The Facebook Comment Section Is Taking Over The GOP 

Posted on by Hunter Walker

Ed. Note: Where things stand will be off for Juneteenth. Nicole Lafond will be back to helming Where Things Stand after the break.

Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s current lieutenant governor and the GOP nominee in the state’s gubernatorial race, is in the headlines again for inflammatory comments he posted on Facebook. The latest national coverage came from the Washington Post and focuses on remarks Robinson made “downplaying and making light of sexual assault and domestic violence.” 

But, in a way, highlighting remarks Robinson made about any one issue really misses the point: The man has spent more than a decade writing hundreds of noxious Facebook posts that, over the span of his oeuvre, attack multiple minorities and marginalized groups. 

I know this because I spent a lot of time with Mark Robinson. I stared deep into his digital soul for an in-depth TPM story that ran in March 2023. 

At the time, local news outlets had covered a couple wild statements Robinson had made on his social media pages, in which he embraced conspiracy theories about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband and posted a bizarre take filled with Yiddish slurs towards Blacks and references to Israeli currency to imply the movie “Black Panther” was part of a “satanic marxist” plot. I quickly realized there was more — so much more. 

As I dug into Robinson’s Facebook page, I found attacks on Jews, the LGBT community, and various minority groups. Robinson, who is Black, repeatedly railed against his own community. His commentaries were striking because of both their viciousness and sheer volume. 

Robinson was clearly hooked on Facebook. He often posted multiple times a day. And his output of angry political takes and attacks was stunning. There were hundreds of them stretching back to at least 2010. 

When we put together a story on this, my editors and I struggled to turn Robinson’s vast archive of extremism into a single, manageable story. I had placed all of his worst comments into a Google doc. It was 37 pages and over 9,200 words long — and I hadn’t included many posts that were either redundant or just completely incoherent. 

We ended up with a piece that characterized Robinson as a Facebook brawler who regularly indulged in conspiracy theories and took clear pleasure in making offensive comments about marginalized people. Given the sheer amount of extreme posts the man had written, we had to leave many of them on the cutting room floor. Our story also noted Robinson was poised to announce a gubernatorial campaign. He did it on April 22, 2023, exactly one month after our article appeared. 

Since Robinson threw his hat into the governor’s race, there has been a steady drumbeat of coverage from both national and local outlets highlighting his wild Facebook history. In journalism, we obviously like to have a unique angle and some stories, like the Washington Post’s, focused on Robinson’s thoughts about an individual topic in order to surface one of his many, many comments that had not been posted elsewhere. But to me, this missed the forest for the trees. 

When I look back at Robinson’s online output, I don’t see individual positions so much as I see an addiction to rage and to the internet. The man’s overall ideology seems to be shitposting. Anything that highlights his position on a given issue obscures this larger point. In fact, Robinson’s whole political career was born out of online anger. He worked in a furniture factory until a 2018 speech he gave defending guns “come hell or high water” went viral and set the stage for his first campaign. 

On balance, the slow rolling coverage of Robinson’s Facebook page reveals another larger truth. Extremist trolling is a draw for many GOP voters. Countless observers have pointed out how Donald Trump’s presidency was, in effect, the right-wing internet’s id making it all the way to the White House. Robinson is yet another example of how memes, insults, and rage are a feature, not a bug, in Trump’s party. 

In the nearly fifteen months since our story — and despite continued coverage from other media outlets — Robinson secured the GOP nomination. Polls of the governor’s race also show he has a real chance to beat the Democratic candidate, state Attorney General Josh Stein. 

Even though North Carolina is something of a swing state, Robinson has felt little need to apologize or distance himself from his social media history. His campaign responded to the latest Washington Post piece with an angry statement describing the newspaper as part of a “Democrat smear machine.”

