GOP Family Values Gate Keepers Come Crashing Down
A series of incidents baring Republican hatred, violence and bigotry has exposed the lie of the MAGA protectors of Christian morality and family values.
Leading off in the embarrassment parade is Mark Robinson, the GOP candidate for North Carolina governor who trump has championed and called “Martin Luther King on steroids.” Or as Robinson has called himself, the “Black NAZI,” or “minisoldr,” who supports a return to slavery, denies the Holocaust, admires Hitler and enjoyed watching women in bathrooms.
Plenty was already known about Robinson’s bigoted, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ background, that included his words at a church speech on June 30, 2024, “Some folks need killing!” and that “It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!”
Just when it seemed like nothing could be more salacious, a new CNN KFile report describes Robinson in his own words as a pornography-trolling liar and worse.
Trump has been all in backing Robinson as North Carolina’s first African American governor, but the trump campaign dodged whether it might urge Robinson to quit the race in the vital swing state.
It remains to be seen if the latest scandalous news will affect Robinson’s candidacy as he already has publicly promoted far-right conspiracy theories, denied sexual assault allegations against various prominent figures and has frequently made inflammatory homophobic, transphobic, racist, anti-atheist, Islamophobic and antisemitic statements. Robinson has argued that people should use bathrooms only that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth. He has said transgender women should be arrested for using women’s restrooms.
Ther is no question but that Robinson has been popular in North Carolina. In the 2020, North Carolina GOP election for lieutenant governor, Robinson won the nomination with 240,843 votes or 32.52 percent of the votes cast. In the general election, he won with 2,800,655 votes or 51.63 percent of the total votes cast.
In the 2024 North Carolina Republican gubernatorial primary election, Robinson got 699,917 votes or 66 percent of the total votes cast.
Robinson’s Democratic opponent is the current state attorney general, Josh Stein.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told CNN, “President Trump’s campaign is focused on winning the White House and saving this country. North Carolina is a 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.”
The CNN KFile investigation uncovered a series of inflammatory comments Robinson posted on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago. The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and his current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor
Among the salacious revelations, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, referring to himself as a “perv.” His enjoyment of transgender sex conflicts with his to his past public anger at the transgender community.
“There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth. And yes, I called it filth. And if you don’t like that I called it filth, come see me and I’ll explain it to you,” Robinson has said.
The posts were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website that includes a message board. The comments were made under the username “minisoldr,” a moniker Robinson used frequently online.
Robinson described his sexual arousal as an adult from the memory of secretly “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a 14-year-old. Robinson recounted the story as a memory he said he still fantasized about.
“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,” Robinson wrote on Nude Africa. “I went peeping again the next morning but after that I went back the ladder was locked! So those two times where [sic] the only times I got to do it! Ahhhhh memories!!!!”
In other comments on Nude Africa, Robinson said he was aroused by transgender pornography.
“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote. “And yeah, I’m a ‘perv’ too!”
In his 2020 campaign for lieutenant governor, Robinson called for a complete ban on abortions with no exceptions. He also said in 2022 that he had regretted paying for his now-wife to have an abortion in the 1980s.
In his current campaign, Robinson supports a so-called “heartbeat” bill that would ban abortion when a heartbeat is detected, at about six weeks, with exceptions for rape, incest and health of the mother.
He wrote as minisoldr on Nude Africa in December 2010, that he did not care about whether a celebrity had an abortion.
“I don’t care. I just wanna see the sex tape!” Robinson wrote.
In another thread, there were comments about whether to believe the story of a woman who said she was raped by her taxi driver while intoxicated. In response, Robinson wrote, “and the moral of this story….. Don’t f**k a white b*tch!”
Robinson also repeatedly denigrated the civil rights leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Get that f*cking commie bastard off the National Mall!,” Robinson wrote about the dedication of the memorial to King in Washington, D.C., by then-President Barack Obama.
“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 posted.
The CNN KFile report came a few weeks after The Assembly, a North Carolina digital publication, reported that Robinson frequented local video pornography shops in the 1990s and 2000s. The story cited six people who interacted and saw him frequent the stores in Greensboro, N.C.
In the pornographic forums, Robinson revealed his raw thoughts on issues of race, gender and abortion.
