Toward the end of 2007, Mark Robinson, now North Carolina’s Republican nominee for governor, made a decision that would change his life forever: He created a Facebook account.
Mr. Robinson, then 39 and running a home day care with his wife, has said that he signed up just so he could post about pro wrestling. But eventually his posts turned political, reflecting his perspective as a Black hard-right conservative. He soon realized that he was good at attracting attention as an online troll.
“I wanted people to come at me,” he wrote in his memoir, published in 2022. “I wanted to be as in their faces as possible. I wanted people to read my page and go ‘What did he say? Did he really say that? And that’s what happened.”
This aptitude for provocation, coupled with a Christian-centered social conservatism and a flair for public speaking, would take Mr. Robinson, now 56, from obscurity to the pinnacles of politics in North Carolina, where he currently serves as lieutenant governor.
Now, though, Mr. Robinson’s campaign for governor is foundering after a CNN report linked him to sexually graphic and offensive comments posted anonymously on a pornography website between 2008 and 2012 — soon after he joined Facebook and began evolving into an online provocateur. He has filed a defamation suit against CNN, but has not offered evidence to support his claim that the report was “recklessly false.”
Even before the CNN report, Mr. Robinson was dropping in the polls as his Democratic opponent, Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general, highlighted extreme statements he had made over the years, such as that women who got abortions had not been “responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” Mr. Robinson has also made comments widely perceived as racist, antisemitic and transphobic.
Mr. Robinson’s rise could have happened only in an age of radically democratized media, which has allowed for the amplifying of unvarnished voices that might have previously traveled no further than across a Thanksgiving table. It may also prove to be a cautionary tale, for a Republican Party in thrall to Trumpism, about the perils and limits of elevating candidates who excel at being edgy on the internet.
“You look at the guy’s résumé. How in the world does he become lieutenant governor?” said Allen Johnson, the editorial page editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., where Mr. Robinson is from.
Mr. Robinson agreed to be interviewed for this article. But on Tuesday, he and his political consultant hung up on reporters after being asked two questions about the porn site allegations, which he declined to answer, and a third question about offensive comments he has made. “Let us know when you want to do an actual profile on the race,” Matt Hurley, the consultant, said before ending the call.
Before he entered politics, Mr. Robinson worked in pizza parlors and as an upholsterer in a furniture factory. He had a high school diploma, a loud personality and a fondness for wrestling shows on TV. When he was in his 30s, he and his wife declared bankruptcy, telling a court they had only $40 in cash between them.
In interviews, some of Mr. Robinson’s longtime friends recalled that he had always been opinionated and a mischief-maker. Anthony Spearman, who has known Mr. Robinson since they were teenagers, said that his friend “used to say stuff for shock value” to “see what your reaction would be.”
Darius Burwell, who grew up with Mr. Robinson in Greensboro, N.C., remembered him as “the life of the party.”
“He was the guy who lit up a room whenever he walked into it,” he added.
Mr. Robinson was born in 1968 in Greensboro, then a city of about 150,000, and grew up in poverty, with a lot of siblings. His father was an alcoholic who beat his mother, according to his book. Mr. Robinson spent some time in foster care, and his family received government food aid.
The city, about 80 miles west of Raleigh, thrived through much of the 20th century, fueled by the booming textile and tobacco businesses. But both industries began to decline in the 1970s and ’80s, as Mr. Robinson was growing up.
His father died when he was in fifth grade, he wrote in his book, “We Are the Majority! The Life and Passions of a Patriot”; he was proud that his mother, rather than going on welfare, went to work shortly thereafter as a custodian at North Carolina A&T State University, a historically Black school. It was A&T students who led a famous civil rights sit-in at a segregated Greensboro lunch counter in 1960.
Despite his family’s struggles, Mr. Robinson was also exposed to Black residents who had built successful lives despite the obstacles white society had placed in front of them. He met many of them, and saw what he called their “normal Black life,” at the church his mother attended.
He would come to bristle at portrayals of Black people as victims.
“It’s disgusting when you take the story of people who have overcome so much,” he wrote in his book, and turn it into “this ‘Woe is me. I’m just po’ ole me, been chased by hounds and hit with water hoses Lord, have mercy.’”
He also found it ludicrous, he wrote in the book, that the integrationist busing plans in Greensboro forced him to bounce from school to school.
In high school, during the Reagan years, he felt the pull of patriotism. He joined the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps and, influenced by Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo” movies, imagined a life as a soldier.
