Source: Jewish Insider
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson is once again in trouble for things he has posted on social media and once again it’s his antisemitic views that are in the media spotlight – this time, it’s for Facebook posts recently uncovered by Jewish Insider.
The posts were highlighted by Jewish Insider in late October, about two weeks after Robinson play-acted as governor for the day, while Gov. Roy Cooper was in Japan on state economic business, by taking advantage of a state law that allowed him to be acting governor while Cooper was out of the country. He used his newfound “power” to proclaim “North Carolina Solidarity With Israel Week.”
It might seem odd that someone with Robinson’s history of antisemitism would declare solidarity with Israel, but attempting to appeal to a broader audience to fool people into voting for you is Politics 101. Unfortunately for Robinson, his proclamation ended up being a poor decision on his part because all it did was renew the media’s focus on the antisemitic things they already knew he said.
Robinson had to stand in front of the media and deny he was antisemitic as they confronted him with all of the antisemitic things he’d said.
He acknowledged that “there have been some Facebook posts that were poorly worded on my part” but insisted that “there is no antisemitism standing here in front of you.”
“We’ve dealt with the Facebook posts and moved past them,” he stressed.
In a new series of previously unreported Facebook posts, which are still available on his page, the extent of Robinson’s antisemitic posts is even greater than previously thought. In these new posts, he shared a quotation attributed to Adolf Hitler, compared the toppling of a Confederate statue to Kristallnacht and frequently minimized the legacy of the Holocaust while decrying the threat of communism, among other highly offensive remarks.
In 2018, Robinson wrote on Facebook that the demonstrators who tore down the Silent Sam statue on UNC-Chapel Hill’s campus were “no better than the Brown Shirts who terrorized Jewish neighborhoods on ‘the Night of the Broken Glass’ during the Nazi rise to power in Germany,” alluding to Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom widely viewed as a precursor to the Holocaust.
Robinson also wrote of how he believed communism was far more damaging than Nazism. “Folks always talk about killing ‘baby Hitler’ to spare humanity from extreme misery,” he wrote in 2017. “But if you really wanna do humanity a favor go back and kill ‘baby Friedrich Engels’ and ‘toddler Karl Marx.’”
“We often speak of the ‘ appeasement’ of Hitler. But the biggest ‘appeasement’ of ALL TIME is how we turned a blind eye to the clear and present danger of MARXISM,” Robinson said in another post written in 2019. “It is EXTREMELY distressing that many well meaning and intelligent people are so focused on long dead Hitler while the living political descendants of Stalin are currently fighting to destroy our REPUBLIC,” he wrote in a separate post days earlier.
In other newly unearthed posts and comments published before he assumed office in 2021, Robinson shared a meme comparing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Stalin and Mao and said that Hitler was a “lightweight” when compared to the two dictators.
Robinson also quoted Hitler in 2014 when he shared a quote about racial pride attributed to Hitler. “History who said it #1,” Robinson wrote before posting his version of the quote, in which he argued, in part, that “Pride in one’s own race — and that does not imply contempt for other races — is also a normal and healthy sentiment.”
The latest discoveries could lead to more concerns among Republicans who have already expressed fear that Robinson’s past offensive statements will hurt his chances to win the governor’s race in one of the most important swing states in the country.
Robinson has also drawn harsh condemnation from North Carolina’s Jewish community and even the Republican Jewish Coalition, which has called his past comments “clearly antisemitic.”
As is always the case when these types of social media posts come up, neither Robinson nor his team responded to Jewish Insider’s request for comment.
