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The Republican frontrunner in North Carolina’s 2024 gubernatorial race made a slew of antisemitic comments over the past decade including sharing a quote that has been attributed to Adolf Hitler. The newly unearthed social media posts, first reported by Jewish Insider, also show Mark Robinson, the state’s lieutenant governor, comparing the tearing down of a Confederate monument to both the Nazis’ first mass roundup of Jews and the racist horrors inflicted by the Ku Klux Klan.
The posts are the latest round of controversy for Robinson. Last year, he was captured on video calling straight couples “superior” to gay couples. And after Robinson characterized being transgender or gay as “filth,” the White House condemned his remarks as “repugnant and offensive,” the News & Observer reported. Those comments also led several state Democrats and LGBTQ advocacy groups to call for the lieutenant governor to resign. If he were to win the nomination, Robinson would likely face Democrat Josh Stein, North Carolina’s attorney general, who is Jewish.
Robinson does not yet appear to have publicly commented on the previously unreported posts. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Wednesday afternoon. The posts were written before Robinson was elected to his current post in 2020.
In one post from 2014, Robinson posted a quote defending the concept of racial pride that has been attributed to Hitler. He did not name the Fuhrer but instead attributed it to “history who said it #1.”
In another post, from 2018, he condemned the toppling of “Silent Sam,” a statue that memorialized the University of North Carolina alums who served as Confederate soldiers, and made some questionable comparisons—to put it mildly:
The “activists/protestors” who tore down “Silent Sam” are the epitome of the lawlessness and violence that ushers in totalitarianism and oppression. They are no better than the NKVD which carried out mass killings in Soviet Russia under Stalin. They are 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. And they they are no better than the very racist they claim to be protesting. For just like the Ku Klux Klan they operate with violent and destructive tactics to obtain their wishes.
In other posts, from 2017 and 2019, Robinson appeared to question Hitler’s historic significance as the architect of the genocide that led to the murders of six million Jews. “There are people on our school boards, city councils, state legislatures, and in our federal government who believe in the tenants of Marxism,” Robinson wrote in one of the posts. “Think about that (instead of Hitler) for a moment.”
Those comments appear to reference the same impulses that have driven Robinson’s lobbying against efforts to diversify the state’s social studies standards and to create a task force to facilitate “exposing indoctrination in the classroom.” It is part of a general denial of the existence of systemic racism in government, which my colleagues Kiera Butler and Isabela Dias have noted.
In July, Jewish Insider also reported on a series of similar social media posts in which Robinson wrote, in part:
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.However……The Communist, who we helped to defeat the Nazis, and who killed at least 100 million in the 20th century, are alive and well.
Robinson posts have come to light as antisemitism has been on the rise nationwide. Earlier this month, after proclaiming “solidarity” with Israel in the ongoing war with Hamas, Robinson rejected accusations of bigotry and “apologized for the wording” of those previously reported posts, local outlet NC Newsline reported.
“We’ve dealt with the Facebook posts and moved past them,” Robinson said, according to the outlet.
