Mark Robinson has a history of saying some brazen things, even by the standards of today’s Republican Party. The North Carolina Lt. Gov.—and current frontrunner to win the GOP’s nomination for governor—said in 2021 that he believed Black people are the ones that should be paying reparations. “Nobody owes you anything,” Robinson said in a 2021 speech. If anybody owes, it’s you. Because you’ve been the benefactor of freedom, you are the one that owes.” It’s an astonishing hill to die on. But it’s hardly a surprising one for Robinson, who, in a similarly astonishing fashion, venomously attacked victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School shooting in 2018. After the shooting, Robinson called the students “spoiled, angry, know it all CHILDREN” and “spoiled little bastards” in a Facebook post. He added that activists like “David Hogg and the rest of these silly little immature ‘media prosti-tots’” needed to “have a seat in time out, and shut up.” Robinson also tried to justify shooting protesters on a podcast in 2018, while simultaneously supporting the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists. As it stands, Robinson is expected to represent the GOP in North Carolina’s 2024 gubernatorial election–despite his unhinged past.
