Far-right Zionists, with long records of open bigotry and harassment, claim they were attacked by an ‘antisemitic mob’ at a bookfair event. They’re not telling the truth

Above: Monica Buckley and David Moritz, in images from videos they posted shortly after disrupting a Palestinian history event at the West Asheville Public Library.

Blade reporter Matilda Bliss contributed to this piece

[This piece contains detailed accounts of racism, Islamophobia, transphobia and harassment]

On June 29 the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair held an event on the history of the Palestinian resistance at the West Asheville Public Library.

Three far-right Zionists — real estate developer David Moritz, realtor Monica Buckley and retired manufacturing executive Bob Campbell — moved into the back of the room and started live streaming.

By that point Buckley and Moritz had, for months, engaged in open bigotry — especially racism and Islamophobia — at local government meetings and seemingly any time locals gathered to protest the escalating genocide in Palestine. They didn’t bother with singling out a particular political or militant group but smeared Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims as a whole.

In an April 25 Instagram post, for example, Buckley mocked queer Muslims simply for existing and holding up a Pride flag that mentioned their religion. In an early June post she claimed pro-ceasefire protests were part of “Islam’s ongoing effort to repeat the Holocaust.”

Moritz meanwhile, has frequently made bigoted remarks at city council meetings, as we’ve detailed before, including excusing violence committed against Palestinian civilians as part of “a holy war that the Arabs started” and approvingly quoting racist 1920s articles about “Arab savagery.” This hatred has been widely condemned, including by many Jewish locals. But, contrary to their own rules against hate speech, Mayor Esther Manheimer and council have never stopped him.

While less vocal at government meetings Campbell is a self-described “MAGA extremist” according to his own social media posts. These also include blatant homophobia, transphobia and misogyny, glorification of the confederacy and sharing posts by Straight Pride, whose own founder described it as “a totally peaceful racist group.”

Somehow, in the flurry of coverage that followed, much of Asheville’s media never bothered to do the incredibly basic research required to find these facts.

These extremely bigoted views are those of the most far-right — and yes, fascist — swath of Zionism. Notably the overwhelming majority of these factions aren’t even Jewish, but fundamentalist Christians, as Campbell and several others who’ve shown up to support Moritz at city council meetings are.

As the genocide in Palestine has worsened, as the atrocities committed by the Israeli regime have become harder and harder to deny, as international court warrants have piled up and even Israeli media are finally admitting that IDF soldiers are openly massacring civilians, this clique has doubled down.

On June 29, shortly after the presentation began, someone in the audience identified the three as “really unfriendly Zionists.”

This wasn’t surprising. In addition to their bigotry Moritz and Buckley in particular have a months-long record of harassing multiple pro-Palestinian individuals and events. Accounts from eyewitnesses, many backed up by video and photos, detail stalking, head-butting signs, screaming insults and getting inches away from protesters while threatening them with assault charges if they bump into them.

Despite their claims to fight antisemitism they have singled out Jewish locals for particularly vicious harassment, even getting one fired from their job on a false allegation.

The speaker at the June 29 event asked what the attendees wanted to do. Multiple people said they didn’t feel safe with the three in there. People in the audience stood up, asking them to leave. Some held up notebooks to block their surveillance. Others started chanting “Free Palestine.”

Visibly quivering with rage Campbell began shouting insults, accusing those in the room of being pro-Hamas. Around that time Buckley, as seen in her own livestream, lost control of her phone. She claims it was stolen. But in that footage the phone falls to the floor and remains stationary after it leaves her grip, recording the sounds of her attacks and the ensuing calls to remove her, Moritz and Campbell from the room. Shortly after, someone sees the phone on the floor and asks who it belongs to before removing it from the room and tossing it outside.

While the video doesn’t make completely clear what happened, a far likelier scenario is that in her rush to go after the audience members Buckley dropped her phone.

