By Alexander Jones

The titans of the market in North Carolina face a profound moral test. Situated in boardrooms in Charlotte and in lobbying shops on the streets snaking out from Raleigh’s Capitol Square, the North Carolina business establishment enters this election cycle tasked with deciding whether they will resume their historic role as caretakers of the public interest or yield to cynicism in an election that threatens to bring permanent damage to the state’s business climate. That’s because Republicans have nominated a ticket that could mark North Carolina as out-of-bounds for enlightened entrepreneurs for generations.

This is stark, dramatic language, but I fear that even the intensity of my words has failed to capture the risk that this year’s Republican ticket poses to North Carolina. We simply do not have the superlatives to adequately characterize the extremism that NCGOP voters invited into the public fray two weeks ago by nominating Mark Robinson for governor, Hal Weatherman for lieutenant governor, Dan Bishop for attorney general, and Michelle Morrow for superintendent of public instruction. They all represent far-fringe, anti-government paranoia that a decade ago was limited to conspiracy websites. If these people were to become the leading officers of North Carolina state government, it would communicate the message to the world that this state endorses views that are repugnant and frightening to the sort of people who make major investment decisions.

Mark Robinson, for example, clearly subscribes to a conspiratorial worldview in which Jews are scapegoats the mainstream institutions of American life threaten personal liberties. He has espoused some of the most radical claims often voiced against the American state. In previous social media posts, Robinson has stated that 9/11 was carried out by the U.S. government and described the Holocaust as “hogwash.” He recently roused Republican donors to resist federal law enforcement — an act of incitement not unlike the tirade that Donald Trump delivered before the terrorist attack on Jan. 6, 2021. With Robinson’s voice blaring through the bullhorn, physical violence against our government could emerge as a common occurrence in this state.

An atmosphere of far-right unrest can destroy a community’s business climate. In the 1960s, Birmingham, Alabama, became the site of so much white-supremacist terrorism that business interests began shunning a city that had earned the violent moniker “Bombingham.” In response to the murder of three schoolchildren at a Black church by Ku Klux Klansmen, the city’s thoroughly racist business establishment took action to curtail terrorist acts and restore a bit of the city’s reputation and business climate. The damage had become so severe, however, that the business community’s belated intervention hardly made a difference. Today, Birmingham is a diverse and progressive city, but few Americans know that because the shadow of Civil Rights-era brutality looms so toweringly over the city’s image.

Robinson and his radical compatriots threaten to do the kind of damage to North Carolina’s business climate that segregationists did to Alabama’s 60 years ago. For example, no young parent who was concerned for her children would move to a state whose public schools were superintended by a woman who posted a doctored photo of Barack Obama in an electric chair on her social media page. Who’s to say that Morrow’s venom would not inspire a mentally unstable radical to commit violence against teachers? If North Carolina’s business elite is not considering the likelihood of extremist catastrophe, they are acting negligently in their role as civic leaders in a state where their opinion is held in high esteem.

Fortunately, there’s a precedent for local elites standing against the challenge of paranoid radicalism in North Carolina. Against an opponent of the Democrat running against Robinson, in fact. In the mid-2010s, a conspiratorial filmmaker who called himself “Molotov” Mitchell ran for state Senate against now-Attorney General Josh Stein. Mitchell had invoked many of the same tropes against the federal government that Robinson trafficks in. But despite his Republican party-label and fiscally conservative views, the Research Triangle business community solidly backed Stein, helping him fend off an extremist who would have raised hell and caused havoc in the N.C. General Assembly. We need business to deliver an encore.

Alexander H. Jones is a policy analyst with Carolina Forward. He lives in Carrboro. Have feedback? Reach him at alex@carolinaforward.org.