Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s embattled Republican gubernatorial candidate, suggested that people who can’t take care of their children should be sterilized, according to one of a series of incendiary and racist social media posts from 2014 through 2019.
The commentary made in reference to Black families, which used terms a white supremacist would find appropriate, predates his time as the state’s lieutenant governor, but much of it came after his rise as a public figure on the right. Most of the social media posts have not previously been reported.
“I have more respect for loyal DOGS than I do for PEOPLE who don’t take care of their children,” Robinson wrote on his Facebook page in 2014. The post contained the hashtag “#haveyourdeadbeatsspayedandneutered”.
Robinson has been in a state of damage control for the last few weeks. Last month, CNN revealed old posts made under his profile on pornographic websites, in which the conservative candidate for governor purportedly described himself as a “Black NAZI” and pined for a return to the days of slavery.
Robinson has denied making the comments, castigated his detractors, attacked his opponent, the attorney general Josh Stein, and launched a defamation lawsuit against CNN.
But the other comments remain public on his social media page.
“If you need a court order to tell you to take care of your children, then you probably need an operation to make sure you don’t have any more,” Robinson posted on Facebook in 2016.
In 2016, Robinson wrote on Facebook: “I said this once and I’m saying it again; A weak minded, muddle headed negro, ALWAYS thinks he and “his people” are victims.”
“I get ticked listening to women talk about how smart and strong they are....while dating men who are deadbeat jobless criminal thugs who abuse them,” Robinson wrote on Facebook in 2017.
“Deadbeat men, the whorish women they breed with, and the undisciplined children they produce are the top three issues (in that order) that cause African American culture to be a dismal failure,” Robinson wrote on Facebook in 2017.
“I’d rather be mislabeled a ‘coon’ by few a African-Americans, than be properly labeled a DEADBEAT by my children,” Robinson wrote on Facebook in 2017.
“Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It’s about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down,” Robinson said in a Facebook video in 2019.
Robinson’s Facebook feed is an almost unbroken parade of conservative invective, accelerating in both pace and intensity through the years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Without substantial exceptions, Robinson’s posts depict Black sexuality and Black culture in negative terms, drawing on common racist tropes about out-of-wedlock births and the use of abortion as birth control.
CNN’s report last month, tying the “minisoldr” profile on the Nude Africa forum and other websites to Robinson’s identity, described anti-Black commentary by Robinson, with comments like “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!”
Robinson’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Robinson filed suit earlier this month against CNN and a Guilford county man who operated a pornographic video store in North Carolina and made a music video about Robinson, claiming the lieutenant governor still owed money for a video tape. The two stories “are responsible for a new low in digital lynching”, Robinson’s attorney’s wrote in his defamation lawsuit. “They have published disgusting lies about Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson in what appears to be a coordinated attack aimed at derailing his campaign for governor, and has already inflicted immeasurable harm to his family, his reputation, and his good name.”
