ANOTHER GOOD OBSERVATION BY CONSERVATIVE DAVID FRENCH

My Sunday column was about Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina, and why MAGA keeps nominating corrupt and unhinged candidates for public office. A CNN report documented that Robinson had posted vile messages on a pornography message board, including messages in which he said he was a “Black Nazi” and “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few.” Robinson is denying the posts are his and is staying in the race. I’m not surprised:

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.

This has changed the composition of the party. While many decent people remain — and represent the hope for future reform — Trump’s Republican Party has become a magnet for eccentrics and conspiracy theorists of all stripes. In a sharp essay (which my colleague Ross Douthat also highlighted), Matthew Yglesias calls this phenomenon the “crank realignment.”

Speaking of MAGA, I was also a guest on the “Opinions” podcast to talk about why MAGA keeps sharing cat memes about Springfield, Ohio, long after the claim that Haitian immigrants were eating dogs and cats had been debunked. The short answer is that they’re having a great time. They love making decent people angry:

I knew that MAGA was going to take this torch and carry it as far as it possibly could. And they did it in that particular way that MAGA interacts with the larger world, with this sense of gleeful transgression. They have fun being outrageous. They have fun being provocative. They like to “trigger the libs.” What MAGA is very good at doing is turning around back to its own people and saying, “See, we struck a nerve.” They’ll use words like, “If you’re taking flack, it means you’re over the target.” And so they use the backlash almost as proof that they’ve hit a nerve and all of this just creates an endless process of doubling down.

The people who are in on the joke, the core MAGA people who are pushing the memes out, look, if it’s true, great. If it’s not true, who cares? They’re having a good time.