But the world doesn’t need to believe TPM or the Washington Post to know Robinson has issues with women and various minorities or that he makes no apologies for it. Thanks to his extensive Facebook history, we can hear it from the man himself. One of the many occasions where he spelled things out was a post from April 2013 where he expressed frustration with the “recognition” given to “single mothers and gays.” After suggesting these groups were not “the ones that please GOD,” Robinson offered an all caps postscript for emphasis: 

“YES I SAID IT! NO I’M NOT SORRY I DID!! IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT UNFRIEND ME!!!!”

The Best Of TPM Today

Idaho GOP Becomes Latest To Embrace Fetal Personhood Ideology, Threatening Access To IVF – Emine Yücel

Yesterday’s Most Read Story

Biden Takes Aim At Felon Trump And Out-of-Control Supreme Court – David Kurtz

What We Are Reading

Trump-heavy courts block Biden LGBTQ school protections in many states – Chris Geidner

Former DCCC Leaders Working to Defeat Incumbent House Democrats – David Dayen

US government, for the 1st time, details how Northwest dams devastated the region’s Native tribes – Associated Press

The Totally Hilarious Impending End of the Career of the Odious Bob Good

Posted on by Josh Marshall

As you know, there are primary elections in a few states tonight. Virginia is one of them. And there’s one race I wanted to highlight because it’s a sign of the times, of the Trump era. Bob Good is currently the chair of the Freedom Caucus. If you’re assuming that because he’s in the Freedom Caucus he’s awful, well … good call. Because he’s completely awful. It also looks like his political career is going to end tonight. And couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Because Bob Good is awful. The reason his career is coming to an end, though, goes back to his very bad decision to endorse Ron DeSantis. In other words, he crossed Trump, although in a pretty meager way. Once Trump was back in the driver’s seat he made very clear that while he was supporting DeSantis he’d obediently return to the Trump Train as soon as DeSantis officially bowed out.

Continue reading “The Totally Hilarious Impending End of the Career of the Odious Bob Good” →

Readers Respond on Dignity Wraiths and Democracy #2

Posted on by Josh Marshall

From TPM Reader ES …

I totally agree with your last post’s insights. Trump’s theater of subservience is here to affirm and habituate people to the politics of authoritarianism.

I’d add two things: maybe you’ve read it back in the day, but one of the founding texts on the topic is La Boëtie’s “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.” It’s from like 1570. He avoided it being published while he was alive because case in point. It’s short and marvelous and very tranchant. In it he notes that tyrants can only survive with the consent of those they rule over. As such they often try to coopt the elites into their courtiers, both to prevent challenges and to give the spectacle of adhesion to the populace. This was written under absolute monarchy. It’s still current. 

Continue reading “Readers Respond on Dignity Wraiths and Democracy #2” →

Readers Respond on Dignity Wraiths and Democracy #1

Posted on by Josh Marshall

From TPM Reader EA …

You are totally correct that Trump’s style of dominance politics demands that everyone around him surrender their dignity. But it’s wrong to call him a strongman, because his demand is really a sign of his utter weakness. I have never seen a more psychically fragile, pathetic U.S. President, and doubt if there was ever a weaker one.

Continue reading “Readers Respond on Dignity Wraiths and Democracy #1” →

Idaho GOP Becomes Latest To Embrace Fetal Personhood, Threatening Access To IVF

Posted on by Emine Yücel

The Idaho Republican Party expanded its anti-reproductive health efforts last week during a party convention, affirming its support for the fetal personhood ideology and proclaiming that they oppose “the destruction of human embryos,” a reference to the common practice in in vitro fertilization treatments of creating more embryos than are needed, and discarding those that are not viable or are not used.

Continue reading “Idaho GOP Becomes Latest To Embrace Fetal Personhood, Threatening Access To IVF” →

2020 Conspiracy Theorists Are Being Held Accountable, But Damage They’ve Done Remains

Posted on by Khaya Himmelman

Late last month, right-wing broadcaster Salem Media Group announced that it would stop distributing 2020 election conspiracy film “2,000 Mules,” part of an effort to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by a Georgia man that the supposed documentary wrongly accused of voter fraud. The company posted a statement to its website, apologizing to the man for the way in which the film portrayed him, which — like so many 2020 election conspiracy theories — resulted in an innocent person and their family facing a deluge of violent threats. 

