Politics
In Mark Robinson’s fall, Republicans are getting what they asked for
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, can no longer win a political race in the state — or anywhere in America, for that matter.
Not after BLN uncovered sexually explicit and inflammatory postshe reportedly wrote in the comments of a pornographic website. According to the report, Robinson — who’s campaigned as a fundamentalist, Christian conservative — commented frequently between 2008 and 2012 on a site called “Nude Africa.”
He’s an outstanding person. I’ve gotten to know him so well.”
Donald Trumpon Mark Robinson
Robinson has denied he is the author of the posts, saying “these are not the words of Mark Robinson” and dismissing the report as “salacious tabloid trash.” But BLN’s reporters documented several connections between the candidate, the email he used to register with the sites and biographical details posted to the various profiles.
The porn chatroom posts identified as Robinson’s are graphic, sexually menacing and demeaning to women. If you track them down, you can’t unsee them.
He commented on his love for transgender pornography, called himself a “Black Nazi,” made profane comments about a woman’s alleged rape, referred to Martin Luther King Jr. by a racial slur (note that this article later quotes some of that language, which readers may find offensive), and even reminisced graphically about a teenage experience peeping on a women’s locker room at a local college.
These are just the tip of a nasty iceberg. BLN acknowledged many of the things Robinson is accused of writing were so lurid, they couldn’t be published.
If these statements offend you, congratulations: You are a thinking, feeling person. You’re holding your elected leaders to a higher standard than the North Carolina Republican Party, which doubled downon its support for Robinson on Thursday night after the report was published. Most folks wouldn’t let the guy in this story watch their dog, much less lead their state.
North Carolina Republicans had few realistic options for replacing Robinson, with the state deadline for candidates to withdraw just hours away when the story dropped. But there’s no reason to think they would have pushed him out anyway. They’ve stuck with him through every disturbing scandal so farand there have been a lot.
This is what rigor mortis looks like in a campaign.
His candidacy was damaged and unhinged from the start, fetishizing violence, demonizing gay people and talking about women like they’re trash. The party has had literally dozens of opportunities to disavow Robinson: when he said some folks out there “need killing,” when he fantasized about murdering people in the governmentwith his AR-15, when he called LGBTQ people “maggots,” when he said women getting abortions just need to keep their “skirt down.”
The party routinely looked past Robinson’s breathtaking hypocrisy. A 2022 story revealed that Robinson, who has referred to abortion as “murder” and abortion doctors as “butchers,” once paid for a girlfriend’s abortion. He’s implied gender-neutral restrooms are a breeding ground for perverts. He’s said women need protection from those perverts, but boasted online about spying on college girls in a locker room, according to BLN. He described LGBTQ+ people as “maggots” but according to that same BLN report, he once wrote about his enjoyment of pornography that features trans people, enthusiastically describing himself as a “perv.”
Many of Robinson’s Republican peers have held him up as a champion, though, an example of America at its finest. At one stump speech in North Carolina, Donald Trump said Robinson was “like a fine wine.”
“You have to cherish him,” Trump said. “He’s an outstanding person. I’ve gotten to know him so well.”
Like Trump, Robinson cast himself as an uncensored outsider who traded put-downs for policy; a conservative, chest-thumping warrior who seemed to be the beneficiary of limitless forgiveness for his transgressions.
North Carolina Republicans have shown that the MAGA movement doesn’t believe in such limits. But voters will, which is why Republicans and Robinson will stay this way, locked in a doomed embrace, through Election Day. This is what rigor mortis looks like in a campaign.
The only question is whether Republicans up and down the ticket, including Trump, will get dragged down with him. Trump is virtually tied with Kamala Harris in this battleground state and some conservatives are worried Robinson’s troubles will keep Trump voters at home. On Thursday night, GOP candidates running for office in North Carolina were trying to scrub their social media profiles of references to Robinson, like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
The only question is whether Republicans up and down the ticket, including Trump, will get dragged down with him.
A candidate who talks about the historic nature of his candidacy — if he wins, he would be the first Black governor in the state’s history — once allegedly wrote, “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.” The man whom Trump praised as “MLK on steroids” once referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as “Martin Lucifer Koon.”
Coincidentally, I interviewed Martin Luther King III on Thursday about a trip he’s making to North Carolina this weekend to speak to rural communities of color about the election. The BLN story hadn’t broken yet but the word was out that it contained hateful descriptions of his late father.
When I asked him about it, he was tactful, which isn’t easy when someone says something awful about your dad.
“Clearly, it feels like this rejection is emerging for this candidacy,” King said. “And at some point, it will be looked at as a disaster.”
Why wait any longer? Let’s call it that now.
Billy Ball
Billy Ball is an award-winning journalist from North Carolina and a senior editor at Cardinal & Pinean online news site that covers North Carolina politics. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and others.
Brazil has won a record five World Cups, but the most important match it has ever played may have been an exhibition match against Haiti that was meaningless in sporting terms but has had a long influence on each country’s politics.
On Aug. 18, 2004, Brazil’s players drove through the streets of Port-au-Prince in armored personnel carriers, World Cup champions greeted like liberators. Two months earlier, Brazil’s military had arrived to lead a multinational peacekeeping force established by the United Nations following a bloody coup d’état.
