The winner of North Carolina’s GOP primary for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is just the kind of loud, charismatic, Trump-aligned Republican the corporate press loves to mock. And in some ways, Robinson is an easy target. His history of social media posts that toy with conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric is the kind of thing that elicits snorts of contempt from pundits like Rachel Maddow.
Maddow went on at length about Robinson Tuesday night, chortling about how a man who thinks Beyoncé is “Satanic,” Martin Luther King Jr. is a “communist,” and the Holocaust is “hogwash,” is going to be the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina. “This is not a normal primary year,” she said. “Mark Robinson is not a normal primary winner.”
But the really abnormal thing about Robinson isn’t what he’s said. It’s how blatantly and how often corporate media outlets have lied about him, lazily taking his words out of context or simply quoting fragments of what he’s said or posted online to smear him as an antisemite or a misogynist.
Did Robinson really deny the Holocaust and call it “hogwash”? Nope. He said leftists in the Weimar Republic restricted gun ownership in Germany long before the Nazis came to power, which is true. Robinson’s point was that conservatives look foolish when they make the ahistorical argument that the Nazis were able to pull off the Holocaust by disarming the Jews. He thinks it’s a bad argument against gun restrictions, and he has a point.
It’s not