One by one, the conspiracy theorists and election deniers who, four years ago, thrust American democracy into chaos, are being held accountable for their actions, despite leaving a trail of destruction behind. 

Whether or not this serves as a deterrence for future damage ahead of 2024 remains to be seen. In the meantime, their baseless ideas live on. 

“I think that accountability is mostly a personal win for those who seek justice,” said Yotam Ophir, a professor of communication at the University at Buffalo who focuses on misinformation and extremism. “I can’t see how it’s going to change the big picture of the influence misinformation is going to have on the 2024 elections.”

Earlier this year, True the Vote, the group whose claims formed the basis of “2,000 Mules,” separately told a judge it had no evidence to support other false claims it made of ballot stuffing. 

That same month, misinformation purveyor Project Veritas publicly admitted that it had no evidence of voter fraud in Erie, Pennsylvania, after settling a lawsuit from an Erie postmaster who said the claims spread by the group forced him to flee his home and destroyed his reputation.

In April of this year, the right-wing website Gateway Pundit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the midst of a defamation lawsuit from Georgia election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman and a separate defamation lawsuit from a former employee at Dominion Voting Systems.

Slowly, but surely, years after injecting chaos into the election system and, in some cases, ruining the lives of innocent election workers, some of 2020s loudest election deniers are being hauled into court — and foundering.

“These are all necessary elements of starting to restore sanity and reality to our perception of our democracy,” David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, told TPM. 

But although voting experts agree that accountability for conspiracy theorists, even years later, is crucial, especially ahead of the 2024 election, a significant number of voters still believe the election was illegitimate. 

That is, in part, because the conspiracy theories live on, boosted in many cases by former president and current candidate Donald Trump himself, even after those who crafted them face accountability. At the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, Trump told the audience that the election was “rigged” and that “they cheated like dogs.” And as recently as last month, during an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Trump repeated the lie that he won Wisconsin — a state Joe Biden won by more than 20,000 votes. 

According to polling from The Washington Post and University of Maryland, published in January of this year, close to one third of adults in the U.S. think that Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020. Similarly, CNN polling from last year shows that 71 percent of Republican voters think Biden’s win was illegitimate. 

“Exposing grifters as grifters is always a good thing,” Becker said. But, he noted, there’s always a market for grifters.

“It exists to enrich the few people who run it and at the expense of those who might be sincerely misled by them,” Becker said of one of the conspiracy theorizing organizations, True the Vote. “So they will continue the grift. They will double and triple down on the grift over and over and over again.”

Election Integrity Consultant David Levine similarly noted that these defamation lawsuits are indeed helpful, but they in and of themselves are not enough in terms of accountability. They can demonstrate, he said,  that “bringing weak cases on the merits can have real repercussions,” but he emphasized too that election denial has proved to be a “cash cow,” and that he will not be surprised to see a new wave of election lies in 2024. 

Even though justice is working, albeit slowly, the tremendous damage these election lies have caused has already been done — not just to democracy, but on an individual level. 

Freeman and Moss said in their lawsuit against the Gateway Pundit that the lies the company spread about them both “devastated their personal and professional reputations” and “instigated a deluge of intimidation, harassment, and threats” that caused them to fear for their safety. And the Erie postmaster, Robert Weisenbach, similarly said he received death threats because of the lies spread by Project Veritas. 

“There is I guess some optimism to have here, but at the same time, I mean to a large degree, the damage was already done,” said Ophir. “It’s not clear to me that these sporadic cases will be enough to dissuade others from participating in the next wave of misinformation.”

The 2024 Election Will Be A Referendum On Jan. 6

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Republicans Are Baldly Turning Jan. 6 Into A Rallying Cry

Let me set the scene here briefly.