“Slavery is not bad,” he posted. “Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.”
In March 2012, Robinson wrote that he would have preferred Adolf Hitler as a leader over the stewardship during the Obama administration.
“I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” he wrote.
Robinson’s comments contained obscenity-laced slurs directed at Black, Jewish and Muslim people.
In a series of seven posts in October 2011, Robinson called King a “commie bastard,” “worse than a maggot,” a “ho f**king, phony,” and a “huckster.”
In October 2010, Robinson used the Jewish pejorative “hebe” when he discussed how he liked the TV show “Good Times,” saying “the show itself was a bunch of heb [sic] written liberal bullshit!”
As part of his on-line discussion of the Taliban, Robinson referred to Muslims as “little rag-headed bastards” and said that “if Muslims took over liberals would be the 1st ones to be beheaded!”
Robinson also used homophobic slurs frequently, calling them “f*gs.”
In a positive forum discussion featuring a photo of two men kissing after one returned from a military deployment, Robinson wrote the only negative comment.
“That’s sum ole sick a** f*ggot bullsh*t!” he wrote.
Jeff Dotseth
Minnesota Republican state representative, Jeff Dotseth, is also in the MAGA spotlight amid accusations of domestic violence, support for a return to slavery and animal abuse.
Dotseth’s reelection campaign has been clouded by recently published reports that he was arrested in 2008 after his then-wife alleged that he physically abused her and her son for more than a decade.
In divorce papers, Dotseth’s ex-wife, Penny, said she had been “choked, punched, kicked, slapped, pinned down, smothered and had my hair pulled.”
“In 1994, Jeff had slammed me up against the wall, he had pinned me to the wall and had all of his weight on me. I could not move my arms and he was choking me. The only thing I could do was spit in his face,” Penny claimed.
She detailed other alleged attacks, including one that ended only when her son, Brandon, who was 9 years old at the time, threw a plastic chair at Dotseth. Brandon, Penny’s son from a previous marriage, also provided an affidavit claiming that he had been “punched, slapped, choked, thrown, hit with things, and kicked by him (Dotseth).”
In his sworn statement, Dotseth’s ex-stepson talked of how his step-father had heated arguments about slavery, during which Dotseth allegedly said, “if slavery was still around today,” he would have slaves. In addition, the divorce affidavits detail instances of animal abuse, with Dotseth allegedly kicking and hitting the family dog.
Dotseth denied the allegations of violence and said he was non-violent and that his wife had caused the arguments and abused him.
“I believe that Petitioner has anger management issues — she has spit in my face, thrown objects at me, frequently hit me and pulled my hair. When she becomes angry and gets violent, communication is difficult,” Dotseth wrote.
In 2008, Dotseth was charged with misdemeanor domestic assault and he later pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of disorderly conduct. A judge ordered Dotseth to have no contact with his then-wife for a year, also barred him from using or possessing firearms and only allowed supervised visits with their daughter.
Dotseth told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that he now has a “cordial relationship with my ex-wife and have worked to put this difficult chapter of my life behind me.”
Democratic leaders called on the Republican leadership to expel Dotseth from the House Republican caucus and demanded that Dotseth suspend his campaign for a second term.
“No one who has engaged repeatedly in domestic violence, child abuse and threats of murder has any business writing the laws that govern our state,” Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) Party Chair Ken Martin said.
DFL House Majority Leader Jamie Long said, “Dotseth’s behavior, whether it was yesterday or years ago, was unacceptable and not fitting for an elected representative of our state.”
Dotseth serves on the Commerce Finance and Policy and Housing Finance and Policy Committees. He lives in Kettle River, Minn., with his second wife, Melissa, and three children.
Mark Green
MAGA Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., a rabid trump supporter, generated unwanted publicity after his daughter said her family is suffering through “the loss of the person that we thought was our father” after Green was accused of having an affair with a mistress 27 years younger than him.
“My dad sells himself in politics as being a Christian, conservative family man,” the daughter, Catherine Green, told the Nashville Banner. “His actions in the last, whatever, year have not been that.”
Earlier the week, in a text message and email to Green’s GOP colleagues, Green’s wife of 30 years, Camilla, accused her 57-year-old husband of having a dalliance with a 32-year-old woman. Green filed for divorce last month.
