So, yesterday CNN’s KFile dropped the following: ‘I’m a black NAZI!’: NC GOP nominee for governor made dozens of disturbing comments on porn forum. The piece starts thusly:
Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.
Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”
You know, the kinds of things that a party loves to read the day that the deadline for the being on the ballot hits and on the cusp of early-voting ballots going out in the mail.
Politico added: Email address belonging to Mark Robinson found on Ashley Madison.
Now, it isn’t as if Robinson was thought to be a high quality individual who is just being exposed at the eleventh hour. Rather he was already known to be a highly problematic candidate who was likely to lose the governor’s race, but this just ramps up the weird to an off-the-charts kind of level. I noted, in passing, the following story back in March Via HuffPo: Mark Robinson: ‘I Absolutely Want To Go Back To The America Where Women Couldn’t Vote’.
The North Carolina Republican’s longing for the days when women couldn’t vote ties into his history of demeaning women and mocking feminism, especially on social media. He’s claimed that feminism was created by Satan. He’s said that men who identify as feminists are “about as MANLY as a pair of lace panties” and are “weak mined, jelly backed ‘men.’”He’s routinely referred to feminists as “fem-nazis” and, in one particularly colorful post, described those who support equal rights for women as “sexist, hairy armpit having, poo-poo hat wearing pinkos.”
“The only thing worse than a woman who doesn’t know her place, is a man who doesn’t know his,” he wrote on Facebook in December 2017.
Channeling the late televangelist Pat Robertson, he has claimed that Satan himself is using “lesbianism and feminism” to destroy traditional families.
And that was just one story.
Robinson in the sitting Lt. Governor of North Carolina, so it is not shocking that he won the nomination for governor. I am insufficiently versed in NC politics to know how he managed to rise to that level. Still, I can’t help but note that this is an excellent example of how the institutional weakness of US political parties and its porous candidate selection process hampers parties from developing in a way that Is in the public interest. North Carolina is either a light red of purple state where a solid Republican should be competitive for the governorship.
Robinson is also an example of Trump’s poor political instincts. All that matters to Trump is how much other politicians kowtow to him. As a result, Trump has said things like this:
Not surprisingly, NBC is reporting Democrats launch new ad push to tie Trump to Mark Robinson following reported porn website comments and CNN that Harris campaign highlights Trump’s past praise for Mark Robinson as CNN report roils battleground North Carolina.
North Carolina is effectively tied in the polls between Trump and Harris. Trumps is up 0.1% in FiveThirtyEight‘s poll average in the state. Nate Silver has the same number.
If Robinson’s woes lead to simply depressing the Republican vote in NC, that could be enough to move the state to Harris. At a bare minimum, this is bad news for the Republican Party and the Trump campaign. And it again illustrated how our candidate selection process can produce truly awful candidates.
