For the past few years, I’ve heard people say Republicans have a “candidate quality” problem. In other words, that Republicans are losing races or are having to fight much harder than they have in the past to protect safe Republican seats because they just happen to be choosing bad candidates. And by bad, I mean extremist candidates who are loud and proud about being extreme.
But the problem for Republicans isn’t that they’re picking bad candidates. It’s that the candidates rising to the top are much more open about the backwards policies and hateful intent of the party’s platform. This is due, in part, to Trump, who has normalized being on the lunatic fringe. But it’s also due to gerrymandering. For example, when a district with a safe Republican seat has a primary election, it’s the base that typically comes out to vote. And the Republican base is not tethered to this earthly plane. They are far out there when it comes to what most people in this country support.
Republicans are out there running on a platform to ban abortion nationwide, ban birth control, get rid of the Affordable Care Act without any plan to replace it, ban public schools (or at least divert funding from public schools to private Christian schools), overturn the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling, do away with any laws that protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, gut Medicaid and Medicare, gut Social Security, make guns easier to get and harder to regulate in any way, ban porn, cut taxes for the richest people in the country and raise taxes on everyone else. And those are just the greatest hits. Plenty of proposed Republican cuts are just as bad if not worse.
And here’s the thing — this is not some kind of new Republican Party that all of a sudden is extreme on just about every issue Americans care about. This is who the Republican Party has been my entire lifetime. A major turning point for the GOP was President Ronald Regan’s embrace of the Christian right back in the ’80s. The party has been moving further and further right ever since.
So, yeah, it’s a feature, not a bug, that causes the Republican campaign machine to spit out candidates who are disconnected from the majority of the country. They were just able to hide their extremism better in the past.
Which leads me to North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, a self-described “perv.”
Robinson, who is currently the state’s lieutenant governor, is running as a man of God. A Christian man not afraid to use his religion to justify his extreme policy positions.
Robinson, among other horrible ideas and beliefs, says the Holocaust never happened, wants to ban abortion, called the Parkland school shooting survivors “media prosti-tots,”and really, really hates LGBTQ+ people.
In 2021, he said during remarks to a North Carolina church, “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth.”
Let’s just say that his views have not changed since then.
Robinson is all over the news now not because his campaign for governor is going so well, but because it is imploding under the weight of scandal.
Apparently Mr. High and Mighty had quite the appetite for porn and for cheating on his wife prior to becoming an elected official. It’s been reported that he frequented porn shops, cheated on his wife with her sister, was a frequent poster to a message board on a site called “Nude Africa” on which he referred to himself as a “Black Nazi” who wanted to own slaves and wistfully recalled when he was 14 and used to peep on girls showering at the gym. Among a long list of other filth.
Robinson, who said that transgender people should just “find a corner somewhere” rather than be allowed to use women’s restrooms, also talked about liking to watch porn featuring transgender people.
“I like watching [slur for transgender person] on girl porn! That’s fucking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in! And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”
So if a transgender person wants to be treated with basic respect and decency they are “filth,” but if they are used for his own sexual gratification they are “hot.” Got it. Cool guy. Definitely governor material.
Oh, and Robinson has denied all of the accusations saying that AI was to blame.
This is a man who Trump called “Martin Luther King Jr. on steroids,” by the way. Robinson once called King a “fucking commie bastard.”
There is open speculation about whether Robinson’s sinking ship will harm Trump’s chances in North Carolina. And to that I say, “Here’s hoping!”
D’Anne Witkowski is a writer living in Michigan with her wife and son. She has been writing about LGBTQ+ politics for nearly two decades. Follow her on Twitter @MamaDWitkowski.
