How are you Is the Republican Party not responsible for Mark Robinson, the party's candidate for governor of North Carolina?
While there are many MAGA supporters in the modern Republican Party, Robinson stands apart from the rest. As we noted in Rolling Stone Five months ago, Robinson’s conspiratorial, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and absurd statements were not only extreme; they were uniquely shocking, offensive, vulgar, and biased—even by MAGA standards—and should be outside the realm of political discourse.
Yet I'm sure most Americans don't even know his name.
Donald Trump has been a vocal supporter of Robinson, even calling him “better than Martin Luther King.” (Robinson is the state’s first black lieutenant governor.) While Robinson himself is trailing badly in the polls—down 14 points, as of Thursday—Trump is running neck-and-neck with Kamala Harris in North Carolina’s presidential race. There is no accountability; Trump hasn’t even been asked about him.
Robinson didn’t stop at making one or two embarrassing comments. Before running for public office, he made a name for himself as an internet troll, especially on Facebook. He also spread crazy conspiracy theories about Jews, such as the claim that the Jewish people created the world. Black Panther “To withdraw shekels from your bank account” [the Yiddish N-word] “Pockets” and that the Holocaust was exaggerated for political purposes. “There’s a reason the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the Nazis and the ‘6 million Jews’ who were murdered,” Robinson wrote in 2018, with chilling quotes. He called the “New World Order” Satanic, along with the Olympics and Beyoncé, while spouting the most vile and despicable things about gays this side of the Westboro Baptist Church.
He has deeply racist views of black people. Here we see Robinson criticizing black activists and defending the concept of “white pride”:
Here Robinson uses the term “monkey” to refer to four black men:
This is who Trump describes as “better than Martin Luther King.”
How can Trump not be questioned about this, and not be held accountable for defending it? Does Robinson’s ethnic background justify his propagation of hateful racist beliefs?
Robinson’s comments about homosexuals also go beyond the pale. He seems to be pathologically obsessed with us. To pick one example out of hundreds, Robinson says this to people who say they were “born that way” and that sexual orientation is a trait:
More recently, Robinson has reinforced this description, saying in 2021: “There is no reason why anyone anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that shit.”
Echoing J.D. Vance’s recent claims that life without children is meaningless and miserable, Robinson said in a 2022 sermon that “everything that God created, from the stench of what a cow leaves behind, to the decaying carcass of every living thing, to the worms that eat those carcasses, to the flies that he leaves behind—God created all of these things for a purpose. Can someone explain to me the purpose of homosexuality?” he said. “If homosexuality is of God, what purpose does it serve? What does it create? What does it create? It creates nothing.”
To be clear, as a gay rabbi who has written extensively on the sanctity of sexual diversity, I am happy to answer Robinson’s rhetorical question. Gays, with or without children, are disproportionately present among cultural creators, from ancient times (King David, for example) to our own. In addition to creating families of choice and kinship, those of us who do not have children create timeless works of art, theater, music, and dance. We help build bonds of social cohesion, and like the “gays” we find in thousands of other animal species, we care for the well-being of the group, an evolutionary advantage—or, in traditional religious parlance, part of God’s design for the world.
Robinson's theology is certainly his own business. But when he links that theology with the coercive and incarcerative power of the state, it becomes everyone's business too.
Finally, Robinson argues that conspiracies are everywhere. He has claimed that Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were the targets of an Illuminati plot, that Beyoncé and Jay-Z are Satanists who spread secret satanic messages in their songs, that Paul Pelosi was not attacked by an intruder in his home, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and that Covid-19 was a plot by “globalists” to undermine Trump—to name just a few.
In a post-January 6 world, this literal shaming of others has become extremely dangerous. For example, in 2016, Robinson posted a photo of Ellen DeGeneres crying as Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The text surrounding the photo read: “The look you get when a high-ranking devil awards you a medal for proudly serving in Satan’s army.”
As with Robinson's racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic beliefs, he has every right to be a crazy internet troll if that's what he wants to do with his life — but as lieutenant governor, and now a candidate for governor, he has the power to turn those crazy beliefs into actual policies that impact people's lives.
Believe it or not, there is still a lot, summarized in Rolling Stone In a March op-ed, Trump invoked Hitler, threatened transgender people with arrest “or whatever we have to do to you” for using unisex bathrooms, mocked Asian accents, disparaged Muslims, disparaged women (“I definitely want to go back to an America where women can’t vote,” he said in 2020), disparaged Parkland shooting survivors, called Michelle Obama a man, and said mass shootings were a response to abortion (“When you shed innocent blood, that blood will come back as a stain on you and you will come home”).
But even by the standards of 2024, this is not normal — and again, as a gay rabbi, I personally find it disturbing that his comments have not drawn more condemnation, and that no one is asking Trump about them.
Over the past month, there has been an encouraging (to put it mildly) erosion in the Republican Party’s attempts to achieve two goals – namely, pamper the odd fringe of the bubble of extremist grievances. And also But that’s clearly not easy. It’s becoming harder for Republicans to convince sensible, soccer-loving suburban moms to ignore all that and focus on inflation and other issues. Thanks to Tim Walz’s brevity and J.D. Vance’s eccentricity, it’s becoming harder for Republicans to escape the eccentricity.
Well, Mark Robinson is very strange and profound. It's time for journalists to confront Trump about him, and for those skeletons hiding in the Republican closet to finally come to light.
