Exposé shares bizarre stories about Trump-backed governor hopeful
Bizarre stories involving a top Republican candidate up for election as governor in 2024 have been revealed in an expose published Monday.
New York Magazine has a new report on North Carolina candidate Mark Robinson, in which he's described as having no real government experience but has some odd obsessions.
Writer Zak Cheney-Rice begins by classifying Robinson as nothing more than a "Facebook s--tposter" who showed up to a city council meeting and became famous for a rant about plans to cancel a gun show scheduled to take place immediately after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Canceling the gun show wouldn't close gun shops, but Robinson didn't seem to understand that at the time. Instead, he argued this would be the beginning of the end of his right to own a gun.
His speech went viral after Congressman Mark Walker shared the video.
"Within the week, a private car was chauffeuring Robinson to Winston-Salem for an interview with Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade on Fox & Friends," the report said.
Earhardt asked him, “Will you ever run for office?”
Robinson said that he and his wife had discussed it, but he was focused on completing his bachelor's degree.
The NRA flew him to Dallas for its convention, where Donald Trump was the keynote speaker. He was then flown to Nuremberg for a global "shooting activities" forum. Robinson quit his job, wrote his memoir, and was elected lieutenant governor.
Among the pages in his book, Robinson detailed his fixation on trains.
"The vastness of this network gave Robinson plentiful opportunities to indulge a borderline-Freudian childhood obsession," the report stated.
He recalls being surrounded by "oil and grease spatter" and becoming enveloped in their "creosote-and-steel odor as they screamed overhead. 'I sighed in a long 'ah,' as adrenaline coursed through me," he wrote.
According to New York Magazine, Robinson's "relationship with trains is slightly less torrid nowadays."
"I call trains 'big dirties,' because they are," he said in the book. "They're big, dirty pieces of equipment."
The piece revealed that in his spare time while serving as the second in command in the state, Robinson tries to find locomotives to follow. When he sees one, he "begins stalking and talking to it."
"There he is right there," Robinson will say. "There's a big dirty, and he's trying to hide from me, but I see him."
The report claimed that gubernatorial Robinson's race, "Gave him special license to ridicule the 'soft-headed negroes' who thought Alton Sterling’s killing in 2016 was motivated by racism and to taunt civil-rights legend John Lewis for getting beaten by state troopers," the report said.
Sterling was a Black man who was shot and killed by two rookie Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officers after one of them shouted that he "had a gun."
The report stated that a search of Robinson’s Facebook history "unearthed a trove of such vicious invective that it made Trump look restrained."
Robinson attacked "The View" co-host Joy Behar as a “she-beast” and lambasted Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) as “Ol’ ‘Maxie Pad.’”
“Note to homosexuals,” he said in another post, “Your homosexuality is a FILTHY ABOMINATION, that satisfies your degenerate, un-natural lust.”
"The goal” of transgender people, he also said, “is to turn God’s creation backwards, and make it into a sickening image of rebellion to glorify Satan.”
Then he alleged that the death toll in the Holocaust was being used to distract people from communism.
He then alleged that the Marvel film Black Panther was “created by an agnostic Jew” in order “to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets.”
New York Magazine argued that bigger candidates have been brought down by far less.
"But the extent of his ambition had become clear," the report continued. "Robinson sallied forth into a series of crusades so trendy and trivial that their only true objective could be higher office."
Read the full column here.