Mark Robinson Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight

By Zak Cheney-Rice, a features writer for New York  where he has covered race, politics, culture, and law enforcement

Of all the politicians in recent memory who have been caught saying horrible things in their past, few rival Mark Robinson in terms of sheer depravity. On Thursday, CNN reported that Robinson, North Carolina’s lieutenant governor and the Republican nominee for governor, was once a frequent commenter on a porn site called Nude Africa where, between 2008 and 2012, he labeled himself a “Black Nazi,” praised Adolf Hitler, yearned for the return of slavery, confessed to spying on showering women at a gym, referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as “Martin Lucifer Koon” and a “f*cking commie” who is “worse than a maggot,” and, though he has publicly characterized transgender people as satanic “filth,” described trans-themed porn as “f*cking hot.”

The story broke just 16 days after The Assembly reported that half a dozen ex-porn-shop employees in Robinson’s hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina, identified him as a regular patron during the 1990s and early aughts, when he spent “a good amount of money” on videos, one worker said, despite being in dire financial straits.

Robinson denied both reports, but CNN’s evidence was overwhelming. There were rumors before Thursday’s report came out that Republican officials in North Carolina and even on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign were scrambling to get Robinson to step down from the governor’s race, an apparent acknowledgment that, even post-Trump, there are things a politician cannot say. Those rumors were squashed when the North Carolina GOP dismissed CNN as liars and J.D. Vance deflected questions about Robinson by changing the subject to Kamala Harris and the “Inflation Explosion Act.” It was naïve to believe that anything different would happen — Robinson has been saying a slightly more sanitized version of these sentiments for years, and Republican voters have turned him into a star.

In fact, Robinson’s talent as a controversy-courting shitposter goes a long way toward explaining his meteoric rise from working on the floor of various local furniture-manufacturing plants to being praised by Trump as “Martin Luther King on steroids.” He joined Facebook in 2007, where two themes soon emerged in his writing — a tortured relationship to being Black, and a rare knack for channeling the id of a gleefully trollish brand of online conservatism. Robinson delighted in slaughtering sacred cows, and seemed to reserve special ire for Black people who believed in collective struggle. Greensboro was the birthplace of the lunch-counter sit-ins that catalyzed the civil-rights movement, a legacy he has reveled in tearing down. He wrote posts ridiculing John Lewis for getting beaten bloody by Alabama State Troopers and smearing adherents to the Black Lives Matter movement as “soft headed negroes.”

Robinson became so emboldened by the positive attention he received from his growing host of social-media followers that he took his freak show on the road. At a 2009 city-council meeting, he argued that Greensboro should not apologize for a Ku Klux Klan–instigated massacre that killed civil-rights activists in 1979 because the city was already healed — it had elected a Black mayor, after all. (In CNN’s report, Robinson was revealed to have ruefully said, “I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let Blacks join.”) On a niche conservative podcast, he went so far as to dismiss the “so-called civil-rights movement” outright, casting it as a Marxist ploy to undermine the free market. The sit-ins, he proclaimed, violated the autonomy of business owners, and if Black people were being denied service they should have simply eaten elsewhere.

This week’s revelation that Robinson once compared Dr. King to a maggot in more private forums showed a less filtered variation on a familiar motif. As did his apparent nostalgia for slavery — in his 2022 memoir, We Are the Majority, Robinson surveyed the two factions involved in the ’79 massacre and deemed only one of them the most “amoral people in the American political arena.” (Hint: It was not the Klansmen.) His admiration for Hitler and self-identification as a Nazi could be gleaned from his long-standing habits of diminishing the Holocaust and casting Jews as money-grubbing connivers. In multiple Facebook posts, he claimed that the dangers of Nazism had been overstated to launder the legacy of communism, and once described the Marvel movie Black Panther as a Jewish plot to extract Black dollars.

One aspect of Robinson’s Nude Africa posts that is largely absent from his Facebook output is their lascivious tone, which tracks — it was a porn site, after all. But even that element of his personality was poorly camouflaged: In his memoir, Robinson writes in unmistakably horny tones about his borderline-Freudian obsession with trains, which began when he was a kid rolling underneath oncoming locomotives and experiencing a rush as they screamed overhead. He confessed to giving them borderline-sexual nicknames like “big dirty” and stalking them across Guilford County trying to talk to them. “There’s a big dirty,” he would say aloud when he spotted one, “and he’s trying to hide from me, but I see him.”

He has, in other words, always been a weird guy, with shades of weirdness that range from the unconventional to the tragically familiar. It is by now a well-known conservative trope to loudly demonize gay or transgender people while privately pursuing queer sexual interests. Robinson has written on Facebook that homosexuality is an “ABOMINATION” and insisted that trans people are not only sickening emblems of Satan worship, but should be criminalized. It’s part of a bigger pattern of Robinson exonerating his own sexual behavior while condemning that of others and seeking to control it. To this day, he regards the abortion he paid for his now-wife to get in 1989 as a forgivable error in judgment, while women who get abortions today are committing a second Holocaust.

Most of these positions were public knowledge by the time Republican voters first started urging Robinson to run for office. After years spent hunched over his keyboard, he had become an overnight right-wing folk hero for going on a conspiratorial pro-gun rant at a Greensboro City Council meeting in 2018, at which he accused officials of planning to deprive him of firearms and let gang members murder him. (The City Council intended to do neither.) Where plenty of observers saw in the 49-year-old Black Facebook grandpa a vicious ideologue who had recently ridiculed the teenage survivors of the Parkland school shooting, the GOP base saw an unapologetic crusader on their behalf. He made quick work of his rivals in the Republican primary. At sunrise on January 9, 2021, Robinson had never worked in politics. By that sunset, he was North Carolina’s lieutenant governor.

Robinson’s notoriety has only grown in the years since, and despite the protests of some old-guard Republicans, the party as a whole has unreservedly embraced him. “I think he’s North Carolina’s Donald Trump,” Chris Cooper, a professor at Western Carolina University, told me a few months after the former president gave Robinson a fawning endorsement, citing the lieutenant governor’s “ability to be somewhat Teflon.” Veteran GOP strategist Paul Shumaker predicted to me that Trump would un-endorse Robinson before Labor Day, citing the likelihood that the toxic gubernatorial candidate would be a drag on the Republican ticket in a critical swing state. But Labor Day has come and gone; Robinson seems to be closing the polling gap between himself and his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein (though he is still losing); social media is being flooded with posts linking him to Trump; and still nothing seems to have changed. What seems truer than ever is that, by saturating the market with his odious views, Robinson has effectively rendered their volume irrelevant. There they remain, staring us in the face, daring us to do something.