What NC’s Mark Robinson has said about abortion, LGBTQ+ people and ‘wicked people’

Since Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson was elected lieutenant governor in 2020, he has rarely shied away from expressing his beliefs, no matter how controversial or offensive they might be.

Past comments also have resurfaced in videos and social media posts, and Robinson often has doubled down on those comments.

That includes derogatory comments about abortion, the LGBTQ+ community and minority groups.

On Thursday, Sept. 19, CNN published a story that tied Robinson to a slew of explicit comments on online message boards before he was elected into office. The story includes racist, sexually graphic comments made on a message board for a pornographic website.

Before the story was published, Robinson called the story “salacious tabloid trash” in a video and said he would not drop out of the governor’s race.

Robinson, a Republican, is running against Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein.

Here are some of his remarks:

Abortion

Robinson posted frequently on Facebook in the years leading up to his 2020 election to lieutenant governor. In a February 2019 selfie video, Robinson talked about abortion on demand.

“It kills me, somebody’s always talking about babies that are dying, and mothers that are in trouble,” Robinson said. “Everybody knows that abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It is about convenience. It is about abortion on demand. That is exactly what it’s about.

“It’s about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down or your pants up — and not get pregnant by your own choice, because you felt like getting your groove thing on. And now instead of taking care of that child, you want to kill that child so your life can go on, being on easy street and you can keep running to the club every Friday night,” Robinson said.

‘Some folks need killing’

North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor used a June 2024 speech about freedom to talk about how he sees the United States “slipping away” from the Declaration of Independence and how he thinks “wicked people” should be punished by the military and police.

Robinson’s speech, still available on the church’s Facebook page, gained attention for his comments about why he thinks “some folks need killing,” referencing Germans and Japanese in World War II, but it went beyond that.

As first reported by The New Republic, Robinson said, “There was a time when we used to meet evil on the battlefield. And guess what we did to it? We killed it. We didn’t quibble about it. We didn’t argue about it. We didn’t fight about it. We killed it. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, what did we do? We flew to Japan and we killed the Japanese army and navy.”

“We didn’t even quibble about it. I didn’t start this fight, you did! You want to be left alone, you should have left me alone. We didn’t argue and capitulate and talk about, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t fight the Nazis that hard.’ No, they’re bad. Kill them. Some liberal somewhere is gonna say that sounds awful. Too bad,” Robinson said to the congregation.

“Get mad at me if you want to. Some folks need killing,” he said.

DEI

Robinson made a rare appearance at the North Carolina Legislative Building June 12, 2024, to speak to the conservative group Moms for Liberty, telling them he wants to replace DEI.

DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, and has been targeted by Republicans in the UNC System, which is eliminating DEI programs. Robinson wants more such eliminations.

“These agendas need to be removed from our schools,” Robinson told the Moms for Liberty members. “They need to be removed from our government. We need to get back to back to doing what we do best.”

LGBTQ+ rights

▪ “Now I’m not saying you don’t have a right ... to call yourself a transgender. You can call yourself whatever you want to call yourself. There’s some people in this room that heard me say this: If you want to call yourself a cocker spaniel, I don’t care. Go down to the seamstress, get them to sew you a cocker spaniel suit and run around here, do your business on fire hydrants, do whatever you want to do. It’s America. But when I see you, I’m going to say there’s that crazy man in that cocker spaniel suit. You’re still a man. There are two genders. God made male and female. Those folks that want to blur those lines. You go blur them at your house. Go blur them at the world that you made because in the real world there’s male and female and that’s how we’re going to operate and that’s how I believe we need to operate in North Carolina.”

▪ “The male gender will not be running on the girls track team, or be on the weightlifting team, or the basketball team. You can make your own team and put yourself over there somewhere. We’re not going to change all this around because you’re inflicted with a problem and don’t know what gender you are. That’s your problem. Go deal with it.”

▪ “Everything that God made serves a purpose. I don’t care how ugly it is. Let’s get a little ugly. I want you to think about what the cows leave behind. It don’t get no uglier than that. But you think about what could be done about what the cow leaves behind. Why is the grass in that cow pasture so green? Why is it so lush? Could it be that ugly stuff the cow left behind? See, God created that. He made that for a purpose. Everything he made from the foul odor that the cow left behind to the decaying body of every living creature to the maggots that eat those dead bodies to the flies that fly around what the cow left, God made all those things for the purpose. Would someone please explain to me the purpose of homosexuality?”

▪ “If homosexuality is of God, what purpose does it serve? What does it make? What does it create? It creates nothing. Someone asked me in a classroom one time, we were talking about it and they said, this fellow was a homosexual and he looked at me and said, so you think your wife and you, you think your sexual relationship is superior to my husband and our homosexual relationship. Yes!”

▪ “There’s no reason anybody, anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth. And yes, I called it filth. And if you don’t like that I called it filth, come see me and I’ll explain it to you.”

Antisemitism

In a 2017 Facebook post, Robinson wrote: “I am so sick of seeing and hearing people STILL talk about Nazis and Hitler and how evil and manipulative they were. NEWS FLASH PEOPLE, THE NAZIS (National Socialist) ARE GONE! We did away with them.” He went on to talk about Communism.

And he once posted that the Marvel movie “Black Panther” was “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxist. How can this trash, that was only created to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets, invoke any pride?”

In October 2023, Robinson walked back some of those comments, saying that he has “never been antisemitic.”

“There have been some Facebook posts that were poorly worded on my part, did not convey my real sentiments, and I have addressed those issues and moved on from those issues,” he told reporters in a news conference at the Legislative Building in Raleigh.

He made the comments as acting governor while Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper was out of the country. Robinson issued a proclamation “calling for a day of prayer and declaring North Carolina Solidarity with Israel Week throughout the state.”

Pressed by reporters, Robinson said “there was never any antisemitism intended from those words, and there’s never been any antisemitism within me. I’ve never been antisemitic. I’ve never had anything against the Jewish people,” he said. Robinson said he has “dealt with” his Facebook comments and spoken to several Jewish groups about it.

Black Lives Matter

▪ “The trouble is the Biden administration seeking to turn this country into a socialist hell-hole. The trouble is Antifa that wants to roam the streets and beat you into submission. The trouble is Black Lives Matter that claims to care about the lives of Black people but it has turned a blind eye while violence in Black communities is taking lives in Black communities at a genocidal rate. They turned a blind eye. That’s where the trouble is and that’s where we’ve got to run toward.”

This story was originally published September 20, 2024 at 11:13 AM.