She and Moritz would later claim that they were then suddenly attacked by the crowd, which they’ve variously characterized as an “antisemitic mob” and “pro-Hamas gangs.” Much of Asheville’s establishment media, as well as the APD and Manheimer, have largely taken their claims at face value.

But if the idea of locals attending a history seminar on a Saturday afternoon suddenly turning into something out of a zombie movie sounds incredibly dubious, it should. Because it’s not true.

In a video Buckley posted to her social media shortly after the event — and which she’s since removed — she admits to striking someone in the audience first, after she lost control of her phone.

“I jumped her to get my phone back,” she says, of attacking a person she thought had taken it. “I held on and I fought hard and I didn’t stop fighting the whole time.”

In the same video Buckley, reading a comment from one of her supporters, positively compared their disruption of the library event to far-right attacks on queer events, noting “a public library reminds me of the drag queen story time, the time we protested them.”

She also expressed her hopes that North Carolina’s recent mask ban legislation, passed by the ultra-conservative general assembly, would enable the APD to arrest everyone who attended the event. She claimed she had discussed that possibility, which even the N.C. law doesn’t allow, with the police who showed up on the scene.

Buckley admitting she attacked the attendees first directly contradicts claims Moritz made in a video posted to his social media in the immediate aftermath, apparently before they’d had a chance to coordinate their stories. He instead said that “we did nothing, we were just sitting there watching” and that those in the audience had suddenly struck her instead.

Understandably people left the event when Buckley initiated physical violence. Even in the livestream recorded on her phone the sounds match not with a mob attack but with people trying to defend themselves while attempting to get Buckley, Moritz and Campbell to leave. Library staff called 911. The police (they have a substation next door) arrived and arrested one audience member on two counts of the ever-vague charge of “resisting a public officer.” Even the police’s own accounts describe the injuries Buckley, Moritz and Campbell received as, at worst, minor bruises and scrapes. That makes it incredibly unlikely that a whole crowd were “punching,” “hitting” and “choking” them, as they later claimed.

Moritz and Buckley would later tell establishment media, who’ve neglected to do even minimal scrutiny into their public remarks and history, that they were just there to watch the event. Buckley claimed in a video later that day that “I just wanted to hear what they were teaching, I just wanted to know.”

This is contradicted by Buckley’s own public statements less than a week before. In open comment at the end of the June 25 Asheville city council meeting she singled out the ACAB bookfair, demanding the police investigate it and ban pro-Palestinian protest.

“They’re meeting in Carrier Park this week, they’re organizing for a revolution,” Buckley said, referring to one of the spots where ACAB held some of its events. “There are people coming from out of town to Asheville to stir this up, to help organize. This is a hub of pre-terrorist activity.”

Indeed after she left the library on June 29, an eyewitness account places Buckley harassing another ACAB venue. According to a source, confirmed by the Blade, an SUV with Buckley in the passenger side drove by a Palestinian solidarity table at the Odditorium and she screamed “we’re coming back for you, we’re gonna get you.”

Rather than three people suddenly attacked at a public event by a ravening mob, all the evidence shows that these far-right Zionists went there to do what they’d done for months: try to disrupt and attack events held by the people they hate for opposing their hatred. When asked to leave, they escalated to physical violence. Now they’re engaged in a common tactic used by others across the far-right, from the klan to Trump supporters: pretending to be the victims in an attempt to gin up sympathy and spur a police crackdown. Their claims deserve no more benefit of the doubt than those of known hate groups like the Westboro Baptist Church.

But city hall has sided with them. In comments to WLOS Manheimer lumped in the events at the library with “attacks on Jews for being Jewish, for being believers in the state of Israel and for wanting the return of the hostages.”

Moritz and Buckley weren’t told to leave the event for being Jewish or any of those other reasons but because they, personally, are belligerent bigots with an extensive record of harassment. When one starts to look at who’s backing them and their actions over the past few months, that’s crystal clear.

‘A pattern of behavior’

If all you heard were news reports and police statements, you might think that Moritz, Campbell and Buckley were just random members of the public who happened to hear of the library event and were then set upon by a violent horde.

