Q Toon: The Roidsemblance Is Striking

This is Mark Robinson's second appearance in my cartoons.

The Republican Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina has a long track record of hatred toward LGBTQ+ citizens, women, and civil rights. He has announced that homosexuals are "filth," "maggots," and "what the cows leave behind." He called transgender people are "demonic," and threatened trans women with arrest or "whatever we go to do to you" if they dare to use a women's rest room. Houses of worship that display the LGBTQ+ Pride flag "make me sick every time."

And echoing Trump's spurious birtherism and secret Muslim accusations against Barack Obama, Robinson claims that Michele Obama, despite having given birth to two children, is somehow transgender.

This has clearly endeared him to the Tangerine Scream, who pointed him out at a Trump kundgebung in North Carolina last week:

"This is Martin Luther King on steroids. Now, I told that to Mark, I said, I think you're better than Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King times two. And he looked at me, and I wasn't sure, was he angry because that's a terrible thing to say? Or was he complimented? I have never figured it out. But I'm telling you, he's one of — right? — when I said that to you, you looked like, I don't know if I like that comment! You should like it."

Given that Robinson has defended his own Facebook posts dismissing Rev. Dr. King as an "ersatz pastor" and "communist," it's no wonder he appeared put off by Donald Trump comparing him to the only Black person he could think of by name whom he didn't suspect of being a rapist and murderer.

Trump's low opinion of Blacks, whether American or from "shit-hole countries," appears to be shared by Mr. Robinson. Seven years ago, Robinson posted on Facebook the following screed:

Someone asked me if I considered myself part of the "African-American" community.
I told them NO!
They asked me why and I said;
"Why would I want to be part of a "community" that devalues it's fathers, overburdens it's mothers, and murders its children by the millions? Why would I want to be part of a "community" that sucks from the putrid tit of the government and then complains about getting sour milk? Why would I want to be part of a "community" that allowed itself in the 1960s to walk right back to the very plantations it was freed from in the 1860s? And why would I want to be part of a "community" that celebrates the very lawlessness and violence that is killing it's future right in front of them?
Why would I want to be part that?
WHY?

If you think Robinson was just having an off day or two, don't be so sure.

In 2014, Robinson quoted Hitler on Facebook, and in 2018 he compared protesters tearing down a Confederate statue to Kristallnacht, a night of Nazi destruction that proceeded the Holocaust. That same year he also speculated Marvel's Black Panther was created by an "agnostic Jew" to profit off of Black people (he actually used a Yiddish slur instead of Black people).

But wait, there's more!

There was the time he called school shooting survivors “media prosti-tots” for advocating for gun-control policies. The meme mocking a Harvey Weinstein accuser, and the other meme mocking actresses for wearing “whore dresses to protest sexual harassment.” ...

Robinson asserted on a 2018 podcast that the political left is going after “the Harvey Weinsteins and the Bill Cosbys” to replicate Soviet-era intimidation.

[Commercials by a GOP primary rival highlighted] Robinson’s 2022 suggestion at a church that men, not women, are meant to be leaders. Acknowledging that he was “getting ready to get in trouble,” Robinson exclaimed to the congregation: “Called to be led by men!”

When “it was time to face down Goliath,” he added, God “sent David, not Davita.”

Lately, Robinson's campaign has tried to place more emphasis on traditional bread-and-butter issues while castigating the media for reminding voters of the peppery red-meat language that endeared him to Trump's MAGA minions in the first place. Make no mistake, however: Robinson is in no way apologizing for or disavowing any of his past. (Except for that one time he paid for a girlfriend's abortion.)

Will North Carolinians be fooled by the new toned-down Mark Robinson?

Trump's comparing Robinson to Rev. Dr. King might very well have been a cleverly disguised insult Trump can refer back to if Robinson loses the election in November.