Episode # 151--Hate, Robinson, Trump, the GOP and Election 2024

Shammai's Episode No. 151
We need to take the issue of hate very seriously as we approach the Election 2024 finish line, because of North Carolina Gubernatorial Candidate Mark Robinson’s long well-documented history of hateful rhetoric, including outrageous Holocaust denial comments and statements wishing Adolf Hitler was still alive. We also have to take very seriously the support Donald Trump has given him, at least up until yesterday, including hosting a fundraiser for him at Mar-A-Lago earlier this year, and calling him a rising Republican star. And we also have to take very seriously the support the GOP has given him and still does. Finally, we also have to take very seriously the support and the hate Robinson, Trump, and the GOP nationally are running on. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Transcript

Shammai's Episode No. 151: Hate, Robinson, Trump, the GOP and Election 2024

Welcome to Keep the Faith, the podcast in which contemporary issues are explored through the prism of Jewish law and tradition.

This week, the “contemporary issue” is hate, and there really is no reason to spend time going over what Jewish law has to say about hate because that should be obvious. So I’ll begin with a short form of Judaism’s view. From the Torah on, hate is forbidden in all its forms, not just our feeling hatred for someone else, but even more so for encouraging others to hate.

One of our earliest Sages of Blessed Memory, Antigonus of Socho, put it this way in the Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of Our Fathers. Said he, “Serve [God] out of love [for God], so that if you are moved to hate [someone], know that you love, and a lover does not hate.”

Another early Sage, Joshua ben Perachiah, said simply, “Judge every person favorably." What he meant by that is that if we try to understand others rather than jumping to negative conclusions about them, we can avoid unnecessary hatred and build compassion.

Yet a third one of these early Sages, Nittai the Arbelite, added to that by saying, “keep a distance from an evil neighbor, [and] do not befriend the wicked.”

We need to take the issue of hate very seriously as we approach the Election 2024 finish line, and especially Nittai the Arbelite’s warning to “not befriend the wicked,” which is what we will do if we vote for people who spew hate and who encourage others to hate, as well.

 And so the topic for this week is Mark Robinson, Donald Trump, the GOP, and the hate they’re running on.

We keep hearing what I consider some truly ridiculous and at times even hateful comments from among too many myopic Jewish voters these days. Among them:

“Joe Biden doesn’t like Benjamin Netanyahu, but we do, so let’s vote for Donald J. Trump and the GOP on November 5th.”

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her squad are antisemitic, leftist progressives, so let’s vote for Trump and the GOP on Election Day.”

“If Biden wins, that progressive, anti-Israel, antisemitic Kamala Harris will be president. No way! Let’s vote for Trump on Election Day.”

Aside from the fatuous nature of such comments, comments I’m sure many of you have also heard, they ignore the full impact on this nation—and on us Jews and all other religious minorities especially—of a Trump victory. They callously dismiss his oft-repeated pledge to turn America into a Christian nation, in essence, if not in fact. As he himself put it earlier this year, “We have to bring back Christianity,” and he wasn’t talking about normative Christianity, either. He means the extreme Christian Nationalist right. He also has brought the Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying extreme right into the GOP mainstream.

They also dismiss Trump’s intimations that if he loses on November 5th, there will be blood running in our streets, presumably from his extreme right, violence-prone supporters. Whether there will be, he said, “depends on the fairness of an election.”

And they also dismiss the fact that the GOP is 100 percent behind Trump’s existential threats to our nation as a whole and to us as Jews in particular. How else can we explain the steadfast support Trump and the Grand Old Party have given, for example, to North Carolina’s Holocaust-denying and rabidly racist Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s bid to be the Tar Heel State’s next governor?

Rep. Kathy Manning, a North Carolina Democrat and co-chair of the House Bipartisan Task Force for Combating Antisemitism, recently said this to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency interviewer: “The fact that we have a gubernatorial candidate in the State of North Carolina who makes antisemitic comments, who veers on Holocaust denial, is very frightening.”

Robinson’s Democratic opponent, I should note, is Attorney General Josh Stein, who is Jewish. North Carolina is very important in 2024. The state has voted Republican in 10 of the last 11 presidential contests. In 2020, it was the closest state in the nation that Trump won, and Robinson’s controversial history almost certainly will be a factor on November 5th.

Taking that factor into consideration, at least some local GOP support for Robinson does seem to be eroding somewhat, but it’s too little and too late, because the deadline for replacing him on the North Carolina ballot passed at 11:59 p.m. Thursday. That erosion, though, if it actually grows in the remaining days of Election 2024, is not because of his antisemitic and other racially repugnant remarks, mind you, which are all on record, but because of a story CNN broke on Thursday. It reported that Robinson once referred to himself as a Black Nazi on a pornographic messaging board website called Nude Africa, of all things. There were two exclamation points after the word Nazi, by the way.

