47 days before Election Day, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s sanctimonious son, has finally found widespread unfavorability among the state electorate. All it took was a bombshell CNN story detailing his elaborate history on a porn website and another story which showed he had an account on a website dedicated to helping people cheat on their spouses.
Robinson is an obviously bigoted individual with a past of comments of the homophobic, antisemitic, racist, transphobic, Islamophobic and anti-atheist nature. That’s a lot of commas for one man. At a church this summer, Robinson said that “some folks need killing,” which has historically been a great way to endear yourself to citizens whose vote you want cast in your favor. If I were to continue detailing his previous remarks, you’d be reading this article until next Tuesday.
Theoretically, these views alone would bar one from public office. Alas, we have members of Congress who publicly claim forest fires are started by “Jewish space lasers.” In all of its glory, the modern GOP has ample space for those espousing views that school children are taught were fixed in the 1960s. So it seems inherently discriminatory views are fine, with one caveat.
Not too long ago, former U.S. Representative Madison Cawthorn, also a homegrown North Carolinian, was ousted from his 11th congressional district seat after a series of, to put it kindly, mishaps. These included allegations of insider trading, attempting to bring a gun through airport security (twice) and wearing lingerie in a nude video. While only the first two are criminal, the third was what got his name in the headlines.
Politicians, especially members of Congress, use their positions to inflate their wealth all the time. It’s almost expected. It appears that bringing a gun to the airport is too: are you really for gun rights if you don’t want to bring a firearm on a civilian flight? What isn't expected or tolerated though, is sexual immodesty. No matter the level of deviance from normal white American sexual morality, those like Robinson and Cawthorn are deemed incredible beings of evil, Satanist nature.
I won’t delve far into the psychology of what causes people to adopt views contradictory to their own identities. Discrimination begins with the need to identify, but turned awry, that can result in horrible conclusions, perverse to the ideals of empathy and equality. It is clear that Robinson found what he thought was a safe haven in the radical wing of the Republican Party, where championing ideas adversarial to minority groups is often endorsed.
As the adage goes, “racists don’t care about your skin color as long as you’re racist too” and boy oh boy, is our lieutenant governor racist. In one of his comments on the porn site uncovered by CNN, he claims to be a Black Nazi. In another, he says he’d like slavery to be brought back, partially so he could “buy a few.”
However, those things will not sink Robinson. Those statements could previously be inferred from his already-stated stances of violence, antisemitism and racism. What will sink Robinson is his secret abandonment of the sacred “Christian” values modern conservatism is founded upon. For his voters, saying that homosexuality leads to pedophilia is fine, but expressing an affinity for videos with transgender performers will lead to the blasphemous end to his campaign. The porn industry is, of course, incredibly problematic, but the issue conservatives take is less with that and more with perceived sexual deviancy.
It is hard to imagine that Robinson’s campaign will hold much water in the coming weeks. Before these stories, he was polling up to 13 points worse than his opponent, Attorney General Josh Stein. It is amazing how far someone as vile as Robinson can make it in contemporary American politics, even campaigning alongside Donald Trump. While Robinson was previously down in the polls to Stein, this could have a ripple effect on an otherwise tight state ballot, removing trust from the N.C. Republican Party as a whole.
