North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson told a Philadelphia audience on Sunday that dictators like Hitler and Mao are being taken out of context and that their texts are worth reconsidering, The New Republic reports. Robinson was one of several speakers — including 2024 presidential candidates Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley — at the second annual summit for Moms for Liberty, a parents-rights group that the Southern Poverty Law Center recently deemed a political extremist organization.
"And here's the thing: Whether you're talking about Adolf Hitler; whether you're talking about Chairman Mao; whether you're talking about Stalin; whether you're talking about Pol Pot; whether you're talking about Castro in Cuba; or whether you're talking about a dozen other despots all around the globe; it is time for us to get back and start reading some of those quotes," Robinson, who has previously called communism a greater threat to the world than Nazism, said of the figures, most of whom were communists.
Robinson's remarks are not the first time he or Moms for Liberty have cited Hitler. The North Carolina official, who assumed office in 2021, has a history of spewing antisemitic, anti-Black and homophobic rhetoric online. Talking Points Memo, in a deep report into the last seven years of Robinson's Facebook activity, discovered he posted false claims about the 2020 election, conspiracy theories and Holocaust denialism. Two weeks ago, Moms for Liberty also came under fire after an Indiana chapter included a quote from Hitler in its newsletter. Though the group issued an apology and, at first, attempted to justify their inclusion of the quote by adding context, they removed it altogether after receiving a barrage of criticism.
