Sometimes I’m tempted to quit. Quit this blog, quit reading the news, quit voting. This temptation does not arise by accident. It is the direct result of people with pulpits in social media issuing a constant stream of lies, invective, and abuse. It is their aim – to browbeat into submission anyone with whom they disagree, or who appears to disagree with them.
Don’t get me wrong – no one comes after me directly. I would almost welcome that. It is MAGA politicians and pundits and fucking “influencers” that spew this garbage, and endless stream of hatred and drivel, misstatements, outright falsehoods, disparagement, and some amount of damning with faint praise (looking at you, New York Times). The drumbeat is constant, unrelenting, this, and this, and this, and you know what else?
This practice did not begin with DJT, but he has raised it to a fine art. And many of our local pols, eager to climb on the bandwagon, have gleefully embraced a post-reality world.
Image from myFox8.com
Here’s a headline from this month on news.yahoo.com: Mark Robinson’s Bizarre Ramble: I Absolutely Want To Go Back To The America Where Women Couldn’t Vote. There are so many things wrong with this story that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let me see if I can bullet-point it.
· The story itself is four years old, from remarks by Robinson at an event hosted by the Republican Women of Pitt County in March of 2020. It’s not newly surfaced; it was reported at the time. If you’ve been following along with Robinson, you know we don’t have to go back four years to find something outrageous in his remarks. He’s practically incapable of any other kind of speech.
· In his presentation, Robinson recalls someone asking arch-Trumpian Candice Owens to “pick which version of America would make America ‘great again,’ one where ‘Black people are swinging from cheap trees’ or one where women weren’t allowed to vote.”
· So, some anonymous person supposedly asked some moron talking head this ridiculous “gotcha” question that no one in their right mind would think to answer – except, of course, Mark Robinson.
· His response: He would “absolutely” return to the days when women were denied the right to vote “because in those days we had people who fought for real social change, and they were called Republicans.” He later remarked that “Republicans ended the Jim Crow laws.”
· Oh, sort of, but not really, and holy-moley is this fractured history.
o Women won the right to vote in 1920, with the passage of the 19th amendment. So, yeah, there were Republicans campaigning for Women’s suffrage. With the crash of the economy and resulting depression in 1929, those Republicans effectively became Democrats, and vice versa.[1] That’s right: Less than ten years later, those “Republicans” became the modern “Democrats,” led by the most loved hated “Socialist” of all times, FDR.
o Is Robinson saying he would like to go back to a time when Republicans were advancing traditionally Democratic causes? Doubt it.
o As for the Jim Crow laws, Lyndon Johnson was President when Jim Crow ended with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
o One of the last reported Black lynching was the lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, in1981. According to the Washington Post, the lynching of Black people has never stopped.[2]
It turns out, Robinson doesn’t really care for women’s rights, much. He says feminism was created by “Satan” and in a 2017 Facebook post described equal rights supporters as “jack-booted feminazis . . . sexist, hairy armpit having, poo-poo hat wearing pinkos.” I’m guessing the real housewives of Pitt County probably endorse Robinson’s POV.
Distortions of history by mistake, for convenience’ sake, or because the distortions serve the purpose of advancing an agenda, are commonplace these days. So are distortions of reality.
Would-be Superintendent of Schools Michele Morrow is a true acolyte of Trumpian (Robinsonian) surrealism. She’s one scary momma, and undoubtably prides herself as such. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to find her under a rock in my yard.
In 2020, Morrow called for the televised execution by firing squad of Barack Obama, as well as advocating the killing of then-President Joe Biden. CNN reports that Morrow has a long list of Democrats on her kill list, including various politicians (I get that), Bill Gates (mixed feelings) and Anthony Fauci (nope). Marrow has that knack, so popular among modern MAGA Republicans, of saying the quiet part out loud. She apparently has some notion that the U.S. Constitution advocates the killing of “all traitors.”[3]
Morrow has won the Republican primary and will be their candidate for Schools Superintendent. As such, she wants to abolish the state Board of Education and share direct control of schools with the state legislature. She ran on a platform of so-called “parental rights” and opposition to teaching Critical Race Theory (which is not, and has never been, a topic in a K-12 classroom). That’s about it in terms of her stated policy objectives.
Regarding conspiracy theories, Morrow is more forthcoming. She sees public schools as “indoctrination centers” for socialism. It’s not clear how she knows this; she homeschooled her own children. She appears to be a staunch QAnon follower, citing Jim Carey’s search for adrenochrome (look that one up) and tweeting “WWG1WGA” – “where we go one, we go all” – a QAnon slogan. She includes in her rich fantasy life the death of Communist N.C. Governor Roy Cooper and imprisonment of Democrats at Guantanamo Bay.
In 2021, Morrow wrote that “Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers were stationed in Canada to invade the United States to help Joe Biden become President.” You’ll be surprised to learn that she is virulently anti-Muslim, claims Obama is a Muslim, and has called for Muslims (Obama and Omar, in particular) to be banned from holding public office.
But wait, there’s more! Morrow calls teachers “groomers.” She links transgender people and Islam to “larger conspiracies,” and expresses concerns about a Satanic agenda. She wants to ban gender-affirming healthcare for people under 18, and claims that “big pharma” is behind the existence of transgender people in a conspiracy to “make our children unable to reproduce” and dependent on pharmaceuticals.
Morrow says that children in special education “can’t compete with able-bodied students,” and should instead focus on “learning life skills.” She calls people with cognitive disabilities or delays – well, our source refuses to print the word, but it begins with “r____.”[4]
Frankly, it’s clear to me that Morrow is a stalking horse for Robinson. With her by his side, the shit that Mark says sounds almost reasonable.
That’s how it works. As the MAGA crowd one-up each other on with outlandish, absurd, and downright violent rhetoric, the things they said yesterday increasingly pale by comparison. This is the Overton Window of speech. In politics, the Overton Window refers to the gradual acceptance of right-wing policies by an increasingly extreme agenda – such that today’s Democrat would have been politically to the right of an Eisenhower Republican in 1954. In the same vein, the Tea Party talk and protests of the early 2000s seem downright civil in comparison to the MAGA antics of 2024. But “what’s past is prologue” and we’re not far from the political tone of 1860. It’s reasonable to fear that the outcome may be much the same. DJT and his gang of thugs are counting on it.
[1] https://www.studentsofhistory.com/ideologies-flip-Democratic-Republican-parties
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/08/modern-day-mississippi-lynchings/
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/14/politics/kfile-gop-nominee-north-carolina-public-schools-michele-morrow-executing-democrats
[4] https://myfox8.com/news/politics/nc/nc-superintendent-candidate-michele-morrow-says-big-pharma-aims-to-make-our-children-unable-to-reproduce-blames-satan-for-liberal-lunatics/
https://apnews.com/article/6d0fb2b195ec319411a2ee2333b5f5d6
Maybe we could forward this to Mr Robinson just as a reminder that there are still plenty of people out there who don’t shiv a git about him or his policies; just that his skin is black. Many are down in his neck of the state.