By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — Journalists recently uncovered a trove of past fascistic, misogynist, and racist posts that Mark Robinson, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina, made on social media. Nevertheless, Donald Trump has endorsed him and called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Robinson denies that these posts were actually his, but if they were, and if Robinson follows in King’s footsteps and gives his version of the “I Have a Dream Speech,” it might be retitled, “I Have an Extreme” and sound like this based on those posts and his current campaign pronouncements:
I have an extreme that one day in North Carolina the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will return their antebellum status as slaves and owners with the slaves eating in shacks and the owners dining in plantations. Slave descendants should pay reparations to reimburse their owners for the room and board their ancestors received for free. If elected governor, I’d issue an executive order allowing me to buy a few slaves.
I have an extreme that little children will one day live in a nation where there are no homosexual and trans people to groom them to be pedophiles. I hope adults will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their porn sites.
I have an extreme that one day White Nazis and aspiring Black ones like me will join hands in our common struggle against gays, Jews, and progressives. I will urge the KKK to accept Black members. “If I was in the KKK, I would have called King Martin Lucifer Koon.”*
This is the faith that I offer North Carolina. With this faith, I deny Hitler exterminated Jews, though he certainly had good reasons to do so since the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are the Rothschild family of international bankers that rule every single central bank, the CIA, China and Islam.”* Don’t accuse me of antisemitism. I instituted a Solidarity with Israel Week, though I might not be so kind to Jews if Trump loses the election.
When this happens, it will speed up that day when we treat everyone but MAGA loyalists as slaves. Bigots of all races and religions will join hands and sing a spiritual I’ve written: “Amazing disgrace, how cheated we were, to elect a wretch like Joe. Trump never lost, but we’ll rebound. Now that he ended Roe.”
No, Mark Robinson is not Martin Luther King on steroids. He is Donald Trump on steroids.
*Direct quotes from the Robinson posts.
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Laurie Baron is a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University.