By now, pretty much anyone who follows political news is aware of how Mark Robinson, the current Republican lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is running for the post of governor, was found to been a frequent visitor to porn sites where he made all manner of posts in the comments section that would cause his religious supporters to wince, to put it mildly. He had already publicly made incendiary comments about women and the LGBTQ community as well as denying the Holocaust.
While I was aware of the story and posted about it last week, I had not paid much attention to how the reporters managed to identify him as the source of all the comments.
Seth Meyers describes how he was identified and I could not believe how mind bogglingly stupid he was.
Because he’s a Republican and he chose to follow his party in its messy bitter divorce from reality. Next question…?
I’ve been writing about Robinson, but more importantly the coverage of Robinson, over on Wonkette (and a bit on my Substack as well).
I don’t think he was particularly stupid. If someone wanted to read an exhausting number of my posts and comments, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out my real life identity. It would just be very time consuming. At the time he was active on the porn forum, he simply wasn’t an important enough person for anyone to bother doing the work.
He quit the forum (apparently) in 2013 or so, and he gave a speech in 2018 or so that went viral. That gave him a thirst for the spotlight and people around him encouraged him to go into politics. It would have been awkward to tell those people, “No, actually, I have a deeply impolitic history of comments on the internet, saying pretty horrible things about liking Mein Kamf and hating MLK and so may other things, so I’ll decline.”
So, he goes forward, and Lt Gov is not a position with that much power, and people don’t find his old internet history. he’s been important for years, and no one has found it, so he thinks it’s safe to run for Gov, because he has months and months and months of experience in the public eye that tells him it’s safe and no one is checking his past.
But Gov is a more important post, and someone decided to search his e-mail addresses and internet aliases and found them used on a porn forum and … that’s it. Someone decided it was important enough to bother. He simply couldn’t have predicted it, and he’d sort of trapped himself into it by not demurring right away when encouraged to run for Lt Gov.
If he had only ever occupied the LG’s office, his past very well might never have come to light.
He played the odds as he saw them, given the experiences he had, and the dice were nice to him right up until they weren’t.