In Parallel Universe, Bigot Is Like MLK And Trump Is Braveheart
Mark Robinson, the bigoted, flamethrowing, GOP candidate for North Carolina governor, has referred to trump as “Braveheart,” the legendary, 13th Century Scottish warrior who lead his countrymen in a rebellion to free his homeland from the tyranny of King Edward I of England.
Trump has returned the praise, calling Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids.”
Talk about oxymorons.
Trump is about as heroic and truthful as George Santos and yet he is neck and neck with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris in the race for president. Robinson’s election could have key effects on trump’s campaign as the Tarheel State was the only swing state that voted for Trump in 2020 and trump needs a win for 2024.
Trump and Robinson agree on many things, foremost that trump was robbed of election in 2020 because of non-existent widespread voter fraud.
Robinson’s often hate-filled, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and violent anti-LGBTQ rhetoric fits in nicely with trump who this week threatened to jail people “involved in unscrupulous behavior” related to voting in the 2024 election. Trump made his remarks in a social media posting in the most overt signal yet that he may not accept the result in November if he loses.
Trump threatened a wide range of the kinds of people who would face prosecution and prison time, including campaign donors and those involved in administering elections.
“Please be aware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters & Corrupt Election Officials,” he wrote, adding that such people will be “sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Comments coming from the likes of trump, Robinson and others on the far right also have empowered neo-Nazi groups and others to act out their anti-immigration extremism.
Two separate hate groups recently rallied in Springfield, Ohio, wearing masks and uniforms and threatening around 20,000 Haitian immigrants who have arrived in Springfield since the COVID-19 pandemic. In August, Blood Tribe, a neo-Nazi group led by ex-marine Christopher Pohlhaus , marched in Springfield while waving swastika flags with at least two members carrying rifles and yelling anti-Black and racist epithets at a jazz festival.
Patriot Front, another neo-fascist group, rallied in Springfield over Labor Day weekend, denouncing what it called the “mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants”.
Robinson was elected North Carolina lieutenant governor in 2020 with 2,800,655 votes or 51.63 percent of the state’s registered voters. He won the 2024 GOP primary, with 699,917 or 66 percent of the voters in a field of three
The only trait that Robinson shares with the Rev. King is they are both African Americans. That’s it and yet Robinson has the backing of the major Republican figures in North Carolina, many members of the evangelical community and has a strong shot at defeating his opponent, Democrat Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general.
Robinson is no fan of the Rev. King as he has labeled the slain civil rights leader as a communist agitator and has claimed that “so many rights were lost” because of the Civil Rights Movement.
“Someone asked me if I considered myself part of the ‘African-American’ community. I told them NO!” he once said.
Those who have gotten behind Robinson include trump and his son, Eric and daughter-in-law, Lara, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee, and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum. He also has garnered plenty of grass roots support by those who see Robinson as trumpian.
For example, Lorrie Hancock, 63, a cosmetologist in Whitsett, said she worked on tobacco farms as a girl and admires Robinson’s early, poverty-laced upbringing.
“He’s a regular person, he came from nothing, and he built himself up,” Hancock said in a published report. She said she had donated $50 to the Robinson campaign because Robinson’s upbringing reflects her own.
Colby Maltry, a Republican in Buncombe County, complimented Robinson for his candor, pointing to Robinson’s “keep your skirt down” comment to avoid pregnancy, as an example.
“He doesn’t care what people think about what he says,” said Mr. Maltry, who owns a roofing company. “He is who he is. He’s genuine, real.”
Jimmy Connor, a Republican from Clyde, N.C., told a reporter that Robinson represents a Christian-centered way forward and a chance for Republicans to wrest control of an office that they have held only three times in the last century.
“He refers to the Bible, and it makes a difference in the South,” said Connor. “My grandkids’ lives are at stake, and the future of this country.”
The last time a Republican was elected North Carolina governor was in 1993 when voters chose Pat McCrory. McCrory is behind Robinson, who he said, is one of growing trend of candidates who “tell people what they want to hear, not necessarily what they need to hear.”
Robinson’s history of bombastic, bizarre, incendiary, homophobic, anti-Semitic and even racist comments are astounding, even in these polarized times.