“We at the APD remain steadfast in our commitment to reducing all acts of violence in our community, particularly those targeting vulnerable groups like our Jewish Communities,” police chief Mike Lamb declared in a July 3 statement. “Our detectives are actively investigating this incident.”

Their July 1 press release dubbed it a “robbery and assault.”

Later the department would tell WLOS that the Major Crimes unit was handling the case. On July 16 and 17 they announced that two individuals were charged with “ethnic intimidation,” a rarely-used misdemeanor and one which the APD has, notably, declined to use when far-right racists harass protesters.

At no point, even in Buckley’s own livestream, can anyone be heard uttering antisemitic remarks or slurs. As of this writing the APD have not alleged any specific actions or statements to back up the ethnic intimidation charges.

“The members of the Asheville community deserve the right to enter any community space with a feeling of security,” Manheimer declared in a statement published by the APD alongside Lamb’s. “Asheville is a city that has thrived and honored the diversity of all its residents. We will continue to do so and not be cowed by individuals resorting to violence.”

It’s perhaps not surprising that city hall views racist realtors and developers as the real “vulnerable groups.” From tear gassing anti-racist protests to crackdowns on the homeless the APD and city government during Manheimer’s tenure have been far harsher towards pretty much everyone else.

Throughout this coverage all opposition to the atrocities committed by the Israeli regime has routinely been conflated with antisemitism. Indeed the very claims of Buckley and Moritz rest on the assumption that any opposition to their extremely racist brand of Zionism is automatically antisemitic.

The local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace wasn’t having it.

“While we, as Jews ourselves, are naturally concerned about our safety in this community, we whole-heartedly reject any conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism,” the group declared in a July 5 statement. “All the recent community events calling attention to Gaza, including last weekend’s anarchist bookfair, have had numerous local Asheville Jewish community members involved as organizers and participants. We reject as false any claim that these events are antisemitic.”

“There is, today, a huge political and ideological schism among the Jewish community,” the statement continues. “Many of us were raised to have a deep emotional attachment to the state of Israel, which is now showing up as reflexive support for the Israeli government, even as that same government commits horrific atrocities. Many of us are now seeing that unconditional support for hardline Zionist ideologies has led to the dehumanization, oppression and murder of our Palestinian sisters and brothers.”

“We therefore reject that ideology and oppose both the Israeli government’s war on the Palestinian people and our own American government’s support for the ongoing murder of Palestinian civilians.”

Jewish locals have played a key role in demanding a ceasefire from the beginning, and are among the staunchest opponents of the bigotry espoused by the far-right.

The bookfair organizers themselves also responded to the tide of propaganda whitewashing the attack on the library event in a July 3 statement.

“Their intentions in being at ‘Strategic Lessons from the Palestinian Resistance’ were not benign; they were there to provoke a conflict and sell a false narrative that the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair is an antisemitic event,” the statement reads. “This is a pattern of behavior locally and elsewhere.”

“This escalatory behavior is no surprise. It was a planned disruption by individuals with extreme, genocidal beliefs who have publicly called for the suppression of solidarity with Palestinians.”

Asheville’s seen this dynamic before. In September 2020 when far-right harasser Chad Nesbitt had his armed “security” try to force their way through an anti-racist protest, one of them stumbled into him and he stumbled into a parking meter and struck his head. The APD and statements from city hall, including Manheimer, endorsed Nesbitt’s lies that he’d been attacked by the protesters. They similarly tried to claim a coffin filled with dirt left outside the APD station was a threat, even though it was part of a vigil for victims of police violence. Manheimer asserted that paper mache tombstones left on her and council members’ lawns were also a threat, leaving out that they included the names of Black people murdered by the police.

