A question for the people of North Carolina: WTF IS WRONG WITH Y'ALL??
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson might be competing for second place in the race for "Worst Person in the World"
Don’t get me wrong; I love North Carolina. I could happily live in Chapel Hill. It’s a beautiful state. I love the Outer Banks, and the western part of the state, including Asheville, is still on my bucket list. We have good friends and former neighbors who live in Raleigh and close friends in Charlotte.
All those good things notwithstanding, even I have to wonder WTF is wrong with a state where a hate-filled bigot with the audacity to call himself a follower of Jesus Christ has a legitimate chance to become Governor in November.
What. The. Actual. Fuck??
calls Robinson “Marjorie Taylor Greene on steroids,” which I don’t think is fair to MTG, who at least pretends that she’s being nice. Mark Robinson hasn’t smiled or been nice to anyone publicly since Jesus was a Cub Scout.In a party of extremists, it’s hard to stand out. But somehow Mark Robinson of North Carolina manages to.
Not only is he a Holocaust denier, he’s also virulently anti-gay, anti-abortion, a misogynist, a conspiracy peddler and a dangerous gun freak.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the GOP base there loves him, and they have nominated him for governor.
Robinson has a few things going for him. He’s Black but somehow MAGA, which lets racists claim that they’re not racist. And he has the support of Donald Trump, who called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
But Robinson is more like someone else who dominates right-wing media: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene rose to notoriety by following Parkland activist David Hogg around while berating him. It was as if she thought, “What’s the one unthinkable thing I could do to really make a name for myself?”
In a party that despises Black people, Mark Robinson provides racists with cover- “Hey, how could we be racist? We let a Black person in!!”
After the Parkland shooting, Robinson, instead of acting like a normal, compassionate human being, WENT AFTER THE VICTIMS as if they had no reason and/or place to interject their voice into the public conversation:
Robinson took a similar route by frequently attacking the Parkland students. “I remember when CHILDREN knew their place, and when they got out of place and got sassy, ADULTS would put them back into it,” he said.
Right…children were massacred, and yet they should’ve known their place and kept their mouths shut? These kids had seen their friends die in front of them…and they were supposed to remain silent?
How in the world could the children of Parkland possibly have been considered out of place unless you weren’t disposed to doing anything about guns to begin with? They survived a mass shooting that claimed several of their classmates on Valentine’s Day; of course, they have every right to take part in the public discourse. If ANYONE had a right to speak out, it was the children who survived the shooting.
Robinson wanted them to shut up and sit down because he didn’t want anyone to do anything to curtail anyone’s gun rights…not one iota. Because the 2nd Amendment is a gift from God and as such, the gun rights of Americans are sacrosanct and inviolable. And, as a Proudly Closed-minded Gun Control Foe ©, Robinson couldn’t stomach the idea of common-sense gun control.
Dead children? That didn’t appear to be a problem for him.
Yeah, he’s getting all of that from 27 of the most willfully misinterpreted words in the English language, none of which were divinely inspired in any sense.
Surprisingly, for a Christian supposedly raised to believe in things like love, tolerance, understanding, acceptance, inclusion, and compassion. Mark Robinson models none of those things. Indeed, the list of his hatreds and prejudices is distressingly long. He gets particularly worked up over transgender people, a minority that doesn’t even constitute 1% of the total American population.
He denigrates transgender people by referring to their desire to live as the person they believe themselves to be as “transgenderism,” as if it’s an ideology on par with communism, socialism, or capitalism. It’s not; there’s no such thing as “transgenderism.” despite Robinson’s attempt to demean a group that means no harm to anyone.
As
observes, Republicans may not be having a quantity issue when it comes to finding candidates, but they sure as Hell seem to be having quality issues.In North Carolina, Republicans have nominated Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson for governor. Robinson has been called a “firebrand”, a “fanatic”, and surely many other euphemisms for “stark raving lunatic”. He called “transgenderism” and homosexuality “filth”. He called Michelle Obama a man. He’s spread conspiracy theories about the New World Order, George Soros, and — apparently tired of beating around the bush — posted a Facebook rant about Jews. He’s skeptical of the JFK assassination, which, given Robinson’s other opinions, might mean “there was a conspiracy” or might mean “JFK is fine and works at the Walgreens by my house.” There’s also other stuff, but you get the point. Probably the least troubling explanation for Robinson’s behavior is that he drunk posts on Facebook a lot, and the most troubling explanation is that he doesn’t have a substance abuse problem, and what we’re seeing is his brain functioning at full capacity.