He said in a Facebook post that he was “skeptical” of everything he heard on television about 9/11. He called Michelle Obama a man and said that Kwanzaa, an African American and Pan-African holiday that celebrates history and community, “is Hanukkah on food stamps.” Robinson also said that Black History Month was for “a people who have achieved so little.”
In 2021, he spoke about his view on abortion and said in a church, “I don’t care whether you just got pregnant. I don’t care if you’re 24 hours pregnant … If you kill that young’un. It is murder. You got blood on your hands.”
Robinson said about women in 2021, “Once you make a baby, it’s not your body anymore — it’s y’all’s body. And, yes, that includes the daddy.”
Among his more outlandish comments, Robinson told congregants at the Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh, “That baby in your womb ain’t no clump of cells, and if you kill that child, you’re guilty of murder.”
In a 2012 social media post, Robinson acknowledged that in 1989, he paid for a woman that he impregnated to get an abortion. In 2022, Robinson said the woman was his eventual wife, Yolanda, who he married in 1990 and with whom he has two children.
Robinson said in 2016 that feminism is “watered by the devil and is harvested and sold by his minions” and that feminists were “just as bad, if not worse” than racists. He condemned women who breastfeed in public as “shameless attention hogs” and said in 2017, “The only thing worse than a woman who doesn’t know her place, is a man who doesn’t know his.”
He denies the reality of climate change, and wants to remove science and social studies from first- through fifth-grade curriculum, abolish the State Board of Education, and expand charter schools and school voucher programs, potentially supplanting the public-school system.
Speaking before church patrons at Lake Church in White Lake, N.C., on June 30, 2023, Robinson made a parallel between the Allied fight against the Nazis in World War II and today’s “enemies of Christian America.”
“Some folks need killing… It’s a matter of necessity!” Robinson, said. “We now find ourselves struggling with people who have evil intent. Time to call out, uh, those guys in green and go have them handle it. Or those boys in blue and have them go handle it.”
Robinson did not identify the “folks” but added that there are “wicked people doing wicked things, torturing and murdering and raping.”
The church’s pastor, the Rev. Cameron McGill, defended Robinson’s comments.
“Without a doubt, those he deemed worthy of death [were] those seeking to kill us,” McGill said, “certainly did not imply the taking of any innocent lives.”
Robinson’s long history of making anti-Semitic comments have been broadly reported.
On May 31, 2017, Robinson posted on Facebook, “I am so sick of seeing and hearing people STILL talk about Nazis and Hitler and how evil and manipulative they were. NEWS FLASH PEOPLE, THE NAZIS (National Socialist) ARE GONE! We did away with them.”
On November 26, 2017, Robinson referred in quotes to the 6 million Jews murdered in Nazi Germany. He posted on Facebook, “There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered. There is also a REASON those same liberals DO NOT FILL the airwaves with programs about the Communist and the 100+ million PEOPLE they murdered throughout the 20th century.”
In 2018, Robinson posted on Facebook, “The center and leftist leaning Weimar Republic put heavy gun ownership restrictions on German citizens long before the Nazis took power. This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash. Repeating that hogwash makes the conservative argument against the current attempts by liberal Marxist to push Unconstitutional gun control measures in this Nation look FOOLISH.”
Robinson has condemned “transgenderism” and “homosexuality” as “filth.” He said Christians should be led by men, not women and he wants to end the American tradition of a separation between God and government. Robinson called for arresting transgender women if they do not use the bathroom of their sex assigned at birth, and urged the introduction of prayer in schools.
He described the 2018 Parkland, Fla. school shooting survivors who pushed for gun control as “spoiled, angry, know it all children.” A total of 17 people were killed and 17 others injured in the nation’s worse mass shooting. Speaking at an evangelical event in 2021, Robinson said the lack of formalized religion in public schools caused societal problems like school shootings.
“Do you not think that maybe if in the homeroom, before school started every day, if you were singing ‘Amazing Grace,’ giving God some praises and introducing his word back in that school, his wisdom back into those schools, maybe them schools wouldn’t be getting shot up to begin with?” Robinson said.