Indeed Nesbitt crawled out of the woodwork to support the far-right Zionists after their library attack, offering a reward for the arrest of those at the bookfair event. For good measure he also indulged in a conspiracy theory common among the local far-right that city council member Kim Roney — a tepid progressive on her best day — is secretly an anarchist member of “antifa” who’s being investigated by the FBI “as she is so well-connected to terrorist supporters.”

Around the same time Nesbitt’s other posts included a call for conservatives to harass trans students and their families and join Moms for Liberty, designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a far-right hate group.

Buckley approvingly shared Nesbitt’s post on July 6 and wrote “we are not stopping. We are going to unmask you all” and now claimed that the bookfair audience was trying to “kidnap” her, Moritz and Campbell.

If there was any doubt of her position she went further in a July 13 Instagram post, accusing a range of pro-Palestine activists, the Firestorm bookstore and a local Jewish woman who’s criticized her bigotry as “preparing for a violent revolution here in Asheville.” She asserted that Roney was conspiring with them, as apparently evidenced by the city council member still taking basic covid precautions.

“Kim Roney won’t take her mask off at council!!! Talk about dog whistling!” Buckley wrote before encouraging far-right Zionists to arm themselves. The exclamation points are in the original.

One commenter promised Buckley he would “crank out some certified killers” to inflict violence on those she named. If one’s looking for threats, there’s far more here than from any pro-Palestine group. At no point have Moritz or Buckley pushed back on such remarks.

Neither has the APD. On their July 1 Facebook post about the library disruption, one commenter openly said Asheville “needs Kyle Rittenhouse” to mass murder pro-Palestine locals. As of this writing the comment remains up.

On July 12 Campbell tried to blame the library incident on Black people in a Facebook post that, for good measure, also included a smear about George Floyd.

“Tear down the historical [confederate] monuments glorify a fentanyl addicted thug what do you expect to happen at your libraries?”

This is the man that the Asheville Watchdog‘s John Boyle, who’s seemingly never met a wealthy racist he didn’t like, described as a mere “80-year-old cancer survivor” who was “beat up” by anarchists.

In addition to Nesbitt’s rantings, major boosters for the trio’s “mob attack” narrative locally — those who first shared it and loudly demanded media back them — are also figures on the far-right.

One is Bob Woolley, previously known for his bigoted open letters. These include a 2023 one attacking Montford Park Players for featuring a play where trans actors briefly talked about the discrimination they face. Another, published in the Mountain Xpress in 2014, called for the racial profiling of Black people. Wooley, also a committed defender of the Israeli regime’s genocide, has joined calls for attendees to be charged with hate crimes, recently declaring “local anarchists love anarchy. And hate Jews.”

Another is Jennifer Cronje, a transplant who moved here in 2021, starting a pickleball paddle company and the All Things Asheville Instagram influencer account. Lately she’s taken a break from posting about “XX CEO” meetings and her personal wealth to publicly harass any business she perceives as insufficiently supportive of the far-right Zionists.

This has even extended to, once again, targeting Jewish locals. After one Jewish business owner commented on a social media post that Muslims as well as Jewish people were welcome at their business Cronje spewed insults at them, writing that they had an “identity crisis” and a “screw loose.”

These aren’t random members of the public speaking out against antisemitism. This is a disinformation campaign driven by a handful of well-off, incredibly bigoted conservatives.

‘Trying hard to pick a fight’

The claim that Moritz and Buckley were victims in their attempt to disrupt the June 29 event crumbles even more when one reviews their extensive record of harassment. Their actions were, multiple times over the past months, specifically focused on trying to start (or entirely fabricate) incidents that they could then portray as an antisemitic attack to excuse a police crackdown.

Over the past weeks the Blade has interviewed a wide array of witnesses, including those directly targeted by this particular clique, as well as bystanders. Different sources describe incredibly similar patterns of harassment in different times and places. Unlike the far-right’s assertions about “mob attacks” many of these are extensively backed up by video, photos and other direct evidence.

One Jewish local who showed up to a February city council meeting to support a ceasefire resolution told the Blade that they left city hall only to find Moritz waiting for them.

