It’s much more conservative.”
‘The Swamp’
For the board’s MAGA majority, the enemy was not just the federal government, liberal “educrats” and consultants, the editorial board of The Pilot of Southern Pines, and the local advocates Hensley and Zumwalt called “flying monkeys.”
“The Swamp” also included members of their own political party, whose factions seemed to swirl elusively, like the colors in the sheen on an oil slick.
Sometimes, the Swamp included each other. Hensley saw it in his colleagues’ reluctance to dismantle the district’s police department, which he believed had been ruined by sexual abuse and conflicts of interest. He accused Levy of stifling his reforms, prompting their fallout.
After his censure, Hensley was relatively quiet. He thought the board might continue enacting the agenda they’d run on.
But that didn’t happen, Hensley said: “What I saw them do is start undoing reforms that we did. They started doing a lot of stuff in secret. They started conspiring against employees in closed session in violation of the law. … And so rather than continuing needed fiscal and other reforms, discipline and whatnot, they just drove the bus off the cliff.”
Some of his colleagues proposed new rules about board member presentations, as well as a higher threshold for making agenda items open to discussion; the rules appeared to be aimed at Hensley. They subsequently backed off, leaving the policies unchanged, but Hensley thought the message was unmistakable: They wanted to silence him.
He got a whiff of similar intentions from the county’s GOP leadership.
In early January, he received an email from Tom Beddow, the retired 3M vice president who served as Moore County GOP’s chairman, alerting him that the executive committee would meet to decide whom to endorse. He would have five minutes to present to the group.
“What I saw them do is start undoing reforms that we did. They started doing a lot of stuff in secret. … And so rather than continuing needed fiscal and other reforms, discipline and whatnot, they just drove the bus off the cliff.”
David Hensley, Moore County School Board member
At the executive committee meeting, the fissures among party factions were on full display. A precinct chair who coordinated the party’s volunteers for the previous seven years argued that the party should not endorse; it was too divisive. But a slim majority voted to proceed.
Hensley missed the endorsement by two votes. However, the conflict was far from over. He asked the state party to arbitrate and accused the county leadership of using the power of their positions to sidestep party rules and achieve their desired outcome. “That is stealing an election,” he wrote.
The state party issued a rules clarification that was viewed by some as a way to minimize the influence of the party’s passionately populist faction. Bannon and some other far-right media figures had pushed Trump supporters to enact a “precinct strategy,” transforming the party from within by seizing low-level leadership positions.
Steve Stern, an 82-year-old hawker of American flag apparel who is now the strategy’s chief promoter, says the initiative has been drawn to a standstill by the infighting. “They’re fighting all over the country—establishment, or RINO [Republicans in name only], versus MAGA,” Stern, who lives in Florida, told The Assembly.
In Henderson County, following a similar NCGOP ruling, tensions ran so high that police escorted one disempowered precinct chair out of a meeting. The local Republican Men’s Club censured the party chair, then a rival Republican men’s club formed, the Hendersonville Lightning reported.
The founder of the new club explained to the publication, “You can’t plan or win elections screaming at one another.”
At the NCGOP convention in Greensboro in May, the Republican candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, acknowledged that some in his party balk at embracing the no-holds-barred, confrontational style of politics that Trump popularized. He argued that the model of political combat was made necessary by a sinister transformation in the other major party.
“We are not dealing with the same people that Ronald Reagan and George Bush dealt with,” Robinson said. “We are dealing with an entire class of so-called politicians that will stop at nothing. …
“They will destroy your lives. They want to bring you to your knees. And so today’s Republicans cannot be like the Republicans of yesterday. Today’s Republican Party requires one word—we require warriors.”
Several of North Carolina’s other top Republican candidates this year also emerged from this combative strain.
Dan Bishop, candidate for attorney general, is a member of the House Freedom Caucus, which has used confrontational and obstructive tactics to push the U.S. House, and the Republican Party, to the right. Michele Morrow, the candidate for superintendent of public instruction, is a Trump superfan who accused her primary opponent, the incumbent, of being a fake conservative and a protector of pedophiles.
The movement has been moving further to the right, Bannon told NBC shortly before reporting to prison this month for defying a congressional subpoena. In his estimation, “President Trump is a moderate in our movement.”
A Renewed Insurgency
Hensley says his work is not done.
“I planned to do four years,” he said. “I knew I could fix stuff—and boy, did we fix stuff. But halfway through, they did what they did to me. I was not happy.”
He named his reelection campaign committee “Informed Republicans,” a dig at the local party’s leadership. From his perspective, he was the one being straight with voters, providing the information they needed to make an informed decision at the polls.
Hensley bragged to The Assembly that some GOP precinct chairs distributed his election materials despite being warned by party leaders that to do so was grounds for expulsion. He’s heartened by what he sees as a growing willingness among the rank and file to buck the party’s leadership and exert their own force.
On Facebook in February, Hensley discouraged his followers from volunteering for the Moore GOP. He wrote that if they did volunteer, they could expect to be berated by the party’s vice chair and used as pawns for personal revenge by its chairman.
“Rather than volunteer to HELP the Country Club Elites and the Moore County Swamp,” he wrote, “let’s work together to take back the Moore County GOP so that it represents The People and our values, not special interests.”
The chair and vice chair did not respond to requests for comment.
Hensley has pledged to create a video series with dozens of installments, “prequels and sequels,” to document the Swamp at work.
Moore County voters didn’t defer to the party’s recommendations in the March primary.
Levy and Hensley, the incumbent school board members who ran for re-election, advanced to the November ballot. Levy had the party’s blessing; Hensley did not.
The two candidates most critical of the MAGA politics of the school board also advanced, by wider margins.
In November, voters will get the final say on whether the school board takeover gave them what they wanted.
Carli Brosseau is a reporter at The Assembly. She joined us from The News & Observer, where she was an investigative reporter. Her work has been honored by the Online News Association and Investigative Reporters and Editors, and published by ProPublica and The New York Times.
Jeffrey Billman reports on politics and the law for The Assembly. Email him at jeffrey@theassemblync.com.