Elections

Mark Robinson: ‘Deadbeat’ Parents Should Be ‘Neutered’

‘MORE RESPECT FOR LOYAL DOGS’

A slew of racist and sexist posts from several years ago are still up on his official account.

Mark Robinson.
Jeenah Moon/Reuters

Mark Robinson, the Republican North Carolina gubernatorial candidate who allegedly called himself a “black NAZI” in comments uncovered on a porn site, also suggested that “deadbeat” parents should be sterilized in one of a slew of inflammatory posts from several years ago that are still up on his official Facebook page, The Guardian reported.

In the posts—which span 2014 to 2019, before his ongoing tenure as North Carolina’s lieutenant governor but after he entered the public eye—Robinson frequently used racist and sexist language to refer to Black families in America.

“I have more respect for loyal DOGS than I do for PEOPLE who don’t take care of their children,” Robinson wrote in a 2014 Facebook post, which also featured the hashtag “#haveyourdeadbeatsspayedandneutered.”

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“If you need a court order to tell you to take care of your children, then you probably need an operation to make sure you don’t have any more,” he wrote in 2016.

Mark Robinson.
The GOP has cut funding for Robinson, amid widespread condemnation of his comments. Jonathan Drake/Reuters

The posts become increasingly vitriolic, and laced with incendiary conservative rhetoric, deeper into Donald Trump’s presidency.

In 2016, he wrote, “I said this once and I’m saying it again; A weak minded, muddle headed negro, ALWAYS thinks he and ‘his people’ are victims.”

And in 2017: “Deadbeat men, the whorish women they breed with, and the undisciplined children they produce are the top three issues (in that order) that cause African American culture to be a dismal failure.”

Deadbeat men, the whorish women they breed with, and the undisciplined children they produce are the top three issues (in that order) that cause African American culture to be a dismal failure.

Posted by Mark Keith Robinson on Thursday, November 2, 2017

“I’d rather be mislabeled a ‘coon’ by few a African-Americans, than be properly labeled a DEADBEAT by my children,” he also posted that year.

As recently as 2019, Robinson posted a video in which he said, “Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It’s about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”

Although not quite as bizarre as the comments uncovered by CNN, which Robinson has denied making and filed a lawsuit over, the Facebook posts—indisputably made by Robinson—follow a similar pattern of bigoted thinking.

“Slavery is not bad,” Robinson wrote in one of the unearthed posts from 2010. “Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.”

Even amid widespread condemnation, and as the GOP has cut funding for Robinson and his campaign staffers have fled in droves, the gubernatorial hopeful has refused to leave the race or resign his current position.

“When times of trouble come in this thing we call politics, it separates the strong folks from the weak,” he said at a news conference last week. “The weak will turn and run, and the strong will stand and fight. And that’s what we’re doing here today.”

Robinson and his wife, Yolanda, who he married in 1990, have two adult children, a daughter Kimberly, who was born in 1990 and their son, Dayson, born in 1992.