I suppose the good news is that no one has to wonder about Robinson’s motivations or who he hates—he hates everyone and proudly wears that animus on his sleeve.
Nice, friendly Christian you got there. It would be a shame if the Rapture happened and he got dumped in a Walmart parking lot in western Kentucky, wouldn’t it??
But why does it seem as if the psycho/normal ratio in today’s GOP is entirely out of whack? Well, as one might expect, Donald Trump is at the center of the explanation:
It seems to me that the GOP has far more wackos than normal. Why is that? Well, see how true this explanation sounds to you:
In the ‘90s, the rise of cable news and AM radio empowered hard-right “movement conservatives” who took power during the Gingrich Revolution. Internet and social media accelerated this trend, and by the Obama years, the Republican base had become only minimally tethered to reality. GOP officials who saw what was happening repeatedly failed to stand up to the crazies because they feared a primary challenge and didn’t want to throw elections to Democrats. Trump capitalized on this hothouse atmosphere by embodying the id of the Republican base, and now he has the ability to excommunicate any Republican who doesn’t endorse his warped view of reality. And that facilitates loons because Trump is, himself, a loon.
None of this, however, explains how the good, God-fearing, White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals of the Tarheel State have made a certified Looney Tune like Mark Robinson the GOP nominee for Governor. If you look at the YouTube video above, Robinson’s audience cheers him enthusiastically as he details what he wants to do to transgender people who don’t stay within the law. It’s a pretty sorry display of unwarranted transphobia that elicits a very enthusiastic response.
Is this what North Carolina has turned into? A grand collection of good, God-fearing, White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals scared of those who aren’t like them? Is this what the GOP hopes to turn the rest of America into?
Is Mark Robinson just the beginning? Of course, he is; he’s precisely what the GOP wants nationwide.
It’s fitting that Mitch McConnell coined the phrase “candidate quality problem”. He saw his party going nuts and might have been able to stop the slide, but he repeatedly backed down from confrontation. Now — to use the words of the scion of the man who is molding the GOP in his image — “the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party”. Which means that in five or ten years, we might yearn for the quality of candidates that we have today.
Ugh, this means we’ll probably be living in the set from “Idiocracy.”
Even though people like
are claiming “victory” because, as he claims, America in 2024 is less “woke” than it was in 2017, which means that, on average, Americans are more likely to be selfish assholes now.
That’s a “victory?” That’s the AmeriKKKa that Mark Robinson is driving us toward? Wow…Mama must be SO proud, eh?
I could go on at some considerable length about what a horrible person and an even worse candidate Robinson is, but I think that ship has sailed, and it’s navigating in circles. So, rather than continue chasing my tail on that subject, I’ll leave you with this from
:Robinson, currently North Carolina's lieutenant governor, is one of the most radical gubernatorial nominees in modern history. He has a well-documented record of promoting conspiracy theories, maligning LGBTQ people, using anti-Semitic tropes, and demeaning women.
Robinson has repeatedly minimized the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. "I am so sick of seeing and hearing people STILL talk about Nazis and Hitler and how evil and manipulative they were," Robinson wrote on Facebook in 2017. He accused unknown forces of "pushing this Nazi boogeyman narrative all these years."
He also has veered into Holocaust denial. “The center and leftist leaning Weimar Republic put heavy gun ownership restrictions on German citizens long before the Nazis took power," Robinson wrote in a 2018 Facebook post. "This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash." Robinson defended himself by claiming he was only referring to the contention that Nazis disarmed Jews as "hogwash." This is not very convincing, since the Nazis did seek to disarm Jews, issuing "Regulations Against Jews Possession of Weapons" in 1938. Overall, "Nazi-era Germany imposed greater gun restrictions for Jews (and other perceived enemies) at the same time it loosened gun restrictions for other groups," according to Politifact.
Wow. He sure seems nice, eh?
As I said at the outset, I love North Carolina, but WTF?? Is it true that the only thing y’all learned from the Civil Rights era was that it was much more effective to subcontract your racism in ways that wouldn’t allow it to be traced back to you?
Mark Robinson? Seriously? WTF is wrong with y’all??
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