Editor’s Note: This story contains graphic images and expletives, reflecting the verbatim language used by the candidate.
Moe Davis has urged Democrats to stomp on the necks of certain Republicans, called Donald Trump the “dumbest f*cking president in history” and described GOP senators currying favor with the president in vulgar, graphic terms.
Just before Christmas, he tweeted that Trump had turned evangelicals into “a klan of un-Christlike hypocrites who betray everything Jesus stood for.” Earlier, he wrote, “you can’t be for @realDonaldTrump and for Jesus.”
The retired Air Force colonel and Democrat running for the 11th district congressional seat is a prolific social media poster. His Twitter account, @ColMorrisDavis, has more than 161,000 followers and nearly 92,000 tweets, many of them strongly defending democratic principles and positions.
But they also include expletive-laced, sometimes violent and deeply personal attacks on his political opponents, and denigrating comments about their supporters.
Above a video ad praising Trump last November by GOP Senate hopeful Jeff Sessions, Davis tweeted that the “giant slurping sound” coming from Alabama was Sessions “down on his knees” performing a remote sex act on the president.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s lips were so firmly pressed on the president’s rear, Davis tweeted in October 2019, “that there’s going to be an indelible hickey on Trump’s fat ass.”
And a year ago in September, Davis wrote one of several tweets denouncing the high-road response to Republican attacks advocated by former First Lady Michelle Obama.
“Screw they go low, we go high bullsh*t,” he tweeted. “When @NCGOP extremists go low, we stomp their scrawny pasty necks with our heels and once you hear the sound of a crisp snap you grind your heel hard and twist it slowly side to side for good measure.”
In a statement Friday, Davis said, “Like many Americans particularly over the past four years, I have become upset and enraged by the extremism of the Republican Party and the actions of the Trump administration that continue to incite violence and denigrate our soldiers as ‘losers.’ At times, I took my anger out on social media and said things using language that some might find offensive. I apologize if that is the case and offer a simple solution … don’t follow me on my personal Twitter account.”
Davis’s “official campaign account” on Twitter is @MoeNc11. It has fewer than 2,000 followers, and most of the tweets are written by his staff.
His Republican challenger, Madison Cawthorn, sent out a press announcement Friday about his opponent’s “nauseating Twitter past” and “hate-filled rhetoric.” Cawthorn’s campaign has created a web site critical of Davis with a page devoted to the tweets.
Davis authored many of the explicit and R-rated posts while he was an administrative law judge for the U.S. Department of Labor from 2015 to September 2019, when he retired.
The tweets surfaced in the Sept. 4 congressional campaign debate and were then reported in the North State Journal. In the debate, Davis dodged a question about whether they improved the political discourse and responded with a commitment to represent and “work for everyone in this district.”
For Republicans, that could be a tough sell. In February, Davis posted photos of a Trump event in North Carolina with banners and Confederate flags “from a war where their ancestors got their butts kicked. Trump and hate go together like pig manure and flies on a hot summer day.”
In an April 2018 tweet, Davis referred to Trump supporters as “his small ‘c’ christian, small ‘p’ patriot, fact-averse, free-dumb loving base.”
In another from 2018, he wrote that “every Republican may not be a Nazi, but every Nazi seems to be a Republican.”
In his statement issued Friday, Davis said, “Let me be clear on this: These are tweets. This is blunt language. That’s all it is.”
He criticized Cawthorn for launching “a negative attack” on Sept. 11, “a day when we should be remembering the civilians who lost their lives on this day in 2001 and the soldiers who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the wars that followed.”
But Davis observed Sept. 11 last year by posting the “stomp their pasty necks” tweet. He has authored several others with the same theme.
“Stomp their necks and grind in the heel of your boot,” said one Davis tweet from May 2019. “Say, ‘have a nice day!’ as you walk away if you’re determined to be polite.”
In July 2019, Davis tweeted that as Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other GOP comrades “slither in the sewer,” Democrats “need to stomp down decisively on their necks. Got to excise this fascist cancer now to save America and democracy for tomorrow.”
