When it comes to Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson, the question isn’t which of his bigoted remarks to mention, but when to stop.
Since he won the North Carolina primary earlier this month, the state’s one-term lieutenant governor has faced criticism for a long litany of comments in interviews, in sermons and on social media in which he quoted Hitler, referred to LGBTQ people as “filth,” depicted Muslims as terrorists and said certain Hollywood actresses were dressed as “whores.”
Faced with questions about whether he is antisemitic, homophobic, anti-Muslim and misogynistic, Robinson, who is Black, naturally responded by arguing that, actually, he is the real victim of bigotry.
Ironically, Robinson made this allegation on a podcast hosted by right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk, who has called George Floyd “a scumbag,” said he wonders whether Black pilots are qualified and argued that Martin Luther King Jr. was “awful.”
When Kirk asked why Robinson believes he’s such a threat to the “MSNBC crowd,” the candidate cried racism. According to Robinson, liberals are only reminding people of his extremism because they fear a Black man holding power in the Republican Party might appeal to disaffected Black voters in the Democratic Party.
He said:
In my case, what they really see is they see a candidate that is able to reach out to those folks, bring common sense solutions to the problems they face, and then they see someone who looks like them and ultimately what happens there is we get into office and there’s success, and all of a sudden voting dynamics in North Carolina are changing for decades. And quite possibly, it starts across the nation. They’re very afraid of that. They don’t want that to happen. They cannot have a conservative Black man at the helm in North Carolina or in any state. Because it’s gonna show the great results of what president Trump did at the national level.
(Robinson has conceded at times that he wrote posts that were
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