“And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”
Trans Panic
A candidate in North Carolina who’s been lavishly praised by presidential contender Donald Trump seems to have said some astonishgly nasty stuff on a porn forum back in the day — some of which counters his controversial public statements about social issues including LGBTQ rights.
In a new investigation, CNN‘s K-File found that GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson, a Black Republican who currently serves as the state’s lieutenant governor, posted salacious and often disturbing material on a forum called “Nude Africa” between 2008 and 2012.
Using the handle “minisoldr,” which Robinson has used elsewhere online for many years, the person behind the account once claimed to be a Black “Nazi,” said he thinks the United States should return to slavery and that if it did he’d be eager to buy slaves, and bragged that he spied on women’s locker rooms as a teenager.
That same “Nude Africa” user also claimed to enjoy transgender pornography — which if it’s indeed the 56-year-old Republican, would run starkly afoul of his anti-trans rhetoric that includes calling LGBTQ people “filth” and saying that trans women should be arrested for using women’s bathrooms.
“I like watching tr*nny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot!” minisoldr wrote on the forum, using a common slur against transgender people. “It takes the man out while leaving the man in! And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”
Breathe Carolina
In a statement to CNN, Robinson repeatedly denied that he’d made the comments — even though reporters Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck linked him to the “minisoldr” moniker on several sites ranging from X-formerly-Twitter and Pinterest to Youtube and Disqus.
“I’m not going to get into the minutia of how somebody manufactured this, these salacious tabloid lies,” the candidate told CNN when presented with the evidence linking him to the account that made such disgusting comments.
Though he’d already been trailing behind Democratic gubernatorial nominee and current North Carolina attorney general Josh Stein before his alleged forum posts were leaked, Robinson maintains that he’s not dropping out of the race in the face of this now-national scandal.
In fact, the GOP nominee went on the offensive before CNN even published its report earlier this week.
“They want to focus on salacious tabloid lies,” Robinson said in a video published to his account on X, without specifying what “they” he’s referring to. “We’re not going to let them do that. We are staying in this race. We are in it to win it.”
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