First Black Lt. Gov of NC Goes Scorched Earth on Cartoon Depicting Him as KKK Member
North Carolina’s Republican lieutenant governor verbally annihilated an NBC News affiliate for its race-baiting depiction of him as a member of the Ku Klux Klan simply because he opposes the left’s condescending infantilization of minorities as perpetual victims.
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who is black, slammed the tone-deaf race hustling of WRAL-TV in Raleigh after it published on its website a cartoon portraying Republicans as the KKK, the white-supremacist hate group founded by Democrats in 1865.
“It’s something we cannot stand for, folks,” Robinson said at a news conference Tuesday.
“That cartoon doesn’t really bother me,” he said. “What bothers me is the hypocrisy behind it. That’s what bothers me. That you would portray a black man — just because he’s in the GOP — as a Klansman. …
“The hypocrisy is mind-numbing, folks. And I’m here to tell you right now, this office is not going to stand by and let it go by, and I’m not going to go along to get along. I’m going to call them out on it every time.”
“By the way, it wasn’t anybody in the GOP that promotes the Ku Klux Klan and the ideals thereof,” Robinson said. “I can tell you who did that.”
In the cartoon by Dennis Draughon, Capitol Broadcasting’s editorial cartoonist, an elephant (the symbol of the Republican Party) is shown wearing a KKK robe labeled “GOP members state school board.”
Robinson is a member of the North Carolina school board, so the racist jab was aimed at him even if it didn’t mention him by name.
The lieutenant governor has come under fire from Democrats for opposing North Carolina’s new “inclusive” education standards, which teach that the United States is built on a foundation of “systemic racism.”
Today WRAL released this cartoon depicting our Lt. Governor, Mark Robinson as a Klansman because he won’t bow to the leftist anti-American agenda they are pushing in our schools! pic.twitter.com/RhJ8SiIuI6
— Tracy Philbeck (@tracyphilbeck) February 3, 2021
Robinson said indoctrinating students with such reckless propaganda in classrooms is divisive and anti-American.
“[It] will set the stage for agendas to enter the classroom that are blatantly anti-American,” he told Fox News.
Robinson said that while racism does exist in the United States, it’s ridiculous to say the entire nation is so infested with “systemic racism” that it prevents black advancement.
He noted that if systemic racism were as pervasive as Democrats repeatedly claim, he wouldn’t have been elected lieutenant governor. Reminder: The U.S. recently elected a black man as president — twice.
“There are racist individuals in our society right now,” Robinson told Fox News. “There have been racist individuals in our society in the past. And there will be racist individuals in our society in the future.
“But our system of government, our Constitution, our founding documents have always stood the test of time to stand against racists and racism. That has always been the way that we have fought against racism — with the words of our Declaration of Independence and the substance of our Constitution.”
Robinson joins a growing number of black leaders who reject the left’s fetishization of black people as helpless victims who need to be rescued by self-flagellating liberals with pathological white guilt.
Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, said Democrats and the left-wing media love to sow racial resentment because the grievance-mongering industry is a lucrative gravy train.
“When people start to talk about ‘systemic racism’ built into the system, what they’re really doing is expanding the territory of entitlement,” Steele — who’s half-black and half-white, like former President Barack Obama — told Fox News host Mark Levin.
Steele said the left’s espousal of the “systemic racism” ruse engenders a welfare mentality that has metastasized into an entitlement complex where minorities constantly demand that society give them stuff because they’re “victims.”
He characterized this entitled mindset as: “We want more — we want society to give us more — to help us [because] society is responsible for us.”
In reality, Steele said, all of this is a big, fat lie being peddled by the left to sow division in order to maintain power.
“The truth of the matter is, blacks have never been less oppressed than they are today,” he said. “Opportunity is around every corner.”
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.