There Is No Bottom to the Horrors of the Modern Republican Party (w/ Update)

I haven't blogged much about the recent craziness in North Carolina, but now this is unavoidable. The wingnut Republican candidate for the governor's office there is going off the rails in the biggest train wreck since JD Vance said more demeaning stuff about immigrants yesterday. CNN has all the gory details about Mark Robinson (via Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck):

Editor’s Note: This story contains offensive language.

(CNN) — Mark Robinson, the controversial and socially conservative Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, made a series of inflammatory comments on a pornography website’s message board more than a decade ago, in which he referred to himself as a “black NAZI!” and expressed support for reinstating slavery, a CNN KFile investigation found.

Okay, just on this lede alone, this is a disaster for the state national GOP. Their preferred candidate in North Carolina - voted in by a primary process, and who had been elected currently as Lt. Governor - was posting stuff on a porn website. The next part is about Robinson openly claiming to be a Black Nazi (!), which used to be a career ender in 98 percent of the American states. And the topper - at this point in the story, which is still the first fcking paragraph - is having a black man supporting slavery in a former Confederate state.

But wait, it gets worse.

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography, a review of archived messages found in which he also referred to himself as a “perv.”

The comments, which Robinson denies making, predate his entry into politics and current stint as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor. They were made under a username that CNN was able to identify as Robinson by matching a litany of biographical details and a shared email address between the two.

Many of Robinson’s comments were gratuitously sexual and lewd in nature. They were made between 2008 and 2012 on “Nude Africa,” a pornographic website that includes a message board. The comments were made under the username minisoldr, a moniker Robinson used frequently online...

That Robinson is publicly hateful towards trans people and yet fetishizes them as porn subjects is part and parcel of the Far Right hypocrisy when it comes to sex and power. This should be shameful except the modern conservative elites no longer have shame.

And the fact that Robinson kept using a common online moniker for going into the kinky stuff underscores not so much his idiocy in leaving behind easily-tracked clues to his identity years later, it's that he likely believed he would never get caught or held accountable for it.

That said: There are a handful of Witty Librarians out there on social media, so do be aware I'm only responsible for like 37 percent of the crazy stuff coming from a Witty account, I swear... I have to admit, I've been insanely active on the Internet since 1994 - when I got into the Usenet chats for the X-Files television show - so I know if I ever get into politics or become a public figure there's going to be a lot of... ahem, interesting things I've posted. 

In my defense, I've made it a personal policy to speak my mind to what I believe and know. My belief: You better be able to say in public what you say in private, and you better say in private what you've said in public. And I try to avoid saying mean or derogatory things towards people who don't deserve it. The mean and derogatory things I say about goddamn conservative wingnuts is that they DO deserve it. So there.

Enough about my bad habits. Back to the report:

Many of Robinson’s comments on Nude Africa stand in contrast to his public stances on issues such as abortion and transgender rights.

Publicly, Robinson has fiercely argued that people should use bathrooms only that correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth. He’s also said transgender women should be arrested for using women’s restrooms...

Yet privately under the username minisoldr on Nude Africa, Robinson graphically described his own sexual arousal as an adult from the memory of secretly “peeping” on women in public gym showers as a 14-year-old. Robinson recounted the story as a memory he said he still fantasized about.

“I came to a spot that was a dead end but had two big vent covers over it! It just so happened it overlooked the showers! I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered,” Robinson wrote on Nude Africa...

In other comments on Nude Africa, Robinson discussed his affinity for transgender pornography.

“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!...”

He's against "trans" going into ladies' restrooms but for himself - like other deviant narcissists - he wants to retain his privilege to invade safe places and demean women. It's all about his lusts getting satisfied, after all.

Robinson, who would become North Carolina’s first Black governor if elected, also repeatedly maligned civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., attacking him in such intense terms that a user accused him of being a white supremacist.

“Get that f*cking commie bastard off the National Mall!,” Robinson wrote about the dedication of the memorial to King in Washington, DC, by then-President Barack Obama.

“I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” Robinson responded...

In the pornographic forums, Robinson revealed his unvarnished thoughts on issues such as race, gender and abortion.

Writing in a forum discussing Black Republicans in October 2010, Robinson stated unprovoked: “I’m a black NAZI!”

That same month, Robinson wrote in another post that he supported the return of slavery.

“Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few,” he wrote.

In March 2012, Robinson wrote that he preferred the former leader of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler over the leadership in Washington during the administration of Barack Obama.

“I’d take Hitler over any of the sh*t that’s in Washington right now!” he wrote.

Robinson’s comments on Nude Africa often frequently contained derogatory and racial slurs directed at Black, Jewish and Muslim people...

Robinson's sell-out over the fight for civil rights for African-Americans is already a public matter. He's made it clear he's a hater - and a sadistic control freak - in the worst way. That he displayed this much vitriol for a respected historic figure like Reverend King under his online handle shouldn't be a surprise. Painful, but not a surprise.

