Meet North Carolina’s GOP Governor Candidate: A Hitler-Quoting Extremist

A Hitler-quoting, gay-bashing, conspiracy-flouting antisemite is on track to cinch the GOP’s gubernatorial nomination in the battleground state of North Carolina.

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson is up for election in the state’s primary election on Tuesday. He has so far pulled ahead by double-digit percentage points over his GOP opposition, Bill Graham, according to a February High Point University Survey Research Center poll.

That’s in spite of the fact that the Trump-endorsed candidate quoted Adolf Hitler in a 2014 Facebook post that normalizes the German dictator’s stance on racial pride.

“History who said it #1; ‘Pride in one’s own race—and that does not imply contempt for other races—is also a normal and healthy sentiment. I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves... They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilization to which we belong,” the post (which is still up) read.

Then, at a Moms for Liberty summit in July, Robinson fervently defended his choice to quote the genocidal leader of the Nazi Party, implying that doing so without context is not akin to endorsing his words or actions.

“Whether you’re talking about Adolf Hitler, whether you’re talking about Chairman Mao, whether you’re talking about Stalin, whether you’re talking about Pol Pot, whether you’re talking about Castro in Cuba, or whether you’re talking about a dozen other despots all around the globe; it is time for us to get back and start reading some of those quotes,” Robinson said, adding, “It’s time for us to start teaching our children about the dirty, despicable, awful things that those Communist and socialist despots did in our history.”

Again, the Facebook post quoting Hitler is still up with none of this additional context.

Robinson has drawn immediate comparisons to Trump for his bombastic orations and loyal GOP following, and like Trump, he has a laundry list of controversies.

In other posts, Robinson has minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, claimed a “satanic marxist” had made the movie Black Panther to pull “shekels” out of Black audiences, likened women getting abortions to murderers, and derided gay people as “filth” and “maggots.”

He has also expressed archaic views about women’s role in society, telling a Charlotte-area church in 2022 that Christians are “called to be led by men.”

“God sent women out … when they had to do their thing, but when it was time to face down Goliath, [He] sent David. Not Davita, David,” Robinson said at the time.

And yet, Robinson’s gubernatorial win would turn the state’s executive branch—its last Democratic holdout—red, effectively locking Democrats out of a state they had once predicted would be their stronghold in the South.

Robinson’s likely opponent come November will be Attorney General Josh Stein, the Democratic favorite.

For conservatives, it can be difficult keeping up with the latest outrages. Yesterday, it was Chik-fil-A and Target. Today, the cultural criminal du jour is tortilla chip brand Doritos.

Yes, right-wingers are angry about nacho chips thanks to the chip brand’s Spain division partnership with transgender activist and singer Samantha Hudson, a native of the European country. Many on the right are calling for a boycott of Doritos, similar to the one of Bud Light, which became a target of conservatives and transphobes last year after hiring transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney as a brand ambassador.

Notable right-wing accounts such as End Wokeness and Chaya Raichik (better known as Libs of TikTok) have gotten in on the action, claiming that Hudson has tweeted about abusing minors and has made pro-pedophile statements. Hudson claimed in a 2023 interview that she herself has been sexually abused.

Whether it’s Doritos, Frosted Flakes, Bud Light, or any number of businesses that decide to honor diversity and the LGBTQ+ community, the far right is running out of things to eat and places to shop these days, and even trying to start its own economy, with questionable results.

Hudson and Doritos Spain have not responded to the attacks.

Donald Trump is well on his way to replacing the conservative party with a “counterestablishment” of his own that, according to his family, has no room for dissenters.

With Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel on her way out the door, Trump’s allies are doing everything within their power to leverage the conservative election machine for the GOP front-runner’s sole benefit, even if he’s not yet the formal nominee. One key element for the takeover? The success of his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who’s gunning to replace McDaniel in a power-sharing agreement that would have her split duties with North Carolina GOP chairman Michael Whatley.

In an interview on Real America’s Voice, the 41-year-old Trump insisted that she was the only person loyal enough to the former president to be considered for the job—which she plans to use to transform the RNC into a Trump-electing machine.

“Anyone who is not on board with seeing Donald Trump as the forty-seventh president and America-loving patriots all the way down the ticket being supported by the RNC is welcome to leave because we are not playing games,” Lara Trump said.

“We have no time to waste,” she continued. “We have to ensure that every single penny of every dollar donated goes to causes that people care about. That’s part of the reason that I think I’m such a great fit for this: There’s no one more loyal to Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again movement than this person you’re looking at right here; than me.”