Davis has reserved some of his most blistering attacks for Trump, whose own voluminous Twitter messages routinely draw outrage. Davis has described the president as buffoonish, a gelatinous slob, a lowlife piece of shit, a 5-time draft-dodger, unindicted felon, racist, moron and oozing “sore on the butt of mankind.”
In 2017, Davis tweeted a photo of Trump at the White House with rocker Ted Nugent, who has bragged about sexual escapades with young women. “Just a couple of draft dodgers/sex offenders hanging out in the Oval Office,” Davis wrote. “2 nuts from the same scrotum.”
Trump’s family have been subjects of some of Davis’s disparagements.
In November 2019, when Donald Trump Jr. posted a doctored photo of Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democrat leading the impeachment against his father, Davis tweeted a photo of Trump Jr. Having a “piss-pour (sic) role model” for a father, he wrote, is no excuse for “being a lowlife scumbag.”
In August 2019, Davis tweeted a controversial photo of First Lady Melania and Donald Trump smiling while holding a baby who was orphaned in the mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas Walmart. The photo drew widespread consternation when Melania tweeted it, including from Davis: “You’ve got to be a 100% purebred worthless scumbag asshole to do a grinning photo doing a thumbs up while your foreign-born nude model 3rd wife holds the baby of 2 parents who were slaughtered by another asshole who was carrying out your racist asshole agenda!”
And Davis mocked Melania’s anti-bullying and child well-being campaign BE BEST, tweeting photos of both her and Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump in revealing dresses with the hashtag, @BeBreasts.
The tweets cited in this story were still visible on Davis’s Twitter feed as of Friday night, and his statement said he had not deleted any tweets.
In Cawthorn’s press announcement about the tweets, he accused his opponent of attempting to hide from his controversies and said Davis had already “begun to delete his past statements.” When asked for specifics, the campaign did not produce any examples.
Cawthorn has had his own social media controversies. AVL Watchdog previously reported that he visited a privately constructed wall at the southern border in July, where he met with several QAnon supporters and posted a video on Instagram repeating an unsubstantiated claim popular with conspiracy theorists that cartels are kidnapping thousands of American children a year for sex slavery.
And in 2017, he posted photos on Instagram from a visit to the Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s vacation home. In the posts, he called Hitler “the Fuhrer” and said the trip had been on his “bucket list.”
Cawthorn called it “another fake news controversy” and tweeted a photo of victorious Allied soldiers at the Eagle’s Nest in 1945. “They weren’t celebrating evil; they were celebrating their victory over evil,” he wrote.
AVL Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. Sally Kestin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. Peter H. Lewis is a former senior writer and editor at the New York Times. Contact us at avlwatchdog@gmail.com.
-I strongly support Moe, but am somewhat disturbed at his ‘colorful’ language in attacking his opponent(s). Of course, Trump and his followers are perhaps the closest we’ve ever seen to a Hitler -wannanbee or a strutting, pompous Mussolini clone- but Moe- maintain dignity!
I like him because he says what he thinks! Hell, he says what we all are thinking and I fully support Moe Davis.
It’s time that the Democrats grew a pair and fought back. Moe is the man! NC-11 needs Moe Davis, not some little poorly educated, nazi-wannabe, mama’s boy with no work experience and very little true life experience. Little madison cawthorn is the most un-qualified Congressional candidate in the US! He’s merely be a poorly educated puppet for the GOP.
VOTE MOE!
Moe swore…and you got sore. Trump lied…and 200,000 died. See the difference?
How true and on point
Thank you for alerting us to this. As a former moderate Republican who did not vote for Trump and can no longer stomach my party I had planned to vote straight Democratic this election. Moe Davis had my support. However one of my biggest concerns is lack of civility. There are 2 other candidates a libertarian and Green Party candidate. I have my ballot in hand and will do additional research. I can not support anger vulgarity and divisiveness. We have that now in our shameful president We need to be able to work together across the aisle for a healthy and strong country. This will require respect for each other regardless of views. Thanks AVL watchdog!
