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Best of Right Wing Watch - 5/5/23
Our Right Wing Watch team at People For the American Way works hard to document, expose, and disrupt right-wing extremism in America.
Here are our top five posts from the past week. We're also featuring another subscriber-exclusive piece this week! Scroll down for an update on the MAGA extremist running for governor in North Carolina.
Click on the images or headlines for the articles.
Moms for Liberty and DeSantis Expand Educator Purge
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NEW: Subscriber Exclusive!
What Mark Robinson’s Run for Governor Tells Us About Today’s Republican Party
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is a MAGA politician for the social media age. His rise and his recently launched campaign to become the state’s next governor tell us a lot — none of it good — about the state of the Republican Party in the age of Trump.
Robinson became an overnight MAGA folk hero when his rant at a city council meeting against gun regulations went viral. He parlayed that fame into a political career, going from working in a furniture manufacturing plant to winning the nine-candidate 2020 GOP primary for lieutenant governor in a matter of months, and then winning the general election by about three percentage points.
Robinson has spent a lot of his time in office traveling the state in partnership with Christian nationalist political operative David Lane and Right Wing Watch has worked diligently to expose the anti-LGBTQ bigotry, religious intolerance, and extreme Christian nationalism spouted by Robinson at those events. The U.S. is a Christian nation, Robinson has repeatedly insisted, telling those who disagree that they should go live in some other country.
After “perusing Right Wing Watch’s archive” on Robinson, Steve Benen at Maddow blog concluded, “By any fair measure, Robinson is among the most hateful radicals to seek statewide office in the United States in recent memory.”
Similarly, when TPM looked at Robinson’s pre-election posts on Facebook, they found a cesspool of “extreme attacks on the LGBT community, immigrants, Jews, and Black people.”
Robinson, who is Black, has gleefully demonized other Black people. In 2017, he wrote that he didn’t consider himself part of the African American community. “They asked me why and I said; ‘Why would I want to be part of a ‘community’ that devalues it’s fathers, overburdens it’s mothers, and murders its children by the millions? Why would I want to be part of a ‘community’ that sucks from the putrid tit of the government and then complains about getting sour milk?”
In spite of the cruel and abusive nature of his attacks on LGBTQ people and other “enemies of freedom” — or even worse, because of it — Robinson’s popularity with the MAGA base and the cash that has brought him “put him squarely at the top of the GOP primary,” according to the Guardian. He’s been endorsed by Senate leader Phil Berger, state Rep. Neal Jackson, and other state Republican officials.
Some political observers suggest that Robinson could end up being one more example of a candidate beloved by the party’s far-right base who loses a winnable general election because he turns off more moderate voters. He seems to be aware of that concern, saying in his response to the governor’s state of the state address in March that “we must drop our weapons of political war.”
But no one who knows Robinson is likely to think that was anything more than unconvincing political posturing. His rally speeches are filled with violent rhetoric of war. At a rally in Raleigh last year, he told rallygoers they were like the patriots on Bunker Hill:
“You are the living embodiment of those people. As you stand here today, stand with courage. Stand with conviction And tell our enemies on the other side of the aisle that would drag this nation down into a socialist hell hole that ‘You will only do it as you run past me laying on the ground choking on my own blood because I will not give up this nation to you.’ …The Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation and help freedom survive for future generations.”
Robinson has portrayed AR-15s, the mass murderer’s weapon of choice, as a gift from God. And he has called the Biden administration “tyrannical,” saying it is “the type of government the Second Amendment was made for.”
In many ways Robinson embodies the Trump-era GOP: ugly anti-LGBTQ bigotry, cultish opposition to any gun safety measures, aggressive Christian nationalism, a belief that the pursuit of social justice is “wicked,” and a determination to say and do anything to win.
We’re just 18 months from the 2024 elections. Get ready, get engaged, and please, support People For the American Way.
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