Dan Bishop wants to bring to North Carolina the chaos he took to Congress

In a presidential year, it’s hard for down-ballot candidates to cut through the noise and be heard, especially when your presidential nominee is melting down in public on a weekly basis. Credit to Michele Morrow and Mark Robinson for grabbing headlines by advocating for a military coup and reminding us that “some people just need killing.” It’s rare for a candidate for a position like superintendent of public instruction to garner national attention and, when they do, it’s almost never good. But who am I to judge?

With all that crazy, we’ve almost forgotten about Dan Bishop, the GOP nominee for attorney general. He might not be as loud, but he’s as far outside the mainstream as Morrow and Robinson and certainly deserves his due. He’s one of the most extreme members of Congress, aligned with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Lauren Boebert.

Bishop started his career in the North Carolina legislature as a conservative, but pretty mainstream, Republican. Somewhere along the way, he became radicalized, embracing online conspiracy theories and tweeting out radical nonsense. He’s flirted with white supremacists, promoted the Big Lie, and sided with Russia and Putin over the interests of the United States.

Bishop first gained notoriety as the sponsor of North Carolina’s bathroom bill. It was a big government bill that overrode a local ordinance saying people could use the bathroom of their choosing in public facilities. The resulting furor cost Charlotte the NBA all-star game and led to mass boycotts of North Carolina. Bishop seemed to revel in his notoriety, getting cheers from right-wing corners of the internet.

He was one of the early funders of Gab, the Twitter alternative for white supremacists. He bragged that his investment was supporting free speech, but then tried to say he didn’t know what kind of people were using the site after reports revealed the Pittsburg synagogue shooter regularly made antisemitic posts on Gab. If he didn’t know what he was funding, he should have because everyone else did. If he didn’t know, then he’s too ill-informed to serve in any office. Either way, his support of Gab should give real concerns about his sense of judgment.

In Congress, Bishop allied himself with the most extreme, right-wing members of the House of Representatives. He joined what the Wall Street Journal, no bastion of liberalism, called the Chaos Caucus whose most prominent members include bomb-throwers like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Paul Gosar. Bishop and his band of “egotistical performance artists,” as Karl Rove described them, threatened to let our government default on its debt, supported government shutdowns, ousted a Speaker of the House, and voted against sanctions on Russia. They’ve shown little interest in governing, instead playing to the cheers of their extremist online constituency and flirting with dangerous policies that could seriously damage the economy and credibility of the country.

In 2020, Bishop was one of the promoters of the Big Lie, voting against certifying the election and repeating unfounded allegations of voter fraud. If he’s willing to support overturning an election as a Member of Congress, just think about the damage he could do as attorney general. His role should be protecting North Carolinians, but he’ll almost certainly be siding with his extremist base. We don’t need a Pizza-gate guy running our Department of Justice.

Bishop should not be anywhere near the levers of power. The attorney general is a serious position that requires someone committed to the people of North Carolina, not a man seeking applause from the most extreme elements of the internet. Instead of building relationships with people in Washington who could help him as the state’s AG, his closest associate in Congress is Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Qanon-adjacent Georgia Congresswoman who famously theorized that California wildfires might have been started by “Jewish space lasers.” Nobody who is serious takes Dan Bishop’s friends seriously.

Bishop is no different from the other extremists on the GOP Council of State slate. He was radicalized online and he doesn’t want you to know who he is. He’s deleted his Twitter account where he made his most unhinged posts. Like Robinson and Morrow, he would prefer you don’t look at what he’s said and done in the past, only what he’s saying on the campaign trail. He won’t bring his ideological soulmates Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert to the state to campaign for him (even though Boebert did do a fundraiser for him in his re-election campaign for Congress). Instead, he’ll pretend, as will the rest of the GOP field, that he’s a traditional conservative when, in reality, he’s waiting to bring the same chaos to North Carolina that he brought to Congress. Dan Bishop would be a disaster for the state.