Developers David Moritz and Jared Wheatley are running for Asheville city council seats. But behind their attempts to rebrand as housing advocates lurks an extensive history of open racism and Islamophobia. Locals should know the truth, including about a political status quo far too indulgent of bigotry
Above: Developers David Moritz (left) and Jared Wheatley (center) in line with other MAGA supporters to attend the Aug. 14, 2024 Trump rally in downtown Asheville. Special to the Blade.
[Editor’s note: This article deals directly with Islamophobic and racist hate speech.]
If all one had to go on were their campaign websites, developers David Moritz and Jared Wheatley would seem pretty par for the course — even blander than most — for an Asheville city council election. Neither has anything resembling a platform, though that’s sadly pretty typical for electoral politics here. Instead they lean on vague buzzwords: “infrastructure, safety, housing, economy” and “lifestyle affordability” to pick just two examples.
Moritz touts his gentry resume in real estate. Wheatley, though also a developer (indeed, he and Moritz are partners in the same company) claims he’s working class in his ads and emphasizes that he would be the first Cherokee council member. They, along with 18 others, are on the ballot for three council seats. Tomorrow’s March 3 primary will narrow that crowded field to six, who will continue to November’s general election.
Working class developers, of course, do not exist. Accordingly, property records reveal that Moritz Wheatley LLC currently owns four properties in Buncombe alone.
The closest either’s public-facing campaign material comes to even hinting at their well-documented history of far-right bigotry and harassment (and supporting said bigotry and harassment) is when Moritz’s notes in passing that “over the past two years I’ve seen firsthand what it feels like to be unsafe, and I’ve stood up against hate and political violence.”
Moritz does indeed have experience with hatred and political violence, but that’s from enthusiastically participating in and encouraging them.
Throughout 2024 Moritz became a well-known figure at Asheville city council meetings, engaging in increasingly Islamophobic and racist tirades.
On March 12, 2024, for example, Moritz approvingly quoted 1920s news articles calling Arabs “savages” and asserted that the genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli regime was “a holy war that the Arabs started.”
These remarks were widely condemned, including at that meeting and shortly after, including by many Jewish locals. His views, contrary to how Moritz later tried to portray them, are those of the most openly far-right — and yes, fascist — factions of Zionism.
Moritz’s racist remarks went on well past the usual three minutes allowed by council, because three others in the chambers that night gave him their time to speak for a more extended period. These were realtor Monica Buckley, former ABCCM treasurer Andrea Clarke — and Jared Wheatley, then a member of city hall’s powerful planning and zoning commission.
It’s worth noting that when someone in council chambers gives up their time to a speaker, they’re doing so because that speaker is expressing views they hold as well. They are literally speaking on their behalf.
Any dubious notion that Wheatley might not have known the extremity of Moritz’s views before he spoke March 12 is disproven by what happened at the next council meeting. On March 26, Wheatley again gave his time for Moritz to speak on his behalf. He proceeded to use this to blame Arabs and Muslims as a whole for violence back in the 1930s and claim that the widespread local condemnation of his bigotry two weeks was analogous to Hitler and Mein Kampf.
No, readers, we are not making this up.
In later meetings Moritz endorsed fundamentalist Christian speakers calling for the banning of the Quran and Muslim religious practice in general. While these, along with his March comments, clearly violated council’s prohibition on hate speech (remarks “intended to harass any person or group of people”) neither Mayor Esther Manheimer or any other council member condemned the statements or halted his tirades.
This was a marked contrast to their pattern of making up rules on the spot to silence or shut down pro-Palestinian speakers, even to the point of crossing state open meetings laws and the First Amendment.
According to multiple sources uncovered in a 2024 Blade investigation, Moritz also stalked anti-genocide speakers after they left council. This included following them, photographing their license plates and screaming insults. In May he also shouted insults at protesters at UNCA, dared them to physically fight them and head-butting one of their signs.
Nor was this simply confined to Asheville. In his own social media videos Moritz can clearly be seen in a far-right crowd at the UCLA anti-genocide encampment on April 29, 2024, shoving security guards trying to keep them from attacking the camp. The video even shows him putting his hand on the throat of one guard before being pushed back.
Hours after the events depicted in his video, an “unholy alliance” of far-right Zionists and white supremacists attacked the encampment. They made a point of targeting Jewish students.
“One neo-Nazi was heard shouting ‘we’re here to finish what Hitler’ started, without any apparent protest from the self-identified Zionists,” professor Robin D.G. Kelley, who investigated the attack as part of a university task force, later wrote.
