Matt Rourke/AP Photo
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Asheville, North Carolina, August 14, 2024.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson has reached another turning point.
Robinson, a 56-year-old internet edgelord and former furniture upholsterer, was elected lieutenant governor of North Carolina in 2020 despite an extremist public record that would be disqualifying if he’d applied to serve the state as a school bus driver. (With all due respect to our essential public bus drivers.)
His election, and electability, was premised entirely on an angry tirade about gun rights at a Greensboro, North Carolina, city council meeting in 2018 that went viral on right-wing media. He was furious about the supposed cancellation of a local gun show—even though the issue was already a moot point, since state laws make it near-impossible to cancel such shows, the Greensboro News & Record reported in April that year.
Moreover, there is absolutely nothing in Robinson’s résumé that qualifies him for his office, in any traditional sense. He lacks even the military career that many other Black conservatives have used as a stepping stone to national prominence in the Republican Party. And there’s plenty on the other side of the ledger.
In March, for example, Rolling Stone magazine ran a greatest hits list of Robinson’s “most reprehensible comments,” browsing through his “rich history of peddling bigotry” to find some of the most incendiary anti-Black, anti-Asian, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-woman, homophobic, transphobic, and purely hateful remarks. That includes comments and Facebook posts expressing approval for Adolf Hitler’s ideas; using slurs against Black people; suggesting gay people are less worthy than maggots; mocking Asian people’s accents; calling the teenage survivors of a mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, spoiled little “media prosti-tots”; and saying women are unfit for any leadership roles in society.
For several years, Robinson steadfastly refused to apologize or reconsider when questioned about his demeaning, dehumanizing, and insulting views of virtually every group in the country, save for white, Christian men. On the contrary, in most instances, Robinson doubled down. He explicitly declined to apologize or retract his bigoted description of gay and transgender people as “filth” in October 2021, for example; and he stood firm on his previous antisemitic and conspiratorial remarks denying the Holocaust and smearing Jewish bankers last October.
Somehow, none of this really affected Robinson’s political career. Until now. Things have apparently changed, hugely, since last Thursday.
Now, after CNN unearthed even more of Robinson’s free-ranging, heat-seeking hate speech, Republicans are finally attempting to distance themselves, and Robinson himself is taking a different tone for the first time in his sincerely unbelievable political rise—which may be coming to an abrupt end.
The September 19 CNN report revealed another series of appalling comments Robinson made on a porn website’s message board before his entrance into politics, under the online moniker “minisoldr.” That includes describing himself as a “black NAZI,” calling for reinstating slavery, and expressing his affinity for porn featuring trans women.
“Slavery is not bad. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few,” Robinson wrote. “I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! … And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!” the candidate said in another instance.
After CNN unearthed more of Robinson’s free-ranging, heat-seeking hate speech, Republicans are finally attempting to distance themselves.
Since then, Robinson has faced calls from within his own party to drop out of the race, including his state’s Republican treasurer commenting that he “fleeced” his donors and North Carolinian taxpayers. Almost all of his senior campaign staff have quit, including his campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, campaign finance manager, and his senior adviser. And the Republican Governors Association has decided that it won’t spend any more ad money to support Robinson, while staffers for presidential candidate Donald Trump are quietly hoping that he will quit, according to a New York Times report on September 20.
As a result, Robinson himself disclaimed his long history of flagrant bigotry for perhaps the first time ever in his political career. “Let me reassure you that the things you see in that story are not the words of Mark Robinson,” the beleaguered candidate said in a video posted to X. “You know my words, you know my character, and you know that I have been completely transparent,” he added.
Unfortunately, it’s far too late, in every respect.
We do, in fact, know Robinson’s words and character by now; and, by all appearances, Robinson will lose the race for governor. In fact, even before the latest scandal, Robinson was trailing Democratic candidate Josh Stein in 31 out of 33 polls taken between April and last week, according to Ballotpedia.
Still, even though Robinson may be a loser, he also represents the future of the Republican Party. He may be plainly hateful and unhinged, but his beliefs do not make him an outlier in today’s GOP.
For one thing, again, his only qualification is a viral rant at a city council meeting. But North Carolina Republicans liked what he said, and how he said it, and went on to nominate him for governor because he’s a hateful, unhinged bigot who approaches politics like an apocalyptic carnival barker.
After all, the CNN report is hardly much worse that what was already reported about Robinson, and he still maintained lockstep support from the party establishment. Take his anti-Black racism, for example.
CNN reported most prominently that Robinson called himself a “black NAZI” and expressed a longing to revive slavery; he also praised Hitler’s leadership, and unfairly maligned Martin Luther King Jr. and former President Barack Obama. Pretty reprehensible stuff.
Yet here’s Robinson referring to Black folks as “Schvartze,” a Yiddish slur akin to the n-word, in 2018, a comment that was covered well before the recent scandal. The Jerusalem Post reported in 2021 that an “array of North Carolina Jewish figures and the Republican Jewish Coalition have called on North Carolina’s lieutenant governor to apologize” for his comments—which also included antisemitic remarks—but Robinson refused. That Facebook post was still up as of Tuesday.
In 2017, Robinson “continuously expressed frustration with the removal of Confederate symbols and posted the flag” of the would-be white supremacist and pro-slavery nation on his page, according to a March 2023 report by Talking Points Memo. He has commented over the years that Black people have achieved little in this country, referred to them as “muddle headed negroes,” “apes,” monkeys, and a “steaming pile of human waste”; and has stated outright that he does not consider himself a part of the Black American community. Robinson’s previously reported comments also quoted Hitler, promoted the racist “birther” conspiracy against former President Barack Obama, and described Michelle Obama as a man, as Rolling Stone reported back in March.