CNN’s reporting on Robinson’s comments comes a few weeks after The Assembly, a North Carolina digital publication, reported that Robinson frequented local video pornography shops in the 1990s and 2000s. The story cited six people who interacted and saw him frequent the stores in Greensboro, North Carolina. A spokesperson for Robinson called the story false and a “complete fiction...”

There's too much consistent bad behavior here to think these reports are in error. CNN is risking a lot posting this report if they didn't have receipts, and so they're backing up these allegations with what they've researched:

On the Nude Africa website in both comments and his profile, minisoldr offered numerous details that align precisely with Robinson’s personal history.

In his profile, minisoldr listed his full name as “mark robinson” and disclosed a private email address Robinson used elsewhere online. In 2012, a user responded to a comment by calling minisoldr “Mark.”

Minisoldr mentioned in 2008 being married for 18 years, which corresponds with Robinson’s marriage to Yolanda Hill in 1990. In 2011, minisoldr wrote he had been married 21 years. Minisoldr wrote in a 2011 post that he lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, the same town where Robinson lived at the time and currently lives.

In a post in 2012, minisoldr said he served in the Army in the 1980s, during the same time period as Robinson. In his sexually graphic comments detailing watching women in the showers in 2011, minisoldr wrote that his mother worked at an Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Robinson’s mother worked as a custodian at North Carolina A&T State University, an HBCU located in Greensboro.

Both minisoldr and Robinson often posted about the same topics online, including reviews for remote-controlled helicopters, their attraction to specific celebrities and their favorite “Twilight Zone” episode.

The email address associated with minisoldr on Nude Africa was also used by Robinson elsewhere online and social media. On the commenting platform Disqus, a user who joined in April 2011 features Mark Robinson’s photo under the username minisoldr.

Usernames and email addresses from Disqus were publicly leaked online in 2017, according to the company. CNN confirmed that Robinson’s username minisoldr on Disqus shared the same email address as the one used on Nude Africa...

If Robinson isn't minisoldr, there's a hell of a lot of coincidences involved.

Robinson has frequently used the username “minisoldr” elsewhere on the internet. On X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, Robinson once used the minisoldr username, according to a screenshot he shared on Facebook in 2018 and data in Robinson’s old tweets.

A YouTube playlist for a user named “minisoldr” features exclusively videos of Robinson. On Pinterest, a user “minisoldr” lists his name as “Mark Robinson.”

People online rarely mix up their Internet handles - in order to avoid confusing themselves - and "minisoldr" is unique enough that I doubt there's others fighting for that persona. The odds of this being the same Mark Robinson are pretty fcking solid.

Tonight there's been a wave of denials, dismissals, and evasions by Robinson's campaign and by the Republican Party at the state and national level. How they respond to this - either by pushing Robinson off the ballot before he drags the whole ticket down in a key battleground state, or doubling down on the racism and sexism and fascism to keep the wingnut base appeased - depends on how they gauge the loss of moderate independent voters who will recoil from these revelations.

But even if the state GOP succeeds in dismissing Robinson if they could, the next question ought to be "who the hell can they get next to replace him?" This unapologetic, hypocritical racist/sexist was the top choice of the party voters in the primary: They're not going to find a rational or less openly racist/sexist candidate to replace him.

We've been seeing it ever since the start of the modern Republican era of "attack politics" forged by Newt Gingrich, where the conservatives took over the party mechanics and the party choices to where there are no true moderates - the more congenial, the less racist/sexist - surviving among the ranks. It accelerated during the Tea Party movement against Obama - less because he was Center-Left and more because he was a Black Man who dared to win high office - to where open rudeness and public hostility by the GOP elected officials are now the norm.

With trump's takeover of the party voting base in 2016 with his anti-immigrant, Mexico-bashing and China-bashing, anti-women antics, this is where the Republicans are today: A roster filled with religious hypocrites, grifters, and sexual predators. This is no longer a party of Ronald Reagan or the Bush dynasty or John McCain, with whatever fidelity to the nation and to public decency they would display. This is now the party of Roy Moore, of Jim Jordan, of Matt Gaetz. It's a Republican party of idiot hypocrites like Tommy Tuberville or Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor Greene, exposing their fears and hatred on the rest of the nation.

It's a Party of Trumps - grotesqueries - all the way down.

For the love of GOD, stop voting for them. 

Update 9/28/24: Just spotted this Peter Wehner article in The Atlantic, and he uses the same word - grotesque - that I used here (read the whole article to get an idea how deep and widespread the rot is):

The GOP is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks. Which is why Mark Robinson fits in so well in today’s Republican Party...

The Republican Party today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic. Since 2016, they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.

None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.

They know.

We as voters need to hold them accountable. The whole Republican Party has got to go.