2024 Won’t Quit…And Neither Will He

Mark Robinson could be a big enough albatross to sink the entire election for Trump.

When GOP voters nominated Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson to the top of the state ticket in North Carolina, my very first thought was, “Now there’s an opportunity.”

After all, Joe Biden had only narrowly lost the state in 2020, and we might have won a senate seat there as well had the Democratic nominee Cal Cunningham not been tarnished by the scandal of an extramarital affair. I remember thinking that Robinson, who thunders like a preacher about sexual morality, must have lots of skeletons in his own closet and would ultimately prove too extreme for the state’s voters. It might get so bad that the state’s 16 Electoral College votes could flip to the Democrats.

That appears to have been the very fear that drove the Trump campaign to urge Robinson to quit the race ahead of a humiliating scandal that CNN was about to break on Thursday concerning Robinson’s internet persona from a decade ago. As rumors exploded about what this could be, I wondered, “Now what could be so bad that the GOP is actually embarrassed and now desperate to put as much distance as it can between Trump and Robinson?”

Welp. Now we know. Before I jump into the sordid details, it’s a good time to remind ourselves that 2024 is anything but predictable. And with six and a half weeks to go until Election Day, pretty much anything could still happen. 

Internet monikers aren’t anonymous

Before we get to what Robinson said back in the day, let’s connect some dots summarizing CNN’s excellent reporting.

In the early 2010s, Mark Robinson was a dabbler in far-right politics and something of a “perv.” That’s not a judgment, that is how he actually described himself. He did so on an internet porn site called “Nude Africa” that had a message board where fans could post whatever they felt like. 

Robinson used the internet pseudonym “minisoldr” to post his notes. He may have thought he was acting anonymously, but here’s the thing: He foolishly used the same handle across social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Whoops.

But wait. Couldn’t it just be a coincidence that someone used the same handle on Nude Africa back in the 2010s? Quite a coincidence it would have to be! As CNN reported,

In his profile, minisoldr listed his full name as “mark robinson” and disclosed a private email address Robinson used elsewhere online. In 2012, a user responded to a comment by calling minisoldr “Mark.”

Okay, but still, it’s possible these are different people, right? “Mark Robinson” is a pretty common name. Oh, but wait:

Minisoldr mentioned in 2008 being married for 18 years, which corresponds with Robinson’s marriage to Yolanda Hill in 1990. In 2011, minisoldr wrote he had been married 21 years. Minisoldr wrote in a 2011 post that he lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, the same town where Robinson lived at the time and currently lives.

Further, in 2012 minisoldr said he served in the Army in the 1980s. As did Robinson. He said his mother worked at an HBCU. That checks out, too: Robinson’s mother was employed as a custodian at North Carolina A&T State University, an HBCU in Greensboro.

Okay, so devil’s advocate: Couldn’t someone have been intentionally trying to frame or defame him by creating a fake account and writing those things? The thing is, Robinson isn’t a typical politician. He didn’t explode onto the MAGA scene until much later. There would have been no clear reason back in the early 2010s for anyone to impersonate him and adopt his personal bio on the porn site. 

There are also some strong digital fingerprints. The email address used by minisoldr was the same on other social media platforms. And on Disqus, Mark Robinson’s photo appears under the username minisoldr. 

Perhaps the most telling fact is that minisoldr’s posts on Nude Africa had a style about them that seems unique to Robinson’s public commentary, which deploys memorable phrases about frogs and their plump posteriors.

What Robinson wrote (apologies in advance)

It’s pretty much beyond dispute that “minisoldr” and Mark Robinson are the same loser. So let’s talk briefly about some of what he said, quoting directly from the story on CNN and other sources:

On race and politics:

• “I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!”

• “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.”

• “Get that f*cking commie bastard off the National Mall!” (referring to the dedication of the memorial to MLK in D.C., by President 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!”

On sexuality and abortion:

• “I like watching tranny on girl p-rn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” 

• “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,” describing his own behavior as a 14-year old boy.

• “Had me another morning with the wife’s sister!” (in a puerile post about golden showers—don’t click on this if graphic sexual language offends you.)

• “I don’t care. I just wanna see the sex tape!” (following news of a celebrity who received an abortion)

Since the reporting by CNN, a number of other reports have emerged, including one linking Robinson’s email address to the infamous swingers site Ashley Madison. 

There is also an unconfirmed photo post by a user going by the handle “minisoldr” of miniature SS soldier dolls. (Granted, this very well could be someone else with that user ID, but given Robinson’s profession of love for the Nazis and the KKK, he doesn’t deserve much benefit of the doubt.)

The hypocrisy of it all

Robinson infamously appeared before a church congregation, bellowing, “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth.” He has attacked the idea of same-sex marriage equality and insinuated that recognition of LGBTQ+ rights could normalize pedophilia. 

