Thursday afternoon, CNN reported that North Carolina Republican Governor candidate Mark Robinson frequented a porn site where he called himself a “Black Nazi,” said he wished slavery was still legal, heaped abuse on Martin Luther King, and expressed several controversial sexual opinions (the latter of which, at least, is more in line with the tenor of opinion one would expect on “NudeAfrica,” the porn site he frequented.)
Of course, any political party’s vetting is bound to slip up from time to time. But understanding how Robinson won the gubernatorial nomination in a swing state requires a bit of context for how the Republican Party’s gatekeeping functions have deteriorated to their sorry state.
Robinson was known for his history of extremely wild statements outside of the NudeAfrica board. Here is brief summary, from March:
There was the time he called school shooting survivors “media prosti-tots” for advocating for gun-control policies. The meme mocking a Harvey Weinstein accuser, and the other meme mocking actresses for wearing “whore dresses to protest sexual harassment.” The prediction that rising acceptance of homosexuality would lead to pedophilia and “the END of civilization as we know it”; the talk of arresting transgender people for their bathroom choice; the use of antisemitic tropes; the Facebook posts calling Hillary Clinton a “heifer” and Michelle Obama a man.
Robinson said all these things before his party’s primary took place. Republicans were informed about this stuff, and then decided to nominate him for governor. The Republican Party could have found a more sober-minded candidate than Robinson even if it had confined its recruitment entirely to the NudeAfrica posting community.
Meanwhile, here are some things that happened within the Republican Party over the last week…
Donald Trump, the party’s presidential candidate, began spending time with and taking advice from Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist who wrote — also in the last week! — that the White House “will smell like curry” if Kamala Harris is elected.
Bill Ackman, a wealthy hedge fund manager turned Trump supporter began posting uncontrollably about a right-wing theory that there is (or was) a whistleblower at ABC News, who claims the network gave its questions to Harris in advance of the presidential debate, and then perished in a car crash.
Elon Musk, one of the world’s wealthiest people and a large financial supporter of Trump’s ground operation, predicted on his social media platform that Harris’s first act if elected will be to ban X and arrest Musk.
And all this was going on at a time when the party’s presidential ticket was pushing the message that immigrants in an Ohio town are abducting and eating pets. The pet-eating lie is not a distraction from the message. It is the message, and the crazier things being said by Robinson, Loomer, et al are the distraction.
This is not a problem of fringe figures operating around the margins of the party. The party’s ability to maintain some distinction between respectable, reality-based figures who wield influence, and conspiratorial maniacs lurking around the margins, has collapsed completely.
The end of the party’s ability to police its boundaries is generally attributed to Trump’s hostile takeover in 2016. Not unlike the fall of the Roman Empire, though, the decline was more of a gradual disintegration over a long period of time, with Trump’s coronation merely serving to dramatize it. Many Romans continued to think of the Empire as an ongoing entity even after Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome in 476. Many non-lunatic Republicans likewise continue to believe “conspiracy theorist” and “Republican leader” are meaningfully distinct categories.
And just as the Roman Empire’s slow decay both resulted from and caused its inability to defend its boundaries, the Republican Party is defined now by a near-complete unwillingness to draw lines between acceptable party rhetoric and paranoid ravings. What remains of the party’s once-formidable establishment has been reduced to feebly warning that sounding too crazy in public will have electoral consequences. “Donald Trump likes to call his political opponents nuts, as in “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” so then why is he hanging with the 9/11 conspiracist Laura Loomer?,” complains a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, “Is he trying to lose the election?”
Trump is obviously not trying to lose the election. The problem is that he is stark raving mad. Appealing to any standard of truth is a hopeless endeavor when attempting to persuade Trump, which ought to be sufficient reason not to entrust him with the vast powers of the presidency. Instead, whimpering appeals to self-interest are the best the party’s establishment can muster.
Robinson may be a step beyond the pale for some Republicans, if only because his peculiarity veers into the sexual. But it’s far from clear they regard him as unacceptable. Trump has already embraced Robinson and praised him as “Martin Luther King on steroids.” At this point, what is left of their reputation to defend?
