The Christian right has a new charismatic leader: Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina, who is running a bone-chilling campaign to become the state’s next governor. Most recently, he made news when he delivered a speech in a church saying some people who are “evil” or “wicked” might just “need killing.”

North Carolina is among the southern states that should be regarded as canaries in the coal mine for “state capture”: the process by which the far right is wresting control of U.S. politics in spite of representing a minority of the population’s views.

State capture is usually discussed in the context of international politics and countries with threatened democracies. Scholar Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett defines it as “a type of systematic corruption whereby narrow interest groups take control of the institutions and processes through which public policy is made, directing public policy away from the public interest and instead shaping it to serve their own interests.”

Right-wing state capture is increasingly a threat within U.S. states, which are systematically being taken over by Christian right leaders and their corporate and wealthy supporters through a combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression, organized and coordinated propaganda, and privatization. Public institutions that often serve as venues for free debate and social change — such as libraries and universities — are under aggressive attack.

North Carolina has been among the testing grounds for this approach, alongside states like Texas, Florida, South Carolina and Oklahoma. (just to name a few). Now Mark Robinson poses an imminent threat of pushing the state’s undemocratic policies to a new level.

Robinson came onto the political scene relatively recently, catching people’s attention with a fiery speech he gave on gun rights at a Greensboro City Council meeting in 2018. Since then, he’s been a splashy figure with a fast rise to fame: He is a Black arch-conservative known for calling education about sexuality and gender identity “filth,” calling Muslims “invaders,” tweeting about Holocaust denial and promoting anti-Jewish tropes, and spreading coronavirus conspiracy theories. Robinson, a former factory worker and army........

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