And here's to you, Mr. Robinson

A hate-filled extremist emerges as a serious candidate for governor of North Carolina.

Mark Robinson, Wiki Commons

On March 5, Mark Robinson, the current lieutenant governor of North Carolina, easily secured the Republican gubernatorial nomination in the Tar Heel state, winning over 63% of the vote in a three-person field in the GOP primary. He’ll now face off against the Democratic nominee, Josh Stein, the state’s current two-term attorney general. Stein is a seasoned politician, having previously served in the North Carolina State Senate, a moderate who’s long been preparing to run to succeed the term-limited current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. As of today, the Stein-Robinson matchup is widely considered a toss-up. In a state in which Republicans already maintain a supermajority in the legislature, the prospect of a Robinson governorship is truly horrifying. That’s because, even in today’s Trumpified Republican Party, Robinson, who is Black, stands out for his extremism.

The lieutenant governor position in North Carolina has little real power. Robinson formally presides over the State Senate, but plays no meaningful legislative role. This is the first elected office Robinson has ever held. He has been a truck driver, furniture salesman and a pastor. He first gained notice in right wing circles beginning about a decade ago when he began obsessively posting hate-filled and conspiratorial rants on social media that read as a compendium of the most unhinged version of contemporary right-wing culture-war grievances. Given his limited political career otherwise, those rantings and ravings serve as Robinson’s primary record as a public figure, an essential guide to understanding what to expect from a Robinson governorship.

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):¹:

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 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.

1. The primary sources for this list are: John Oliver’s Sunday night segment on Robinson; Hannah Knowles’ Washington Post article; this Popular Information piece; Hunter Walker, for Talking Points Memo; this CNN report; Sarah Posner, for MSNBC;