It’s not the first time that she’s cast the warning, insisting that the sole purpose and focus of the RNC should be reelecting her father-in-law.

“Every single penny will go to the number one and the only job of the RNC,” Trump told Newsmax last month. “That is electing Donald J. Trump as president of the United States and saving this country.”

Meanwhile, McDaniel’s tenure ends on March 8, putting a cap on a monthslong feud with Trump over her former endorser’s demand for “total loyalty.”

Donald Trump wants you to know that he is absolutely not having a hard time finding the money to pay his legal comeuppance and that he is still totally super, super rich.

The former president was fined $354 million for committing real estate–related fraud in New York. In order to appeal the decision, Trump must post a bond of the full amount plus interest—which has already reached more than $450 million, with an additional $112,000 tacked on per day.

“You have to come up with something like $400 million; how close are you to securing the bond or would you need for that?” asked Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday.

“I have a lot of money, I can do what I want to do, but this was a horrible, illegal decision,” Trump said. “This was a decision made up by a crooked judge, a 100 percent crooked clubhouse judge, a disgrace with an equally crooked attorney general, who campaigned on ‘I will get Trump,’ and we’re appealing that decision and we’ll see how we do.”

So far, the self-purported billionaire has attempted to pause the rapidly growing interest on the order with a $100 million bond in lieu of the full $465 million. That effort was roundly rejected by a New York appeals court judge last month, who did allow Trump to continue borrowing money.

Trump’s legal team is still working to appeal the entirety of the decision—but even that avenue would still require them to put nearly half a billion dollars into an escrow account with the court, or Trump could be hit with more fines or held in contempt.

“So you’re not worried about the money?” Kilmeade clarified.

“No, I don’t worry about money,” Trump snipped.

That’s good to know, because launching a sneaker campaign the day after getting hit with the legal penalty and flagging a fan-funded GoFundMe to help with his bills had definitely raised a lot of eyebrows.

Still, his former allies aren’t so quick to believe Trump, especially since he still owes an additional $88.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for sexually assaulting her and then defaming her twice in his rabid denials. He also owes $400,000 to The New York Times and has racked up thousands more over gag orders he’s violated amid all these trials. And in the realm of non–court ordered debts, Trump’s former right-hand man Rudy Giuliani claimed he still hasn’t been paid for the legal services he provided to the former president and is reportedly waiting on a sum of about $2 million.

“I mean, what is he going to do?” Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, told CNN on Thursday. “What, is he going to call like a J.G. Wentworth and say, ‘I need cash now’? How was he going to raise more than this half a billion?”

Trump has until March 25 to implement a stay on the fraud order, by which he would need to put up the money, assets, or an appeal bond to cover the $465 million disgorgement. Failing to do so could result in the seizure of Trump’s assets, warned New York Attorney General Letitia James.

As he campaigns for a second term for president, Donald Trump has taken his attack on migrants to the next level.

But a shocking new low came during an interview with the right-wing Right Side Broadcasting Network Monday, as Trump proceeded to invoke a horror movie character to describe migrants.

“They’re rough people, in many cases from jails, prisons, from mental institutions, insane asylums. You know, insane asylums, that’s Silence of the Lambs stuff,” Trump said. “Hannibal Lecter, anybody know Hannibal Lecter? We don’t want ’em in this country.”

The line drew laughter from the audience at his Mar-a-Lago estate, where the interview was taking place. He also compared migrants’ languages, bizarrely, to languages from Mars, and then made the claim that cities where large numbers of migrants have gone don’t even have youth sports anymore.

“We have children that are no longer going to school. They’re throwing them out of the park. There’s no more Little Leagues, there’s no more sports, there’s no more life in New York and so many of these cities,” Trump said.

This line was seized upon by the Biden campaign, who posted video of it on X, formerly known as Twitter.

It’s only the latest outlandish remark he has made about migrants in recent days. On Thursday, during a visit to the southern border, Trump claimed that many of the migrants arriving in the United States are people “who don’t speak languages.”

And if that anthropological impossibility wasn’t absurd enough, Trump on Saturday confused President Biden with former President Obama and mistook the country of Argentina for a person, among other gaffes.

