It sure would be nice if life were at least occasionally like an old movie. Especially those old-fashioned political stories like A Face In the Crowd, where all it takes to get rid of a slimy fraudulent political figure is (spoiler alert) leaving a mic open so the baddie’s adoring fans realize what an awful hypocrite they’ve been supporting, and they all reject their former idol.
But as we learned from the 2016 campaign and the “presidency” of Donald Trump, simply exposing the awful truth is no longer a surefire way to end their populist appeal. “Hey, he says what he thinks! He’s not afraid to be a little rough around the edges! I too think children should be taken from their parents at the border! Who doesn’t?”
What we’re saying is that we really hope yesterday’s jaw-dropping Associated Press exposé on North Carolina Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson will lead voters to reject him, but we’re not getting our hopes up.
Robinson, the current North Carolina lieutenant governor who hopes to become the state’s first Black governor, regularly says government safety net programs create a “‘plantation of welfare and victimhood’ that has mired generations of Black people in ‘dependency’ and poverty.”
Pretty standard GOP bootstraps macht frei talking points as far as it goes, until the story drops not just another shoe but a whole freakin’ Timberland outlet store on the reader, boots, straps and all.
Robinson also demonizes LGBTQ+ folks whenever he can, loves to “joke” that Michelle Obama is a man, and used to post antisemitic crap online before people were paying attention to him. Big surprise: Donald Trump calls Robinson “Martin Luther King Jr. on steroids.” Like King, Robinson is Black, after all.
Turns out that while Mark Robinson may play an enemy of public assistance on the campaign trail, Robinson and his family have done very well for themselves by running a nonprofit that distributed taxpayer-funded free lunches to needy kids in North Carolina, presumably making the poor kids dependent plantation residents.
The nonprofit, Balanced Nutrition, Inc., was founded by Robinson’s wife, Yolanda Hill, and gets all its funding — some $7 million since 2017 — from federal and state taxpayers. And as the AP’s dig into tax filings and state documents found, the nonprofit has in that time paid “at least $830,000 in salaries to Hill, Robinson and other members of their family.”
Thank goodness big government assistance helped at least one family improve its situation, hooray!
The income offered the Robinsons a degree of stability after decades of struggle that included multiple bankruptcies, home foreclosure and misdemeanor charges — later dropped — for writing bad checks. In Robinson’s telling, the financial turnaround provided by the organization also allowed for his ascent into the North Carolina government.
“Yolanda’s nonprofit was providing a salary for her that was enough to support us,” Robinson wrote in his 2022 memoir, noting its growth gave him the freedom to quit his furniture manufacturing job in 2018 and begin a career in populist conservative politics.
Why, it’s an even more impressive story about how conservatives live out their values than that time when Craig T. Nelson went on the Glenn Beck program to say he might just stop paying taxes because Barack Obama was throwing too much money at poor people who didn’t deserve it. “They’re not going to bail me out,” Nelson lamented. “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No. No.”
Robinson has made a point of telling voters that he “grew up poor,” the son of an alcoholic father (like mine!) who died when Robinson was still in elementary school (again, like my own adoptive father!). He talks often of how he went bankrupt and lost jobs, because life is a struggle. But you know what? He persevered and triumphed without any government help!
Apart from the help his wife’s nonprofit distributed to lazy takers, at least.
Fortunately, Robinson and his family were Personal Responsibility fans, at least as far as how he tells other people to take personal responsibility for their lives.
The couple declared bankruptcy three times from 1998 to 2003 and failed to file federal income taxes for five years until compelled to do so during bankruptcy proceedings.
They’ve left behind a trail of aggrieved creditors, including the Girl Scouts, court documents show. Among them was a former landlord whose wife was dying of cancer when the Robinsons shorted him $2,000 in rent, according to local news accounts and documents from a 2012 case.
A bankruptcy judge rejected their 2003 bankruptcy case after the Robinsons failed to make payments to their creditors that they’d agreed to in court. The case ended with Robinson and Hill having paid about $9,000 on about $71,000 in debt payments negotiated in bankruptcy court.
So much responsibility!
Thank goodness Ms. Hill started up her “nonprofit,” Balanced Nutrition, in 2015, and it was approved to manage a “joint state and federal program that reimburses day cares for feeding low-income children.”
Good thing Hill and Robinson didn’t similarly become dependent, because they were working hard! Or maybe not hard enough, because state regulators in 2020 noticed the nonprofit’s books were such a mess that they considered placing Balanced Nutrition on the state’s “seriously deficient” list.
A major issue, according to government emails obtained by The Associated Press, was a lack of documentation: missing menus, timesheets, prior approval for some expenses and confirmation of income eligibility for children receiving aid.
Another issue flagged in those emails: $134,729.23 in spending from last year that was not explained in documents Hill submitted to the state as part of annually required paperwork.
In an inspiring example of Republican devotion to the principle of Individual Responsibility, Ms. Hill in April responded to the investigation by moving to shut down the nonprofit, complaining in an email that the state was up to “some type of vendetta, be it personal or political.”
There’s so much more, like the salaries paid to family members, the raises Ms. Hill took whenever new pandemic funding became available, and the “$45,000 in minority women in business grants” Balanced Nutrition received, which only looks like DEI if you’re a mean liberal. Throughout, a campaign flack pops in from time to time to decry all of it as old news that Democrats and the media are just dragging up for no reason but to hurt an honorable man whose family didn’t want to stiff anyone dying from cancer, but had no choice, and that just shows he’s close to the struggles of ordinary people, you elitists.
As we like to say, read the whole thing and be whomperjawed.
Apropos of nothing, here is the website of North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, the Democratic nominee. Oh, no reason.
[AP / Photo (cropped): National Film and Sound Archive Of Australia]
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