North Carolina Republican’s Time As Acting Governor Forces Him To Confront Past Comments About Jews, the Holocaust

North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the frontrunner for the North Carolina Republican gubernatorial nomination next year, is the state’s acting governor while Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper is out of the country. 

On Thursday, Robinson used his power as acting governor to issue a proclamation standing with Israel in response to the deadly Hamas terror attack, calling for a statewide day of prayer.

But the announcement put Robinson, a flame-throwing conservative who often veers into conspiracy theories, face-to-face with some of the most damning comments he has made in the past about Israel, the Holocaust and Nazis.

“I am so sick of seeing and hearing people STILL talk about Nazis and Hitler and how evil and manipulative they were,” Robinson wrote in a 2017 Facebook post where the would-be lieutenant governor said the Nazis “ARE GONE” and wrote it was communism, not Nazism, “was, and still is, the BIGGEST threat to American freedom.”

“After all,” he added, “who do you think has been pushing this Nazi boogeyman narrative all these years?”

In another post, Robinson referred to the Holocaust as “hogwash” in 2018.

“This foolishness about Hitler disarming MILLIONS of Jews and then marching them off to concentration camps is a bunch of hogwash,” he wrote. “Repeating that hogwash makes the conservative argument against the current attempts by liberal Marxist to push Unconstitutional gun control measures in this Nation look FOOLISH.”

Pushed on those comments, Robinson declined to apologize but contended they were “poorly worded.”

"There have been some Facebook posts that were poorly worded on my part," he said. “There is no antisemitism standing here in front of you."

He added: “There was never any antisemitism intended from those words, and there’s never been any antisemitism within me.”

Cooper, the two-term Democrat, is term-limited. Robinson, who became lieutenant governor in 2021, is all but certain to be his party’s nominee to replace Cooper. Democrats are expected to pick state Attorney General Josh Stein as their nominee.

Kate Frauenfelder, a spokeswoman for Stein’s campaign, blasted Robinson’s call for a statewide day of prayer as “a transparent political stunt.”

“Mark Robinson called the Holocaust 'hogwash' and now uses the slaughter of Israelis and Americans to perform a transparent political stunt — this is as close as he should ever get to being governor,” she said.