North Carolina Mark Johnson is an idiot! Holocaust denier and all around crazy

 Ah, the double edge of a Donald Trump endorsement. 

Crazy loopy North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson

Opinion published in the New York Times by Frank Bruni:

On the one hand, the dangerous MAGA chieftain has commanded his cult tribe to vote for you, and that can be enough to propel a candidate into the winner’s circle. 

Trumpziism cult hat

On the other hand, you’re stuck with whatever loopy language and loopier logic he used.

In endorsing (the Trump idiot doplganger!) Mark Robinson for governor of my home state, in North Carolina, Trump called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

Mark Robinson is a dangerous Trump doppleganger

Trump didn’t leave it at that. “I think you’re better than Martin Luther King,” he told Robinson at a rally in Greensboro, N.C., last weekend. “I think you are Martin Luther King times two.”

I think that there are better mathematicians and more trustworthy historians of the civil rights movement than Trump, but I also think that his remarks are kind of perfect. They exemplify how far the MAGA brigade travels from reality into gaudy, even grotesque, hyperbole.

This is one riveting and profoundly consequential governor’s race. The March Super Tuesday primaries in North Carolina made it official: Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, is the Republican nominee and would be the state’s first Black governor, while the Democratic nominee is the state attorney general, Josh Stein, who would be the state’s first Jewish governor.

But, the contest isn’t really about milestones, nor will it hinge on them. It will instead be a moment-defining referendum on the virtues of theatrically (and sometimes hypocritically) mouthing off against the system (Robinson) versus dutifully working within it (Stein), on seat-of-the-pants amateurishness versus extensive government experience, on sensationalism versus seriousness, on dark conspiratorial fantasies versus unentertaining realities.

Does that sound like any other race you know, and does Robinson sound like any other populist you’ve met? He’s Trump on steroids, Trump times two. 

If you’re an arsonist, Robinson is your guy. If you’re an institutionalist, you’re a Stein stan.

Robinson had no real public profile when, at a meeting of the Greensboro City Council in 2018, he made an impassioned speech in favor of gun rights that went viral and made him an instant darling of the right. 

In 2020, he ran for lieutenant governor and won. Ever since, concerned Democrats and even many aghast Republicans have taken a more careful look at him.

And they have found florid homophobia, shocking antisemitism and an alarming contempt for science — all of which I described in this newsletter early last year. But that’s just his ideological bent, which also extends to a stated desire to outlaw abortion or at least get as close to that as possible.

His life outside politics contradicts his rants against what he sees as excessive government charity and his styling of himself as a poster boy for gumption and resilience. As a devastating article by Jeffrey Billman in the North Carolina publication The Assembly detailed in January, Robinson has been delinquent on taxes and repeatedly filed for bankruptcy, and his wife, Yolanda Hill, has prospered from the acquisition — and then forgiveness — of Covid-era Paycheck Protection Program loans from the federal government.

Those loans were first reported by The Daily Haymaker, a conservative website, with information provided by Don Carrington. The editor of The Haymaker, Brant Clifton, asked Billman: “How do you go around claiming to be Mr. Conservative, or the King of Conservatism, when your family business is solely based on keeping the trains running on the welfare state?”

How, indeed? But that’s what makes Robinson, a fiery orator who’s all smoke and mirrors, such an apt emblem of the MAGA movement. He’s not about accountability. He’s about ire. He’s not selling something sensible. He’s an instrument for inchoate rage.

He’s gratuitously cruel and divisive, as when he suggested last month that the best bathroom option for people who “are confused” about their gender was to “find a corner outside somewhere to go.” He’s proudly inept, as when, two years ago, he shrugged off his tax woes — he had failed to pay many years of vehicle taxes and federal taxes — by saying: “When you start talking about taxes, if I’m the guy doing them, somebody’s going to jail. I’m not very good at math.”

He excels instead at provocation, at grievance, at promoting himself as a dauntless warrior against all those lefties out to wreck civilization. He’s a far, far cry from King. But, he’s all dangerous 💥🚨❗MAGA king. (And he is also a certifiable lunatic!)