1. “Actually, Charlotte’s vote was a very little debate. They just had a lot of public speakers speaking for and against.”
Todd had just pointed out that Charlotte has been fighting this issue for some time. Last year, its city council rejected a similar antidiscrimination ordinance. But then voters elected new council members who campaigned on a pledge to pass this very law, and those elected officials followed through on their promise. It was an arduous, passionately argued process, and the voters spoke. Compare that to HB 2, which was unveiled, “debated,” and then signed into law in all of twelve hours.
As Todd retorted, “You guys debated for like ten seconds.”
2. “It was the left that brought about the bathroom bill, not the right in the city of Charlotte.”
Here McCrory was actually blaming Charlotte’s leaders for following through on their campaign promises. Weird thing for a politician to say.
3. “I walked into a buffet restaurant, an African-American buffet restaurant, and people welcomed me with open arms and said, ‘Thanks for protecting us.’”
McCrory, who worked at Duke Energy for nearly thirty years, is pitching himself as a protector of the working class from the amorality and political correctness of corporate America. Yep.
4. “A very powerful group called the, Human Relations, uh, uh, Human Rights Council … my gosh, they’re more powerful than the NRA.”
The Human Rights Campaign, which is the organization’s actual name, will be delighted to learn that it wields more power than the group that shut down gun control after Sandy Hook. Perhaps the HRC should harness it to push through the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which LGBTQ groups have been unsuccessfully pursuing for years.
5. “With all due respect to the Hollywood, the new Batman and Robin movie is playing in China.”
As we all know, The Hollywood is a very powerful outfit that forces all films to be screened in communist countries. We also know that the new “Batman and Robin movie” is actually called Batman v. Superman, and Robin isn’t in it.
McCrory’s point, such as it is, was that Hollywood’s opinion on HB 2 can’t be trusted because it deals with China, the second largest movie market in the world after the United States. His fellow Republicans have made similar arguments about, for instance, PayPal, which bailed on a planned expansion after HB 2. But remember Novo Nordisk, the company McCrory just praised for its $1.8 billion expansion in Clayton? It has three plants and offices in China.
Todd had the perfect response to this sentence, which sums up our thoughts on the entire interview: “OK.”