“David Moritz taunted me as I exited City Hall, shouting ‘aww you’re such a good Jew, you must feel like a good Jew, don’t you?’ several times,” they said. Buckley and other far-right Zionists were standing nearby.

In late April Moritz showed up among a crowd of far-right demonstrators all the way across the country at UCLA. Video posted to his Instagram account show him and others, on the night of April 29, try to push through a line of university security guards preventing them from rushing the pro-Palestinian student encampment. At one point the video shows Moritz with his hands against a guard’s throat before he’s pushed back.

The guards treated Moritz fairly gently, given that, but that didn’t stop him from shouting, falsely, that they were “breaking my arm.”

“UCLA violently enforcing segregation on behalf of pro-Hamas protesters,” Moritz’s caption to the video reads. “Jewish students and students unwilling to pledge loyalty to the pro-Hamas protesters were blocked from full access to UCLA.”

This wasn’t true. Hours after Moritz posted his video an “unholy alliance” of far-right Zionists and white supremacists, let through by the police, launched a brutal attack on the encampment. They specifically targeted Jewish students there.

“White nationalists and neo-Nazis joined forces with Zionists (including some saying they were Israelis) to attack UCLA’s Palestine Solidarity Encampment, whose residents included a large number of Jewish students,” professor Robin D.G. Kelley, part of a university task force investigating the attacks, later wrote of the events. “The assailants were not affiliated with the university. One neo-Nazi was heard shouting ‘we’re here to finish what Hitler started’ without any apparent protest from the self-identified Zionists.”

The attack sent at least 25 students to the hospital. Investigative reporting from the Guardian would later identify some of the fascists as being affiliated with the Proud Boys and prominent at previous far-right attempts to attack queer community events.

But on May 1 Moritz posted that the far-right were, of course, the real victims at UCLA.

“You have completely abandoned your Jewish students and have allowed the pro-Hamas mob to create a police state on your campus and bully, intimidate and attack with impunity,” he wrote in a caption, addressed to UCLA’s official account, of a video of far-right demonstrators shouting insults at the encampment. This included calling for the students inside to be deported to Gaza.

A few days later Moritz was back in Asheville, harassing people at the UNCA encampment on May 5.

“He got extremely close to several protesters. One of them was so close that he headbutted their sign, pushing them backwards,” Wynn, a local activist using an alias, tells the Blade.

Moritz then called a visibly queer protester “a pussy” and dared them to physically fight him.

He pressed his body against the chair another protester was sitting in and screamed in their face. Moritz even shouted at UNCA students unaffiliated with the protest who were simply walking through the area, calling them “terrorists.”

This is confirmed by multiple eyewitnesses as well as videos and photographs obtained by the Blade. Despite Moritz engaging in open harassment he faced no warnings or sanction from university administrators, whom he chatted amiably with on the steps of the library shortly after his tirade. UNCA officials instead blamed protesters for unspecified “altercations” that it cited as an excuse for police to dismantle the camp.

At the May 14 city council meeting Moritz tried to manufacture a threat out of thin air, suddenly shouting “get out of her face” at a pro-Palestinian person he’d sat beside, to try to make it appear as if they were harassing Buckley. They didn’t react and even police officers in the chamber told Moritz to back off.

“She was just sitting there,” a local woman who was at the meeting, and witnessed the incident, tells the Blade.

After the meeting that same woman left city hall, only to find Moritz waiting for her outside and taking photographs of her car.

“He took a photo of my license plate and he tried to take a photo of me,” she recalls. “I started to leave the park and he kind of started trailing behind me. He was trying to scope out where I was going.”

She was surprised, as she’d never spoken to or interacted with him before. Eventually she managed to shake Moritz, but saw it as a clear attempt to intimidate her for speaking up in public.

“I would definitely say it’s deterred me from going to city council again.”

Not shockingly, like all the pro-Palestine locals interviewed by the Blade she’s not driven by some mysterious hatred of Jewish people, but by witnessing very real atrocities and wanting to stop them.

