GREENSBORO, N.C. — Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee in the North Carolina governor’s race, spoke from the pulpit at the Lake Church in the state’s southeast on the last Sunday in June, just before the Fourth of July holiday.
A large Black man with a shaved head and trim salt-and-pepper goatee, Robinson paced the floor and scowled while preaching a hellfire sermon of conservative paranoia. An all-white group of parishioners sat behind them. They shifted uncomfortably in their seats, smiling thinly and clapping occasionally.
Seen in a video posted on the church’s Facebook page, the parishioners seem strangely unmoved by Robinson’s speech, as if they’re either completely in accord with him and find his conclusions unremarkable — or they think he’s completely lost his mind.
Robinson warned that there was “a certain class of people” that wanted them to forget the U.S. Constitution “was crafted for you” and that “Jesus Christ died to give you your freedom.” This unnamed “class of people,” analogous to King George during the Revolutionary War “want control, and the trappings that come with it,” Robinson said. “That’s why they despise America.”
America has set aside God and forgotten its founding principles, Robinson lamented, and for that reason he said, “we now find ourselves struggling with people who have evil intents.
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“You know, there was a time when we used to meet evil on the battlefield,” he continued. “And guess what we did to it? We killed it! We didn’t quibble about it. We didn’t argue about it. We didn’t fight about it. We killed it!”
Then, he made a rhetorical swerve from the ambiguous enemy of the “class of people… who hate America” to the Japanese and German Nazis whom the U.S. armed forces fought during World War II.
“Kill them!” he said. Then he preempted the anticipated criticism by adding, “Some liberal somewhere is going to say that sounds awful.
“Too bad!” he continued. “Get mad at me if you want to. Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it… We have wicked people doing wicked things — torturing, murdering and raping. It’s time to call out, uh, those guys in green, and go have ’em handled. Or those boys in blue, and have ’em go handle it.”
Then, the speech swerved yet again. And while Robinson didn’t specify who exactly the enemy was, his remarks suggested he had shifted to one that was not a historical foreign adversary, but rather forces at work in American society today.
“We need to start handling our business again,” Robinson said. “Because guys, what I said at the beginning about you getting in your cars and listening to your radios, putting on what you want to put on, and saying what you want to put on — keep thinking about it.
“Don’t you feel it slipping away?” he said, taking a long pause. “Don’t you feel it slipping away?” Then he warned that 1776 is becoming “a distant memory,” and “the tenets of socialism” were gaining ground.
“They’re watching us,” Robinson said. “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 and close down your business.”
An extremist political brand that might not work in a general election
Robinson’s “some folks need killing” remarks are only one of a continuous string of controversies and scandals that have unspooled since his meteoric rise after giving an angry speech before the city council in his hometown of Greensboro in 2018.
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It’s not even the most recent controversy. Since his appearance at the Lake Church in late June, Robinson has made waves by holding a fundraiser at another church in the western part of the state that has been labeled a cult and whose leaders have been accused of physically abusing children.
Bombast, provocation, name-calling and anger have been Robinson’s political hallmarks going back to his 2018 viral speech in which he lambasted local leaders for exploring options for ending a gun show held at a city-owned facility.
During the speech, he denigrated “people talking in here about this group and that group, domestic violence, Blacks, these minorities and that minority” as “loonies from the left.” Local residents who had never heard of Robinson before that night in April 2018 looked at his Facebook page and quickly discovered mocking former President Barack Obama and other Democratic elected officials. They found blatant homophobia and antisemitic conspiracy theories.
With each round of liberal outrage at Robinson’s succession of outrages, his popularity with conservative voters in North Carolina only grew. In that way, Robinson’s strategy of building a political base by leaning into polarization aligns with that of former President Donald Trump, whose endorsement he has received.
In 2020, Robinson used his notoriety to easily dominate a crowded field of more experienced Republican candidates for lieutenant governor. By the time he announced his candidacy for governor in 2023, Robinson was already heavily favored to win the Republican primary, and he vanquished his opponents with almost 65 percent of the vote.
While the 56-year-old candidate has taken the Republican Party in North Carolina by storm with his brand of scorched-earth culture-war politics, whether he can win the statewide race for the top post in state government is a completely different question.
Robinson has been trailing his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, by double digits in the polls.
Stein, who currently serves as the state’s attorney general and would be the first Jew to serve as governor, is heavily outspending Robinson on political advertising that largely consists of throwing Robinson’s inflammatory statements back at him.
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History also doesn’t favor Robinson. Despite Republicans holding a super-majority in the state legislature, only one Republican has held the governor’s office since 1994. The last Republican governor, Pat McCrory, lost his reelection bid in 2016 amidst a backlash over the unpopular HB2 law that policed transgender people’s access to bathrooms and caused entertainers and sporting events to yank their business.
Gay jokes and Facebook shock-posting
So, how did Robinson become the Republican nominee for the highest office in North Carolina?
Between working in furniture factories and running pizza takeout stores, Robinson was honing his rhetorical skills by telling homophobic jokes to patrons at a porn shop, Louis Money (his legal name) recalls.
In the early 1990s, Money told Raw Story that Robinson gained favor with the staff at Gents Video & News in Greensboro by bringing in pizza from Papa John’s. In the pre-internet era, porn stores provided a haven for gay men — one of the few places in small Southern cities, aside gay bars, where they could meet discretely. Although Robinson did not directly interact with the gay patrons, Money told Raw Story that they were in the audience when he held court in the back of the store.
“He was hilarious,” Money recalled. “It would be 4 o’clock in the morning, and we’re trying to stay awake, and he would have us dying of laughter.”
