“Instead of a war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.”

-Tupac Shakur, “Changes,” 1996

In that one lyric tucked into a song that eloquently expressed Clinton-era Black rage, Tupac Shakur said more about the burden of systemic racism than North Carolina Lieutenant Governor has at any point in his tenure in public life. Yet it was because a teacher suggested Tupac as a superior subject for a Black History Month book report rather than Robinson himself, that our obstreperous L.G. decided to launch a witch hunt against North Carolina teachers. Personal pique, political opportunism: the arrows in the quiver of a charlatan.

Robinson rolled out his crusade against “indoctrination in public schools” with a press conference in Raleigh yesterday. Accompanied by the ever-loyal Superintendent of Public Instruction Catherine Truitt (herself prone to Trumpian tirades), Robinson described a set of largely nonsensical complaints he had receive from parents across the state. Much of it had to do with teaching race and racial history, and making students uncomfortable in an attempt to broaden their social horizons. Robinson added a healthy dose of gay-baiting and religious demagoguery to his demagogic stew. All in all, it was preposterous and unworthy of the state’s second-highest executive official.

Equally clear was the constituency for Robinson’s new campaign: white, fearful evangelical voters. These people have viewed public schools with suspicion and loathing ever since the mid-century era of desegregation and the expulsion of sectarian religion from the schools of a secular republic. Many of them are still angry that the U.S. Supreme Court banned school prayer in 1963 and disdain having to send their kids to schools with “rough” populations. That’s why homeschooling and effectively all-white private academies have boomed in the South for decades–driven by the insecurity of evangelicals threatened by change.

Thus, Robinson is playing to his base, attempting to solidify the loyalty of core Republican voters–all white, mostly evangelical, afraid of the 21st century–in preparation for his inevitable shot at the governorship. His ravings will fall flat with the majority of North Carolinians, who trust and count on public schools, but they will burnish his image as a “fighter” with the MAGA crowd that he must have on his side if he is to clear the field for governor. (Dan Forest: you’re on notice.) But at the same time it places him even further outside the mainstream of a state that is conservative-leaning but consistently hostile to the prospect of an ideologue in the Governor’s Mansion.

But the true impact here will be to further demoralize our education workforce. Teachers have taken one blow after another ever since Republicans took the General Assembly in 2010–lagging pay, the loss of tenure and master’s degree supplements, rhetorical demonization by leading Republicans. Now they are being scapegoated not only as lazy “government” employees with long summer vacations, but as the perpetrators of a secular-socialist–indeed Marxist–plot to manufacture a generation of radicals in the Tar Heel State. It’s utterly unserious in intellectual terms but the effect on teachers already streaming out of the profession will be very real indeed.