The Republican Freak Show
The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party.
Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, has described himself as a “devout Christian.” But a recent CNN story reported that several years ago he was a porn-site user who enjoyed watching transgender pornography (despite a history of an antitransgender rhetoric), referred to himself as a “Black Nazi,” and supported the return of slavery. According to CNN, commenters on the website discussed whether to believe the story of a woman who said she was raped by her taxi driver while intoxicated. Robinson wrote in response, “and the moral of this story….. Don’t f**k a white b*tch!” Politico reports that Mark Robinson’s email address was also registered on Ashley Madison, a website for married people seeking affairs. (Robinson, the current lieutenant governor of North Carolina, has denied all of the claims.)
These allegations aren’t entirely shocking, because Robinson—a self-described “MAGA Republican”—has shown signs in the past of being a deeply troubled person. (My Atlantic colleague David Graham wrote a superb profile of Robinson in May.)
[Read: Mark Robinson is testing the bounds of GOP extremism]
Regarding the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in 2011, he wrote, “Get that fucking commie bastard off the National Mall!” Robinson also has referred to the slain civil-rights champion as “worse than a maggot,” a “ho fucking, phony,” and a “huckster.” During the Obama presidency Robinson wrote, “I’d take Hitler over any of the shit that’s in Washington right now!” He promoted the conspiracy theory claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. He referred to Michelle Obama as a man and Hillary Clinton as a “heifer.” He compared Nancy Pelosi to Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Castro and mocked the near-fatal assault on her husband, Paul Pelosi. He is also an election denier, claiming Joe Biden “stole the election.”
In 2017 Robinson wrote, “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered.” He has used demeaning language against Jews and gay people. He has cruelly mocked school-shooting survivors (“media prosti-tots”). And he supported a total ban on abortion, without exceptions for rape or incest, even though he admitted he paid for an abortion in the past.
Much of this was known before he ran for governor. No matter. Republicans in North Carolina nominated him anyway, and Donald Trump has lavished praise on the man he calls his “friend,” offered Robinson his “full and total endorsement,” and dubbed him “one of the hottest politicians” in the country.
SOME REPUBLICANS ARE distancing themselves from Robinson partly because they are worried he’ll be defeated, but also because they’re even more concerned that he will drag down other Republicans, including Donald Trump. But the truth is that Robinson is a perfect addition to the Republican ensemble.
The GOP vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, has been relentlessly promoting the lie that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets. In 2021, he said that the United States was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has blamed wildfires on a Jewish space laser, promoted a conspiracy alleging that some Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring, and agreed with commenters who suggested the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida was a “massive false flag.” Another House Republican, Paul Gosar, has promoted fluoride conspiracy theories and posted an animated video depicting him slashing the throat a Democratic congresswoman and attacking President Biden. Yet another Republican member of Congress, Lauren Boebert, was ejected from a family-friendly musical for vaping, being disruptive, and groping her date (and vice versa). She also falsely claimed school authorities “are putting litter boxes in schools for people who identify as cats.”
The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey reported that Republican Representative Matt Gaetz, who is under House investigation for having sex with an underaged girl, “used to walk around the cloakroom showing people porno of him and his latest girlfriend,” according to a source Godfrey spoke to.
This is not normal.
The GOP is home to a Republican governor, Kristi Noem, who describes in her book shooting her 14-month-old dog, Cricket, in a gravel pit, as well as killing an unnamed goat. A Republican senator, Ron Johnson, claimed COVID was “pre-planned” by a secret group of “elites” even while he promoted disinformation claiming Ivermectin, which is commonly used to deworm livestock, was an effective treatment for COVID. (Because people were hospitalized for taking the drug, the FDA put out a tweet saying, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow.”)
Earlier this month Donald Trump attended a 9/11 memorial event in New York City. He took as his guest a right-wing conspiracy theorist, Laura Loomer, who has claimed 9/11 was an inside job, referred to Kamala Harris as a “drug using prostitute,” and said that Democrats should be tried for treason and executed. (Trump has called Loomer a “woman with courage” and a “free spirit.”)