But so what if some GOPers in the Tarheel State are suddenly worried about the effect this will have on November 5th, as the Trump campaign is said to be? What took them so long? Antisemitic comments are nothing new for Robinson, and Trump and the GOP itself have known that all along.

Comments made by Robinson in 2021 were denounced by the Anti-Defamation League and by the Republican Jewish Coalition. Matt Brooks, RJC’s executive director, said at the time that Robinson’s “clearly antisemitic” comments “have no place in our society.” The GOP apparently disagreed.

Robinson in years past has said even worse things, though. In 2018, he posted this disgusting entry on Facebook: “this foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS [that word is in all-caps] this foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”

In another Facebook post the year before, in 2017, he wrote: “there is a REASON [also in all-caps] there is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered.” NAZI was also in all-caps, and 6 million Jews was in quotes, meaning that Robinson believes it’s a fake number.

He also wrote this in 2017, “I am so sick of seeing and hearing people STILL talk about Nazis and Hitler and how evil and manipulative they were.” Apparently, he didn’t think they were that evil and manipulative.

In another post that year, he went so far as to bemoan the fact that Adolf Hitler is dead while so many truly dangerous people are still alive. As he posted it, “George Soros is alive. Adolf Hitler is dead.” Soros, of course, is the Jew-hating extreme right’s go-to person when all Jews are meant. Robinson also said, “Thousands of left-wing liberal Marxist members of our media are alive (and brainwashing our societies). Adolf Hitler is dead.”

In 2012, Robinson was even more blunt. “I’d take Hitler over any of the [excrement] that’s in Washington right now!” I cleaned up that comment, by the way. Excrement was not the word he used.

Steve Schewel, the then mayor of Durham, who is Jewish and a Democrat, said this about Robinson some months ago: “I’m very used to the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric of the Trump wing of the Republican Party. But I haven’t heard very often the kind of antisemitism that Mark Robinson has added to that toxic mix.”

Robinson has often argued that his private opinions should be of no concern to anyone because “As a public servant, I have to put those opinions behind me and do what’s right for everyone in North Carolina. I’m grown enough to do that.”

As absurd a comment as that is, Robinson’s rhetoric all too often suggests that he hasn’t “grown enough to do that.”

For example, on Sunday, June 31, just days before Independence Day, Robinson spoke at a “God and Country Day” prayer service at a North Carolina Church. In his speech, Robinson was cheered on as he very pointedly called for killing many of the enemies of Christian America—killing them, not merely marginalizing them in some way. These “enemies,” as he called them, include those “making 1776 a distant memory,” which actually is what he and Trump propose to do.

Said Robinson: “Get mad at me if you want to. Some folks need killing….It’s a matter of necessity.”

He also said this: “There was a time when we used to meet evil on the battlefield. And guess what we did to it? We killed it. We didn’t quibble about it. We didn’t argue about it. We didn’t fight about it. We killed it.”

Robinson is considered a hero to the extremist Christian right, as well as the extremist right generally, and he’s beloved by the GOP. He was introduced to the church worshippers by a brief video that excerpted remarks he made at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority conference held in Washington, D.C., a few days earlier—an event that included Trump and other GOP luminaries. In that excerpt, Robinson attacked the nation’s media, one segment of the enemy crowd. Said he, “I don’t care about your plans and your schemes to bring this nation down, with your Democratic friends. Why? Because Jesus Christ is still on the throne!”

Robinson, in fact, has often claimed that he was born “to be one of God’s freedom fighters.” In one speech he delivered in 2021, he said he was born “to literally make war on the devil.....I want to make the literal foundations of Hell tremble.” In another 2021 speech, he called on Christians to “get as bold and unafraid and warlike in spreading the truth in this nation as these people have been in spreading the lies that are currently destroying it.”

Trump in the past has referred to Robinson as “one of the great stars of the party,” and said at another time that he was “Martin Luther King on steroids.” He said these things despite Robinson’s long history of antisemitic, Holocaust-denying, gay-bashing, slavery-supporting comments. Trump even hosted a fund-raising event for Robinson at Mar-a-Lago, at which Trump said this: “I think someday—hopefully I’m going to be around to see—someday we’re going to see that man at the highest position,” by which he meant Robinson sitting in the Oval Office. Trump added: “I got to know him so well and fairly quickly....I hope you can back him and write checks for him.”

If Trump got to know Robinson so well, as he said, that in itself speaks volumes.

On Thursday, Trump told the audience attending the Israeli-American Council national summit in Washington that, “I will be the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.” What this “best friend” of ours failed to do was say anything negative about Robinson or about the latest Robinson revelation, or even why he ignored all of Robinsons hateful comments over the years.

