The question is, why is he also a candidate for governor?
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.
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.
