As you may be aware, the North Carolina gubernatorial race has been in the national spotlight the past few days.
I appeared today on Ian Masters’ Background Briefing program to discuss the latest Mark Robinson revelations and what Robinson’s increasingly disastrous campaign could mean more broadly for political races in the Tar Heel state this year, including the presidency.
You can listen here:
Below, I’ll reprint some of what I wrote about Robinson in March. First, I’ll just add a few tidbits from the CNN story that dropped on Thursday, which alleged that Robinson posted regularly between 2008-2012 at a porn site called Nude Africa, under the handle minisoldr. Robinson has denied authorship of the posts, which were deleted over the weekend, insisting that the minsoldr musings are not his. You can decide for yourself whether his denials are credible.
CNN would not publish the most salacious sexual fantasies Robinson shared at NudeAfrica, though you can find those online readily enough.
But it did share his political thoughts, including his self-description as a “Black NAZI,” praise for Mein Kampf, especially offensive comments he hurled at Martin Luther King, Jr., wistfulness about not being able to join the KKK, and, perhaps the topper, that “[s]lavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few…”
What’s worth emphasizing, again, is that while these latest revelations are particularly scurrilous and scandalous, they are entirely in keeping with Robinson’s history of deeply offensive, often unhinged comments, most of which was well known in March when GOP primary voters overwhelmingly selected Robinson to be their nominee for governor.
At the time, despite Robinson's extremism, it was widely assumed that the race would be a close one between him and the Democratic nominee, the two-term North Carolina Attorney General, Josh Stein. North Carolina is, after all, a closely politically divided state in which Republicans have largely had the upper hand over the past decade or so.
But as North Carolinians began to pay closer attention to the race over the past couple of months, and as Robinson continued to make outrageous comments, including intoning from a church pulpit in June that "some people just need killing," the polls showed Stein with a high single digit or even double digit lead. Stein has a long track record in public office, whereas Robinson, the Lieutenant Governor, has essentially nothing to run on other than his history of inflammatory rants.
Robinson’s campaign appears to be taking on water - just today several top Robinson campaign officials resigned. There is reason to be hopeful that Robinson will lose, perhaps decisively in November. But that he’s in this position at all is emblematic of the particular pathologies of the Trumpified GOP.
From March:
Here’s a small sampling, really only the tip of the iceberg of Robinson’s repeatedly professed beliefs (take a deep breath before you started reading the following):
Robinson has variously called survivors of school shootings “prosti-tots;” called LGBTQ+ people “devil worshipping child molesters,” “filth” and same-sex relationships a “filthy abomination. He says he’d accept “gay pride” when liberals accept “white pride;” ranted about how the “liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘six million’ Jews they murdered (the scare quotes around “six million” are Robinson’s) — presumably as some sort of Soros-ian plot to silence conservatives. He has repeatedly referred to Michele Obama as a man (and ranted endlessly in the most hateful terms about trans people generally); defended Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby against what he believes is a leftwing conspiracy to defame them; intoned that “we are called [by God] to be led by men,” not women; mused that DACA (the acronym for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) stands for “Dumb Ass Communist Americans;” excoriated Black people as exclusively responsible for the poverty and violence in their neighbors and disavowed membership in a community he says “sucks from the putrid tit of the government and then complains about getting sour milk…;” And so on….
Robinson is now 55. So, these musings are not the product of youthful indiscretions. Instead, they reflect Robinson’s beliefs as a fully formed adult. In recent months, as he was gearing up to run for governor, Robinson has kind of/sort of apologized for some past comments (with the usual “poor wording” defense), notably in connection with statements — like the above comment about media coverage of Nazism — widely deemed antisemitic. He visited Israel after Oct. 7, to show support for Jews (his opponent, Stein, is Jewish). He’s otherwise not shown any contrition. Instead, he’s now complaining that he himself is a victim of liberal racism, part of his effort to deflect, downplay, disavow and distance himself from his hate-filled history. But the important point to understand about his social media oeuvre is that all these utterances aren’t incidental to Robinson’s appeal. In fact, his grievance-filled rantings, especially because they’re coming from a Black man, are precisely what has made Robinson such a star with the base of his party, the man Donald Trump has proudly called “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Indeed, Trump’s description itself reflects the kind of deliberately incendiary provocation that has become the hallmark of the GOP. Robinson has emerged as a demagogue par excellence precisely by mimicking that provocation-for-provocation’s-sake approach, viciously attacking the groups that have become the main target of the Republican Party and reveling in their hurt.
In 2020, in a kind of reductio ad absurdum of what the Republican Party has devolved into, the GOP dispensed with even bothering to write a platform to accompany Donald Trump’s renomination for president. Instead, they affirmed that whatever Trump says and does is the parry’s agenda. In turn, Trump mainly outsourced his presidency to conservative forces like the Federalist Society.
Robinson is likely a more avowed culture warrior than is Trump, who cares about literally nothing except himself. But a Robinson governorship will look much the same as a Trump presidency, except with the full cooperation of the [GOP controlled] legislative branch. As the NC political observer Thomas Mills has put it, the emergence from the March 5 primaries of Robinson and his ilk on the NC GOP ticket sends a clear message: “governing is unacceptable in the party of Trump. Burn it down or go home. The most favored candidates are those who have no track record of doing anything other than burnishing their MAGA credentials.”
As Governor, Robinson can be expected to spend four years directing the state legislative and executive apparatus against those he hates. Like Trump on the national level, Robinson has been telling North Carolina exactly what he’d like to do to the objects of his venom, if he’s ever given the chance.