When Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz called the GOP weird, it was the understatement of the year. The Republican Party has degenerated into a repository of freaks, flakes and frauds. The most common mask for Republican immorality is right-wing Christianity, which launders increasingly brazen lies and licentiousness. Under the banner of Trump, the GOP has shed its piety to shamelessly embrace its pathology.
The latest conservative serpent to shed his skin is Republican North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson. An explosive CNN K-File report revealed Robinson to be a repulsive pervert and brazen hypocrite who hid behind religion to conceal the subterranean depths of his depravity.
Robinson first made a name for himself when he launched into an anti-transgender jeremiad in 2022, loudly preaching, “Ain’t but two genders.”
Apparently, Robinson was more appreciative of sexual diversity when partaking in his quotidian porn habit. The right-wing scold, a regular user of Nude Africa, got off on trans porn, while referring to himself as a “Black Nazi” and “perv.”
“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote on the porn site. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”
After the scandal broke, GOP strategist Doug Heye slammed the Republican Party for promoting “cartoon candidates.” Indeed, Robinson’s behavior leads one to wonder how the GOP could elevate such a lunatic in a key swing state that might decide the presidential election:
In a series of seven posts in October 2011, Robinson disparaged Martin Luther King in such intense terms, calling him a “commie bastard,” “worse than a maggot,” a “ho f**king, phony,” and a “huckster,” that a user in the thread accused him of being in the KKK. Robinson responded by directing a slur at King.
In October 2010, Robinson used the antisemitic slur “hebe” when discussing how he liked the show “Good Times” developed by Norman Lear, saying “the show itself was a bunch of heb [sic] written liberal bullshit!”
While discussing the Taliban, he referred to Muslims as “little rag-headed bastards” and said that “if Muslims took over liberals would be the 1st ones to be beheaded!”
Robinson also used homophobic slurs frequently, calling other users f*gs.
In a state that’s basically tied, Trump’s over-the-top endorsement of Robinson could be the kiss-of-death. Prior to the scandal, Trump gushed over Robinson.
“You have to cherish him. He’s like a fine wine.” Another time, Trump praised Robinson, who is black, as “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Albeit, Robinson probably saw the comparison as an insult. “Get that f*cking commie bastard off the National Mall!,” Robinson wrote on the porn site about the dedication of the memorial to King in Washington, DC, by then-President Barack Obama.
The cherry on top was Robinson’s endorsement of slavery: “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few,” he wrote.
It would be poetic justice for Trump to lose, and ultimately end up in jail, because his cynical embrace of right-wing religious zealots backfired. As if on cue, new legal documents place Trump surrogate Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) at a 2017 drug-saturated sex party that included underage girls.
This is just the latest scandal for Florida Republicans. Earlier this year, Florida Republican Party Chairman Christian Ziegler was fired after it was revealed that he and his wife, Sarasota County School Board member Bridget Ziegler, engaged in threesomes with at least one other woman. Bridget was also the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a homophobic organization, championed by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, that crusades to ban books, lobbied for the notorious “Don’t Say Gay” law and disparages drag queens.
Too many conservative Christians, like Robinson, Gaetz and the Zieglers, preach against sin, while acting like political prostitutes. They pretend to be bulwarks of morality in a world of moral relativism. They hold themselves up as examples of piety and purity.
When it’s convenient, these strident hypocrites promote voting as an expression of values. But what message are they sending our youth when they pull the lever for Trump, a race-baiting rapist and convicted felon? Trump’s lifestyle is far lewder than the books they have banned, yet they bow at his feet and sing his praises.
It’s telling that mostly hookers and right-wing Christians stand on street corners hawking their wares. At least the escorts make an honest living — selling a straightforward product. The fanatics offer a nifty bait and switch — preaching virtue for others while behaving like reprobates in private.
If I’m tough on right wing Christians, it’s because I’ve spent more than three decades picking up the shattered pieces from their bigoted, self-serving actions. As the Executive Director of Truth Wins Out, I’ve encountered too many LGBTQ people who tried to change their sexual orientation or gender identity because they were browbeaten by preening conservatives. They were told they can’t be gay and go to heaven. These extremists told LGBTQ people that they “aren’t God’s best” and that they were “rebelling against the Lord.”
