Republican nominee for North Carolina Governor: "I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn't vote"
Mark Robinson's Bizarre Ramble: 'I Absolutely Want To Go Back To The America Where Women Couldn’t Vote'
What a stupid click bait headline. Here's the context of what he actually said:
Robinson said he would definitely return to the days in America when women were denied the right to vote “because in those days we had people who fought for real social change, and they were called Republicans.”
Totally reasonable to disagree with that take (I don't think it's accurate), but it is not at all what the headline implies.
"My party hasn't fought for people's rights since women's suffrage." There really isn't a good way to spin it.
Yeah, that's pretty much my point. You don't have to take the statement out of context for it to sound bad.
The headline is absolutely accurate. It would be like saying “We should go back to the days of slavery because that’s when states had rights,” and the headline read he said he wants to go back to the days of slavery.
He could have said “We should go back to the days when the republicans fought for people’s rights.” He didn’t.
Anti women’s suffrage rhetoric has been common from far right Americans for a while. I remember Ann Coulter saying explicitly that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, because they tend to vote for democrats.
When you look at the actual data, though, you see that while women tend to skew more democratic then men, white women voters had their majority voting for Trump. Going off of memory, it was somewhere around 52%. It’s African American women voters who vote above 90% for the dems, and African American men have a slightly lower rate but still have the vast majority voting D. I think they were in the high 70s to mid 80s last time I checked.
White men, on the other hand, break about 65% R. Again, I’m going off of memory here but that shouldn’t be too far off at the national level. That’s who the republicans want voting.
Of course the headline is technically accurate. Click bait always is. He did in fact say those words, but the actual meaning of the statement is clearly not what the headline is trying to convey.
To be clear, I'm not saying what he meant is correct either. It's not corrrct to most people. Which is why I have a problem with the misleading headline--the statement doesn't need to be taken out of context to show how dumb it is. Miscontruing the actual meaning just muddies the water.
I watched the video, and while it was stupid, he basically was saying he'd go back to when women couldn't vote so that they could give them the right to vote all over again. Also then continued to say if they want back to the days of lynching, they would end the lynching.
He was trying to say the Republicans should get credit for women's suffrage which is ridiculous, and is the weirdest way to do it, but it's not exactly as described.
I was on the fence about your take until I watched the video and he explicitly said the Republicans would give women the right to vote all over again because the Republicans were once the party that made womens suffrage happen, and also claimed they were the ones to send Jim Crow.
So fine, he awkwardly gave people a stupid quote in a way a more clever person would have made his point. His point then seems to become that the republican party is no longer that party, which seems pretty bad too. But you are right, he was trying to say he'd go back just so he could be a part of making it all better again.
I'm not sure, but the context was a choice between lynching black people or women not voting. Still not the best way to handle the question, but his hedge was claiming that Republicans then were more progressive (not sure that is what he actually intended to say).
Who makes a choice between lynching black people or women not voting? It's never come up in my long life's conversations.
Politicians are confronted by crazy people asking crazy questions all the time, and in these cases politicians are going to try and not directly confront the questioner, for many logical reasons. I don't know this person, they may be terible, but this is definitely taken out of context to create rage bait.
And in some brain numbing way, republican women will still vote for this piece of shit.
Let's not let the Republican men off the hook, either. They are just as smooth brained.
100% agree with you.