“Seeing a bunch of people die for what seems like no reason, I just kind of was like ‘I need to figure out what’s going on,’ how this happened, educate myself on it, and then figure out what I as a citizen in America can do about it,” she says. “The more I learned, the more enraged I got.”

Notably this local is a BIPOC woman, part of demographics that — according to multiple eyewitnesses — the far-right Zionists make a point of targeting, along with Jewish protesters and visibly queer people.

“If they see a small Muslim woman that’s who they’re singling out,” Wynn tells the Blade. “It’s never going to be the six foot tall cis white guy that they pick on.”

Shortly after this stalking attempt Moritz, along with Buckley, started showing up at weekly pro-Palestine protests on some of the bridges leading into downtown.

“He attempted to instruct me on how Israel was the God-given homeland of the Jews and that they have a right to it,” peace activist Ken Jones told the Blade in an email. “He depicted ‘Arabs’ (his term) as terrorists and claimed that what was going on was a holy war.”

This is further confirmed by activist Laura Mayes, who’s also attended some of the bridge protests. While Moritz would usually try to intimidate protesters, getting inches away from their face and yelling at them, Mayes recalls Buckley standing back, waving an Israeli flag or filming.

“She’s been at the bridge, the city council meetings, other events, she’s been around,” Mayes told the Blade. “It’s important that the public know that this isn’t their first action.”

“They will get close to your face, yell, call you names,” Jones notes. “They are trying hard to pick a fight with us and we are determined not to give that to them. We don’t like being targeted like this, but we aren’t going to be intimidated.”

‘The kind of people who would punch themselves in the face and call the cops afterwards’

On June 2 Buckley, Moritz and Campbell, along with a few other far-right Zionists, broke from a larger, earlier “return the hostages” rally (attended by Manheimer) in Pritchard Park and went to harass pro-ceasefire protesters holding a separate demonstration in Pack Square.

A few of this group — particularly Buckley, Moritz and Cronje — moved into the crowd of protesters, repeatedly trying to start a fight.

“They came over and decided to embed themselves in their crowd, standing inches away from people with flags,” Wynn told the Blade. “Buckley was saying that if the flags touched them that would be assault and they’d ‘have to do something.’ They were saying they’d devolve into physical violence if a breeze pushes a Palestinian flag up against them when they chose to stand a foot away.”

Mayes also witnessed Buckley’s harassment that afternoon.

“Monica was the most volatile, she was right in front of them, waving her arms, she was right up against one guy’s face,” she tells the Blade. “Her intent was to disrupt and incite violence. She didn’t succeed.”

This is further supported by photos Mayes provided to the Blade, showing Buckley — and, in some cases Cronje as well — directly up against protesters. Buckley was waving a sign accusing them all of being “Jew haters.”

Moritz meanwhile, according to multiple eyewitnesses, repeatedly got in a Jewish protester’s face and shouted that they were a “suicidal Jew.” Another witness also recalls him saying another Jewish person was “not a real Jew.”

By all accounts the protest — organized by the Palestinian Sumud collective — was entirely peaceful. The only harassment came from the far-right Zionists.

They didn’t stop when they left the protest. Afterwards Buckley, Campbell and Moritz went to Farm Burger. Max, a Jewish local who worked there at the time, remembers the staff saw them outside and dreaded them coming in. They told their manager that, as an individual, they wouldn’t serve the trio.

“If I’m allowed to wear a ‘Free Palestine’ patch at my job, then I’m allowed to deny service to customers that I don’t feel safe to be around,” they told the Blade. “Because they’re not safe people to be around.”

Buckley would later claim, at the next city council meeting on June 11, that she and Moritz were denied service at the business for being “visibly Jewish.” This is untrue.

Max and additional eyewitnesses instead say that the three were provided service and remained at the business for several hours. Even Farm Burger’s own statement confirms they were served by other employees. This is backed up by a photo obtained by the Blade, taken by a customer, showing them sitting at a table.

