On April 3, 2018, a 49-year-old furniture upholsterer and incorrigible Facebook shitposter named Mark Robinson set fire to North Carolina politics. It happened at a city-council meeting in Greensboro, where officials were soliciting public input about a proposal to cancel an upcoming gun show on city property. Robinson’s hometown, like the rest of America, at the time was reeling from the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people and drew more than 1 million protesters into the streets calling for stricter gun-control laws. “We didn’t want to sell guns,” Greensboro mayor Nancy Vaughan told me.

Vaughan was minutes away from banging her gavel when the final speaker strode to the podium: a middle-aged Black man who looked like a retired bouncer, bald and heavyset with a salt-and-pepper goatee and eyebrows that, whenever he became agitated, furrowed in a cartoonish V. “I didn’t have time to write a fancy speech,” he began, shooting a disdainful look at the 12 speakers who came before him, only two of whom had delivered pro-gun statements. “What I want to know is, when are you all going to start standing up for the majority?” By “the majority” he meant people like himself, “a law-abiding citizen who’s never shot anybody,” he explained in a twanging baritone, jabbing his index finger at the ceiling for effect. “It seems like every time we have one of these shootings,” he went on, his voice growing louder, “nobody wants to put the blame where it goes, which is at the shooter’s feet. You want to put it at my feet.” This would ultimately spell death for lawful gun owners once they were disarmed by the government and left at the mercy of gun-toting Crips. “Guess who’s going to be the one that suffers?” he shouted. “It’s going to be me!”

To Vaughan, the speech was a bracing, baffling four minutes that, for all the speaker’s boorish charisma, was wildly off-topic. Nobody had proposed confiscating guns — Vaughan was a gun owner herself — and canceling the show would hardly hurt firearm sales in a city that housed plenty of brick-and-mortar gun shops. But Vaughan didn’t realize that their debate and others like it had poked a hive of gun fanatics and culture warriors eager to turn Robinson’s grievance into a national rallying cry.

Robinson likely had only a vague notion of this himself. He had spent the last decade building a Facebook following of 15,000 people by putting a Black spin on the ravings of a typical terminally online Gen-X conservative. His race gave him special license to ridicule the “soft headed negroes” who thought Alton Sterling’s killing in 2016 was motivated by racism and to taunt civil-rights legend John Lewis for getting beaten by state troopers. But none of it could have prepared him for what happened after his speech. If you kept tabs on conservative media in the spring of 2018, its impact was epochal, the political equivalent of watching the dinosaur-killing asteroid hurtle into the Yucatán Peninsula. There was life before Mark Robinson, a fiery detonation, and then life after him.

Later that night, a clipped version of his speech exploded across conservative messaging apps and social-media feeds, catching even those who followed local politics closely off guard. “Before many of us knew that Robinson was from Greensboro and had spoken just up the street, he was in our inboxes, linked and headlined in screaming type,” wrote journalist Steven Doyle in a column for the Greensboro News and Record. Mark Walker, a Republican who represented Greensboro in Congress, shared the video on Facebook and racked up millions of views, which Robinson estimates helped his own following double overnight. Within the week, a private car was chauffeuring Robinson to Winston-Salem for an interview with Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade on Fox & Friends. “How can we follow you on social media,” asked Earhardt, “and will you ever run for office?” Robinson replied blushingly that he and his wife, Yolanda Hill, had discussed a bid for elected office, but for now he was focused on completing his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

That calculation began to shift after the National Rifle Association cast Robinson in a commercial featuring video from his speech. “Anyone who is concerned with holding onto the Second Amendment, I absolutely think they should join the NRA,” he said solemnly. The organization flew him to Dallas for its May convention, where President Donald Trump was a speaker. The commander-in-chief did not stop by Robinson’s green room, but Robinson flew home dazzled and started to parlay his underground celebrity into appearances where GOP voters might take notice. “I back what Mark Robinson said 100 percent,” a Hillsborough resident named Jeffrey Brenneman told the News and Record at a Second Amendment rally in July. Robinson was fêted by conservative media and gun groups so often — the World Forum on Shooting Activities flew him to Nuremberg, Germany, and gave him an award — that he quit his job at Davis Furniture, a manufacturing plant in nearby High Point.

The more Robinson spoke, the more people seemed to want him on their ballots. “Sometimes others see more in you than you see in yourself,” he wrote in his 2022 memoir, We Are the Majority! Soon, he and Yolanda were brainstorming which elected position made the most sense for a factory worker turned keyboard warrior and ended up with lieutenant governor. “Our lieutenant governor,” explained Chris Cooper, who runs the public policy institute at Western Carolina University, “has about as much power over legislation as the cashier at the local Family Dollar.” For Robinson, a person with no experience in politics and barely any experience in leadership of any kind, it was ideal — a mostly ceremonial position where he could learn the ins and outs of state politics while keeping the media on call.

He used an online search engine to find a campaign consultant and hired the third guy listed — a 20-something up-and-comer named Conrad Pogorzelski III who agreed to get started working for free — then waded into a crowded 2020 Republican primary field. The previous year’s groundwork paid immediate dividends. Many of his opponents were more experienced, among them the superintendent of education and a state senator, but none could match the star power he had amassed through coverage from Breitbart, the Blaze, and Fox News. In March 2020, Robinson won the primary with a 32.5 percent plurality of the vote.

It was around this time that reporters started digging into Robinson’s Facebook history and unearthed a trove of such vicious invective that it made Trump look restrained. Robinson blasted The View co-host Joy Behar as a “she-beast” and Congresswoman Maxine Waters as “Ol’ ‘Maxie Pad.’” “Note to homosexuals,” he wrote, “Your homosexuality is a FILTHY ABOMINATION, that satisfies your degenerate, un-natural lust.” He mocked what he considered poor refereeing in the NFL as “‘f@g uh-hum I mean, flag football.” “The goal” of transgender people, he wrote, “is to turn God’s creation backwards, and make it into a sickening image of rebellion to glorify Satan.” The Holocaust death toll had been used, he proclaimed, to distract from deaths caused by communism, while Marvel’s Black Panther was “created by an agnostic Jew” in order “to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets.”

Lesser offenses have killed bigger candidacies, but 2020 was an unusual cycle. There were several consequential elections in North Carolina that year: MAGA edgelord Madison Cawthorn was gunning for Congress, Cal Cunningham for Thom Tillis’s U.S. Senate seat and a possible Democratic majority, Governor Roy Cooper for reelection, and Joe Biden for the Oval Office. Robinson’s race for lieutenant governor barely cracked the top five, and he flew under the radar by play-acting as an average retail politician, spending hours a day phone-banking and gladhanding. “On the campaign trail,” recalled Blake Harp, Cawthorn’s old chief of staff, “I remember walking into dinners, coffee shops, and small businesses seeing everyone wanting to shake his hand.” There was only so much his Democratic opponent, former state senator Yvonne Holley, could do to sound the alarm about their relatively low-priority contest.........

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