Not much new on the anti-Black racism end, it would seem.
The CNN report also highlighted Robinson’s fond memories about a teenage episode of prowling and illicit voyeurism—when he secretly peeped on women in a public gym shower.
Yet Robinson also has a fairly well-known history as a general “perv,” as he put it on the porn message board. Just a few weeks before the CNN report, six different first-person eyewitnesses told North Carolina news site The Assembly that Robinson frequented porn shops in Greensboro throughout the 1990s and 2000s. One employee of the windowless, 24-hour stores said Robinson “came in as often as five nights a week to watch porn videos in a private booth.”
Robinson also used homophobic slurs frequently, and referred to Muslims as “little rag-headed bastards,” according to the recent CNN report. Again, pretty deplorable stuff.
Yet here’s Robinson calling LGBTQ people “filth” in 2021, likening being gay to “what the cows leave behind” and maggots, and saying straight people are “superior,” also in 2021. (A pastor who has also called heterosexual people “superior” introduced Robinson at a stump speech yesterday, after the recent uproar.)
And in 2017, he posted on Facebook that Muslim-majority countries are “pile[s] of rocks,” and said that all Muslims are sympathetic about terrorism and violence.
There was also Robinson’s apparent pro-abortion statements—despite his anti-abortion political stance. But this would be the same candidate who also released a TV ad in August admitting that he and his wife decided to have an abortion decades ago.
All of this raises an obvious question: Why are Republicans turning from Robinson now? It could be that this is just one freakish scandal too many, or the glare of the spotlight growing larger as we approach Election Day.
Or it might have to do with the affinity for trans women. After all, Robinson’s statement about his preferences in pornography is about the only thing that is meaningfully different from what’s already been reported about him. And conservative reporting and commentary seems to be focused on those particular allegations. Robinson’s statements about his sexual preferences for trans women have featured somewhat prominently, for example, in Fox News’ reports about the revelations, and in conservative radio host Erick Erickson’s show.
Make of that what you will.
Robinson may be plainly hateful and unhinged, but his beliefs do not make him an outlier in today’s GOP.
In any event, Robinson isn’t that much of an outlier in today’s Trumpist GOP. We’ve seen many similar candidates and current officeholders, it’s just that their language is coded, rather than openly hateful—and also they don’t have a dossier-length history of bigotry and internet posts that include their porn preferences.
Remember, for example, other Trump-endorsed candidates like Kari Lake, Madison Cawthorn, or Herschel Walker. Or consider the current Trump-backed Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who has espoused misogynist and homophobic beliefs and is now in hot water among conservatives because he has been linked to an Adult Friend Finder profile that sought “Men for 1-on-1 sex.” He’s also been sued multiple times for race discrimination, which may be a problem for some other potential voters.
Virginia Senate candidate Corey Stewart was backed by Trump in 2018 despite his ties to white nationalists and anti-LGBTQ hate groups. He lost and has since announced his retirement from politics.
Madison Cawthorn, who also had a history of racism and other disqualifying behavior, like a pattern of sexual misconduct allegations, lost a House re-election race in 2022, becoming one of the few incumbents to lose a primary race.
Former Colorado Republican chairman Dave Williams lost a House primary race in June, and was then ousted by his fellow Republicans from the party chairmanship in August, shortly after he and the state party posted “Burn all the #pride flags” on X. Williams was also accused of using party resources to promote his congressional run.
Kari Lake, the election-denying former TV anchor and Arizona Senate candidate, disparaged Latino migrants and has referenced the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, in addition to running ads featuring an extremist homophobic pastor, The Guardian reported in 2022. She also led anti-mask rallies during the COVID-19 pandemic, and called for imprisonment of her political opponents. Lake lost the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election, and she’s currently trailing her Democratic opponent in the Senate race, and losing support among many Republicans.
That’s just some of the people running for office.
Moreover, each of the first three speakers at this year’s Republican National Convention had a long and well-known history of racism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism: Sen. Ron Johnson, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene—and the self-described “black Nazi,” Mark Robinson.
This is the Republican political dilemma in 2024 and beyond. The party is quite likely to continue to front candidates like Robinson: unqualified people whose central offering is a passionate stance on “culture war” issues, and promises to further marginalize some group, or perhaps the majority, of American voters, because that’s what many of the party’s primary voters want, and it’s certainly what the party leader, Trump, wants. (Women, for example, have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980, and the turnout gap grows in each successive election.)
The party will also continue to deal with fallout and major losses due to the fact that those policies are quite unpopular, even among many red-state voters, and because many people who espouse a multitude of bigoted, hateful views also tend to have other disqualifying attributes, like an eagerness for political violence.
In short, Robinson is likely to lose because it’s quite difficult to actually win a majority of voters in any state when all you have on offer are plans to actively marginalize the social and political lives of much of the voting public, along with a side of insulting and degrading language toward a majority of people. He’s also likely to lose because his character and past are questionable, or simply disqualifying, for most voters, much like other noted bigots. Unfortunately, we will see many more failed candidates just like him from the GOP.
Republicans can try to distance themselves all they want, but it’s too late now. Robinson will almost certainly lose. And they won’t be able to create any real separation between the party and people like him going forward. His platform, which is mostly empty bigotry, is already a part of the core of the GOP.
