‘Only someone who is a complete idiot’ would do this, said former Larry Hogan communications director Doug Mayer
“Maryland is home to some of the nation’s best public schools, but also some of its most neglected,” then-gubernatorial candidate Wes Moore (D.) said in a 2022 campaign ad. “We can’t settle for that. We must make sure that every Maryland student gets that fair shot to succeed, the same one that I got.”
It was a noble sentiment—but a strange setting. Moore filmed the campaign spot inside Calvert School, the elite Baltimore private school where he enrolled his children, according to two sources familiar with the school’s interior. Situated prominently behind Moore in the ad are Calvert School’s iconic punch-holed wooden lockers.
The K-8 school, where middle school tuition exceeds $33,000 a year, is, according to its website, a “nurturing space where students and families feel valued and supported.” Both sources said the wooden lockers on the left side of the frame are a dead giveaway, a unique and recognizable detail splashed across the school’s website and social media pages.
The Moore campaign confirmed it filmed the 2022 campaign ad at Calvert School.
“The [Washington] Free Beacon‘s obsession with Wes Moore has now moved to investigative pieces on what school he filmed a campaign ad on education nearly four years ago,” said Moore campaign senior communications adviser Carter Elliott. “But let’s be clear, Gov. Moore has been a champion for Maryland public schools since he took office and is proud to have the support of Maryland’s largest teachers’ union.”
Moore’s decision to film a campaign ad focused on Maryland’s public schools inside an elite private school raises basic questions about his political judgment, said Doug Mayer, a Republican strategist and former communications director for Moore’s predecessor, Larry Hogan.
“It’s the height of hypocrisy,” Mayer told the Free Beacon. “It’s the height of political arrogance. Only someone who is a complete idiot, or someone who is so arrogant they don’t believe the rules apply to them, would film a campaign ad promoting public schools in the private school he enrolls his kids in.”
Moore identified himself as a “Calvert parent” during a virtual talk for the school in 2020 on “racial inequity and reform.”
“I’m proud to be a Calvert parent in this moment,” Moore said. “I’m looking forward to the day we can all get together in person. But, again, I’m very, very proud of the way this community has really rallied and responded. And also, frankly, I’m really proud of our kids.”
Calvert School boasts a “unique K-8 model” that recognizes the social, emotional, and instructional needs of young boys and girls are different. In a virtual tour posted on YouTube, the private school says it teaches students “in a combination of single sex and co-ed settings” in order to reap the benefits of both.
Reached by phone on Wednesday, Calvert School communications director Sam Shelton said she was familiar with the ad Moore filmed at the school in 2022 but did not provide any additional comment.
Moore has shown Calvert School students love throughout his term as governor. The local news outlet Maryland Matters indicated students at the school were given “dedicated seating” at his inauguration. Calvert School said in a press release that over 135 students attended Moore’s inauguration.
It’s not clear whether Moore granted any public school students dedicated seating during his inauguration.
Later, in May 2024, Moore visited Calvert School to give its students a private talk about his educational journey. Calvert School posted photos on Instagram showing Moore embracing his son during that event.
Now considered a serious prospect for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, Moore, the first black governor of Maryland, is often referred to as the “next Obama.”
But his sparkling résumé—Johns Hopkins University, a Rhodes Scholarship, a stint with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division—has come under scrutiny since he burst onto the national stage.
In a 2006 application for a prestigious White House fellowship, Moore claimed to have received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, which he had not. He claimed to have been inducted into the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, an organization that doesn’t exist. And he said he was born in Baltimore, a city he didn’t live in until he attended college as a young adult.
Moore also claimed to be a “foremost expert” on radical Islam based on the graduate thesis he wrote as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. But leading scholars of radical Islam say they’ve never heard of Moore in an academic context, and Oxford does not have a copy of his thesis on file. Moore could not provide a copy of his thesis to the Free Beacon after several requests dating back to early November. Similarly, there is no evidence to support Moore’s claim that he was a doctoral candidate at Oxford as he claimed in his White House fellowship application.
In his 2012 book, Discovering Wes Moore, Moore described the Bronx neighborhood he grew up in as “the hood,” a theme he dilated on in his 2022 campaign ad. “Like so many Marylanders who don’t come from wealth or privilege, my life could have gone many different ways,” he said. Yet there is no evidence Moore set foot in a public school as a child—if he did, it was not for long. He attended grade school at the elite private Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, according to the Washington Post. That school is now ranked as the second-best K-12 private school in the United States with an annual tuition of nearly $70,000.
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