Rob Schofield, NC Newsline

Tuesday, Nov. 18, started out the way most other days had of late in the relatively brief life of Triangle-area resident Fernando Vazquez. Like so many children of immigrants who, despite being native-born American citizens, find themselves working alongside their parents at difficult, low-paying jobs that most of their fellow Americans are unwilling to take on — office cleaners, farmworkers, construction site helpers — 18-year-old Fernando showed up for work at a Cary construction site.

Unfortunately, it didn’t end in normal fashion.

As NC Newsline’s Brandon Kingdollar reported, while Fernando was walking back to work after buying a drink at a nearby store, he saw a group of masked men wearing dark glasses emerge suddenly from a group of unmarked SUVs that had pulled up to the job site. Within a few moments, they had cornered Fernando behind a fenced-off HVAC area in which he had been trying to evade their attention....

There’s a strong argument to be made that North Carolina Republicans have, for many years, not been serious about adhering to legal and constitutional norms when it comes to the state’s elections.

In 2016, former state Rep. David Lewis (a man later convicted of multiple felonies) proclaimed on the House floor during a redistricting debate that he and his colleagues had intentionally rigged a new U.S. House map to guarantee a 10-3 Republican majority in a deeply purple state in which Democratic candidates frequently win the most votes — only because, Lewis said, he couldn’t figure out a way to make the map 11-2.

Ever since then, GOP leaders have made it plain that winning and accumulating power are all that matters. Any subsequent statements about fair and honest elections were merely a smokescreen designed to provide a crutch for friendly judges overseeing inevitable post-election court cases and/or to con a distracted public....

Over the last several decades, few initiatives of the American political right have met with greater sustained success than the relentless crusade to capture control of the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court’s reactionary majority is, of course, the ultimate and most visible example of this success, but the ongoing effort to politicize and radicalize the judiciary has borne fruit in many places.

See, for example, the appellate courts in North Carolina where, thanks to the investment of big dollars and a whatever-it-takes-to-win approach to campaigning, Republicans have captured sizable majorities on the state’s Supreme Court (5-2) and Court of Appeals (11-4).

By spending millions of dollars and waging a determined and unabashed culture-war-based ground game that has helped spur conservative voters to action in bottom-of-the-ballot races that once were treated as nonpartisan, the GOP has transformed the state appellate courts through a series of narrow electoral wins into a rubber stamp for its gerrymandered legislative majorities. ...

The Bulwark — a national news and commentary website run by veteran conservative journalists, political strategists and commentators, including William Kristol, founder of the now defunct Weekly Standard — is reporting that it has unearthed more online comments posted by North Carolina Lt. Gov. and Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson in the years prior to his political career.

According to the report by the website’s White House correspondent, Andrew Egger, Robinson posted comments to an online news site in 2009 in which he advocated violence and attacked then-President Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Egger’s report highlights three comments:

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s campaign to be the next governor of North Carolina appears to be collapsing before our eyes. Last week’s bombshell report from CNN that Robinson had made a series of cringe-inducing comments on a pornography website in the years before he commenced his political career has sent Republican elected officials and candidates scrambling to scrub photographs and favorable mentions of Robinson from their campaign websites and social media accounts.

On Sunday, Robinson’s campaign – which was already trailing Attorney General Josh Stein in the polls before the story broke – announced a mass exodus of staff. By Sunday night, WUNC Radio reported that Robinson was down to having just “three people working on his campaign — two campaign spokesmen and a bodyguard.” On Monday, the Republican Governors Association cut off its financial spigot.

Had last week’s story broken earlier, it’s possible to imagine that GOP leaders would have put on a full-court press in an effort to force Robinson to abandon the race in favor of a substitute nominee. As a relative newcomer to politics, Robinson has few, if any, deep connections or personal ties to state Republican leaders of the kind that might generate feelings of personal loyalty. ...