Mark Robinson is many things: the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, the Republican nominee for governor, and a bigot. But the key to understanding him is that he is a poster.
The poster is an internet creature—the sort of person who just can’t resist the urge to shoot off his mouth on Facebook or Twitter or in some other online forum. (For example, the message boards on the porn site Nude Africa.) These posts tend to be unfiltered and not well thought out. Sometimes they’re trolling. Sometimes they’re a window into the soul. The imperative is just to post.
Robinson is a particular flavor of poster familiar to almost anyone who is Facebook friends with an extremely online, right-wing Baby Boomer, a curmudgeon who is upset about new cultural currents and airs his conservative and sometimes conspiratorial views for anyone to hear—or, more likely, to simply scroll over and ignore. (And it’s always Facebook.) This type of Boomer poster is common. What’s unusual is for someone like this to make the jump from Facebook oddball to gubernatorial nominee.
[David A. Graham: The GOP should have drawn its Mark Robinson line long ago]
As I explained in a May profile of Robinson, he made that jump in what must be record time. In 2018, he gave an impromptu speech to the city council in Greensboro, North Carolina, defending gun rights. A video of the remarks went viral, and two years later he was elected lieutenant governor in his first run for office.
Robinson’s hopes at becoming governor of North Carolina dimmed yesterday with a CNN report about his truly disturbing posts on Nude Africa. He called himself a “black NAZI” and said he wished for slavery to come back. He also wrote about relishing transgender porn, although he has railed against transgender people as a politician. Robinson was already trailing the Democratic nominee, Josh Stein, in polls, partly because of a long trail of offensive comments prior to this.
In an interview with CNN, Robinson denied that he’d made the posts, and suggested they were an AI hoax. “This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me,” he said. The problem is that they sound exactly like him: Intentionally provocative remarks about race, anti-Semitism, and attacks on Martin Luther King are all in his record. (That’s not to mention characteristic phrases like “gag a maggot” and “I don’t give a frogs ass.”)
[David A. Graham: Mark Robinson is testing the bounds of GOP extremism]
Even if Robinson genuinely made the comments, the things he says in them seem dubious. (Robinson is a huge fan of professional wrestling, which is premised on exaggerated tales and made-up backstories.) Consider some of the most lurid material. Robinson recounts finding a way to peep on women in showers when he was in high school. “I came to a spot that was a dead end but had two big vent covers over it! It just so happened it overlooked the showers!” he wrote. “I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered.”
Perhaps this really happened, but it sounds more fantasy than reality. This is the sort of thing that happens mostly in teen-sex comedies and Gay Talese books. (I emailed Wayne Campbell, a high-school friend of Robinson’s, to ask if he knew anything about the alleged incident. “CNN is pushing garbage about my great friend, Mark Robinsonn,” he wrote. “The stories are completely false. Any intelligent person can see this is simply mudslinging and character assassination.”)
Robinson also writes in several excruciating posts about supposed sexual encounters with his sister-in-law. I have no insight into Robinson’s marriage, though Politico reported yesterday that his email address was registered on Ashley Madison, a site for people seeking extramarital liaisons. But fantasies about sisters-in-law are apparently common, and the writing in the anecdotes is, well, not convincing. It reads like a randy teenager trying to replicate the tone of Penthouse “I can’t believe it happened to me” letters, but updated for the coarseness of a porn message board.
[David A. Graham: Mark Robinson is already making new promises to veterans]
Earlier this year, I read through Robinson’s Facebook history, going back years. (For whatever reason, Robinson never deleted his old posts and left them public, providing a jackpot for opposition researchers.) Occasionally, his Facebook friends would try to argue with him; more occasionally, they’d agree. But mostly they seemed to respond with affectionate eye-rolling: There goes Mark again. Reading the porn-forum posts reminded me of that. There goes Mark again, indulging his fantasies.
Robinson’s sexual life is his own business, and he’s welcome to it. The problem is that Robinson doesn’t take the same approach to others. He is a hardliner on abortion, having long called for a complete ban. He’s also been outspokenly critical of LGBT people, deriding transgender rights and calling homosexuality “filth.”
Robinson’s racism, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust denialism, among other things, can’t be so easily excused as personal sexual predilections. But they would have remained hateful comments by some random guy if Robinson hadn’t decided to run for office so he could establish his own views as government policy. He’s just a poster on the internet, and he should have stayed there.
theatlantic.com