In her text, Green’s wife warned of “readily available ‘predators’” that would tempt men like her husband. She accused D.C. politicians who espouse family values as “having affairs and getting divorces, drinking, parties.”
Catherine said the family became aware in January of the affair, which began in fall 2023. She said her brother found a letter from Green’s alleged mistress. Green denied the affair, but the family later found “additional evidence,” Catherine said.
Catherine was asked by reporters if she believed that trump, who is alleged to have had several extramarital affairs and been accused of sexual assault or harassment by more than a dozen women, was part of the negative influence on her MAGA father.
“Trump doesn’t lie about who he is, you know, he’s upfront with you,” she said, contrasting the former president’s actions with her father’s family values-based public profile. “You know [trump’s] an ass, but he’s just good at what he does.”
Green announced in February that he would not seek reelection, before changing his mind a month later.
Green, a physician, was elected to congress in 2019 and has chaired the Committee on Homeland Security since 2023. In April 2017, trump nominated Green for Secretary of the Army, after trump’s his first nominee, billionaire Vincent Viola, withdrew from consideration. Green withdrew his nomination on May 5, 2017.
Green espoused conservative, family-based values. He attracted opposition from some because of his public comments about transgender people, including his statement at a 2016 Tea Party gathering, that “If you polled the psychiatrists, they’re going to tell you that transgender is a disease.”
Green also said that he would “not tolerate” students learning about Muslim beliefs and practices.
In August 2022, Business Insider reported that Green had violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012, a federal transparency and conflict-of-interest law, by failing to properly disclose a purchase of stock in NGL Energy Partners worth between $100,000 and $250,000.
In a closed-door GOP meeting in 2024, Green called Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas “a reptile with no balls.”
On July 29, 2024, Green was named as one of seven Republican members of a bipartisan task force investigating the attempted assassination of trump. Green opposes abortion and wrote in a 2019 op-ed, that “modern science has revealed that mother and baby are, in fact, two separate persons — long before the baby is born” and argued that “a child becomes a child at conception.”
Green rejects the scientific consensus that human activity plays a key role in climate change. He also dismisses the theory of evolution, and in a 2015 lecture he used creationist reasoning such as “irreducible complexity.”
Irreducible complexity is the argument that certain biological systems with multiple interacting parts would not function if one of the parts were removed. Therefore, the argument goes, an organism could not have evolved by successive small modifications from earlier less complex systems through natural selection, which would need all intermediate precursor systems to have been fully functional.
In 2018, as a congressman-elect, Green said “there is some concern that the rise in autism is the result of the preservatives that are in our vaccines.” The claim has been repeatedly debunked by scientific studies and rejected by medical organizations including as the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Green was named as part of the trump campaign’s Tennessee leadership team.
John Kennedy
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., garnered negative publicity at a senate committee hearing on hate crimes for his blatantly bigoted attack against a Muslim witness who he told “You should hide your head in a bag.”
The hearing was titled “A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Stemming the Tide of Hate Crimes in America,” and the target of Kennedy’s tirades was Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute.
Berry had previously criticized the Biden administration for banning funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) amid the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. The Biden decision came after reports that some of the UNRWA workers were involved in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that killed 1,139 Israelis and foreign nationals, including 815 civilians. In addition, 251 Israelis and foreigners were taken captive into Gaza.
In response, Israel invaded and more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, including 17,652 women and children. Israel’s tightened blockade cut off basic necessities and attacks on infrastructure have caused healthcare collapse and an impending famine. By early 2024, Israeli forces had destroyed or damaged more than half of Gaza’s houses. Nearly all of the strip’s 2.3 million Palestinian population have been forcibly displaced.
Kennedy seethed at Berry’s past criticism of the U.S. for pulling funding from UNRWA. An extensive U.N. investigation found that a total of nine of its more than 30,000 employees may have been involved in the attacks. UNWRA is the only intergovernmental organization that provides funding to Gaza.
The accusations surfaced in January when Israel informed UNRWA of the alleged involvement of 12 staff members in the attacks. UNRWA terminated the employment of 10, while two were confirmed dead. The UN later received information from Israel about seven more cases — five in March and two in April.
