North Carolina may be the nation’s largest exporter of right-wing nut jobs to Washington. Yesterday, a guy from Grover drove to DC claiming to have a bomb in his truck and threatened to detonate it unless Biden resigned. Back in 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury shot up Comet Pizza in an attempt to break up a fictitious child sex trafficking ring supposedly linked to John Podesta and other prominent Democrats. So far, thirteen idiots from North Carolina have been charged in connection with the January 6 insurrection. And, of course, Madison Cawthorn is a sitting Member of Congress. 

All of these losers are products of Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and the disinformation campaigns circulating on the internet. They are also who the GOP is scared of offending. None of the Republican Members of Congress from North Carolina supported the January 6 Commission. Instead, they’ve pandered to Donald Trump for fear of alienating a base that believes socialism and immigrants are taking over our country and that Biden’s presidency is illegitimate. 

In Congress, Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama issued a statement essentially sympathetic to the would-be bomber saying, “I understand citizenry anger directed at dictatorial Socialism and its threat to liberty, freedom and the very fabric of American society.” The Republican leadership has so far been silent in response to Brooks’ statement. They don’t want to upset other rank-and-file Republicans who might agree with the sentiments of the guy from Grover. 

Brooks is like another North Carolina export to Washington who encouraged extremism. Jesse Helms also understood the frustrations of White radicals who worried about the end of their world at the hands of “Negro hoodlums” and communism. He called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in Congress.” He opposed the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, accusing King of “communism, socialism and sex perversion.” He supported apartheid in South Africa. Republicans didn’t rebuke Helms, either. Instead, they made him a hero and still won’t reject the racism on which he built his career. 

North Carolina has a long and sordid history of right-wing extremism. We had the largest Ku Klux Klan in the country during the 1960s. We spawned Glenn Miller, the KKK leader who went on to kill three people at a synagogue in Kansas City. While Republicans will denounce the most vile actions of these extremists, they won’t denounce the reasons for their actions. They may decry the use of a bomb threat but they won’t contradict the false notions that socialism is taking over the country or that immigrants are causing the spread of COVID. And they won’t disavow the notion that Donald Trump’s election was stolen. Their silence just encourages more nut jobs to act out their distorted fantasies.

Thomas Mills

Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >