Republicans are resorting to ahistorical nonsense in their attempts to shield former President Donald Trump from accountability.
Dan Bishop, a North Carolina state representative and GOP nominee for state attorney general, claimed a Manhattan jury finding Trump guilty of 34 felony counts is an injustice on par with what Black people experienced before the civil rights era. In that time, of course, many Black people were essentially prohibited from jury service and others faced lynchings.
“It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950 — if a person happened to be Black — in order to get justice,” Bishop, who’s white, said in a radio interview this week, adding: “And that’s what they did in New York. So it was fundamentally rigged.”
Bishop ranted on, saying Republicans ought to dispense with “unilateral disarmament” and engage in the “warfare” he falsely claims Democrats have waged against Trump. He suggested, for example, prosecuting “everyone who was involved in the attempt to take Trump off the ballot in Maine and in Colorado” on 14th Amendment grounds. Even widely respected conservative legal theorists such as retired Judge J. Michael Luttig, who served on the 4th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, said the arguments to remove Trump from the ballot were legally sound. But Bishop’s comments show his eagerness to wage war on liberals using the courts.
This is the guy Republicans want to be the top law enforcement official in North Carolina.
Bishop is a reminder that gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson isn’t the only far-right extremist nominated for statewide office in North Carolina. Along with Bishop and Robinson, there’s also Michele Morrow, the GOP nominee for superintendent of public schools.
Morrow has fashioned herself as a crusader against school discussions and literature referencing inequality, and she has a track record of promoting violent extremism.
[Morrow has] expressed support in 2020 for the televised execution of former President Barack Obama and suggested killing then-President-elect Joe Biden. In other comments on social media between 2019 and 2021 reviewed by CNN’s KFile, Morrow made disturbing suggestions about executing prominent Democrats for treason, including Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Hillary Clinton, Sen. Chuck Schumer and other prominent people such as Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates.
And here’s a video that went viral recently, of Morrow fearmongering about people heard speaking foreign languages in public.
Chad Brown, the North Carolina GOP’s pick to become secretary of state, has pushed the GOP’s bogus “election integrity” rhetoric following Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss, boasted about receiving a 2020 endorsement from hatemongering baseball legend Curt Schilling, opposes abortion rights, and thinks life begins at conception, and he’s promoting his campaign with a gun raffle. Sadly, much of this is standard-issue Republicanism these days.
There’s steep competition, but based on some of the candidates they’ve selected for statewide office, North Carolina is clearly in the running for having the most extremist-friendly Republican Party in the nation.
