Washington Post: NC GOP Nominee Mark Robinson Compared Planned Parenthood, Men with Saggy Pants to KKK

Washington Post: NC GOP Nominee Mark Robinson Compared Planned Parenthood, Men with Saggy Pants to KKK

Today, new reporting from the Washington Post revealed that Mark Robinson has made more than a dozen Facebook posts suggesting that Planned Parenthood, men with saggy pants, and some Black Americans – among others – are similar to or worse than the Ku Klux Klan.

Robinson took particular aim at Planned Parenthood, dedicating multiple posts to attacking the non-profit and labeling it “klanparenthood.”These posts have come as Robinson has called for a complete abortion ban in North Carolina, and labelled abortion “murder” and “genocide.”

Additionally, users on the notorious white supremacist website Stormfront have “praised Robinson’s comments on LGBTQ people and Jewish people, among others. Asked about the mentions on Stormfront, Robinson’s campaign did not directly address them and generally accused the media of treating Black conservatives unfairly.”

Read more about Robinson’s hateful rhetoric in the Washington Post:

• Planned Parenthood. Men with saggy pants. People who tore down Confederate flags and monuments. The Rev. Al Sharpton. Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee in one of this year’s most competitive governor’s races, has declared them all comparable to or worse than the Ku Klux Klan in social media posts that have drawn little attention.
• Robinson has criticized the civil rights movement of the 1960s and attacked prominent Black people in harsh and offensive terms, calling Michelle Obama, for instance, a man and an “angry, anti-American, communist black lady” who speaks “ghetto” and “wookie.”
• Robinson’s references to the KKK, a white-supremacist group that has terrorized Black Americans, underscore the risks Republicans have taken in nominating him…
• In 2014, Robinson wrote on Facebook that “an ignorant man with a sheet over his face in the country and an ignorant man with his pants hanging off his behind in the city are two sides of the same worthless wooden nickel,” adding a hashtag that suggested he was talking about people of different races: “ignoranceknowsnotcolor.”
• In 2016, he likened certain Black people to those enslaved on plantations: “A ‘plantation minded’ negro hates a free thinking black person worse than ANY Klansman EVER could or EVER will.”
• The next year, he wrote that he considered the KKK less reprehensible than “Black gang murderers” and Planned Parenthood, a health nonprofit whose services include abortions.
• “The KKK never claimed to love black folks like many of the murders in Chicago probably do, and the KKK never tried to eradicate the black race like PLANNED PARENTHOOD is,” he said, putting the KKK third in his ranking of “most evil.”
• Other posts took similar aim at Planned Parenthood or, as he called it, “klanparenthood.”
• But the context of many of Robinson’s most controversial statements is clear, making some in the GOP queasy. North Carolina’s state treasurer, a Republican, accused Robinson of “spewing hate” while running against him in the primary contest.
• Robinson has occasionally drawn attention on the forums of Stormfront, a white-supremacist website founded in the 1990s by a KKK leader from Alabama.
• A 2021 thread praised Robinson’s comments on LGBTQ people and Jewish people, among others.
• Robinson made KKK comparisons in more than a dozen Facebook posts over several years. Some of them refer to Black people. In 2015, Robinson addressed a Facebook post to “all those black folks running around attacking people for carrying flags and ripping flags off houses and trucks and … all the people on social media who applaud their foolishness,” an apparent reference to Confederate flags.
• He called them as ignorant as “any Klansman,” adding the hashtags “counterproductive” and “apelikebehavior.”

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