In North Carolina, Republicans have two champions: Donald Trump and one of his sound-alikes, Mark Robinson. The 55-year-old African-American easily won the Republican nomination for governor on Super Tuesday, March 5. At a rally, Trump referred to him as "Martin Luther King on steroids."

Robinson is best known for his outrageousness on steroids. As a New York Times opinion article recalled, Robinson has called homosexuality "filth" and the transgender rights movement "demonic." He is concerned about the devil, whose hand he believed he saw in the film Black Panther, which was "created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by [a] Satanic Marxist." The article is titled: "Anti-Gay? Anti-science? Antisemitic? Run for governor of North Carolina!"

Yet Robinson appeals to the state's Republicans. "He's a good Christian and shares a lot of my values: He's 'pro-life' [opposed to abortion rights] and for free speech," hailed Larry Jennings, a 70-year-old white man who worked for the tractor firm John Deere for 43 years and was running a polling station in an affluent neighborhood of Raleigh, the state capital.

"The grassroots support is very strong. They like someone who speaks unfiltered, like them, and they fell in love with Robinson when he defended individual freedom and opposed intrusion into personal lives in a speech," deciphered Steve Bergstrom, an airline pilot and head of the Republican Party in Raleigh County. In 2018, after the Florida high school massacre, Robinson's speech went viral on social media. The then-powerful gun lobby – the National Rifle Association of America – spotted him and, in 2020, he became lieutenant governor of North Carolina.

Since then, the Republican Party has been extolling the perfect narrative of an African-American, the ninth child in a family of 10, who was raised in a home of alcohol and violence, who went bankrupt, but managed to pull through. Republican Dale Folwell, an unsuccessful moderate primary opponent against Robinson, wasn't fooled: "He is history's latest example of someone trying to rise to power through hate" he lamented recently in the Washington Post.

Mary Thomson, a 65-year-old African-American woman manning the Democratic booth across from Jennings in Raleigh, condemned the Republicans' cynicism. "They chose Mark Robinson because he's Black. With that, they get a lot of press, but the reality is that Republicans don't care about the plight of Black people. Robinson believes all the Republican Party's crazy things. He'll say things to shock and it pays off. If the press hadn't given so much space to his provocations, Trump might not have been elected," she said.

You have 66.31% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.