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North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, referred to himself as a “black Nazi” and said “slavery is good,” among other shocking remarks, on a porn forum, according to reporting from CNN’s KFile.
Earlier on Thursday, independent journalist Bryan Anderson had said that Robinson’s campaign was bearing down a negative story about to break. A few hours later, CNN’s KFile reported that he had an account on a porn site called “Nude Africa” where the anti-transgender conservative admitted that “I like watching tranny on girl porn!”
The social conservative, who has taken a stance against promiscuity in the past, wrote: “yeah, I’m a perv too,” and reportedly said on the same site when told that a celebrity had had an abortion: “I don’t care. I just wanna see the tape!”
Robinson denies the allegations and told CNN that the account they had found on the porn site was not his.
“Robinson has long been toast,” Doug Heye, a longtime Republican operative from North Carolina, told The Independent via text message. He noted how the Trump campaign was “very nervous about how [the story] impacts him.”
The online comments were made between 2008 and 2012 on Nude Africa, which has a message board. They were written before Robinson stepped into politics under the username “minisoldr” which CNN matched to several biographical details as well as a shared email address.
Trump, for his part, has compared Robinson to Martin Luther King Jr in the past.
“So we had rumors months ago that Josh Stein’s camp had some really damning information about Robinson that they wanted to hold on to until right before early voting,” Jonathan Bridges, another Republican operative in the state, told The Independent. “As the campaign consultants, we hold our worst negative information right before people go to the polls, because then it’s too late for a campaign to recover.”
Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College, gave his take on the fallout of the story: “I think with a very tight toss-up presidential race, this can’t help Donald Trump get over a very competitive dynamic how this plays out.”
Bitzer also noted that candidates like Michele Morrow, a candidate for superintendent who called for Barack Obama and Joe Biden to be executed, could drag Trump down in a similar way.
“We’ll have to wait and see what the polling tells us, but there has to be some impact if Democrats start to tie Robinson to Trump and to somebody like Michele Morrow and other Republicans on the ballot,” he told The Independent.
A firebrand with a controversial past
Mark Robinson, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina, is 2024’s answer to the question: Has the GOP learned from the last election cycle?
That answer seems to be “no.”
Bridges warned that Republicans no longer take credentials seriously.
“Look, both parties used to vet their candidates,” he said. “You didn’t prop them up, no matter how good of a speaker they were… [but due to] the populist shift of our party, we placed this rhetoric at a forefront instead of recruiting good quality candidates.”
As the first Black lieutenant governor of the state since his inauguration in 2021, Robinson has been a divisive figure in North Carolina politics for years. But it’s his latest run for governor that has finally earned him national scrutiny.
His stances on the cultural issues that define the MAGA right also appear to directly conflict with his own personal choices. On abortion, Robinson claims to be a hardliner, calling the practice “murder” and in at least one case arguing that a woman’s body is no longer merely her own after she becomes pregnant, declaring: “It’s not your body anymore. It’s y’all’s.”
But Robinson himself has admitted that he paid for his girlfriend to seek abortion care in the 1980s — even though he has blamed abortion in America for mass shootings in schools. On issues of race, he has made similarly shocking remarks, and has referred to fellow Black Americans as “monkeys” and “apes.” He also defended the term “white pride” in multiple Facebook posts.
A must-win state for Trump and Harris
North Carolina holds its race for governor the same year that it holds its presidential race, and Robinson is on the ticket the same year that Kamala Harris is trying to turn North Carolina blue and Trump is fighting for his life. Just last week, Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff campaigned in Raleigh with Robinson’s opponent Josh Stein, who received about as big applause as Emhoff did.
In an election where every vote matters, Republicans are now fretting that Robinson could bring down the whole ticket.
The Harris campaign wasted no time in tweeting out a video of Trump praising Robinson as the story about his porn forum posts broke.