Meanwhile, media reports are full of stories about Biden’s supposed decline in mental acuity, despite Trump’s slip-ups and missteps veering into far more dangerous territory, echoing rhetoric like that of Adolf Hitler.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Donald Trump’s claim of presidential immunity, the decision could protect him from any legal consequences in his forthcoming election interference trial. But the stakes are even bigger than the threat of jail time for the former reality TV star … at least, according to Trump.

On Monday, the GOP front-runner tried to argue that his preordained innocence is an issue of national security by admitting that he’s actually very susceptible to blackmail.

“Without Presidential Immunity, a President will not be able to properly function, or make decisions, in the best interest of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“Presidents will always be concerned, and even paralyzed, by the prospect of wrongful prosecution and retaliation, after they leave office. This could actually lead to extortion and blackmail of a President. The other side would say, ‘If you don’t do something, just the way we want it, we are going to go after you when you leave office, or perhaps even sooner.’ A President has to be free to determine what is right for our Country with no undue pressure,” he continued.

That is, of course, despite the fact that the United States has had 46 presidents in its 248-year history. Of those, Trump is the only one to face criminal charges—some of which relate to insurrection.

“Without Immunity, the Presidency, as we know it, will no longer exist,” he added in a follow-up post. “Many actions for the benefit of our Country will not be taken. This is in no way what the Founders had in mind. Legal Experts and Scholars have stated that the President must have Full Presidential Immunity. A President must be free to make proper decisions. His mind must be clear, and he must not be guided by fear of retribution!”

The Supreme Court has scheduled hearings pertaining to Trump’s immunity claim for the week of April 22.

Under Donald Trump’s leadership, the West Wing operated more like a pill mill than the White House, at least according to a January report by the Department of Defense inspector general, which capped a six-year investigation into the administration’s medical practices.

But sources knowledgeable on the matter paint an even more dramatic image than that, describing the nation’s highest office as “awash in speed,” reported Rolling Stone.

Common pills included modafinil, Adderall, fentanyl, morphine, and ketamine, according to the Pentagon report. But other, unlisted drugs—like Xanax—were equally easy to come by from the White House Medical Unit, according to sources that spoke to the magazine.

At least two senior staffers would regularly mix the depressant with alcohol, a potentially life-threatening combo, to deal with the stress of working with a highly erratic boss.

“You try working for him and not chasing pills with alcohol,” one source told Rolling Stone.

While other presidents were known to take a mix of drug cocktails to fight off back pain (like JFK) or bad moods (like Nixon), no previous administrations matched the level of debauchery of Trump’s, whose in-office pharmacists unquestioningly handed out highly addictive substances to staffers who needed pick-me-ups or energy boosts—no doctor’s exam, referral, or prescription required.

“It was kind of like the Wild West. Things were pretty loose. Whatever someone needs, we were going to fill this,” another source said.

Ultimately, the unmitigated access to controlled substances fostered an environment that would have been considered highly illegal and problematic anywhere else in the nation—if it weren’t inside the very office that helps craft those regulations.

“Is it being done appropriately or legally all the time? No. But are they going to get to that end result that the bosses want? Yeah,” said another, referring to the high demands of the office.

Meanwhile, pharmacists described an atmosphere of fear within the West Wing, claiming they would be “fired” if they spoke out or would receive negative work assignments if they didn’t hand pills over to staffers.

Representative Jamie Raskin has a message for the Supreme Court: challenge accepted.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Monday that Colorado can’t kick Donald Trump off its 2024 state primary ballot—and by extension, neither can any other state. Although the bench was united in its decision, it was sharply divided in reasoning. Five of the six conservative justices determined that the Fourteenth Amendment can only be enforced through a law passed by Congress, which the three liberal justices strongly opposed.

“I disagree with that interpretation, just because the other parts of the Fourteenth Amendment are self-executing,” Raskin said on CNN.

“In any event, the Supreme Court punted and said it’s up to Congress to act,” the Maryland representative continued. “And so I am working with a number of my colleagues, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Eric Swalwell, to revive legislation that we had to set up a process by which we could determine that someone who committed insurrection is disqualified by Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Raskin noted that the House had voted in 2021 to impeach Trump for inciting insurrection. The Senate ultimately acquitted Trump, but only by a vote of 57–43.

The Colorado state Supreme Court ruled in December that Trump had engaged in insurrection during the January 6 attack and was therefore ineligible to appear on the primary ballot. Little more than a week later, Maine’s secretary of state also barred him from the state’s ballot. He was booted from the Illinois state ballot just last week.

