While speaking at a parental rights summit, North Carolina Lt. Gov. and gubernatorial hopeful Mark Robinson suggested that school instruction about former communist and socialist leaders might draw young people’s interest away from those political ideologies.
Robinson made an appearance at the Moms for Liberty “Blessings of the Liberty Breakfast” in Philadelphia over the weekend.
The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies Moms for Liberty as a far-right organization that self-identifies as a modern parental rights movement. The group vehemently opposes LGBTQ+ school instruction and racially inclusive school curricula and routinely advocates book bans. They also challenged public health regulations enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The weekend-long event also hosted other speakers like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, and Asa Hutchinson, all of whom are 2024 Republican presidential candidates.
An earlier clip of his speech that didn’t include part of Robinson’s remarks where he denounced the dictators he named went viral and ushered in a wave of backlash in which people thought he was backing the views and actions of these leaders and war criminals.
“Whether you’re talking about Adolf Hitler; whether you’re talking about Chairman Mao; whether you’re talking about Stalin; whether you’re talking about Pol Pot; whether you’re talking about Castro in Cuba; or whether you’re talking about a dozen other despots all around the globe; it is time for us to get back and start reading some of those quotes,” Robinson said during the event.
“It’s time for us to start teaching our children about the dirty, despicable, awful things that those communist and socialist despots did in our history.”
Though he appears to condemn the actions and beliefs of these dictators, Robinson has a history of sharing anti-Black, homophobic, and anti-Semitic content on his social media platforms, which has drawn fierce scrutiny and criticism. Those posts were also accompanied by several conspiracy theories, 2020 election falsities, and even the denial of the Holocaust.
He’s also compared some of his opponents who are also vying for the North Carolina governor’s seat to Hitler and proclaimed that the U.S.’s current political climate resembles Nazi-era Germany.
Robinson, the current Republican frontrunner for the North Carolina gubernatorial election, was also a vocal opponent of the teaching critical race theory in the state’s public schools.
Critical race theory is an academic framework that examines how systemic racism is embedded in institutions and structures. It is usually taught at the university level.
Robinson said he believed teaching around CRT would “indoctrinate” children to hate themselves and the country.
“America’s still the place of dreams for everybody. It’s still the greatest nation on earth. We want to teach that to our children,” in a July 2021 anti-CRT video.
“That’s why ending indoctrination in schools is such a passion of mine. We have got to ensure that things like critical race theory are not creeping in and causing our children to hate the nation that they live in,” Robinson continued.
A recent poll shows he’s in a neck-and-neck race with Democratic candidate and state attorney general Josh Stein but just might best him in the general election. He endorsed Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential run. The former president is expected to return the favor ahead of the primaries and throw his weight behind Robinson in his run for governor.