After graduating, though, he seemed to struggle to find his way. He enrolled in college and considered active military service, but neither fit him (although he served in the Army Reserves for a few years and would earn a college degree after he became lieutenant governor). He got married in 1990 and took on different jobs, including at a furniture factory.
But by the mid-1990s he quit the factory job; in his memoir, he said he left because his hours had been reduced to the point where he could not “earn a living wage.” He blamed the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the migration of domestic manufacturing overseas.
It was also in the mid-1990s when Mr. Robinson decided he was a conservative. It happened, according to his memoir, when he read “The Way Things Ought to Be,” by the talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, with its diatribes against “feminazis” and “environmentalist wackos.”
Mr. Robinson bought the book with the intention of highlighting all of the racist passages in it. But when he opened it, he said in a speech in September 2020, he realized, “Rush Limbaugh is not a racist. Rush Limbaugh is me.”
Bankruptcy records, previously reported by ABC, show that Mr. Robinson did not file federal tax returns for five straight years, through 2002, and that he and his wife had more than $1.1 million debt in 2003 against $70 in cash and savings.
A house they had bought was foreclosed on in 2004, and they bounced from rental to rental, with their two children forced to change schools. “I call this our ‘time in the wilderness,’” Mr. Robinson wrote in his memoir.
In 2006, state inspectors found 20 violations during a single visit to Precious Beginnings, a day care that Mr. Robinson’s wife, Yolanda Hill, had started and that he had worked at. The violations were for poor hygiene, substandard meals and poor record-keeping on matters of fire and playground safety, among other issues. The business closed the next year.
It was at Precious Beginnings, Mr. Robinson would go on to write, that he “saw firsthand how the government can overburden small businesses.”
The failure of the day care reflects a recklessness that has characterized Mr. Robinson’s online persona, his personal life and his brief time in the political limelight. He and his wife have been through three bankruptcies in total. They have been accused of passing bad checks, and closed two businesses amid regulatory scrutiny.
In September, The Assembly, an online news site, reported that Mr. Robinson regularly frequented porn shops in the 1990s and early 2000s. He denied it, though his lawsuit against CNN, which also names as a defendant the main source for The Assembly’s story, states that he was managing a Papa John’s pizza place near a porn shop during that period and would “occasionally bring over free pizza and socialize” with the manager.
Mr. Robinson does not deny making the comments on Facebook that helped him attract thousands of followers. In many cases, he thought of them as an antidote to what he called “the kind of junk out there passing for ‘official’ Black opinion.”
He called the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a communist. He called African Americans concerned about racism and police shootings “soft-headed Negroes” who were “as blind as the Negroes that allowed a party that hates you to buy your votes and loyalty for the right to live in the ghetto on welfare.”
By 2018, he had come to think of himself as a battle-tested truth teller. “I had been whetted and honed through the rough and tumble environment of social media,” he wrote in the memoir. “I had put in years of Facebook argumentation and meme making. I had been in the fire, getting ready.”
That April, he took these skills to the real world, giving a pro-gun speech at a Greensboro City Council meeting that would quickly turn him into a national conservative star. Two months earlier, a gunman had killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., and the council was discussing whether to cancel an upcoming gun show.
His comments that night went viral within hours. He was soon invited to be a guest on “Fox & Friends,” and a convention speaker for the National Rifle Association, whose board he would soon join.
His words were all the more compelling to conservatives because of his race.
“It’s unusual for a Black man to get up and speak about gun rights at a City Council,” said Lee Haywood, a former local Republican Party official, who immediately invited Mr. Robinson to speak at a party function. “You just don’t see that every day.”
In July 2019, Mr. Robinson announced his run for lieutenant governor. He would go on to win a nine-person Republican primary with 32.5 percent of the vote, and the general election with 51.6 percent.
But problems kept bubbling up. This spring, after Mr. Robinson’s wife shut down a nonprofit she had started in 2012, regulators began to circle. The organization, Balanced Nutrition, administered federal grants to reimburse child care centers for meals and snacks, and employed Ms. Hill and other Robinson family members.
In July, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services found that the company had “serious deficiency” and ordered the Robinsons to pay back more than $132,000.
Since the CNN report, most of Mr. Robinson’s campaign staff has resigned. The Republican Governors Association has stopped buying advertising in the state, and Mr. Trump and other Republicans have distanced themselves from Mr. Robinson.
A few years ago, he had imagined what it would take for him to aim for an even higher place in government.
“If some did approach me about running for national office,” he stated, “it’s going to sound funny or odd perhaps, but I would leave it up to God — and social media.”
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