Well then you’ll be handing your vote to Cawthorn, who will continue to further the agenda of this trash administration, should it be re-instated.
“In All the Way, LBJ bellows, “There’s no place for ‘nice’ in a knife fight”…….
(LBJ was referring to Washington’s hardball politics and the limited clout of his running mate, Hubert H. Humphrey—or anyone else unwilling to pull out all stops to get a bill passed. My longtime mentor Bob Wood, who worked for LBJ, among other things, as Undersecretary and Secretary of HUD, used to refer to Washington, D.C. as “the land of long knives“.)
http://murninghanpost.com/2013/09/19/walter-white-and-lbj-personality-plus-to-what-end/
The rest of the Democrats need to grow a pair and start calling it like it is. Mr. Davis does so and he seems to be alone in doing so. In 2016.they went high while the GOP went low. We see how that turned out.
First, nice job, Asheville Watchdog, for putting both candidates on the hot seat. What we need now is a comprehensive story on what really happened when Davis was a military prosecutor in light of the stream of bald-faced lies coming from the Cawthorn (RNC) camp.
I don’t like the tweets, and they definitely put a ding on Davis being the obvious choice for maturity and measured leadership. Then again, he’s doing the right thing by owning it, and let’s face it: He’s right to bring light to the completely different standards of decency and behavior we’ve come to expect from Republicans and Democrats. The former has been reveling and wallowing in this for years, and it has worked in putting Democrats on the constant defensive and allowed Republicans to get away with almost anything. It’s pretty easy to turn this attack around by saying, oh, NOW you care about this? Please.
As a Moe supporter and volunteer, I was put off by his vulgar, divisive words. However, there are no “perfect” candidates and I’ll take someone who owns up to his actions and has a history of service to our country over a youngster trying to rewrite his personal history. I do hope Moe wins and will represent all of us with dignity and respect.
Thank you AVL Watchdog for your timely, non-partisan reporting!
QAnon wouldn’t make this race one bit weirder…..
finally a reason to vote for the guy
Mr. Davis has my support. He has expressed the very thoughts and emotions that many of us have, and his colorful language makes the point clearly. For those pristine people who are offended by his tirades, consider the blatant hate, misogyny, vile destructive call to violence Mr. Trump has been broadcasting for the last 4 years. We are fed up with it, and Mr. Davis is responding in kind to the White House B.S. Franky, I’m thrilled to see someone finally coming out and saying what many of use have said and thought in private.
I’ve been very impressed with how professionally Madison Cawthorn has run his campaign. Even during the debates he tried to stick to the platform issues, while Moe kept insisting on throwing personal attacks. It seems that a 25 yr old is more mature than a 60 yr old. That says a lot about the candidates. Madison gets my vote!
Moe Davis’s Tweets are reprehensible, delusional and unhinged.
Moe is unhinged, full of hate, wanting to settle the score for his military service. Moe is a disgrace to the uniform.
I don’t believe he is full of hate and unhinged, I think he truly fears what Trump and his minions have done to the country he loves. The man spent 25 years serving in such places as Cuba and Afghanistan. All Trump wants to do is go his golf resorts and sit on his gold commode.
He was in Afghanistan? Are you sure?
Or did you just assume that because almost everyone who served in the period did go to a combat zone and very few managed to arrange careers that avoided it?
Mr. Davis is a vile and vulgar man, unworthy of public office.
Seething with hate and bigotry. . And we wonder why our country is so dysfunctional. And I truly wish we knew WHY?
District 11 wants and NEEDS to know about policy and the future. . Davis’ hate campaign is tiring and so unnecessary!
Moe Davis has my vote! He has the qualifications and capabilities to work for us in Washington. Go Moe!
Oh my…the breathless “pearl clutching” by Trump supporters who saw nothing wrong with the “grabbing the lady parts” revelations, the 200,000 dead due to a pandemic he classified as a hoax when he knew full well what was about to happen, the insults behind closed doors of all the military, the constant gaslighting……it goes on and on.
So the disingenuous dismay is just hollow and hypocritical bull sh*t.