Mr. Traditional Marriage, however, claimed in graphic detail to be having threesomes with his wife’s sister. He also said he got off on watching trans porn. And yet he called the transgender rights movement “demonic” and full of “the spirit of Antichrist.” Here’s an example of that:

Trans rights activist Charlotte Clymer worried that the news cycle would be an opportunity to hurt trans people while purporting to shame Robinson. We should be very mindful of this. In her substack, Clymer wrote,

If a non-trans adult has a kink for trans people, I really don’t care, and moreover, I really don’t wanna know. I would prefer not knowing how they privately fetishize trans folks, and also: I see nothing wrong with them doing what they want in private, so long as they keep it to themselves and act in a consensual manner.

The problem here is that central to Mr. Robinson’s political brand is an aggressive and cruel dehumanization and shaming of trans people, in addition to the LGBTQ community generally.

Mr. Robinson has called for trans women to be arrested for using public women’s restrooms and went further than that, stating that if trans people need to use a public restroom, we should “find a corner outside somewhere.”

Like dogs, of course.

She continued,

There’s so much more this sad, cowardly, insecure person has said and done throughout his public life that makes him beyond disqualified, many times over, to run for any elected office. 

So, am I surprised that Mr. Robinson viciously attacks trans people publicly while enjoying transgender porn privately? Not even a little. It is the opposite of shocking.

He is simply part of a long pattern of MAGA extremists who weirdly sexualize the bodies of trans people and are deeply unsettled by their own desires and bizarrely address that internal quagmire by projecting their conditioned self-loathing and resulting rage on those of us who are trans.

It is always those protesting loudest who are the first to be exposed for their own hypocrisy. Robinson is no exception. It’s already clear that Robinson loathes his own skin color (Black Nazis and Black KKK members are not actually a thing). It’s also clear now that his moralizing and condemnation of others comes from a far deeper place of insecurity and shame, long hidden behind what he thought was an anonymous internet persona.

The fallout 

The timing of the release of the CNN story could have been part of a Hollywood script. The deadline to drop out of the North Carolina governor’s race was yesterday, and as political observers watched the clock tick down, many wondered whether the GOP was in fact internally driving this story to force a losing candidate out in the nick of time.

But Robinson, predictably, dug in, and as of 12:01 a.m. today, the state’s board of elections had received no word from any candidate about an intention to withdraw.

The North Carolina GOP, also predictably, fell in line. It issued a statement noting that Robinson had categorically denied the allegations and that Democrats were attempting to “demonize him via personal attacks.” This is rather ironic given the widespread belief that the attack was coming from inside the GOP house.

The comments below that post are worth reading. Here is a smattering:

GOP politicians are currently running from Robinson like he is radioactive, with many scrubbing their social media posts of any evidence they were ever seen together. But the Harris campaign was quick with receipts. After all, Trump publicly sang Robinson’s praises not long ago.

Hard to run away from Robinson when he was a featured speaker at the RNC.

Eric Trump probably regrets having said things like this about him:

Narrator: He is not gonna win the state.

Reverse Coattails

Yesterday in my piece in The Big Picture substack, I laid out 10 reasons I remain cautiously optimistic that Harris will win the White House and prevent a second Trump presidency. Among those reasons were what are the notion of “reverse coattails”—a rare political phenomenon where someone down ticket is so toxic that it affects up ballot races like the presidency:

In North Carolina, the radical extremist GOP Lt. Governor Mark Robinson is at the top of the gubernatorial ticket. He is badly trailing his Democratic challenger, state Attorney General Josh Stein, in many polls by double digits. There could be a strong “reverse coattail” effect in the state, as Democrats and independents turn out to reject Robinson and while they’re at it cast a vote for Harris/Walz. The presidential polls are currently tied in North Carolina, so the GOP is very worried about this possibility.

I wrote and published this before all the revelations about Robinson emerged in which he declared himself a “Black Nazi” who wants to bring back slavery and has unusually graphic and prurient sexual tastes that he felt the need to post about in a porn site forum, revealing himself as the worst kind of moralizing hypocrite. 

The chances of reverse coattails now impacting the race for the presidency have now shot up considerably in North Carolina, with no ready escape hatch for the GOP.

In another earlier piece, I had zeroed in on the state of North Carolina, which is now very much in play, and demonstrated that a win by Harris in the state would seriously complicate any path to victory for Trump:

Harris is already looking strong in the Midwestern blue wall states of Wisconsin and Michigan, where she has moved the polls considerably in her favor. Were she to win those two states plus North Carolina, look at where it puts her:

That’s right: She’d have 267 Electoral College votes, all other things being equal. That means she would only need one other swing state—Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia or Nevada—to win the presidency. 

The Trump campaign realizes what a disaster it now faces. But we need to understand that this is peak MAGA self-destruction. Extremism always carries the seeds of its eventual implosion, because the only way to feed the beast is to grow ever more extreme. In a democracy that is even partially functioning—which is where I still put us—this can result in a death spiral where the center of the country is exhausted by the nonsense and the noise and the extremists respond by growing louder and more exhausting.

If Trump loses North Carolina because of the reverse coattail effect, the universe will have written a most ironic ending to his political career. 

Who destroyed Donald Trump in the end? Why, it was a Black Nazi!