North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (Photo by Leon Neal | Getty Images)
The Bulwark — a national news and commentary website run by veteran conservative journalists, political strategists and commentators, including William Kristol, founder of the now defunct Weekly Standard — is reporting that it has unearthed more online comments posted by North Carolina Lt. Gov. and Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson in the years prior to his political career.
According to the report by the website’s White House correspondent, Andrew Egger, Robinson posted comments to an online news site in 2009 in which he advocated violence and attacked then-President Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Egger’s report highlights three comments:
“If the cops wanted to shoot an elderly black man they should have shot Al Sharpton,” Robinson commented in April 2009 on a NewsOnearticle about Sharpton participating in a police-brutality protest. “Closing his mouth would do this Nation good.”
“Obama IS a blackface step-in fectch-it [sic] for liberal white America,” Robinson wrote on the same site the same month.
“It’s Oprah the wicked witch, leading the way to sexing up the children!” he wrote beneath another article a few days later.
The report says that it uncovered the old comments — which it says were posted to the website newsone.com — “through an archive of old comments made on sites built with the content management system WordPress. Plugging Robinson’s personal email address (the same one that multiple outlets have reported on in recent days) into that archive, we were able to find his now-infamous ‘minisoldr’ username and the comments he left.”
In a statement to The Bulwark, Rev. Sharpton said, “This is a long line in despicable, self-hating, antisemitic rhetoric from a man who enjoys the support of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Now, his candidate in that state has suggested cops shoot me instead of some other victim. It’s clear that someone’s life is expendable to them, especially if you disagree on the issues.”
The report comes less than week after CNN reported that Robinson had made a series of cringe-inducing comments on a pornography website under the same online alias during the same general time period.
The tenor and tone of the comments reported by The Bulwark appears to be similar to those of previous controversial public statements Robinson has made — both prior to becoming Lt. Governor and during his term in office.
Robinson has vehemently denied the CNN report and says he has retained legal counsel to aid him in investigating and refuting it. The Bulwark says the Robinson campaign declined to comment when asked about its new discovery.
This story was originally produced by NC Newsline which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network, including the Daily Montanan, supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.