Buck Newton is the worst of the South

The voice of raw bigotry

State Senator Buck Newton gives off the aroma of the Old South. His voice dripping with molasses and his mouth curled into a permanent good ol’ boy grin, he is the personification of how little has changed in North Carolina. His politics are as ugly as our history. In his relentless efforts to repress marginalized groups, Newton represents not only the worst of the North Carolina Republican Party but the worst of the South.

The outlines of Newton’s worldview are neo-Confederate. In his (blessedly unsuccessful) run for state attorney general, he promised to aggressively use the power of his office to frustrate the federal government’s efforts to police bigoted policy in North Carolina. This stance recalls John C. Calhoun’s theory of “interposition”: that state governments should stand between the federal government and the people and protect their rights from the federal colossus. As with the venerable slaver from South Carolina, Newton’s theory of federalism was really about protecting white patriarchy from efforts to protect social equality. He would undoubtedly have gone to court on issues like voting rights, LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights—always taking the side of privilege.

For a region dominated by conservative Protestants, the South is an intensely sexual place. The mind of the South, to borrow a term from the great social critic W. J. Cash, is laden with psychosexual neuroses about supposedly predatory Black men defiling virginal white women. Newton has adapted this patriarchal sexual paranoia to the age of LGBTQ rights. Constantly targeting trans people and unrepentant for his demagoguery about the Bathroom Bill, Newton and other conservatives conjure a fantasy of female trans people molesting women and girls. Taking this slander as his premise, Newton now wants to remove any recognition of trans identity from legal records in North Carolina. The Republican President of the United States has been found liable for sexual abuse. But Newton uses a false epidemic of trans sexual abuse to justify legally annihilating thousands of North Carolinians.

The agenda of Chair Newton’s Senate Judiciary Committee has included obliterating trans people from legal documents in North Carolina, encouraging paranoid evangelicals to ban books, and prohibiting racial equity initiatives on Juneteenth. He doesn’t advance this ugliness with the genteel mask of a Sam Ervin, the “constitutional racist.” Newton’s style is more with the raw and blithering demagogy of the Southern demagogue. Sneering at gay people, he once demanded that heterosexual North Carolinians “keep our state straight.” He responded with a vicious laugh to Senator Sydney Batch’s observation that banning gender-affirming care for teenagers would lead to young people committing suicide. That last grotesequerie reminded me of the South Carolina demagogue “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman’s frequent and flamboyant invocations of death. Southern bigots know lives are at stake.

Newton could at least have some manners. But he’s the kind of white man for whom Southern gentility is reserved for white people. He treats his Black and female colleagues with open disrespect. Senator Batch—a Black woman attorney—objected to his refusal to restore a legislative effort to protect women and children from Epstein-like abuse. “You’ve been around here long enough to know how this works, so the answer to your question is, respectfully, ‘no,” he said superciliously. She could hear hundreds of years of Southern white racists speaking in his voice.