Trump’s first national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, floated the idea of having Trump declare martial law so that he could “rerun” the 2020 election. He suggested that the president should seize voting machines. He predicted a governor will soon declare war. He has also warned about the dangers of a “new world order” in which people such as Bill Gates, George Soros, and World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab “have an intent to track every single one of us, and they use it under the skin. They use a means by which it’s under the skin.”
Tucker Carlson, a keynote speaker at the Republican National Convention and an unofficial Trump adviser, recently hosted a Holocaust revisionist on his podcast. He praised the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as having been “vindicated on everything” and described Jones as “the most extraordinary person” he has ever met. (Two years ago Sandy Hook families won nearly $1.5 billion in defamation and emotional distress lawsuits against Jones for his repeatedly calling the 2012 school shooting, in which 20 first graders and six educators were killed, a hoax staged by “crisis actors” to get more gun-control legislation passed. As the New York Times reports, “The families suffered online abuse, personal confrontations and death threats from people who believed the conspiracy theory.”)
Carlson, one of the most influential figures on the American right, has also peddled the claim that the violence on January 6 was a “false flag” operation involving the FBI and used to discredit Trump supporters, alleged that former Attorney Bill Barr covered up the murder of Jeffrey Epstein, and promoted testicle tanning.
Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former Democrat who recently endorsed Trump. The former president has asked Kennedy to go on the transition team should Trump win the election and “help pick the people who will be running the government and I am looking forward to that.” Trump told CNN’s Kristen Holmes, “I like him, and I respect him. He’s a brilliant guy. He’s a very smart guy.”
Sara Dorn of Forbes listed some of the conspiracy theories Kennedy has promoted—vaccines can cause autism; COVID was genetically engineered and is targeted to attack Caucasian and Black people (and that Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people are mostly immune); mass shootings are linked to Prozac; the 2004 presidential election was stolen from John Kerry; the CIA was involved in the death of his uncle John F. Kennedy; and Sirhan Sirhan was wrongly convicted of murdering his father.
In addition, Kennedy, who has revealed he had a parasitic brain worm, told the podcaster Joe Rogan that Wi-Fi causes cancer and “leaky brain.” He believes chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender. He claims that 5G networks are being used for mass surveillance. He’s said that Katherine Maher, the president and CEO of NPR, is a CIA agent. Even journals like Smithsonian and National Geographic “appear to be compromised by the CIA,” according to Kennedy.
[Read: Why RFK Jr. endorsed Trump]
According to Kennedy’s daughter Kick Kennedy, her father chain-sawed the head off a dead whale on a beach in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, bungee-corded it to the roof of their car, and drove it five hours to the family home in Mount Kisco, New York. (The severed head streamed “whale juice” down the side of the family minivan on the trip home. “It was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy told Town & Country magazine in 2012. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”) Kennedy has also recently admitted to leaving the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, as a joke.
Donald Trump Jr. has said that he could see Kennedy being given some sort of oversight role in any number of government agencies, if his father is reelected, including the FDA and the Department of Health and Human Services. “I can see a dozen roles I’d love to see him in.”
Like Mark Robinson, RFK Jr. fits right in.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that make them uniquely dangerous to the Republic. Since 2016 they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.
None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.
They know.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in an essay titled “As Breathing and Consciousness Return,” warned that no one who “voluntarily runs with the hounds of falsehood” will be able to justify himself to the living, or posterity, or to his friends, or to his children. Don’t surrender to corruption, the great Russian writer and dissident said; strive for the liberation of our souls from not participating in the lie. Don’t consent to the lies. The challenges facing Solzhenitsyn were quite different, and certainly far more difficult, than anything we face, but his fundamental point still holds.
The Trump movement is built on layers of lies. It’s late, but it’s never too late to liberate yourself from lies. One word of truth outweighs the world.