North Carolina Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson is denying a damning CNN report that he made a wide range of odd sexual and other downright derogatory comments on a porn site more than a decade ago.
The comments – posted under a username that Robinson, the current lieutenant governor of North Carolina, used frequently in interwebs forums before his career in politics, and used an email address that Robinson had widely used – included one in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and another that expressed support for reinstating slavery.
“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few,” Robinson wrote on the website Nude Africa, where he was a frequent commenter between 2008 and 2012 under the username “minisoldr.”
“Minsoldr” was a name that Robinson used frequently online, and CNN reported Thursday that the user profile for “minisoldr” on the Nude Africa website had Robinson’s full name listed on its biological profile.
ICYMI
Robinson is facing pressure, in the wake of these revelations, to withdraw from the governor’s race, with the push coming from Republican leaders in North Carolina and from the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, according to published reports.
Robinson, for his part, is resisting being pushed aside, and he insisted to CNN that “somebody manufactured this, these salacious tabloid lies.”
“This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me,” said Robinson, who has cast himself as an evangelical Christian who supports a total ban on abortion, despite having admitted paying for a girlfriend to get an abortion in the 1980s.
He’s also made himself out to be virulently anti-gay and even transphobic, saying there is “no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth.”
That would be an interesting comment from a guy who wrote online, on the Nude Africa message board, that he liked “watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!”
The CNN report on this comes on the heels of reporting by The Assembly, a North Carolina-based news outlet, that Robinson was known to frequent local porn shops in the Greensboro, N.C., area in the 1990s and 2000s, a story that the Robinson campaign called a “complete fiction.”
Robinson, a former factory worker who entered politics after his comments at a Greensboro City Council meeting about gun rights went viral in 2018, somehow got elected lieutenant governor in 2020 down ticket from Democrat Roy Cooper beating Republican Dan Forest by four and a half points in the governor’s race.
Cooper has almost entirely ignored Robinson, who under the North Carolina Constitution should be tasked to serve as acting governor whenever Cooper leaves the state – Cooper gets around that by not informing Robinson when he’s leaving – and Robinson rarely presides over sessions of the State Senate, which would be the other thing of any consequence that he would be empowered to do.
Pretty much all the guy has done for the past four years is give speeches, prepare for his run for governor, and have his staff issue denials whenever the latest bit of awful news from his past blows up.
It’s not surprising at all, against that backdrop, that Robinson is trailing the Democratic nominee, Josh Stein, the state’s sitting attorney general, by double-digits, and his flailing campaign seems to be having a drag effect on Trump’s poll numbers in the state, with FiveThirtyEight.com putting the presidential race as a virtual dead-heat.
That would be why there is pressure mounting on Robinson to drop out of the race.
Which doesn’t appear to be happening.
“We are not getting out of this race,” Robinson told CNN, point-blank.
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Chris Graham
