Mark Robinson: North Carolina Republican has called LGBTQ people ‘filth’ and quoted Hitler
Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for North Carolina governor, has a long history of attacking the LGBTQ+ community. (Getty)
North Carolina Republicans have nominated Mark Robinson – who once called LGBTQ+ people “filth” and has a history of making inflammatory remarks – as their nominee for governor.
Robinson, currently the state’s lieutenant governor, won the GOP (Grand Old Party, the nickname for the Republicans) gubernatorial primary on Tuesday (5 March), setting him up for what is expected to be a close battle with Democrat and state attorney general Josh Stein in November’s election.
Former president Donald Trump has described the state’s first Black lieutenant governor as “Martin Luther King on steroids”.
Comparing Robinson to the iconic civil rights leader is unusual given Robinson’s history of controversial comments about the LGBTQ+ community, reproductive rights, religion and school shooting victims.
Here’s a brief guide to what Robinson has said in the past.
He once described LGBTQ+ people as ‘filth’
Mark Robinson faced calls for his resignation in 2021 after a video surfaced on social media of him raging that children shouldn’t learn “how to hate America” before referring to LGBTQ+ identities as “that filth”.
Instead of apologising, he said he wasn’t ashamed of his remarks, and challenged anyone who didn’t agree to “come see” him.
“When you introduce these adult theme issues to children, that is filthy,” he said.
He also claimed right-wing speech was being “demonised”, going on to describe LGBTQ+ issues as “adult topics” that have “no business around children”.
Just a few months later, Robinson said straight people are ‘superior’ to queer folks
Continuing his trend of attacking the LGBTQ+ community, Robinson was caught on camera questioning the “purpose” of being gay. He also equated queer people to maggots and “what the cows leave behind”.
He claimed heterosexual people are “superior” because they “can do something these people can’t do” before saying homosexuality “creates nothing”.
He claimed the trans rights movement was ‘full of the spirit of the antichrist’
Robinson has called trans rights “demonic” and “full of the spirit of the antichrist”.
He also said transgender people can’t change “what God put in you” even if they get “drugged-up, dressed-up, made-up, cut-up”, and condemned schools for “dragging” kids “down into the pit of hell”, by teaching about LGBTQ+ issues.
Robinson said trans women should be arrested over use of toilets
At a campaign event last month, Robinson threatened that trans women “will be arrested” or “whatever we go to do to you” if they used a women’s toilet.
At a different event, he said people who are “confused” about their gender should “find a corner outside to go” to the toilet and has claimed discussions what facilities trans people use are “tearing society down”.
He has repeatedly attacked trans youth and gender-affirming healthcare
In a 2016 Facebook post, Robinson described a trans child featured on a National Geographic magazine cover as “sick” and “demonic behaviour”. He then claimed the US wouldn’t “survive God’s wrath” if trans youth were affirmed.
At a rally in May, the man hoping to be sitting in the governor’s mansion come November falsely claimed “clinics” were performing gender-affirming surgeries on trans youth as young as five years old.
He described gender-affirming healthcare as “abusing children” and predicted that society wouldn’t last for much longer if such care continued.
The LGBTQ+ Pride flag made him ‘sick‘
While on the campaign trail recently, Robinson said: “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: when children were going to be dragged down to go see the drag show, when pornography was going to be presented to our children in schools.”
It “makes [him] sick every time” he sees a church flying an LGBTQ+ Pride flag and believes such acceptance is a “direct spit in the face of God almighty”.
He attacked the Pride flag again, saying: “The rainbow is a symbol of God’s covenant with man, and, as a Christian, I refuse to see it besmirched. If it costs me the governorship of this state so be it. But I will not allow it to cost me my soul.”
He repeatedly alleged Michelle Obama is secretly trans
Robinson’s personal Facebook is full of posts insinuating the former First Lady Michelle Obama is transgender – a misogynistic and anti-trans conspiracy theory spread by many right-wingers.
In his posts, Robinson refers to her by using he/him pronouns and wondered if she’d “take the day off” being a woman. He also claimed that while “Melania Trump speaks five languages, (Obama] did too: “female, male, ghetto, anti-American liberal and wookie”.
Robinson is a Holocaust denier, decries abortion, and has mocked victims of school shootings
In a Facebook post in 2014, the Trump-endorsed candidate quoted a speech by Adolf Hitler about racial pride. At a Moms for Liberty summit last year, Robinson clarified that just because he quoted the Nazi dictator, didn’t mean he supported him.
However, it’s claimed that he once described the Holocaust as “hogwash” and, on another occasion, implied that the number of Jewish people murdered by Nazis is false, WRAL reported.
According to The Guardian, he once described the movie Black Panther as “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by [a] satanic Marxist”. He’s then quoted as saying it “was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets”.
Robinson has a history of making Islamophobic remarks too and has called the survivors of the 2018 Parkland school shooting – in which 17 people lost their lives – “media prosti-tots”. In addition, in 2018, Robinson said he represented average Americans who feel targeted and whose safety feels threatened by attempts to restrict firearm access. The speech earned him a spot on the board the highly influential lobby group, the National Rifle Association.
He has said he wouldn’t be surprised if the 9/11 atrocities were an “inside job” and has mocked the #MeToo movement.
He wants to “go back to the America where women couldn’t vote” and claimed Christians are “called to be led by men” not women. He’s threatened to use his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle against the government if it “gets too big for its britches”, and described abortion as murder, a “moral evil, like slavery“.
He has proclaimed that once a person becomes pregnant, “it’s not [their] body any more”. He has also vowed to “protect life from conception, saying of abortion: “We got it down to 12 weeks. The next goal is to get it down to six, then keep moving from there,” The Guardian reported.
