KIRKPATRICK: The GOP's rot produced Mark Robinson

In hindsight, we should have known that the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina, Mark Robinson, was a self-described “Black Nazi.” 

For those who are unaware, Mark Robinson is currently the lieutenant governor of North Carolina. He’s from my hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina. He attended the same college as my parents and worked in furniture manufacturing. He is also probably the worst nominee for public office by a major party anywhere in the United States, including Doug Mastriano, Kari Lake, and J.D. Vance LAW ’13.

CNN reporting unearthed a series of accounts seemingly belonging to Robinson — they all used the same username and often had biographical information or even pictures of his face attached — all over the internet. His worst comments come from the message board of a pornographic website he seemed to frequent even more often than he frequented pornographic video stores in the early aughts. 

CNN declined to print the most graphic details and this is not Rumpus, but here are some highlights. He fondly reminisced about “peeping” on women in public gym showers when he was 14 years old. He referred to himself as a “perv” and, despite public transphobic rhetoric, expressed a fondness for pornographic content with transgender actors, albeit in the most transphobic way possible.

He also, on the same pornographic website, would get political. He used homophobic slurs frequently, used an antisemitic slur that I had never heard of before, said that “some people need to be slaves” and how he wished they would bring it back because he “would certainly buy a few.” He railed against Martin Luther King Jr. using language so hateful he got accused of being a member of the Klu Klux Klan, to which he replied that he would join if they accepted Black applicants. To top this all off he wrote out, looked at, then decided to post on the Internet — perhaps with only one hand — the now famous line “I’m a black NAZI!”

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. But what’s fascinating here is how quickly everyone has believed these reports. You would imagine that when news like this breaks, it would be met with disbelief or shock, but the rot at Mark Robinson’s core is not news: for us who have followed North Carolina politics it’s been evident for years.

He has a well-documented history of homophobia, transphobia and antisemitism. I hesitate to call a Black man racist towards Black people, but saying that we owe reparations for slavery puts him at the top of the list. He and his wife also ran a daycare with such amenities as unblocked sockets around 1 year olds and falsified staff credentials. The daycare was sold by the Robinsons, ostensibly due to “government red tape,” but they managed to keep operating the Balanced Nutrition non-profit that owes the state over $100,000.

Put quite simply, he is the worst. He is a disgrace to the Republican Party and a shame to the state of North Carolina. The best thing Mark can do right now is to drop out of the race, resign, install content restrictions on his personal devices and have some uncomfortable conversations about his Internet habits with a therapist. 

Besides his general existence, the worst part of this whole affair is how preventable it was. Mark Robinson should have never been elected to any position of public trust. His first claim to fame was a fiery pro-gun rights rant at a town council meeting. Those fifteen minutes told the North Carolina GOP one thing: that they should make him into a star.

This is a lesson in candidate selection. Republicans in North Carolina were willing to overlook obvious character deficiencies, a lack of policy experience and the virulent, hateful rhetoric that comes more naturally to Robinson than anything else because he was a Trump-endorsed MAGA Republican. This happens when you get your candidates from the political equivalent of Temu.

Part of me is glad this all came out. Josh Stein, the incumbent attorney general running against Robinson, has an even clearer path to the governorship, preventing a Republican trifecta in Raleigh that would curtail women’s rights even more and skew our economy further towards the wealthy and well-connected. Perhaps we will even see a reverse coattail effect that delivers North Carolina for Kamala Harris at the presidential level. Honestly, you could not draw up a more noxious Republican candidate and, therefore, a more fortuitous situation for Democrats if you tried.

But a small part of me is upset, both with Republican voters and Republican leadership. I’m upset with Republican primary voters because this was not the only option; there were relatively less-greasy Republican candidates on the primary ballot, yet they chose the equivalent of a Deepwater Horizon sized oil spill. A significant chunk of the Republican electorate has fallen so deep into negative polarization that they are willing to nominate toxic candidates as long as they are anti-Democrat. We’ve known this at least since 2016, but it’s still startling to see it play out again.

My gripe with Republican leadership is much the same. This guy should have never been allowed near a daycare center or a laptop, let alone the Republican ballot line. Any political operative worth their salt should have found all this out and kept him out of electoral politics or revealed all of this as soon as possible, not on the day of the deadline to drop out of the race. A well run party, or even just a party with a backbone and principles, would have coalesced around a moderate alternative as soon as Mark even thought about running for office, and would have funneled money into ads opposing him and resources toward alternative candidates. Instead the NCGOP stands by the vat of acid they’ve nominated.

So, while we watch the worst campaign of the century crash and burn, I hope that the future leaders of America’s right-wing are watching. This is what the current GOP thinks a good representation of American conservatism is. This is the best of what Republicans have to offer. I’m praying to God you can prove me wrong. 

MILES KIRKPATRICK is a sophomore in Saybrook College majoring in the Humanities. His column, “Looking Across the Aisle”, runs biweekly and discusses right-wing politics and spaces at Yale and nationwide. He can be reached at miles.kirkpatrick@yale.edu.