We start this week off with a bang. Longtime First Draft reader and commenter Lex Alexander hails from a proud North Carolina family. Dr. A and I ate BBQ with Lex and his wonderful wife Carroll in Greensboro before the pandemic. First Draft brought us together.

North Carolina is a purple state, but Trumpism has taken hold of its Republican party. Lt. Gov Mark Robinson is the extremist GOP nominee for Governor. After he said, “Some folks need killing,” I considered making Robinson malaka of the week.  Instead, I asked Lex to write about him.

This post is longer than the average First Draft post, but it needed to be: Lex uses Robinson’s own words against him. It wasn’t hard, the stupid motherfucker never shuts up.

Enough from me. Hit it, Lex.

-Adrastos

Mark Robinson: More Than Just Malaka Of The Week by Lex Alexander

Greetings from Greensboro, North Carolina, home of Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor of the state. It has been my distinct displeasure to watch Robinson progress from Old Man Shouting at Clouds in a Greensboro City Council meeting in 2018 to my state’s lieutenant governor and a guy polling two points ahead of his Democratic opponent in one of N.C.’s most crucial gubernatorial races in decades.

Robinson becomes much easier to understand if you first understand this about him: He is batshit, bugfuck insane. Now, I am not a mental health clinician, and I don’t play one on the Internet. That said, in my constitutionally protected opinion, it is absolutely true, and it informs all his statements, actions, and decisions.

How he got that way I neither know nor care. What matters is that he is leading in a race that Dems have won seven of the past eight go-rounds in a very purple state, yet he is manifestly unqualified to be governor of the ninth largest state of the country and a key swing state in the 2024 presidential election. (Incumbent Democrat Roy Cooper, a moderate, practical politician, is term-limited out after this year.)

Like most people, I had never heard of Mark Robinson until he showed up on the night of April 3, 2018, during the Speakers from the Floor segment of a Greensboro City Council meeting. If I had, I might have had occasion to do a little digging and find out that he had filed for bankruptcy in 1998, 1999, and 2003, that he had failed to file a federal income tax return for five consecutive years beginning in 1998, and that he went public with his anti-abortion screeds only after he and his future wife chose to abort a pregnancy in 1990.

I’ll spare non-Greensboro folks the obscure details of the city business that made gun safety the theme of the evening’s floor speakers that April night. But suffice to say that Robinson, in contrast to most of the other speakers, insisted on strong gun rights so that he could protect himself and his family:

The majority of people in this city are law abiding, and they follow the law and they want their constitutional right to bear arms. … I am the majority! A law-abiding citizen who’s never shot anybody, never committed a serious crime, never committed a felony! I’ve never done anything like that, but it seems like every time we have one of these shootings, nobody wants to put the blame where it goes, which is at the shooter’s feet. You want to put it at my feet!”

In fairness, his speech was enthusiastic but not, generally speaking, insane. Then-U.S. Rep. Mark Walker, R-N.C., posted video of it on his Facebook page and it got 3 million hits. Someone sent it to the National Rifle Association, which posted it on its channels. One of the editors of the Greensboro News & Record (where I reported, edited, recruited, trained, and ran web sites from 1987 to 2009) even wrote a column about it. He said Robinson had “cast a silver dollar where some may have hoped for two cents’ worth of impact.”

That column, to say the least, cast pearls before swine. Because the more we learned about Robinson, the more swinish he came to appear.

I don’t know whether running for lieutenant governor in 2020 was Robinson’s idea or the idea of some GOP kingmaker who knows that a lot of racist white folks are always happy to see a Black politician spouting white conservatives’ lies. And they certainly were in 2020, with Robinson’s Trumpist pronouncements allowing him to more than double the second-place candidate’s vote total in a nine-way, low-turnout GOP primary. He went on to defeat the Democrat, a veteran but obscure legislator, in the general election, 51.6% to 48.4%.

Fortunately for North Carolinians and for Robinson, state law doesn’t give the lieutenant governor very many responsibilities. Sure, the lite gov presides over the state Senate, but that’s about it other than being prepared to step in if the guv dies or is ill or absent. Oh, and one other thing: preparing full-time to run for governor, which is exactly what Robinson has done. (In fairness, so have other lite guvs of both parties before him.)

And if he had been able to keep his mouth shut, he might be well ahead right now. That’s not to say he’s a shoo-in to win, not least because the Democratic nominee, state attorney general Josh Stein, hasn’t really started spending any money yet. But he is well ahead of where a candidate with his record should be.

What has Robinson said or done that’s disqualifying? Hell, what hasn’t he said and done?

Even before he became a public figure in 2018, he was posting hatred and abuse on his Facebook page.

After the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., he posted:

I pray for the souls of all those killed, healing for all those wounded, and comfort for the family members of the terrorist shooting in Orlando. However, homosexuality is STILL an abominable sin and I WILL NOT join in ‘celebrating gay pride’ nor will I fly their sacrilegious flag on my page.” In 2017, he posted, “You CAN NOT love God and support the homosexual agenda.”

