It’s possible nobody cares whether or not Mark Robinson, the MAGA Republican running for North Carolina governor, used to hang out at adult video stores, as one explosive investigative piece in that state reported last week.
It’s possible, but unlikely.
Robinson’s star has been rising since a gun rights rant made him a right-wing star in 2018. Now, he’s North Carolina’s lieutenant governor and, with former President Donald Trump’s blessing, he’s trying to be the first Black governor in the state’s history.
The problem with judging so loudly and so often is you invite the same for yourself.
But Robinson has built his brand on judging, more than any politician I’ve seen in my two decades covering politics in North Carolina. Women, liberals, public school teachers, atheists, LGBTQ+ people, Jewish people, poor people — few have been spared Robinson’s righteous wrath. God calls men, not women, to lead, he says. LGBTQ+ people are “demonic.” They’re “filth,” they’re “maggots.” Women get abortions because they couldn’t keep their “skirt down.” Some folks out there “need killing.”
The problem with judging so loudly and so often is you invite the same for yourself. A man who gives no grace to others can’t expect it for himself.
The Assembly, an online news site in North Carolina, reported last week that in the 1990s and early 2000s, before Robinson was running for any offices, he would visit adult video stores in his hometown as often as five times a week.
According to the report — which Robinson’s campaign denied, calling the reporters “degenerates” — he would bring in pizza from the Papa John’s restaurant he worked at and “preview” pornography in a booth inside the store. Multiple employees said he was a memorable customer. He was gregarious and funny, they said, albeit homophobic, occasionally cracking jokes at the expense of the store’s gay clientele.
“I know he might have problems with gay people, but I don’t think he has problems with lesbians,” one employee said of Robinson’s taste in pornography, according to the Assembly.
People will say this isn’t news. Many Americans, especially men, have watched or regularly watch pornography. But porn’s ubiquitousness has nothing to do with why this story matters.
Voters will forgive bad policies, dumb statements, even crimes, but they rarely forgive humiliation. They won’t see the big, strong MAGA superhero Robinson says he is. They’ll see a gay-hating man taking a pizza into a private booth in a windowless adult video store to watch lesbian porn.
In politics, there’s the person politicians say they are, the person people perceive them to be, and the person they really are. You hope there’s not much of a gap between them, but with Robinson — this “born again” Christian who, according to his memoir, found religion in the 1980s — it’s a Grand Canyon-sized chasm.
This adult video store story is just the latest trouble for Robinson’s struggling campaign.
Not everyone in Robinson’s base — rural, mostly white Christians — will believe this story. But some will and, for better or for worse, people don’t like to talk about sex or pornography in these communities. It’s not “table-talk.” The Assembly’s story documented how people of faith picketed the Greensboro, North Carolina, adult video stores that Robinson is accused of going to. Those people are the people who are supposed to be excited to vote for Robinson.
This adult video store story is just the latest trouble for Robinson’s struggling campaign. The governor’s race should be nail-bitingly close but, according to some polls, Robinson trails his Democratic opponent, North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, by double digits. Some Republicans are even concerned that Robinson might damage former President Donald Trump’s hopes of carrying North Carolina, an all-important battleground state in the presidential election. If that’s the case, Republicans have no one but themselves to blame. Robinson’s drawbacks as a candidate were obvious. In 2022, after years of anti-abortion statements from Robinson, we learned that he paid for his wife’s abortion in 1989, before they were married. That’s hard to stomach from a man who’s supported a complete abortion ban, called abortion doctors “butchers of humanity,” and shamed women who need reproductive health care. Robinson also has touted himself as a small-business owner who believes in personal responsibility while slamming people who take government “charity.” But his background includes multiple bankruptcies, five years of unfiled federal taxes and a day care business that, according to state records, was cited numerous times for violations of state standards that are meant to keep children safe. Another report found that state inspectors cited the day care, which Robinson and his wife co-owned, for falsifying certification documents so it could stay open. Then there’s last month’s report in the Atlantic that Robinson, a U.S. Army veteran who promised to lead on veterans’ issues, hasn’t attended a single meeting of North Carolina’s Military Affairs Commission in the four years he’s been lieutenant governor — even though the commission is one of the few statutory duties of his office. Either the state Republican Party performed no background research on its candidate for governor or, more likely, it knew and didn’t care. It believed that, after Trump’s myriad controversies didn’t sink him, that there is no floor, no accountability anymore for a MAGA candidate. But Robinson isn’t Trump. He isn’t being forgiven like Trump’s forgiven. The polls make that clear. Republicans assumed the worst of their own base, of people of faith, of North Carolinians. Like Trump, Robinson is light on policy, large on spit and venom. From his speeches, you’d think North Carolina is a blood-soaked, charnel wasteland, not one of the fastest-growing states in the nation — a pretty place with mountains, beaches, bootleggers, the best historically Black colleges in the nation, a massive veterans’ community, race car drivers, Dreamers, poets, musicians and Pride marches. It’s a complicated place, the kind of complicated that politicians like Robinson are afraid of. Republicans assumed the worst of their own base, of people of faith, of North Carolinians — that they are cruel and stupid people who will reward the same in their political candidates. It’s an offensive miscalculation. Now, the only question is whether North Carolina voters will make Trump and other Republicans on the ballot with Robinson pay for it too.
Billy Ball is an award-winning journalist from North Carolina who founded The Living South, a journalism project focused on changemakers in the American South. He is also a senior editor at Cardinal & Pine, an online news site that covers North Carolina politics. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and others. 
