The winner of North Carolina’s GOP primary for governor, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, is just the kind of loud, charismatic, Trump-aligned Republican the corporate press loves to mock. And in some ways, Robinson is an easy target. His history of social media posts that toy with conspiracy theories and incendiary rhetoric is the kind of thing that elicits snorts of contempt from pundits like Rachel Maddow.
Maddow went on at length about Robinson Tuesday night, chortling about how a man who thinks Beyoncé is “Satanic,” Martin Luther King Jr. is a “communist,” and the Holocaust is “hogwash,” is going to be the Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina. “This is not a normal primary year,” she said. “Mark Robinson is not a normal primary winner.”
But the really abnormal thing about Robinson isn’t what he’s said. It’s how blatantly and how often corporate media outlets have lied about him, lazily taking his words out of context or simply quoting fragments of what he’s said or posted online to smear him as an antisemite or a misogynist.
Did Robinson really deny the Holocaust and call it “hogwash”? Nope. He said leftists in the Weimar Republic restricted gun ownership in Germany long before the Nazis came to power, which is true. Robinson’s point was that conservatives look foolish when they make the ahistorical argument that the Nazis were able to pull off the Holocaust by disarming the Jews. He thinks it’s a bad argument against gun restrictions, and he has a point.
It’s not hard to find this out. All you have to do is read what Robinson himself has posted online. But that hasn’t stopped hacks like Maddow from lying about his views.
The same thing goes for his comments about women’s suffrage. A reporter named Jennifer Bendery seems to have taken up the Robinson beat at HuffPo for the sole purpose of misrepresenting him. Once it became clear Robinson would win the primary on Tuesday, Bendery took to Twitter to partially quote something Robinson said in 2020 about the 19th Amendment: “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote.”
Sounds pretty bad, huh? But that wasn’t the full quote, which anyone could easily track down, including Bendery, who says she “unearthed” the video where he says this. That means she also “unearthed” what Robinson says immediately after the line she quoted, which is this: “Do you know why? Because in those days we had people who fought for real social change, and they were called Republicans, and they are the reason why women can vote today.” He goes on to say, “I’m a Republican because of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. I’m a Republican because whenever you look at true, honest-to-God social change for the better, at the top leading the charge is a Republican.”
Now maybe you think Robinson’s rhetoric here is a bit too clever, or his reasoning too circuitous. But whatever you think of his style, he most certainly is not saying he opposes women’s right to vote. Bendery is lying, in other words, and doing so by simply omitting his full remarks.
Why would the corporate press react this way to Robinson? Why would they bend over backward to lie about him over and over on a host of issues in hopes of portraying him as something he’s not?
The answer might be in a clip that was circulating widely on Tuesday and Wednesday in the wake of Robinson’s primary victory. It’s a speech from 2021 about gender ideology, and in it, Robinson levels a blunt, unapologetic, no-holds-barred attack on transgenderism. “Here’s something else I’m not supposed to say. Ain’t but two genders,” he thunders from the pulpit, holding up two fingers. “Two genders. Ain’t nothing but men and women.”
Robinson doesn’t mince words. “You can go to the doctor and get cut up. You can go down to the dress shop and get made up. You can go down there and get drugged up. But at the end of the day, you’re just a drugged-up, dressed-up, made-up, cut-up man or woman. You ain’t changed what God put in you, that DNA!”
Robinson is a black, southern pastor, and speaks in that cadence and idiom. His delivery is as powerful and compelling as the truth of his words. He speaks with absolute moral clarity in a way that’s rare in mainstream GOP politics today. At a time when it’s not uncommon for Republican governors to balk at laws restricting so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors, in some cases vetoing them over the will of Republican-controlled state legislatures, Robinson holds the line.
You won’t hear any of the mealy-mouthed equivocation we heard last year from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who bought into the bogus rhetoric of the transgender lobby and vetoed a bill that would have outlawed the castration and sterilization of minors under the guise of “gender-affirming care.” You won’t see any of the performative hand-wringing over the transgender issue like we saw from Republican Govs. Spencer Cox of Utah and Eric Holcomb of Indiana in 2022, both of whom vetoed similar bills passed by GOP majorities in their states.
With Robinson, you see a man willing to speak the truth — shout it, even — without regard for the consequences. If every GOP governor were that bold, if every Republican member of Congress had that much courage, poisonous ideologies like transgenderism would be driven from public life in America in short order.
That’s why the left hates Mark Robinson, and that’s why everything the corporate press says about him is a lie.
