Monday, October 21, 2024

The MAGA and the Gender Gap Thread -- Mister Robinson's Neighborhood

[Written 9/29/24]



It is surprising, and then when you think about it unsurprising that, after all the major Republican scandals that have turned out to be 48-hour stories, it is the Mark Robinson one that had legs. The establishment media has tried to pretend that this is about the Nazi/slavery comments, but those still contested (okay, technically still contested) remarks on a chat site years ago are not all that worse than what the man has said on the record, and often on mic, as recently as a couple of years ago. Given the widely circulated videos of Robinson endorsing white supremacy and denying the Holocaust, if the Nude Africa comments had been unearthed from some obscure chat room in the 90s, they hardly would've caused a ripple.

This is about the porn.

This is about the luridness, the hypocrisy, the creepiness, and the "you knew it all along" quality of the story. Robinson was one of the most hateful "moralists" of MAGA whose anti-abortion stance seems to have been based entirely on slut shaming. Even a cursory Google search will turn up numerous on camera claims that we only have abortion because women can't keep their skirts down. (That same Google search will probably reveal that Robinson actually admitted in an ad to paying for his future wife's abortion back in 1989, another story that disappeared from view within a couple of days.) These comments attacking female (and, as far as I can tell, exclusively female) promiscuity alternated with Holocaust denial and endorsements of white supremacy.

Mark Robinson is just the kind of judgmental misogynist that women suspect of being a porn addict, and, in a move that would have been to on the nose for even the most hackneyed of streaming series but which is right on brand for 2024, it turned out he wasn't just a porn addict, he was pretty much the creepiest and most hypocritical version imaginable. Even in the highly expurgated CNN article (which was very much a PG-13 edit of an NC-17 movie) we learned that his interests included fantasizing about his experiences as a teenaged voyeur, constructing elaborate sexual fantasies about his sister-in-law, and most of all (queue up Robinson's anti-LGBTQ comments here) transsexual porn.

The other reason that the Robinson story continues to have legs is that he refuses to drop out of the election, which tells you a great deal about today's Republican Party. A Trump-endorsed, own-the-libs candidate, the very idea of dropping out of the race for the good of the party is alien to him. Dickishness is so fundamentally ingrained in this movement as to be possibly its defining trait. Sometimes it can be viewed as a show of dominance. More often, it is nothing more than an adolescent need for attention. It is followed not that far back by a refusal to conform to conventional standards, mores, even consensus views of reality. Staying in the race, even when told that winning is impossible and that by not dropping, you are threatening Republicans up and down the ticket, is entirely in character.

One of the points we've been making in dozens of posts for more than two years now is that Dobbs has pushed us into unexplored political territory. Over that time we've had any number of data journalists and news analysts assuring us that they have it all figured out, that they have factored in all the new developments, and that we should trust them. They haven't and we shouldn't. When it comes to the impact on presidential elections of Dobbs and of the radically changed landscape of reproductive rights, N = 0.

We can't quantify or calibrate. The best we can do is try to keep track of what's going on and make a few very cautious assumptions about direction and the range of magnitude. With all that in mind, the Republicans are doing an extraordinary variety of things seemingly designed to drive women away from the party. There is no statistical basis for predicting just how big of an effect this will have, but it is difficult to see it being positive for the GOP in November.



PS And in case you were wondering. No, he's not going down quietly.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)