Asshole of the Month: Mark Robinson
However enlightened and good-hearted, most of us still harbor stereotypes about groups of people beyond our own. One stereotype about African-Americans is that they are all Democrats. Joe Biden expressed this in the 2020 race when he said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black.” But Trump actually netted 12% of the Black vote in 2020. Another stereotype, promoted by some progressive professors and activists, is that it’s impossible for Blacks to be racist, due to the long, sordid history of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow apartheid.
One name is enough to destroy these stereotypes: self-proclaimed Black Nazi Mark Robinson, who, as of this writing, is the lieutenant governor of North Carolina and a candidate for the top spot in the 2024 gubernatorial election. He’s Republican, of course. If Hollywood wanted to create a villain with melodramatically evil traits and beliefs, no screenwriter could create a character as unhinged and outrageous as this heavyweight bigot. He’s living proof that the human condition applies to all of us and that compassion and tolerance are not guaranteed by skin color or any other identity category.
Robinson grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, the ninth child in a family of ten, governed by a violent, alcoholic father, forcing him and his siblings to spend part of their adolescence in foster care. While attending the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, he worked in furniture manufacturing. He credits reading and listening to gasbag Rush Limbaugh for helping him to “find out I was conservative and always had been.” Robinson was unknown nationally until April 2018, when he gave a speech to the Greensboro City Council, then considering whether to cancel a local gun show after the horrific Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting that killed 17 students and staff members and wounded another 17. The speech was a barn burner in defense of “law-abiding” citizens’ threatened gun rights, stoked with the straw man argument that total gun confiscation was the real agenda behind renewed attempts to prevent school shootings. It went viral on social media, drawing the attention of the NRA. Historically as lily white as the GOP, the NRA was thrilled to get all diverse and inclusive and invited Robinson to speak at that year’s national convention.
Armed with his new celebrity, Robinson ran for lieutenant governor in 2020 and won, becoming the state’s first Black lieutenant governor and assuming office in January 2021. Since then, he hasn’t accomplished much beyond feuding with Democratic Governor Roy Cooper and leading the FACTS (Fairness, Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students) Task Force, devoted to ferreting out alleged political bias in public schools and trying to quash any instruction about critical race theory and LGBTQ rights. He has even advocated abolishing the State Board of Education and wrote in his memoir about removing “history, science and a number of other subjects” from the first- through fifth-grade curriculum.