On June 29, 2024 Moritz, along with Buckley and self-described “MAGA extremist” Bob Campbell, tried to disrupt a presentation on the history of Palestinian resistance at the West Asheville public library. Earlier the same week Buckley had publicly demanded the police shut down local pro-Palestinian events going on that weekend as “pre-terrorist activity.” The three were pushed out by the attendees.
Despite Moritz’s later portrayal of the incident as a “mob attack,” social media video posted that day by Buckley (and later removed) showed her bragging about striking first after she claimed one of the attendees tried to take her phone. Her own footage, while not particularly clear, was more consistent with her dropping it.
Despite no footage of the event or the attendees voicing any slurs or other signs of antisemitism, Asheville police later charged several locals with “ethnic intimidation” at the far-right harassers’ urging. Manheimer and much of the establishment press dutifully repeated Moritz and Buckley’s false narrative without examination.
Max, a working class Jewish local who was fired from Farm Burger and publicly smeared by the far-right Zionists in 2024 for quietly saying “Free Palestine” after Moritz and others spent several hours at the restaurant loudly making racist remarks, summed up their record neatly in a July 2024 interview with the Blade.
“They’re the kind of people who would punch themselves in the face and then call the cops afterwards.”
‘We filed to run for Asheville city council’
After the Blade‘s investigation and other local grassroots pushback disrupted their claims of a “mob attack,” Moritz started to keep a lower profile, scaling back his rants at council.
But photos of the Aug. 14, 2024 Trump rally in downtown Asheville offered another clear sign of their allegiances, showing Moritz and Wheatley in line with Campbell and other MAGA supporters.
At more recent city council meetings, Wheatley and Moritz tried to rebrand themselves as housing advocates, though notably supporting policies that would directly benefit for-profit developers.
Last year, on Nov. 18, city council voted 5-2 to remove Wheatley from the planning and zoning commission. They did this not for his record of supporting bigotry, but due to clashes with city staff.
Vice Mayor Antanette Mosley (currently running for re-election) and Council member Kim Roney (running to unseat Manheimer in the November mayor’s race) voted against his removal.
Social media shows Moritz and Wheatley not just remaining business partners, but also teaming up for their council campaign. They both filed on Dec. 17 and Wheatley noted on an Instagram post that day that “today we filed to run for city council” They’re even using incredibly similar designs for their campaign signs.
Wheatley, in a photo posted on his Instagram, noting ‘today we filed to run for Asheville city council.’ Moritz filed the same day
While Moritz and Wheatley’s records should have been well known to anyone familiar with local politics – it’s not like they were known for quiet subtlety — they’ve largely been treated as any other candidates. This includes local groups featuring them in forums (and media in campaign guides) without any real reference to their history or views. The far-right Coalition for Pubic Safety, also using the council election to try to launder their record, endorsed Moritz (though not Wheatley) alongside the city council incumbents and other conservative candidates. For far too many in Asheville electoral politics, open bigotry is clearly not a dealbreaker.
Indeed the larger issue here, more than just some candidates holding particularly despicable views, is that we shouldn’t be here right now.
The two’s political ambitions, in any electoral culture not rotten to the core, should have ended in March 2024. Moritz’s racist tantrums should have been immediately barred, even under city council’s own hate speech rules. Wheatley should have been swiftly removed from his position on the planning and zoning commission, something city hall was clearly capable of doing the second his behavior impacted them.
Any run for office should have been similarly curtailed, with forums refusing to seat them and media refusing to run their responses or normalize them as candidates. While many structural evils are encoded into campaign season here, rancid hatred like theirs should have been a step too far even for Asheville’s political class. It was not.
So none of that happened, because despite all the progressive pretensions those in power here are fine with bigotry, even open racism. Indeed, many of them are bigots themselves and as the challenges from angry communities have grown, so has the brazenness of their contempt for anyone outside the gentry.
This is, after all, the place where anti-racist demonstrations were met with clouds of tear gas aimed at parents holding their children in their arms, where Palestinian voices are routinely silenced while those calling for their genocide are endlessly coddled, where Black communities still regularly face racist lies smearing them as uniquely violent and an obstacle to progress, where trans journalists and activists are dragged to jail for exercising their rights, where the mayor effusively praises the same federal fascists tearing immigrant families apart and sending them to concentration camps.
There are many who, courageously, oppose this oppressive status quo in our city, but you will search in vain for them in the seats of power.
This is Asheville, and even if Moritz and Wheatley are crushed in the polls, that is what the rest of us must overthrow.
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Blade editor David Forbes is an Asheville journalist with over 20 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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