RALEIGH, N.C.— Republicans are falsely being accused of instigating the transgender bathroom debate, state Rep. Dan Bishop from Charlotte, North Carolina, told The Daily Signal.

“This controversy nationwide has been a media-driven, ideological carpet bombing,” he said. “And I think a very dishonest one across the board. Everything that we’ve done has been distorted — so many falsehoods, outright falsehoods about what HB2 does.”

Along with the media, Bishop, a Republican, blamed a “new and dangerous kind of activism” for peddling the controversy over HB2.

“This entire event from the beginning to the end has been the most extraordinary display of a new and dangerous kind of activism,” he said, adding:

The appallingly-named Human Rights Campaign, HRC, they make the NRA [National Rifle Association] look like pikers in terms of their impact. And for 20 years, they’ve been deepening their influence over major corporations, they are just exceedingly aggressive. They can bring about a course of economic retaliation and attempt to elicit fear. That’s not the way you set policy. But they have had great success in doing that and to the detriment of North Carolina.

The Human Rights Campaign did not immediately respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

Watch the video for the full interview.

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