Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor, posted extensive antisemitic and sexually explicit content on adult websites before entering politics, CNN reported on Thursday.
In a 2010 forum discussing black Republicans, Robinson, the incumbent lieutenant governor of North Carolina, wrote “I’m a black Nazi,” according to the CNN report. Two years later, he reportedly wrote that he would prefer to be governed by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler than by the Obama administration.
“I’d take Hitler over any of the (expletive) that’s in Washington right now,” he reportedly wrote. CNN also reported that Robinson used an anti-Jewish slur in 2010 in a description of the television show “Good Times,” which was co-created by Norman Lear, who was Jewish and who died last December at 101.
All of the posts that CNN reported that Robinson, 56, wrote were allegedly penned as an adult but prior to his entering politics in 2019.
Robinson told CNN on Thursday that he didn’t write the posts. “I’m not going to get into the minutia of how somebody manufactured this—these salacious tabloid lies,” he told CNN. “This is not us. These are not our words, and this is not anything that is characteristic of me.”
In a video on social media published shortly before CNN ran the story, Robinson denied authoring the posts and compared the accusations to the sexual-harassment allegations leveled against Clarence Thomas during his 1991 nomination hearing for the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Clarence Thomas famously once said he was the victim of a high-tech lynching. Well, it looks like Mark Robinson is, too,” Robinson said. “We’re staying in this race. We’re in it to win it.”
CNN reported that it connected Robinson to the posts in question through a shared username that Robinson is known to have used on other platforms, extensive overlapping biographical details, unusual phrases that Robinson employs, email addresses connected to him and the inclusion of his name in one of the profiles.
The network found that the social conservative had also written extensive, graphic sexual content on the sites and that he had also used slurs against other minority groups.
Robinson previously came under fire for other social media posts about Jews, the Holocaust and Hitler.
In a 2014 Facebook post, Robinson quoted Hitler on the value of racial pride, and he has used Yiddish and Hebrew phrases in posts implying that Jews exploit black people.
The North Carolina gubernatorial candidate said during a press conference on Oct. 12 that he is pro-Israel and denied that he is antisemitic.
“There have been some Facebook posts that were poorly worded on my part,” Robinson said at the press briefing, which announced Israel Solidarity Week in North Carolina. “There is no antisemitism standing here in front of you.”
The 10 polls this month of Robinson’s race against Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general who is Jewish, show Stein up between five and 14 percentage points, per FiveThirtyEight. The RealClearPolitics poll average for the race has Stein up 9.4%.