Robinson’s alleged porn consumption was first reported by the Assembly, an online outlet that covers North Carolina. But Money, who fronts a band called Trailer Park Orchestra, has been publicly talking onstage about the matter since at least March 2024. Part of the story is memorialized in a humorous song by his band — a comedic troupe that he describes as a “redneck rock and roll band,” called “The Lt. Governor Owes Me Money.” The song addresses Money’s assertion that Robinson failed to pay him for a bootleg porn video in the mid-2000s.
A spokesperson for Robinson told the Assembly that the allegations about his porn consumption, which are backed up by other patrons of the porn shop, were “a false and personal attack” and “complete fiction.” But the Robinson himself refused to respond to questions from a reporter who met him at a campaign stop on Tuesday.
With the advent of Facebook just before the election of President Obama, Robinson found his true calling as a social media troll, staking out controversial positions and, like the professional wrestlers he revered, projecting a “come at me, bro” persona.
In his 2022 memoir, We Are the Majority, Robinson acknowledged that the crucial training for his 2018 speech to Greensboro City Council was Facebook. As compared to a previous public speaking attempt nine years earlier, Robinson reflected: “I was a much sharper weapon. I had been whetted and honed through the rough and tumble environment of social media. I had put in years of Facebook argumentation and meme making.”
By that time, Robinson was also deep into conspiracy theories.
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In an interview given only one month before he burst onto the national scene with his viral city council speech, Robinson embraced the host’s perspective of looking at history “from the conspiratorial viewpoint.”
“All you have to do is read the Communist Manifesto and know who Karl Marx was and know what he was about, and you understand that communism is pure evil and has evil intent,” Robinson said. “Everywhere it goes, it brings death, murder, it brings suffering…. I actually think communism is going to be a segue into one-world government.”
There was the “evil intent” that Robinson would invoke six years later as a candidate for governor to the parishioners at the Lake Church, when he said it must be met “on the battlefield.”
Robinson’s paranoia about communism seeping into nearly every facet of American life contextualizes one of his more controversial statements about Black people — surfaced by CNN in 2023 — in which he said that during the “so-called” 1960s civil rights movement “so many freedoms were lost.”
Robinson’s comments during the 2018 interview echoed the arguments made by white segregationists in the 1950s and ’60s.
“I think since the early 1950s, matter of fact, directly after World War II, since directly after World War II, Black people have been pawns for communists up ’til today,” he said.
Robinson’s obsession with communism and apparent belief that shadowy forces are conspiring to take away Americans’ rights dovetails with statements that, intentionally or not, convey antisemitic tropes and downplay the Holocaust.
“There is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” Robinson wrote in a 2017 Facebook post. “There is 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 another social media post, made in 2018, Robinson wrote: “This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash.”
After his viral city council speech launched Robinson as a conservative media star, he gave an interview to Sean Moon, a cult leader whose sect worships with AR-15 rifles. During the interview, Moon described the modern incarnation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation as China, the CIA, Islam and the Rothschild family of “international bankers that rule every single national and Federal Reserve-type style of bank in every country.”
Robinson responded: “That’s exactly right. It’s amazing to me, that we live in this age of information where you can go online and you can find all this information, and it’s not hidden from anybody.”
Recalibrating as election nears
Robinson apologized for a string of antisemitic comments in October 2023 by declaring “Solidarity with Israel Week” in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack, resulting in more than 1,200 deaths and the kidnapping of more than 100 civilians.
“There was never any antisemitism intended in those words,” he reportedly said during a press conference in Raleigh. “It was never within me. I’ve never had anything against the Jewish people.
“I apologize for the wording,” he added. “We’ve dealt with the Facebook posts and moved past them.”
Since winning the Republican primary in March, Robinson has toned down his rhetoric on social issues while backing away from a previous position supporting a ban on all abortions once a heartbeat is detected. He has admitted that he paid for his wife to get an abortion before they were married — a jarring admission in light of a history of comments describing the practice as “murder.”
Robinson also backpedaled on calls for political violence following the July 13 assassination attempt against Trump. He told a reporter during the Republican National Convention that he made his comments about killing people “in a historical context” that was not intended to extend “to the political discourse.” But he hasn’t explained who he was referring to when he said a “class of people… want control” and “despise America.” And he hasn’t explained who the people are who “have evil intents.”
Robinson has never apologized for repeatedly calling LGBTQ+ and transgender people “filth.” And while rhetoric about LGBTQ+ and transgender people aren’t a feature of his recent campaign stops, he staked a clear position during a talk at a church outside of Charlotte one month before announcing his candidacy for governor in April 2023.
“God formed me because he knew there was going to be a time when God’s learning was going to be intolerable to the wicked,” Robinson said at the time. “When children were going to be dragged down to see the drag show. When pornography was going to be presented to our children in schools.
“Makes me sick every time I see it — a church that flies that rainbow flag, which is a direct spit in the face of God almighty.”
Robinson could not be reached for comment for this story.
One person who won’t be voting for Mark Robinson is Louis Money, the former porn video store worker.
The main reason is Robinson’s homophobia.
“That’s still the same guy that was telling all those jokes and talking all that trash in the back of the porn shop,” Money told Raw Story.
Money was 19 at the time — about four years younger than Robinson. He no longer laughs at gay jokes, he said, adding that he would like to think most people evolve.
“That guy that’s onstage now talking about gay people is the same guy that used to come to the porn shop at 2 o’clock in the morning to talk trash about gay people,” Money said. “To me, there was no evolution.”
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