North Carolina GOP Candidate Wants to ‘Go Back to the America Where Women Couldn’t Vote’

Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for North Carolina’s gubernatorial election, said he wanted to go back to a time “where women couldn’t vote” in a video that resurfaced in the wake of his Super Tuesday victory.

The video, recorded at a Republican Women of Pitt County event in March 2020, shows Robinson when he was a candidate for North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, which he later won.

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In the clip, he says that he heard a man ask about the phrase “Make America Great Again,” which he posited implied the America where “women couldn’t vote” and “Black people were swinging from cheap trees.”

“I would say to him, if I was standing in front of him, ‘I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote,’” Robinson said.

He continued, explaining his reasoning: “Do you know why? Because in those days, we had people who fought for real social change, and they were called Republican.”

Robinson’s comparison is an outlandish take on an oft-repeated argument by the self-proclaimed “party of Lincoln” about standing up for values, despite the fact that today’s GOP differs greatly from the Republican party of 150 years ago.

“That’s the America we want to bring back,” Robinson said at the end of the clip. “We want to bring back the America where Republicans and principles and true ideas of freedom rule.”

Robinson is no stranger to making offensive remarks: before his foray into politics in 2019, he had a habit of posting on his personal Facebook screeds against Muslim invaders, calling Michelle Obama a man and quoting Hitler. Even after his election to state office in 2020, he continued to make hateful remarks about LGBTQ+ people.

Unfortunately for Robinson, we do not live in a time when women cannot vote in U.S. elections, and he will have to reckon with what North Carolina women make of his remarks.

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