Our Opinion: Mark Robinson is who he is

According to a CNN report, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson posted an array of tasteless and deeply offensive comments on an online porn website between 2008 and 2012.Is anyone surprised?

From day one Robinson was eminently unfit for office — any office — due to his temperament, his stances on the issues, his toxic posts on social media, his inflammatory rhetoric and his sketchy resume. This latest revelation merely adds another brick to that wall.

The CNN story cites posts on a porn site by the Republican nominee for governor in which he allegedly describes himself as "a black NAZI" and suggests that that "slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves."

The post added: "I would certainly buy a few."

The CNN story says Robinson, who has consistently condemned the LGBTQ community as "filth" and "demonic," also professed an interest in transgender pornography in his porn-site comments.

And it says there are other comments that Robinson posted that are too offensive to either be broadcast or printed.

All this from a man who has proclaimed himself a moral warrior and attacked the state's public schools for "indoctrinating" students.

Some Republicans professed being shocked — shocked! — that Robinson could say such things.

Some even have suggested that Robinson withdraw from the race.

Among the paragons of virtue in the GOP who have clutched their pearls in the wake of the story are Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, and South Carolina Congressman Ralph Norman, who said Robinson should withdraw.

"He knew this was in his background," Norman said. "And he didn't think it was going to come out."

As if Robinson hasn't said and posted a litany of vile things before, targeting Jews, Muslims, the Obamas, Black people, gay people ... have we left anyone out?

He has denied the Holocaust as "a bunch of hogwash."

He has defended domestic violence and said men are called to be leaders, not women.

When "it was time to face down Goliath," he told a church audience in 2022, God "sent David, not Davita."

Predictably, Robinson denied the CNN story and vowed to stay in the race.

"You know my words and you know my character," Robinson said Thursday, "and you know I have been completely transparent in this race and before."

Well, yeah, we do know his words and his character. That's why the CNN report appears so eminently unremarkable

It's also why some Republicans already are distancing themselves from the man Donald Trump once described during a Greensboro rally as "Martin Luther King on steroids."

The North Carolina Republican Party on Thursday defended Robinson in a statement on X, saying that, despite his denial of CNN's report, it wouldn't "stop the Left from trying to demonize him via personal attacks."

That was no surprise, either, given a political climate in which shame has become almost nonexistent.

Show no remorse. Make no apologies. Deny, deny. And soldier on.

Thanks in part to gerrymandered districts and Trump's outsized influence, Republicans have increasingly trotted out unqualified fringe candidates who easily win primaries and often struggle in general elections.

Republicans should muster some sense of dignity and principle and call for Robinson to end his candidacy. He is trailing Democrat Josh Stein badly as it is.

More broadly, the GOP should search its soul and ask itself how it became what it is today.

As for what Donald Trump thinks, at press time, he hadn't commented. But Robinson, who typically appears at Trump rallies in North Carolina, was not invited to the one in Wilmington Saturday.

Because it could ... what? ... hurt Trump's reputation?

Meanwhile, as of Friday, the state GOP 's support of Robinson seemed to be softening. State Party Chairman Jason Simmons called the comments attributed to Robinson "deeply troubling."

Yet, even if Robinson walks away, the GOP's national standard bearer will remain a convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault, who still denies the results of the 2020 election, who is bullying a small city in Ohio over a racist lie about Haitian immigrants, who just this week made another offensive comment about Jewish voters, and who lit the spark for a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol.