RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 2018, Mark Robinson stood up before the city council in Greensboro, North Carolina, and gave an impassioned defense of the Second Amendment. That video went viral and led to him entering politics. Last year, Robinson became North Carolina’s Republican Lieutenant Governor. This year, when a local paper published a cartoon calling the entire North Carolina Republican party a KKK entity, Robinson (who is black) ferociously attacked the newspaper for its dishonesty and ignorance. He needs to give master classes in handling the media.

To get a sense of the man, I recommend that you take the four minutes to watch his defense of the Second Amendment in the face of the Greensboro city council’s plan to ban gun shows from coming to the city. It’s epic:

This man is not a shrinking violet. So, as I said, that speech was the springboard to a successful political career that saw Mark Robinson go from private citizen to North Carolina Lieutenant Governor in just two years.

On Tuesday, WRAL.com published a cartoon that showed the Republican party as the KKK party. The cartoon revolves around the North Carolina Board of Education’s plan to have “inclusive” social studies standards. In a word, the standards are “woke” – they are the usual anti-American stuff about America being a racist, imperialist, destructive, hate-filled, yadda, yadda, yadda country.

Republicans on the Board of Education – and Robinson is one of those Republicans – object to the proposed standards. By way of rebuke, the cartoon shows an elephant draped in KKK garments, saying that, as to the proposed standards, “We prefer to start with a clean sheet”:

Robinson was neither amused nor apologetic. Instead, he launched a full-frontal attack against the media for being racist, hypocritical, and historically ignorant:

“I’m not going to go along to get along. I’m going to call them out every time.” That’s what every Republican should say when the media goes low.

Robinson isn’t a stranger to fighting back. When he was running for Lieutenant Governor, the Democrats tried to smear him as every kind of hater. When they trolled through his Facebook posts, they discovered that he denied that systemic racism was a problem in America, doesn’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, doesn’t believe police brutality is a major problem, hated Barack Obama, is willing to show the Confederate flag, thinks Black Panther was a Marxist movie made to pacify blacks, and objects to the demeaning way Hollywood actresses dress. In other words, he opposes leftist culture and values.

What’s most offensive to me is that Robinson trades in some Jewish tropes. He thinks that bankers, whom he associates with the Rothschild family, are controlling the world. He sees Jews in Hollywood as being responsible for cultural degradation. After two-thousand years of non-stop anti-Semitism, we Jews rightly don’t like being called out this way. The fact that a Jewish person does a bad thing does not mean all Jews are bad. That’s Exhibit A in the worst type of stereotyping, and I’m glad Robinson seems to have stopped.

When it comes to Robinson, as with Majorie Taylor Green’s ill-informed statements about Jews, it’s important to recognize that neither she nor Robinson back their statements with active malevolence. Unlike the anti-Semitic Democrats in Congress, neither has shown hostility to the Jewish state (so far as I know), and both support American values.

As Sally Zelikovsky said, the answer is to educate, not destroy, those Republicans who need a new understanding of Jews and Judaism. The fact is that we have almost no fighters in the Republican party. We shouldn’t jettison the ones we have because they’re flawed. We should, instead, work with them to make them better.