“We’ve only seen such joy in the eyes, the exuberance of the eyes, when we paraded in Brazil after winning the World Cup,” coach Carlos Alberto Parreira said afterwards. “I will never forget this moment.”
The team was accompanied to the U.N.-hosted friendly match that followed — “They play, peace wins,” went the slogan — by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then in his first term as Brazil’s president. More than two decades later, Lula is back in office, now cemented as the most accomplished leader the world’s left has seen in the 21st century. His approach to foreign policy, say observers, was shaped partially on the soccer pitch that day in Port-au-Prince.
“It showed he was trying something different as a diplomatic tool,” said Mauricio Savarese, an Associated press political reporter in São Paulo who has researched the legacy of the 2004 game. “That match at the time was a symbol of Brazil’s soft power. You really showed how Brazil could win hearts and minds with a policy that was not exactly bowing to the United States or to the China or to Russia, but independent.”
The match, designed to build goodwill between a shell-shocked population and its benevolent occupiers, began after players from the two national teams unfurled a pre-match banner that read “Social Justice is the True Name of Peace.” The peacekeeping mission represented an early commitment to “continental solidarity,” as Lula defined it in a speech the following year to up-and-coming diplomats where he cited the Haiti mission as an example of “non-indifference.”
Lula was feeling his way toward a foreign policy centered around South-South Cooperation and the BRICS alliance of emerging markets. Lula has used that role as de-facto leader of the democratic developing world to, with mixed results, position Brazil as a leader on climate change — it hosted last year’s COP30 in the Amazon city of Belém — and a mediator when thorny international conflicts arise. It has a position of official neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine war, so as to serve a potential role as mediator, as it did when partnering with Turkey in 2010 to broker a nuclear-fuel swap with Iran.
That same year, an earthquake hit Haiti, killing over 100,000 people while injuring and displacing millions more. It also destroyed the headquarters of the U.N. Stabilisation Mission in Haiti, even as Brazil led a post-disaster humanitarian relief effort. The experience further deepened ties between the two countries, as Brazil introduced a humanitarian-visa program for the first time to welcome Haitians fleeing the devastation; it has since been extended to Syrian war refugees, as well. One historically Italian neighborhood in São Paulo is now known as Little Haiti.
The broader peacekeeping mission began to resemble a military quagmire in humanitarian garb: Brazilian troops were blamed for human-rights violations and a cholera epidemic, while doing little to improve the overall security situation. For Lula and his protegée Dilma Rousseff, the Haiti project became a political liability, in both Haiti and Brazil.
As the two nations prepare to face off against one another in Philadelphia on Friday, Lula is not expected to be in attendance. Instead his travel schedule this week was built around the G7 summit in France, in which Brazil participated as one of five “partner countries” — a reflection of its increased global standing over the past few decades. If Lula shows up at one of Brazil’s matches later in the World Cup, it will likely be with a domestic audience in mind rather than a foreign one: he is in the midst of a reelection campaign for his fourth term, against a son of his longtime antagonist Jair Bolsonaro.
“I doubt that anyone is going to vote for him just because he’s recognized abroad as a key leader,” said Savarese, Brazilian political journalist who wrote the book “Dilma’s Downfall.” “But of course that helps with some moderates, which are a very thin part of Brazil’s electorate, and they’re going to be decisive in October’s election, that is also one of the things that tips the balance in his favor, as is being seen as this pragmatic leader who can also be respected even when he’s speaking about issues that clearly don’t affect as much in Brazil’s daily life.”
That day in Haiti, not yet a global figure, Lula confronted one limit on his power. He reportedly asked his team not to score too many goals, in the interests of goodwill. The players did not oblige, winning 6-0, including an astonishing solo effort from Ronaldinho.
Blue Light News has been crunching the numbers to see how all 48 of this year’s World Cup participants rank in several other off-field categories, which we’ll share more of over the weekend.
In today’s item, we look at whether GDP per capita has any connection to soccer performance. As you can see, the chart does show some positive correlation — note, for example, wealthy tournament contenders such as France, the Netherlands and Germany all in the upper right corner.
But it’s not a perfect indicator. By this metric, Qatar is the wealthiest country in the tournament — and it lost 6-0 to Canada on Thursday …
CANBERRA — It was disappointment from start to finish around the USA vs. Australia match in the Bush Capital, won comfortably by the American side.
Neither of Canberra’s Socceroos made the starting lineup and the local government failed to provide an outdoor watch site for the match, despite a heavy social media campaign from locals. With federal politicians out of town and back in their districts this week, the campaign lacked star power and fell on deaf ears.
That left thousands to fill inner city pubs and the University of Canberra, which were allowed special trading hours for the match, from 4.30 a.m.
Australia’s politicians — vocal in their support in the lead-up to the match — went silent quickly, after Australia’s own goal 11 minutes minutes into the game.
If the Aussies’ lackluster performance left the crowd subdued, they found energy to boo Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a notably unpopular figure in Australia, which embraced harsh Covid lockdowns and vaccines — when he appeared on the match broadcast.
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