The Supreme Court ruling mandates his return to all three ballots and ends dozens of lawsuits weighing whether Trump was eligible to appear on other states’ ballots.

The three liberal justices agreed that Colorado couldn’t make such a massive decision on its own but strongly disputed that the amendment can only be applied through legislation. Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson slammed the majority for overstepping the bounds of the lawsuit at hand and, in doing so, “ruling out enforcement under general federal statutes requiring the government to comply with the law.”

“By resolving these and other questions, the majority attempts to insulate all alleged insurrectionists from future challenges to their holding federal office,” the three justices wrote in their dissenting opinion.

Representative Lauren Boebert hasn’t alienated just potential voters. She has also pushed away her former campaign volunteers, who feel the congresswoman used them just to get power.

Things haven’t been going well for the Colorado Republican lately, whose public image has taken a major hit since she and a date were caught on security footage groping each other during a performance of Beetlejuice. The scandal is a major reason why Boebert is struggling to gain popularity in her new district.

But trouble began to brew long before Beetlejuice, a former Boebert volunteer told The Washington Post.

“She has a bad reputation with her volunteers at this point,” Savannah Wolfson said in a story published Monday. “She just kind of uses you and then leaves.”

Wolfson said that she and some of her friends had noticed last year that Boebert was sharing many “weird” photos on Facebook. It looked like the representative, who filed for divorce from her ex-husband in May, was “constantly at frat parties.”

One of Wolfson’s friends texted Boebert to warn her to be careful about her choices and her posts. Boebert “just responded with a kissy face emoji,” Wolfson said—but it felt more like a kiss off.

It seemed as if Boebert was saying “Bye, bitch” to the people who had helped get her elected, Wolfson said.

Boebert, who currently represents Colorado’s 3rd congressional district, announced in December that she was moving and would run for election in the 4th district. She billed the move as a necessary fresh start for herself and her sons following her divorce.

While the 4th is a GOP stronghold and will likely send a Republican to Congress, there’s no guarantee that that Republican will be Boebert. As of late February, only a third of Republican primary voters said they backed the MAGA lawmaker.

Boebert’s fellow candidates have repeatedly slammed her for carpetbagging, and many voters expressed serious skepticism over her ability to represent their district well and over her personal character—something brought further into doubt by her former volunteers’ revelations.

“I don’t appreciate, as a Christian, people saying they’re Christian to get your vote and then turning out to be a lowlife, and now I just kind of think of her as a lowlife,” Judy Scofield, a retired university employee, said in February.

Sinéad O’Connor has a posthumous message: Fuck Donald Trump.

On Monday, the Irish musician’s estate issued a missive to the GOP front-runner, demanding that Trump never again use her music after he featured her breakout hit, a cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” during rallies in Maryland and North Carolina over the weekend.

“Throughout her life, it is well known that Sinéad O’Connor lived by a fierce moral code defined by honesty, kindness, fairness, and decency towards her fellow human beings,” read a joint statement issued by O’Connor’s estate and her longtime label, Chrysalis Records. “It was with outrage therefore that we learned that Donald Trump has been using her iconic performance of Nothing Compares 2 U at his political rallies.”

“It is no exaggeration to say that Sinéad would have been disgusted, hurt and insulted to have her work misrepresented in this way by someone who she herself referred to as a ‘biblical devil,’” they continued.

“As the guardians of her legacy, we demand that Donald Trump and his associates desist from using her music immediately.”

O’Connor rose to superstardom for her dynamic, imposing voice, which she wielded to attack oppressive systems like sexism, racism, and war. But the former Christian singer threw all of her commercial success away in order to draw attention to circulating rumors of rampant child abuse within the Catholic Church (which, years later, would prove to be true). During a Saturday Night Live performance in October 1992, O’Connor tore a picture of Pope John Paul II after singing a rendition of Bob Marley’s song “War.” Two weeks later, she was booed off the stage during a Bob Dylan tribute concert at Madison Square Garden, after which she retreated from public life.

O’Connor passed away on July 26 from natural causes, according to a coroner’s report. She had spent the last year and a half of her life grief-stricken after her 17-year-old son Shane committed suicide, canceling the release of her next album and her scheduled performances.

She’s not the only musician to want to keep their work far and away from the GOP front-runner. In fact, there’s a long list of artists who have peeled their rights away from Trump, including The Beatles, Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, Leonard Cohen, Queen, Prince, Pharrell, The Rolling Stones, The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty, and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler.