Mark Robinson, the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, handily won a three-way primary Tuesday that advanced him to a November showdown with Democrat Josh Stein, the state’s attorney general.
Robinson and Stein are vying to replace Gov. Roy Cooper, the Democrat governor who is term-limited.
About the same time the Robinson campaign was celebrating his win, social media was blowing up with accusations from Democrats that Republican voters had nominated a “Holocaust denier” to be the next North Carolina governor.
That claim was first raised by Bill Graham, a Republican opponent in the primary. It comes from two social media posts, from 2017 and 2018, that Robinson wrote and posted before entering politics.
In the first post, which is about the liberal media, Robinson is being criticized for putting the phrase "6 million Jews" in quotation marks.
The implication is that he was disputing that historical figure about the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust.
In the second example of a political hit job, liberal podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen was one of many who lifted a sentence about Robinson’s views on gun control from a 2018 post. The sentence Cohen posted to X shows the following comment:
“…This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash…”
That comment from Robinson, if it was true, does seems to suggest Hitler did not send Jews to their deaths. In fact, Robinson had written a longer post that suggested Germany’s strict gun control laws had banned guns, and hence disarmed the Jews, years before Hitler rose to power.
Robinson’s entire post reads:
The center and leftist leaning Weimar Republic put heavy gun ownership restrictions on German citizens long before the Nazis took power. This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash. Repeating that hogwash makes the conservative argument against the current attempts by liberal Marxists to push Unconstitutional gun control measures in the Nation look FOOLISH.
Robinson’s history lesson is mostly accurate. Weimer authorities required gun registration in 1931, in the name of public safety. When Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, they used those records to identify and disarm their political opponents, according to a National Review story.
Despite the context of Robinson’s 2018 post, AFN found numerous examples on X of politically active Democrats calling him a “Holocaust denier.” Those posts include MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, journalist Mark Jacob, and the group Democratic Governors Association.
On other X comments, Robinson's defenders pointed to his actual quotes and urged him to sue his accusers for defamation.
Snopes publishes entire 'go back' quote
In a second political attack against Robinson, Democrats are citing his comments from a 2020 speech to Republican women in which he states, “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote.”
Under that X post, however, a “Community Note” points out Robinson was referring to another history lesson: Republicans in Congress helped pass the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
That Community Note also includes a link to Snopes, the fact-checking website, which is usually not a fan of Republicans and conservatives. That article includes the entire comment from Robinson:
This idiotic guy was on stage with Candace Owens a few days ago and asked her, 'What America are we going back to to make America great again? The one where women couldn't vote or Black people were swinging from cheap trees?' I would say to him if I was standing in front of him, 'I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn't vote.' Do you know why? Because in those days, we had people who fought for real social change and they were called Republicans. And they are the reason why women can vote today.
Before the political attacks began Tuesday night, AFN spoke to Christian apologist Alex McFarland, a lifelong North Carolinian. He predicted Democrats will call Robinson “every bad name in the book” but the voters there know it’s not true.
“Mark Robinson is known as just an exemplary Christian man, very vocal, absolutely fearless,” McFarland said. “A man of conviction and courage.”
