GOP primary voters wanted that guy
For those just tuning in, yes, N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) is a freak show. Between his tax troubles, investigations into his daycare business billings and bankruptcies, his misogyny and demand for an ouright ban on all abortions, it’s his porn habits that are finally attracting big headlines. Go figure. Okay, on the heels of his “some folks need killing” comments. Little of this is news to North Carolinians.
I was always partial to his declaration that “The Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation” as the clearest indicator not of his dishonesty or fetishes, but of where his type wants to take the country. Oh, and “Tell our enemies on the other side of the aisle that will drag this nation down into a socialist hellhole that you will only do it as you run past me laying on the ground, choking on my own blood.”
Even Donald Trump is not that colorful. P.T. Barnum might have put this guy on display and made a fortune.
Some New York Magazine writers are playing catch up.
“Mein Kampf” is enough of an informative read that Robinson extolled its virtues on a porn site (Nia Prater and Chas Danner):
Robinson, who has publicly questioned some of the events of the Holocaust, allegedly used antisemitic slurs and displayed an affinity for Hitler. In one 2012 comment, he expressed a preference for the dictator over then-president Barack Obama. “I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” Robinson said. Per the Post, Robinson also wrote that Mein Kampf was “very informative and not at all what I thought it would be. It’s a real eye opener.”
No wonder Trump was such a quick endorser, being a reported fan of Der Führer’s speeches.
This week’s revelation that Robinson once compared Dr. King to a maggot in more private forums showed a less filtered variation on a familiar motif. As did his apparent nostalgia for slavery — in his 2022 memoir, We Are the Majority, Robinson surveyed the two factions involved in the ’79 massacre and deemed only one of them the most “amoral people in the American political arena.” (Hint: It was not the Klansmen.) His admiration for Hitler and self-identification as a Nazi could be gleaned from his long-standing habits of diminishing the Holocaust and casting Jews as money-grubbing connivers. In multiple Facebook posts, he claimed that the dangers of Nazism had been overstated to launder the legacy of communism, and once described the Marvel movie Black Panther as a Jewish plot to extract Black dollars.
One aspect of Robinson’s Nude Africa posts that is largely absent from his Facebook output is their lascivious tone, which tracks — it was a porn site, after all. But even that element of his personality was poorly camouflaged: In his memoir, Robinson writes in unmistakably horny tones about his borderline-Freudian obsession with trains, which began when he was a kid rolling underneath oncoming locomotives and experiencing a rush as they screamed overhead. He confessed to giving them borderline-sexual nicknames like “big dirty” and stalking them across Guilford County trying to talk to them. “There’s a big dirty,” he would say aloud when he spotted one, “and he’s trying to hide from me, but I see him.”
Weird. Weirder. Weirdest. Robinson’s been hiding in plain sight, Cheney-Rice writes, and a type all too familiar among conservatives.
Just the type GOP primary voters who chose Robinson love in a way that’s just as creepy. Creepier, considering they may live next door.
I’m reminded of Siskel and Ebert doing a special show decades ago on the “women in trouble” film genre. The independent woman is always the slasher’s prime target. It was Ebert, I think, who was more creeped out by a guy sitting next to him in the theater. When the woman enters the dark attic/basement and we see her through the maniac’s eyes/mask, he whispered to himself, “She’s gonna get it now.”
Republicans nominated that guy for governor in North Carolina.