Robinson has insulted the African American community as one that “celebrates the very lawlessness and violence that is killing its future right in front of them.” He also called Black Americans “hypocrites who remain silent while they murder each other in abortion clinics and gang shootouts but then raise hell when a white cop shoots a Black criminal.”
The same summer in 2021, he was at the Asbury Baptist Church in Seagrove, N.C., where he said, “there’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality or any of that filth. And yes, I called it filth.”
He has railed against pro-diversity efforts and “critical race theory” lessons in schools, which he described as garbage. Critical race theory is an academic field that claims that racism undermines every social aspect.
He criticized teachers and other school officials as “all-powerful bureaucrats who think they know more than you, know your children better than you, who believe it’s okay to feed your children a steady diet of communism and pornography.”
Robinson, 56, is a former furniture factory worker who entered the political fray after he made an inflammatory speech defending gun rights at a Greensboro City Council meeting in 2018. The speech garnered millions of online views.
Robinson failed to file five years of federal income taxes and filed for bankruptcy three times. Robinson has claimed that like trump, he is the target of the “weaponization of government” as his wife’s nonprifit owes more than $130,000 to the state of North Carolina for violating compliance rules set by the Child and Adult Care Food Program. The nonprofit was reported to be “seriously” deficient in its operations by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.
He has compared himself to trump who he said also has been victim of a weaponization by Democrats after he was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
“We’ve got to stop the weaponization of our government,” Robinson said Aug. 14. “My wife and I have felt the sting of it. My wife ran a successful business for almost 10 years. It wasn’t until some folks inside that business that don’t like me found out who I was and then this game begins. The harassment begins.”
“It’s bad at the state level, when it’s me and you, and it’s bad at the federal level when we see it done against someone like President Trump,” Robinson said.
Robinson supporters include Sen. Ted Budd, R-N.C., and Rep. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C. Robinson had been a strong Budd supporter and Budd has returned the favor. At a 2022 trump rally in Selma, Ala., Budd told the audience, “Mark Robinson, ladies and gentlemen, our next governor of North Carolina. What an introduction by a great friend, somebody that I deeply admire.”
In 2022, Budd, a member of the far right Freedom Caucus, voted against the Respect for Marriage Act, which requires states and the federal government to recognize the validity of same-sex and interracial marriages. He voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and on January 6, 2021, Budd was one of 147 Republican lawmakers who objected to the certification of electoral votes from the 2020 presidential election after a mob of trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Edwards has served in congress since 2023. He was sanctioned by the House of Representatives Communications Standards Commission on April 24, 2024, for making personal attacks against President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, in email newsletters sent to constituents in May, June, July and December, 2023. Such attacks are prohibited by federal law and by rules of the House of Representatives when they are sent out as “mass communications” at taxpayer expense.
Other strong supporters include state Rep. Neal Jackson, state senators. Danny Britt, and Brad Overcash, Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C. and Republican state Senate leader Phil Berger.
“I just think he’s got a good head on his shoulders,” Berger said. “I think philosophically, he’s generally in the right place. I think he has been supportive of many of the things that we’ve done here at the General Assembly.”
Britt said he supports Robinson for his Christian values and because he will listen to the Republicans in the state legislature, who hold the majority.
“Mark Robinson would not serve as a dictator and king, he would serve as a leader for the majority in this state,” Britt said.
Jackson, a Baptist pastor, led a prayer during the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
“Tonight, we ask that You would protect our country from those who would do us harm,” Jackson said. “Thank You for protecting President Trump from the many attacks leveled against him, but especially the attack this past Saturday.”
Bishop, who is running for attorney general, has consistently opposed abortion rights, same sex marriage, reproductive healthcare in general and LGBTQ protections. He also co-sponsored the Life At Conception Act to give a fetus the same rights as a person. The bill did not include protections for in-vitro fertilization (IVF).
Bishop refused to certify the 2020 presidential election and pushed trump’s “Big Lie” about non-existent voter fraud. Bishop and other North Carolina Republicans joined a lawsuit to contest Biden’s victories in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Bishop also downplayed the nature of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“If it was an insurrection, it was the worst example of an insurrection in the history of mankind,” he said.