North Carolina's Republican gubernatorial candidate sure has said some stuff
This is about antisemitism
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: Paid subscribers got this month’s ET Ask Home, featuring March guest Chris Geidner, the Law Dork himself.
Paid subscribers also get the premium version of The Election Tricycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on this year’s elections in the United States, United Kingdom, and India. As that goes out on Thursdays, I’m moving this, your regularly scheduled ET Write Home, to Friday mornings. I hope that’s alright with you, my cherished readers!
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about a new book, To Be a Jew Today, and what it means to read and write about how to be Jewish at a time when Jews disagree so strongly on the matter.
This week on The Election Tricycle, we talked about money in politics in our respective countries.
France became the first country to make abortion a constitutional right.
The AP on the consequences of one Israeli airstrike: “It took 10 years and three rounds of in vitro fertilization for Rania Abu Anza to become pregnant, and only seconds for her to lose her five-month-old twins, a boy and a girl.”
Szabolcs Panyi has a great report on how the Hungarian government funded ads that appeared to be driven at influencing other countries’ elections, while railing against election interference in Hungary.
MY VIEWS ON…
…North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor!
On Tuesday, North Carolina voters decided that Lt. Governor Mark Robinson would be the Republican candidate for governor. If elected, he would be the first Black governor of the state. Unfortunately, he would also be a governor with a history of Holocaust denial.
In 2018, he wrote in a social media post, “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.” When this was noted by one of his Republican party rivals, Robinson countered that he visited Israel after Oct. 7, a fact that, to be clear, does not negate his 2018 social media post.
Perhaps you are thinking to yourself, “Well, Emily, that’s a little unfair. It was one social media post and besides, that was six years ago, when he was a young ~49 year old who didn’t know better.”
Here, submitted without commentary, are some other remarks Robinson has made:
He said that COVID-19 was a “globalist” conspiracy intended to destroy Trump. He said the movie Black Panther was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by [a] satanic marxist.” He then said it “was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets.” He quoted Hitler on racial pride in a social media post in 2014, and then, last year, defended quoting Hitler. He also suggested that Boko Haram’s 2014 kidnapping of girls was masterminded by Hungarian born Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
Perhaps you are thinking, “It sounds like this guy has a penchant for antisemitic conspiracy, but so do a lot of people.” To which I would say first that that should be disqualifying, and second, that you, my strawman, needn’t worry! He’s attacked lots of other people, too! Like women, whom he said are to be led by men; Muslims (“Sad Fact: ‘Religious freedom’ in this country now means Muslims are free to do as they please and anyone who says anything about it is a bigot.”); LGBTQ people, whose sexuality he likened to filth; and Martin Luther King Jr.
But to return for a minute to the whole “antisemitic conspiracy and Holocaust denial” element: I do not even have the word to describe the feeling of learning that someone posted Holocaust denial and then, when called out for it, pointed out that he visited Israel. The latter is not a get out of Holocaust denial jail free card. It says something deeply depressing about our political moment that he thought it was, and that there are, I am sure, some who accepted it as such. This is to say nothing of the fact that he appears to think very little of regularly pushing antisemitic conspiracy. More troublingly, this is the person who got more votes than anyone else in the Republican primary in the ninth most populous state in the country.
This, to me, is antisemitism to be alarmed about: This person has political power. If elected, he would have still more political power. And there are many voters who are excited about handing it to him. The election (against the state’s attorney general who would be the first Jewish governor) is expected to be close.
As a journalist, I do not feel it is appropriate to make political endorsements, so instead I will say: A vote for Mark Robinson in this week’s primary was a vote for a person who has—to put it very generously—dabbled in Holocaust denial and antisemitic conspiracy. To vote for him in November will be to make that person the governor.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
If you are in Washington, DC, The Lehman Trilogy is playing at Shakespeare Theatre Company until the end of March. We saw it this weekend and loved it. If you read this section of my newsletter, you will probably love it, too. I was going to write my little essay on it this week before North Carolina’s Republican primary voters elected Mark Robinson.
Ben Samuels of Haaretz has a great deep dive into/explainer on AIPAC.
Ben Samuels also has a good piece on the ADL’s honoring of Jared Kushner and ensuing fallout.
J Street and the Reconstructionist movement have joined calls for a ceasefire.
The Wall Street Journal has a visual investigation into the post-Oct. 7 surge in illegal construction by settlers.
From JTA: “The Jewish Fertility Foundation is funding out-of-state treatments for some Alabama clients after the ruling last month largely halted in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, treatments in the state, as clinics could face prosecution should embryos be destroyed or otherwise become unviable over the course of the procedure.”
-ET
"North Carolina in United States" by TUBS is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.