On Thursday, Donald Trump was welcomed back to the scene of his greatest crime by elected Republicans in thrall of his power over the party’s base. No one on the Hill was more gushy about Trump that day than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Here she is in an on-camera interview with my former TPM colleague Lauren Fox:

As I noted at the time, it felt like the whitewashing of Jan. 6 was complete. But I may have undersold it. Republicans aren’t just minimizing Jan. 6 as a tourist incident or a legal assault on hapless MAGA adherents ushered into the Capitol by complicit police. They’re baldly using it as a rallying cry now. Yeah, we did it. So what? What are you going to do about it?

Two days after Trump’s scandalous return to the Hill, Greene spoke at a Turning Point Action event in Detroit and doubled down on all things Jan. 6.

“Anyone that wants to continue to shame us for January 6th can go to hell,” Greene told a raucous audience.

Greene’s election opponent this year posted an extended excerpt of her Michigan speech where she was bragging about her role on Jan. 6, based on her belief that Trump had won her home state of Georgia, despite no evidence to that effect:

Note her initial line there: A civil war started on Election Day 2020 when Democrats stole the presidency from Trump. A lot about the last four years can be encapsulated by the notion that one side in American politics is fighting a cold civil war, and the other side is totally bewildered by it. That’s not what war fighters mean when they refer to an asymmetric battlefield, but the asymmetry is stark as hell.

In some ways, none of this is new. Trump himself is out there claiming every week that the 2020 election was stolen, so his followers are only following his cue. But if you thought elected Republicans might memory hole Jan. 6 for the duration of the 2024 campaign, or downplay it, or try to sidestep it, nope.

Consider how powerful it will be in the MAGA mind for Trump to win this time. It would vindicate — to them — their 2020 election theft claims. It would set up years of investigations of those supposedly responsible for the theft. Trump would of course follow through on his promise to pardon J6 defendants. But beyond that it would empower him and Hill Republicans to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 and commemorate it in ways that boggle the mind. Think: memorial plaque where Ashli Babbitt was shot.

If Trump wins in November, we may very well be living in a world where Jan. 6 is a national holiday. Let that sink in.

Real Accountability For Jan. 6 Is Slipping Sway

Katherine Miller: The System Isn’t Built for Jan. 6, and Neither Are We

Steve Bannon Not Eligible For Club Fed

Steven Bannon’s pending criminal trial in the “We Build The Wall” fraud case renders him ineligible for cushiest level of federal prison, the minimum security “Club Fed,” CNN reports. So he’ll be reporting instead to a low-security prison in Danbury, Connecticut, to serve his four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. He is due to report by July 1.

Just Saying …

Morning Memo is not claiming any credit for a headline change at the NYT yesterday, but within a couple of hours of MM’s critique of its headline about a new Biden campaign ad hanging Trump’s criminal conviction around his neck, the headline was changed.

Before and after:

Trending …

One of those occasions where the coincidence of similar stories with the same basic thrust landing on the same day helps to reinforce the point:

  • WSJ: Antiabortion Lawsuits Leaned on Discredited, Disputed Research
  • NYT: Case after case challenging gun restrictions cites the same Georgetown professor. His seemingly independent work has undisclosed ties to pro-gun interests.

Power Play By Conservative Federal Judges In Texas

In a move that will make venue-shopping easier in the conservative Northern District of Texas, judges there approved a new rule that will automatically “stay for 21 days any decisions to transfer civil cases to courts outside of the jurisdiction of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals,” Reuters reports.

For The Record

In a new ruling — that starts with “There are two sexes: male and female” — a federal judge blocked the Biden administrations new Title IX rules intended to protect transgender students from going into effect in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia. A Louisiana federal judge last week similarly blocked the new rules in Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana and Idaho.