He mocked the survivors of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in the most vicious terms in 2017:

Let me see if I have this correct. A spoiled, angry, disobedient CHILD shot and killed 17 of his classmates, and now spoiled, angry, know it all CHILDREN are trying to tell law abiding ADULTS that we must give up our Constitutional RIGHT to own certain weapons. Cue Rod Serling because this must be an episode of the Twilight Zone? David Hogg and the rest of these silly little immature “media prosti-tots” need to grab a passy, have seat in time out, and shut up.”

He has pronounced the U.S. a “Christian nation” and added, “If you don’t like it, I’ll buy your plane, train or automobile ticket right outta here,” and said that people who oppose him politically are “people who love the devil and love wrong.”

In conservative churches and on talk-radio programs, he has opposed same-sex marriage, he has called homosexuality and transgenderism “filth” and “demonic,” and he has had similarly disparaging things to say about Muslims and Jews, Black Democratic leaders, and Black Lives Matter.

He even told the Republican Women of Pitt County, during a 2020 campaign stop, “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote.” Apparently, the only reaction by the women attending apparently was silence. I’m old enough to remember when Republican women cared deeply about voting.

Earlier this month, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that the State Department of Health and Human Services had found in 2007 that a Greensboro day-care center run by Robinson and his wife, Yolanda Hill, had falsified training information for a staff member. Robinson denied it.

The department also had found then that the Robinsons had produced credentials allowing them to operate the center – even though the state had no record of ever having issued any such credentials – and claimed that they had undergone criminal background checks, although the department had no records to that effect.

Robinson and his wife sold the center, which ended state disciplinary efforts. In his 2022 autobiography, We Are the Majority!: The Life and Passions of a Patriot,  he complained about government regulation of child care: “It was hard at times to operate effectively because there were so many regulations and red tape.”

In that autobiography, he also said, among other things, that he:

• Wants to eliminate the State Board of Education.
• Has difficult relationships with women because “they love to be able to talk a man into submission. And with me, it never happens. They can’t do it.”
• Wants to stop teaching history, science and social studies in N.C. public schools below the sixth grade.
• Believes, in spite of statistics to the contrary, that government financial assistance fosters dependence.
• Believes that transgender people are unfit to serve in the military.
• Believes that there’s no such thing as systemic racism, in defiance of the evidence amassed by authors and scholars.

On June 30, he made national news for saying in an address to a White Lake, N.C., church (video of the whole service here) that “some folks need killing!”:

We now find ourselves struggling with people who have evil intent. You know, there’s a time when we used to meet evil on the battlefield, and guess what we did to it? We killed it! … When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, what did we do? We flew to Japan! And we killed the Japanese Army and Navy! … We didn’t argue and capitulate and talk about, well, maybe we shouldn’t fight the Nazis that hard. No, they’re bad. Kill them. Some liberal somewhere is going to say that sounds awful. Too bad. Get mad at me if you want to.

 

Some folks need killing! 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! When you have wicked people doing wicked things, torturing and murdering and raping. It’s time to call out, uh, those guys in green and go have them handled. Or those boys in blue and have them go handle it.…

 

We need to start handling our business again.… Don’t you feel it slipping away? … The further we start sliding into making 1776 a distant memory and the tenets of socialism and communism start coming into clearer focus. They’re watching us. They’re listening to us. They’re tracking us. They get mad at you. They cancel you. They dox you. They kick you off social media. They come in and close down your business. Folks, it’s happening … because we have forgotten who we are.”

This fulmination combines two of the great principles of Trumpism: 1) Conservatives are constantly being mistreated and victimized by leftists, and 2) therefore, they should be allowed to murder, without legal consequence, the people who they think are doing this to them. MAGAts already say the former in public. The latter is still said primarily in private but is working its way into the mainstream – remember the gallows intended for Mike Pence on Jan. 6, 2021? And in North Carolina, Robinson, at least for now, is the foremost purveyor and is not paying any price for it.

Remember how I said he’s batshit, bugfuck insane? So are a lot of North Carolina Republican voters. And that’s the problem: The state’s Republicans, for the most part, used to be sane and responsible, in the mold of Jim Martin, the Republican who represented the Charlotte area in the U.S. House for six terms before serving as governor from 1985 to 1993. The state GOP hasn’t gotten much larger since 2016, but it has gotten a lot Trumpier. Robinson is the one N.C. politician who speaks to it – like Trump, encouraging voters to give in to all their worst instincts — and is beloved for it.

I’d like to conclude this piece with some grand swell of great writing. But after more than 50 years of watching N.C. Republicans – of which I was one for almost 40 years — grow ever more venal, corrupt, stupid, and hateful, I’m tired of watching it and tired of explaining it and don’t feel like wasting my good stuff on it anymore. If you’d like to help out Robinson’s Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, you can do so here.