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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 sex 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, long before Robinson stepped into politics, on Nude Africa, which has a message board. They were written under the username “minisoldr” which CNN matched to several biographical details as well as an email address.
Robinson also listed his full name on his Nude Africa profile, along with the email address that he used on several websites online for years.
He wrote on the site about “peeping” on women in public gym showers when he was 14.
“I came to a spot that was a dead end but had two big vent covers over it! It just so happened it overlooked the showers! I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered,” he wrote on Nude Africa, according to CNN.
“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f****** hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote in separate comments on the site.
Lieutenant governor denies making controversial comments
The lieutenant governor denied making the comments when speaking to CNN on Thursday.
“This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me,” he said. “I’m not going to get into the minutia of how somebody manufactured this, these salacious tabloid lies.”
He told CNN that the issues the residents of his state face are more important than “tabloid trash” as he began attacking his Democratic opponent.
“We are not getting out of this race. There are people who are counting on us to win this race,” he told the network.
In his online comments, Robinson repeatedly attacked Martin Luther King Jr, including when a new monument was put in place in Washington DC.
“Get that f****** commie bastard off the National Mall!” he wrote at the time.
One user accused the gubernatorial candidate of being a white supremacist.
“I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” he wrote.
North Carolina publication The Assembly reported earlier this month that Robinson often visited local video porn stores in the 1990s and 2000s, which a spokesperson for Robinson rejected.
CNN found Robinson’s full name on the profile “minisoldr” and it had a private email address that Robinson had used on other sites. The network also matched Robinson’s wedding date to a comment he made in 2008 about having been married for 18 years. In 2011, the account stated that the user behind “minisoldr” lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, where Robinson currently lives and lived at the time. Robinson also used the username on other sites.
CNN also connected certain phrases used by Robinson on Nude Africa and Facebook, such as “gag a maggot,” “dunder head,” “I don’t give a frogs a**,” and “I don’t give two shakes of it.”
Robinson wrote “I’m a black NAZI!” on a forum discussing Black Republicans.
“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few,” he wrote in a separate post.
“I’d take Hitler over any of the s*** that’s in Washington right now!” he wrote in March 2012.
In October 2011, he called Martin Luther King Jr “worse than a maggot” and a “huckster.”
Trump, for his part, has compared Robinson to King 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.
The Trump campaign told The Dispatch in a statement that they’re “focused on winning the White House and saving this country. North Carolina is an [sic] vital part of that plan. We are confident that as voters compare the Trump record of a strong economy, low inflation, a secure border, and safe streets, with the failures of Biden-Harris, then President Trump will win the Tarheel State once again. We will not take our eye off the ball.”
Politico reported on Thursday that Robinson’s email was used to register for an account on Ashley Madison, a site for married people looking to have an affair. An anonymous adviser to Robinson confirmed to Politico that the email was Robinson’s. It was the same email address used by Robinson on Nude Africa.
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.”
Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh wrote on X: “The problem isn’t that Mark Robinson wasn’t vetted. The problem is that he was vetted and his bad, horrible stuff didn’t matter to Republican voters. Pretty much just like with Trump.”
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.
The chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Representative Richard Hudson, told reporters on Thursday that “the allegations are very concerning.”
“He says they’re not true,” he added, according to Politico. “I think he needs to assure the people of the state with a little more detail that they aren’t true.”
In a video shared on X before the CNN report, Robinson said, “Let me reassure you, the things that you will see in that story, those are not the words of Mark Robinson.”
“Folks, this race right now, our opponents are desperate to shift the focus here from the substantive issues and focus on what you are concerned with to salacious tabloid trash,” he added.