Investigators with the UN Office of Oversight Services (OIOS) made findings in relation to 19 UNRWA staff alleged to have been involved in the attacks, UN Deputy Spokesperson Farhan Haq told journalists in New York.
“In one case, no evidence was obtained by OIOS to support the allegations of the staff member’s involvement, while in nine other cases, the evidence obtained by OIOS was insufficient to support the staff members’ involvement,” said Haq.
Regarding the 10 cases, Haq said that appropriate measures will be taken in conformity with UNRWA Regulations and Rules. The evidence obtained by OIOS indicated that the other nine UNRWA staff members may have been involved in the 7 October attacks.
Referring to the Gaza war, Haq stressed the importance of remembering that a “huge number” of UNRWA staff “have been taking enormous risks for months, keeping hundreds of thousands of people alive, whether in shelters or by providing food and services.”
“And we want to make sure that the reputation of our UNRWA staff, our dedicated staff, including about 200 people who have lost their lives since 7 October, is fully recognized and that UNRWA gets the support that it needs,” Haq said.
In a statement to the senate panel, Berry said that he hatred between Israel and Palestinians stems from the expulsion of around 750,000 Palestinians from their lands after the Israeli war of independence in 1948, a period that Palestinians call the Nakba.
“From the Nakba to today, Palestinians have faced over a half century of illegal occupation, settlement expansion, displacement, and grave injustices,” Berry said. “AAIF is committed to advancing human rights through public discourse and policy which recognize and respect the rights and dignity of Palestinians.”
Kennedy, who is not related to the family of President John F. Kennedy, started his questioning on a partisan note, by saying that Berry is described on her organization’s website as “a longtime Democratic Party activist.” He then proceeded to badger Berry and repeatedly asked if her opposition to the halt in UNRWA funding means that she supports Hamas.
She said she does not support Hamas but Kennedy kept insisting she had not answered the question.
“Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support. But you asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country,” Barry said.
Kennedy then asked Barry, “you support Hezbollah, too, don’t you?”
“The answer is I don’t support violence, whether it’s Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other entity that invokes it. So no, Sir,” Barry said.
The senator kept on Barry with “You can’t bring yourself to say ‘no,’ can you?” He then asked if she supports or opposes Iran “and their hatred of Jews?”
“You can’t bring yourself to say no, can you?” said Kennedy.
“Sir, I don’t support them,” Barry said.
“You support Hamas, don’t you? You support UNRWA and Hamas, don’t you?” Kennedy repeated.
Kennedy left a parting comment to Berry, “You should hide your head in a bag.”
Berry later commented about Kennedy’s line of questioning.
“It’s regrettable that I, as I sit here, have experienced the very issue that we’re attempting to deal with today,” Berry said later in the hearing. “This has been regrettably a real disappointment, but very much an indication of the danger to our democratic institutions that we’re in now.”
“That kind of bigotry and hatred is difficult to hear from anyone, but to actually experience it at a hate crime hearing from a sitting member of this institution was pretty extraordinary,” Berry said.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has described the de-funding of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees as “unconscionable”.
“It’s also not grounded in sound facts,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We have intelligence assessments that speak to this and I find it highly political.”
Berry said defunding UNRWA during a starvation crisis in Gaza is part of the push to “erase Palestinian refugees.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, condemned Kennedy for anti-Arab bigotry targeting an Arab American leader.
“Maya Berry went before the committee to discuss hate crimes. Both Ms. Berry and the topic should have been treated with the respect and seriousness they deserve,” said CAIR Government Affairs Director Robert McCaw, who attended the hearing. “Instead, Sen. Kennedy and others chose to be an example of the bigotry Arabs, Palestinians and Muslims have faced in recent months and years.”
In July, CAIR reported that the surge in anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate that erupted last October continued in the first half of the 2024. From January to June 2024, CAIR documented 4,951 incoming complaints, a sixty-nine percent increase over the same period in 2023.
“Education discrimination incidents spiked in May as student encampments urging universities to take an anti-genocide stand dominated media headlines,” CAIR said in a statement. “The experience of students and employees during this cycle of anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian hate remain the standout trends compared to past cycles.”