Mark Robinson Attempts Desperate 'All My Employees Quit' Strategy
He doesn't need a campaign staff! He just needs this ashtray and this paddle game.
Is it bad when damn near your entire campaign staff quits on you six weeks before Election Day? Because it seems like it would be a bad thing.
And yet that is the situation North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson finds himself in after most of his campaign turned in their walking papers on Sunday, leaving him with just two press reps, a bodyguard, and maybe his well-worn copy of Mein Kampf (allegedly!) to see him through to November 5.
Among those who quit: Robinson’s campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, finance director, deputy finance director, two political directors, and the director of operations. So, really low-level folks, nothing to worry about, he’s got Democratic nominee Josh Stein right where he wants him.
As a bonus, we have found ourselves a level of behavior Republican campaign operatives won’t support, it is apparently bragging on porn forums that he loves “watching tr*nny on girl porn. That’s f*cking hot!” All of Robinson’s previous insanities — the Holocaust denial, the suggestion that slavery wasn’t so bad, the utter hatred of LGBTQ+ people — were fine. Shoot, the man had already gotten himself elected lieutenant governor when all these land mines were laying around just waiting to be stepped on, so why wouldn’t his staff think he could ride it out?
We suppose we could be generous and speculate that this was simply the last in a very long line of straws, but that would mean that at one point you heard the anti-gay comments or the Holocaust denial or the grotesque misogyny or his slagging the civil rights movement as “crap” or the assertion that the first moon landing was faked or that George Soros orchestrated the 2014 kidnapping of dozens of schoolgirls in Nigeria by the terrorist group Boko Haram (gotta admit, that was a new one for us) or the suggestion that some people are so terrible we should just kill them, and said, “Eh, that’s gross but it’s still better than letting a Democrat become governor. I can live with it.”
For his part, Robinson has continued swearing up and down that he didn’t write all that stuff on the internet message board Nude Africa. From CNN:
“This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me,” Robinson said. Presented with the litany of evidence connecting him with the user name on Nude Africa, Robinson said, “I’m not going to get into the minutia of how somebody manufactured this, these salacious tabloid lies.”
Us? Our? Are you Eddie Brock now? Did the alien parasite you share your body with write all that stuff?
This would seem to be an enormous setback for a campaign that has been generally trailing by double digits for months. But Robinson still insists he is not quitting his campaign. The deadline for dropping out was Thursday, and absentee ballots with his name on them have already gone out. So even if he does quit, the GOP is stuck with him. They’re not spinning up a write-in campaign for someone else at this point.
Republican strategist Doug Heye went so far as to tell Axios that the staffers quitting is meaningless “because the campaign was already over.” Ouch.
It remains to be seen how Robinson’s total collapse affects the rest of the race. Donald Trump (who has heartily endorsed Robinson and talked him up at campaign rallies because Trump has the judgment of a syphilitic cow) is neck-and-neck with Kamala Harris in the race for North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes. If Harris wins North Carolina, she likely wins the election.
Too bad, so sad, GOP. We’d suggest you try nominating candidates who are not bugfuck insane, but who are we kidding, all you have is bugfuck insane.
[CNN]
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Ciaobella notes below that the porn forum on which Robinson spelled out all his nastiness (with the help of three spellcheckers and an English teacher, we presume) "Nude Africa" is now shut down.
And while personally I don't consider this a great loss, one of the interesting things found in between the lines of CNN's reporting is that Robinson wasn't even really popular with that crowd. In talking about how he insulted a pair of men who were shown kissing in a picture shared on the forum, CNN noted that Robinson's was the only negative quote. Not just the only quote using anti-gay slurs, but the only negative quote.
I don't know what porn forums per se are like, but I have posted to FetLife a little bit, and there's a strong resistance to calling out fuckface shortcircuiting assgadgets there. This is not because most people don't recognize the FFSCAGs when they run across them, but rather because it's very hard to call them out without seeming like you're criticizing them for their sexual preferences. Yell at them about using the anti-gay "f****t" and they'll just come back with, "Why should I have to like gay sex?" The FFSCAGs just fundamentally don't get that they're not being called out for what they like or don't, but because they're not showing other people the same basic respect that literally everyone else is showing the FFSCAG by not hurling insults at them.
These dynamics are hard to interrupt, so... most people just ignore, block, and/or change threads. Again, I never tried to look at Robinson's original posts to learn more about their context, but based upon my (admittedly small) experience with FetLife, I'd expect that even though he posted there for years, he had few or no friends.
There's probably lots of gross stuff on Nude Africa, just as there's lots of gross stuff on a lot of porn sites, but I seriously doubt that Nude Africa as a whole was anywhere near as gross as Robinson himself. Wouldn't surprise me in the least if Robinson was the grossest guy on there.
Judge anyone who still votes for this asshole. Judge them harshly and know that it shows their values at this point.
Really judge them for voting for the unreconstructed party that would have him. But really, I find it really uncharacteristic that they're letting him twist in the wind; President Klan Robe is way worse and an even greater threat to democracy.