That North Carolina is a must-win state for Trump and the GOP is no excuse. That Trump failed to say anything about Robinson on Thursday and that Robinson apparently has been asked to stay away from a Trump rally in North Carolina on Saturday is somewhat understandable, though, but only somewhat, because if Robinson was to withdraw from the race at this point, he can’t be replaced and Josh Levy wins, so Trump and the GOP are stuck with Robinson all the way through to November 5th.

That the Republican Party itself remains committed to Robinson even now should not be a surprise to anyone because Trump himself says many of the same things Robinson has said, albeit in his own way.

Remember that Robinson told a church audience in June that “Some folks need killing….It’s a matter of necessity.” When demonstrations were held around the White House following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, Trump reportedly asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, to “shoot them in the legs or something.” Esper, in his 2022 memoir “A Sacred Oath,” insists that Trump was being serious.

Remember, too, that Robinson said that he wanted “to make the literal foundations of Hell tremble.” In a Truth Social post last November, Trump pledged to “demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists [the extreme right’s euphemism for Jews], we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists [by which he means both Jews and Democrats], we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will evict Joe Biden from the White House, and we will FINISH THE JOB ONCE AND FOR ALL!” That, he said, “is our final battle.” That certainly would make the literal foundations of Hell tremble.

Trump repeated those remarks almost verbatim in a 30-second video he released following the 34 guilty verdicts he received in his New York fraud trial.

Trump not only openly espouses extremist Christian nationalism, just as Robinson does, but he’s also made those beliefs a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign, just as Robinson has.

On February 22, when Trump spoke for over an hour to an overflow crowd of radio and television preachers and other Christian communicators at the National Religious Broadcasters convention, he said, “We have to bring back our religion.” Making no secret about his intentions for a second term, he added, “We have to bring back Christianity.”

In that speech, Trump promised to enhance the influence and power of Christian preachers in American life. “If I get in, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used before. With your help and God’s grace, the great revival of America begins on [Election Day] November 5th.” By “the great revival of America,” Trump means imposing Christian ideals on this country.

Trump has even promoted the absurdity that God chose him to turn America into a Christian enclave. He’s often even screened a 2-minute 45-second video, “God Made Trump,” at many of his rallies, and had it posted on his Truth Social website until very recently.

In that video, a narrated voice begins by saying that on the day Trump was born (June 14, 1946), “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a caretaker.’ So God gave us Trump.”

The narration then quotes “God’s” lengthy explanation for choosing Trump, including virtually everything Trump claims to have done or promises to do as president (although combatting antisemitism and anything about a secure Israel are suspiciously missing). Then “God” said, according to the video, “I need someone who will be strong and courageous, who will not be afraid or terrified of wolves when they attack…I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith….[And who finishes] a hard week’s work by attending church on Sunday.”

And that’s why “God gave us Trump.”

A great many people believe that Trump was indeed anointed by God. According to a May 2019 survey conducted for the non-denominational Religion News Service, nearly 30 percent of white evangelicals believe that, as do 53 percent of white Pentecostal Christians.

The video was viewed nearly 30,000 times before Trump’s Truth Social website deleted it.

In an August 2019 press conference, Trump said, “I am the chosen one.” He later said he was joking, but his energy secretary, Rick Perry, insisted on Fox News that Trump was serious.

Trump’s spiritual advisor—a role she says she took on in 2002 at God’s request—is the Pentecostal preacher, author, and televangelist Paula White-Cain. She has said she could never say no to a request from Trump because “saying no to President Trump would mean saying no to God, and I won’t do that.”

Trump rarely speaks the truth about things, but we really need to take it very seriously when he says, “We have to bring back Christianity.”

We also have to take seriously his backhanded comments about the violence that would ensue if he loses in November. As he told Time Magazine earlier this year, “I don't think we're going to have that [violence because] I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”

Be afraid, all of us, including those who revere Trump and the Republican Party.

Be very afraid.

This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I do hope you come back for my next podcast in two weeks, God-willing, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. Go to www.shammai.org—w-w-w-dot-s-h-a-m-m-a-i-dot-o-r-g—and email me, please.

 If you don’t get the Jewish Standard but want to read my columns, go to the columns page of my website. The latest column focuses on a despicable pre-Yom Kippur ritual that violates everything the Torah stands for—by which I mean the atoning chicken ritual, known as kaporos or kapparot.

 Especially with COVID-19 cases on the rise again throughout the U.S., flu on the rise, RSV plaguing us, as well, keep taking every precaution, no matter who tells you otherwise. Also, get fully vaccinated if you haven’t done so yet, including the latest COVID booster shots that are now available.

Shabbat Shalom. Stay healthy.

And stay safe.