But the rhetoric of these moralizers rarely matches their sordid reality. They sanctimoniously demand that LGBTQ people, and many others, be exactly like them — without revealing how they really live when they think no one is looking. They pose as saints, when they are far worse sinners than the people they are cruelly targeting with invective. My experience has taught me that most right-wing preaching is a form of projection or deflection. These zealots are fighting personal demons on the public stage, unbothered by the collateral damage they cause in peoples’ lives.
The rancid sewer of sexual misconduct, however, is only the tip of conservative malfeasance. The biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about God punishing residents for acting inhospitably toward visitors. Yet, MAGA Republicans regularly disparage immigrants and cast them as dangerous criminals who must be deported. In Springfield, Ohio, Trump and his running mate JD Vance have targeted Haitians, claiming they are stealing pets and having them for dinner.
Such hateful rhetoric has led to bomb threats, the closure of schools, two colleges had to switch to remote learning, the city’s hospital was placed on lockdown and City Hall was forced to close. Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine called on Trump and Vance to stop spreading misinformation.
“I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield,” DeWine wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “This rhetoric hurts the city and its people, and it hurts those who have spent their lives there.”
It’s sickening that Vance admitted in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that his toxic tales about Haitian immigrants were fabricated. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Moreover, it’s debatable whether Vance believes his own anti-immigrant rhetoric. A week after President Barack Obama won reelection in November 2012, JD Vance, then a law student at Yale, wrote a fierce assessment of the GOP’s stance on migrants and minorities, condemning it for being “openly hostile to non-whites” and for alienating “Blacks, Latinos, [and] the youth.”
Today, Vance presents as a completely different person. To win power, he sells out his own wife, who is of Indian descent, when he meekly reproaches reactionary Trump operative Laura Loomer, who mocked Kamala Harris’ south Asian heritage, saying that if she wins the White House it “will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Vance’s weak-sauce response was, “I don’t like those comments.” Way to defend your family, JD!
If the assault on Haitians weren’t bad enough, Trump spoke to the conservative Israeli-American Council in Washington, D.C. and appeared to preemptively blame Jewish Americans if he loses the upcoming election in November.
I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40%. If I’m at for– think of it. That means 60% are voting for Kamala, who in particular is a bad Democrat. The Democrats are bad to Israel.
As usual, the former president lied about the numbers, with only 25% of Jewish voters planning to vote for Trump. But his caustic rhetoric put a bullseye on the back of the Jewish community during a precarious time that saw a sharp increase in antisemitism. In the three months following the Oct. 7 massacre, antisemitic incidents in the US skyrocketed 360%, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Meanwhile, Trump’s most outspoken supporter is oligarch Elon Musk, a man whose legendary malignant narcissism might even surpass Trump’s. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg disclosed Musk’s cornucopia of insecurities:
Attending the Super Bowl as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, Musk had one of the most luxurious seats in the house, but rather than watching the game, he was glued to his phone in dismay. Both he and President Biden had sent tweets cheering on the Philadelphia Eagles, but even though Biden had far fewer followers than Musk on the platform, the president’s tweet garnered 29 million views to Musk’s 8.4 million. Livid, Musk demanded that his engineers find out why his tweet was underperforming Biden’s. He left the game early to fly back to his San Francisco office, where dozens of employees were summoned to meet him on a Sunday night.
Eventually, to placate their boss, the engineers tweaked Twitter’s algorithm to boost Musk’s posts, pushing them into users’ feeds whether they follow him or not.
Finally, the Republican Party has long exploited patriotism to smear Democrats. But it was conservative bloggers who were co-opted as useful idiots by Russian intelligence services. They were paid handsomely by Putin operatives to stir division, undermine democracy and tear at the social fabric of America. In the transactional world of today’s right wing, nothing is sacred, and the American flag was used as a front to launder their seething contempt for modern America.
MAGA madness, highlighted by the tawdry Mark Robinson affair, is the logical conclusion of a Republican Party that long-ago left the reality-based community. It is now a bawdy circus of sickness and a barnyard of broken people who traffic in strange conspiracies and dangerous lies. The only cure for this calamity is voting for Kamala Harris.
Wayne Besen is the executive director of Delray Beach-based LGBTQ nonprofit organization Truth Wins Out. He is the former spokesperson of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ rights organization.