Max remembers that the trio were belligerent towards other customers.

“They were intentionally speaking very loudly,” Max says. “Trying to poke the bear. Trying to bait people into interacting with them, so that they can escalate any situation, really, that they’re entering.”

The restaurant would have been justified in denying service simply due to their open bigotry. Buckley was wearing a shirt that accused genocide opponents of supporting the rape of Jewish people. Campbell loudly made racist statements hoping the Israeli military would “finish them,” meaning wiping out the Palestinian population.

Max told the Blade that customers making racist remarks in the past were told to leave by the business.

“After I heard the ‘finish them’ joke, that is when I was unable to not say anything. I truly tried my best to not escalate the situation for the sake of my coworkers. But then I just reached a point where I had to ask myself, ‘Is it really worth it?’”

“My family escaped the Holocaust,” Max said. “I wasn’t really having the ability to care about Farm Burger, a silly little burger job, over ethnic cleansing that’s killing thousands of people.”

As Max was stocking cups, Buckley made eye contact with them. They quietly said two simple words: “Free Palestine.”

“I wanted her to know that what she was doing was harmful enough to make a worker unable to do their job.”

The three then shouted at Max, and misgendered them to boot, demanding to see a manager and claiming that they were antisemitic.

“That was immediately the narrative, right? That Farm Burger doesn’t support Jewish people.”

Max’s manager tried to appease the harassers, apologizing for them saying “Free Palestine.”

“They were requesting that I had to leave the restaurant. That they didn’t feel safe around me, which I found hilarious,” they continued. “They’re scraping for anything they can to say that pro-Palestinian people are violent, pro-Palestinian people are antisemitic. I haven’t seen anything violent. I haven’t seen anything antisemitic. I’ve been to the protests. I’m a Jewish person, I’ve felt safer there than at even some bars in Asheville.”

Sadly, Farm Burger sided with the far-right and fired Max, a queer Jewish person, who then lost their housing.

The harassment didn’t stop there. Over 24 hours after the far-right Zionists’ attack on the library presentation, Max stopped briefly at a local gas station. Then Buckley pulled in. Max recalls that she recognized them and immediately “charged towards” them on foot, screaming “we found you, we found you! We’re calling the police. We’re reporting this car to the police.”

Max wasn’t in the Asheville area during the bookfair.

“They’re the kind of people who would punch themselves in the face and call the cops afterwards.”

The dizzying spread of disinformation

“We’ve never counter-protested any of their events, not one,” Wynn emphasizes. “They keep showing up over and over again to anything we organize.”

“It’s been dizzying to watch disinformation spread before my eyes locally, especially with the WLOS reporting of this incident,” one of the local activists who’s witnessed the harassment told the Blade. “Had they been covering the pro-Palestine movement actions at rallies or city council in any meaningful way they would have known Buckley and Moritz to be instigators and look deeper instead of just uncritically running with their narrative.”

But run they have. Yet again police and “progressive” city officials are bending over backwards to appease a handful of wealthy racists at the expense of many locals’ safety. This is especially blatant given that this particular clique of far-right Zionists has repeatedly, publicly, declared both their bigotry and their intent to harass anyone they don’t like. They’re not exactly subtle.

Max believes that more solidarity, especially among workers, against this kind of bigotry could help counter those business owners too ready to appease it.

“We be many and they be few. It’s very true. You can apply that to so many things. Restaurants need you,” they said. “All of the people that are working in all of these bars and restaurants and shops are needed. If we’re not there, Asheville cannot exist.”

Despite everything they’ve been through, they remain determined.

“At the end of the day, I just want people to be okay. I want people to have access to food and clean water. It’s really not that fucking radical,” Max tells the Blade. “I have witnessed time and time again community being stronger than whatever oppression these people are going to try to force upon any of us.”

—

Blade editor David Forbes is an Asheville journalist with over 18 years experience. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.

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