Quote Of The Day

But let’s be crystal clear: if Democrats take the coward’s way out and sign our names to a half-baked deal that lets the wealthy off the hook, it will be a huge failure — and one the American people cannot afford.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), on how to handle the 2025 expiration of the Trump tax cuts

Double Norcrossed

I don’t know South Jersey politics very well, and so I’ve always wondered whether George Norcross was the real deal or a character that journalists needed because we love throwing around descriptions like powerbroker, political boss, kingmaker, and machine pol. But his indictment yesterday by the state attorney general on racketeering charges (which also ensnared his brother, his lawyer, a former Camden mayor, a trucking company executive and a real estate developer) paints a picture of Norcross that was everything news accounts have conveyed over the years and more. The cherry on top was Norcross personally showing up at the attorney general’s press conference announcing the indictment and plopping down on the front row:

Bob Menendez Corruption Trial Is Grinding Along

WaPo: Five memorable moments in the corruption trial of Bob Menendez

2024 Ephemera

  • VA-05: Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) is trying to survive a primary challenge today from a Trump-backed MAGA candidate, all the result of Good (who himself is crazy conservative) initially backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) over Donald Trump in the GOP presidential primary.
  • Philip Bump: Trumpworld keeps overstating Trump’s support among Black voters

High On Their Own Supply

I wrote a little bit yesterday about the inanity of presidential debates — and to be fair I only focused on mainstream news coverage. Meanwhile, over in wackadoodle land:

Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!

If You Already Hated Presidential Debates, Wait Til Next Week!

Posted on by David Kurtz

Ed. Note: Nicole Lafond will be back to helming Where Things Stand soon.

Next week, the 2024 presidential campaign will hit one of its predictable low points. The two major party nominees will meet in a nationally televised debate — and everything we know from watching these two men in public life for the last 40-50 years and our lived experience of their presidencies for the past nearly eight years will be thrown out window.

Continue reading “If You Already Hated Presidential Debates, Wait Til Next Week!” →

Ouch

Posted on by Josh Marshall

We talk a lot, rightly, about how Democrats are often instinctively cautious about going on the political attack. I just got a mass-email press release from the Biden campaign that is part of their “felon” push and the jousting in the lead up to the debate. I don’t have anything particular to add beside, jeez, this is intense stuff, by which I mean not “intense” in the slangish mean of “good” but intense. Like totally going off. One needs to do this with a full spectrum approach, in press conferences, ads, surrogates etc. But if this press release is any measure, they’re not holding back.

Text after the jump … (links are the ones that came embedded in the email).

Continue reading “Ouch” →

Dignity Wraiths, Resilience and Democratic Character

Posted on by Josh Marshall

I’ve been reading through your emails about your favorite Editors’ Blog posts, and among the maybe dozen that are most often mentioned, there are three themes I wanted to highlight, because they each relate to a central dimension of our politics today.

The first is the post on “bitch-slap politics” which I wrote in 2004; I later began referring to the concept I described in it as “dominance politics”.

The second is the post I wrote the day after the 2016 presidential election about optimism as an ethic, a posture toward life rather than a set of predictions about the future. It was actually a post with a series of bullet-pointed observations. But that one bullet point — about optimism — resonated with people. A lot of you wrote in about it. And in recent years it’s probably the thing I hear about from people most.

I’ll return to those two topics in a moment.

The third theme is not really any individual post but a stream of posts and tweets over several years about “dignity loss” and “dignity wraiths” and like things, a whole bespoke vocabulary or a running gag about this pattern we’re all aware of in which Trump demands of people an ever escalating series of humiliations, dignity losses and more. Trump requires it — that part alone isn’t hard to understand. It’s that people give it … lavishly and fulsomely. Soon you’ve got some guy you may not have agreed with but seemed like a reasonably self-possessed adult, and they’re saying “thank you, sir, may I have another” each time Trump comes up with a new insult name for them, praising his far-reaching intellect and encyclopedic knowledge of history, clapping obediently on his approach. Trump somehow casts a spell over these people and soon they’re like a desiccated dignity husk. It’s like he’s a dignity black hole that no one can re-emerge from.

Continue reading “Dignity Wraiths, Resilience and Democratic Character” →