In the eyes of the leftist media, the only thing worse than being a black Republican is being a black Republican who chooses to run for office.
Just look at their despicable treatment of recent presidential candidates, including the late Herman Cain, Dr. Ben Carson, Larry Elder, and Senator Tim Scott.
When Cain ran for the presidency in 2012, the media peddled unsubstantiated claims of sexual harassment, just as they did to Justice Clarence Thomas—another one of their favorite targets—and Brett Kavanaugh for that matter.
When Dr. Ben Carson, who happens to have been one of the world’s top neurosurgeons and a God-fearing Christian, ran for president in 2016, his faith was routinely mocked, and his biography—particularly his upbringing—was questioned by the media in ways that Barack Obama’s never was—even though it turns out Obama’s supposed memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” was almost entirely a work of fiction.
Typically, the leftist media has no problem covering a white Republican who they consider a threat to their power because they can gleefully, without a shred of evidence, call him or her a “white supremacist” or a neo-nazi.
One might think a black Republican would be harder to label in such a farcical way.
But apparently for Larry Elder, the affable radio host, that was no longer the case. When Elder decided to run for Governor of California in 2021 in a recall election to unseat the wildly unpopular pro-lockdown policies of Gavin Newsom, the Los Angeles Times disgracefully referred to him as “the Black face of white supremacy.”
Evidently, so long as a mostly white newsroom dispatches a person of color to slander a fellow minority, it’s fair game.
More recently, when Tim Scott ran for president last year, “The View” host Joy Behar said of Scott, ”He’s one of those guys… black Republican who believes in pulling yourself by your bootstraps, rather than, to me, understanding the systemic racism that African Americans face in this country, and other minorities. He doesn’t get it. Neither does Clarence. And that’s why they’re Republicans.”
Nothing screams racism louder than an elderly white lady lecturing a black man about what it’s like to be black in America.
Apparently the rule is that if you’re black and you’re running for office, you must denounce America as irredeemably evil.
The left despises successful black Republicans, not only because they win elections but because they refute the lie that America is a “systemically racist” and evil country that oppresses minorities to this very day.
Every election cycle, the left just assumes that black Americans, like sheep, will head to the polls and vote down ballot for whoever the Democrat candidate is—regardless of how destructive their policies are.
Or, as Joe Biden once said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
But every so often, a disrupter comes along, in the form of a black conservative who has a legitimate shot at defeating whatever dark money-funded radical the left throws in the ring.
And when that happens, the leftist media cannot hide just how racist they are.
Which brings us to North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who, according to the RealClearPolitics Average, is essentially locked in a dead heat against his radical, George Soros-backed opponent, Attorney General Josh Stein.
As the first black Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina, Robinson grew up poor as the ninth of 10 children in Greensboro. His father died when he was in the fifth grade, forcing his mother to get a job as a janitor at North Carolina A&T State University to provide for the large family.
“She had a choice between welfare and work, and she chose work,” Robinson said after winning the Republican gubernatorial primary in March. “And she worked her fingers to the bone to take care of her children and set a standard in her life. I would not be standing here right now if it was not for her.”
Robinson has also served in the U.S. military, worked in furniture plants, and owned a small business.
He became a household name in 2018 after forcefully defending the Second Amendment at a city council meeting in Greensboro, after his impassioned remarks resonated with thousands of Americans who correctly felt their rights as law-abiding citizens were being infringed upon.
Robinson is also an evangelical Christian who speaks sincerely about his faith and the right to life.
One would think that Robinson’s rise to the second highest office in the Tar Heel state would make for a compelling story of triumph—but Robinson’s biggest crime is that he happens to be a black Republican who is endorsed by Donald Trump.
So it was no surprise when New York Magazine came out with a reprehensible, but not unexpected, hit piece on Monday titled “Mark Robinson Is MAGA’s Great Black Hope.”
As an aside, I was unaware that Robinson was Jack Johnson fighting against James Jeffries in Reno, circa 1910.
“When Robinson finally announced in April 2023 that he was running to succeed the term-limited Cooper this November, thus becoming the instant and prohibitive front-runner for the Republican nomination for governor, it had been the worst-kept secret in state politics for more than a year,” writes Zak Cheney-Rice. “The news thrilled the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, which saw Robinson’s viciousness as a marker of authenticity and adopted him as their Great Black Hope.”
But what exactly is Robinson’s supposed “viciousness?” Let’s check the record. He does not want black people to be victims; he does not believe that requiring a voter to show a driver’s license is proof of racism (because it isn’t); he believes deeply in faith, family and God; and he believes in the American Dream.
The left despises black Republicans who do not make race the central theme of their campaign—in a pathetic attempt to pander to minorities.
“Part of Robinson’s appeal was his knack for slaughtering sacred cows around race. He reserved particular ire for the civil rights movement, despite the fact that his hometown of Greensboro—with its history of sit-ins, student protests, and visits from Martin Luther King Jr.—had served as the movement’s cradle,” Cheney-Rice writes.
Apparently the left believes that continuing to talk about real discrimination that occurred 60 plus years ago—and somehow relating that to imaginary oppression today—is more important than Robinson talking about the issues that matter to voters, including: lowering the cost of gas and groceries; incentivizing investment, not penalizing corporations who create job opportunities; securing our border; keeping our cities safe from violent criminals; removing sexualized and racist education from our schools; promoting charter schools in favor of failing public schools; and restoring faith in the Judeo-Christian values that our country was founded upon.
Even though Obama only served one term as a U.S. Senator, no one was allowed to question whether or not he was qualified to become president. If you did, you were immediately denounced as a bigot. The same was true of Kamala Harris, the first black vice president, who, like Biden, is a national embarrassment and has made a mockery of the office.
But apparently the “bigot standard” that the legacy media concocted no longer applies anymore.
“We know he [Robinson] is an exceptionally underqualified public servant, even by today’s standards, an emblem of the Republican Party’s desperation to recruit black spokesmen,” Cheney-Rice writes. “We know he is one of the legitimate would-be heirs to whatever Trumpism-after-Trump looks like, and at a time when black male voters appear to be drifting rightward.”
And therein lies the threat. The left knows that black Americans are running away from the Democrat Party as fast as they can because their policies do nothing to make their lives better.
Perhaps Robinson said it best on the night of his historic primary election victory: “We’re not going to allow these folks to drag this campaign into the mud. Those who want to go into the mud, feel free. Where we’re going is, we’re going towards the substantive issues that all North Carolinians face. The things that will make North Carolina great, that will take her to the next level of success.”
At the end of the day, the substantive issues are what matter more than anything else, and if Robinson keeps doing that, he might just find himself soaring above the highest Blue Ridge Mountains in November.
Surely the legacy media will want to celebrate that historic victory, right?
David Keltz is the author of “The Campaign of his Life” and “Media Bias in the Trump Presidency and the Extinction of the Conservative Millennial.” His writing has been published in The American Spectator, RealClearPolitics, American Greatness, the Federalist, the American Thinker, and the New York Daily News, among other publications.
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