Mark Robinson Once Called for Murder of Prominent Civil Rights Leader

North Carolina’s scandal-ridden Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, once suggested that prominent civil rights leader the Reverend Al Sharpton should be shot.

The Bulwark reports that back in 2009, the North Carolina lieutenant governor commented on a NewsOne article about a protest against police brutality that Sharpton took part in, writing, “If the cops wanted to shoot an elderly black man they should have shot Al Sharpton. Closing his mouth would do this Nation good.”

The publication found several other unhinged comments that Robinson made on the same website, including “Obama IS a blackface step-in fectch-it [sic] for liberal white America” and “It’s Oprah the wicked witch, leading the way to sexing up the children!”

The comments were previously unreported and made on a now defunct system, and The Bulwark was only able to find them thanks to an archive of comments made on websites using the WordPress content management system. They used Robinson’s personal email address that was known to be used on other websites, and found a trove of comments.

Sharpton, as one might expect, took exception, drawing a connection between Robinson and Donald Trump.

“This is a long line in despicable, self-hating, antisemitic rhetoric from a man who enjoys the support of Donald Trump and the Republican party,”  the civil rights leader said in a statement “Now, his candidate in that state has suggested cops shoot me instead of some other victim. It’s clear that someone’s life is expendable to them, especially if you disagree on the issues.”

Last week, CNN broke a bombshell story that Robinson had left comments on a pornography website calling himself a “Black NAZI,” expressing his desire to own slaves, and talking about peeping in women’s locker rooms. The story came on the last day that a candidate could withdraw from North Carolina’s election, and Robinson defiantly said he would stay on.

Since then, Trump has refused to disavow Robinson, even as the gubernatorial candidate’s own staff has abruptly resigned. Senator Lindsey Graham has scrambled to try and distance Trump from Robinson, as the scandal could deal a decisive blow to the former president’s efforts to win the key swing state. It seems there are some scandals that are just too much for Trump’s GOP allies.

Vice President Kamala Harris has fought to end the death penalty since 2003—but suddenly, the Democratic presidential nominee’s campaign has gone mum on the issue.

Missouri’s decision to execute Marcellus Williams late Tuesday, despite the pleas from his victim’s family and the prosecutors in his case, as well as hundreds of thousands of petition signatures sent to the governor’s office calling for a commuted sentence, brought the issue back to the foreground. But despite mounting pressure, Harris’s campaign wouldn’t respond to direct questions about her current stance on human euthanization, reported Axios.

That’s a far cry from where she’s stood on the issue over the years. In her inaugural address as San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris promised to “never charge the death penalty.” She kept that promise through her time as a prosecutor—all the way through 2019, during her first run for the White House, when she included the liberal policy as part of her core agenda, promising an end to capital punishment in her criminal reform plan.

“Kamala believes the death penalty is immoral, discriminatory, ineffective and a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars,” her campaign website read at the time.

Harris’s sudden retreat from the historically liberal policy aligns with the Democratic Party’s latest stance on capital punishment—which is, apparently, that it is no longer a topic for discussion. In August, the nation’s liberal party dropped its anti–death penalty stance from its platform, marking the first time since 2004 that the DNC has failed to address the death penalty, reported HuffPost.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has gone all in on the death penalty, advocating to expand the extreme punishment to people convicted of relatively minor crimes, such as dealing drugs. During his time in office, Donald Trump executed more people than any administration in 120 years, according to the ACLU.

His obsession with capital punishment goes back to his early days as a New York City real estate developer, when he personally paid out $85,000 for full-page ads in four local papers calling for the execution of the Central Park Five—a group of teenagers who were accused of raping Trisha Meili but who were later exonerated after serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed to the crime a decade later.

“I want to hate these murderers and I always will,” Trump wrote in the May 1989 ad. “I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”

“Bring back the death penalty and bring back our police!” he wrote in all caps.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is continuing to sow chaos with his spoiler campaign antics, this time in Wisconsin and New York. 

When Kennedy “suspended” his failing presidential campaign last month, he embarked on a new quest to see Donald Trump elected, by attempting to stay on the ballot in states where it would hurt Kamala Harris and vacating in the battleground states where staying would hurt Trump.  

Already, Kennedy has seen himself scrubbed from ballots in Pennsylvania, Arizona, Ohio, and North Carolina. Now he’s set his sights on Wisconsin.

Kennedy has petitioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court to remove him from the ballot by having election administrators place a sticker over his name, Slate reported Tuesday. Last month, the Wisconsin Elections Commission told Kennedy he could not remove his name from the ballot, citing a law that says qualified nominees must appear on the ballot unless they die. 

Wisconsin election officials have balked at the request, which has never been tested and could potentially slow vote tabulation in Wisconsin, a crucial swing state. The circuit court that oversaw the case called Kennedy’s sticker plan a “logistical nightmare.”

Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, a Republican, also said that requiring stickers would be both a “logistical and administrative nightmare,” according to VoteBeat. 

“With over 1,800 municipal clerks statewide, uniformity of any sticker placement becomes a real concern,” Miner said. “Errant sticker placement would produce an error and return the ballot to the voter, uncounted, again sowing distrust in the tabulation and administration of the election.”

In addition to preemptively undermining both the administration and legitimacy of the election, Kennedy’s hijinks have also cost taxpayers time and money. In North Carolina, Kennedy was able to get his name off the ballot—only after thousands of them had already been printed. As a result, Kennedy delayed early voting in the state by two weeks and cost Forsyth County an estimated $16,000.

Kennedy is also asking the Supreme Court to put him back on the ballot in New York, after he was disqualified in August when a judge ruled that the former independent candidate’s connections to his New York address “existed only on paper and were maintained for the sole purpose of maintaining his voter registration and political standing” in the state.

In an emergency appeal filed Monday to the Supreme Court, Kennedy’s lawyers argued that his supporters “have a constitutional right to have Kennedy placed on the ballot—and to vote for him, whether he is campaigning for their vote or not.” The appeal is being handled by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

To pay off his more than $1 billion debt owed to Sandy Hook families, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is being forced to sell his media company InfoWars for parts.

On Tuesday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez said that he will move forward with auctions of InfoWars’s trademarks, websites, social accounts, and copyrighted material beginning on November 13. From there, the remaining assets, such as studio equipment and cameras, will be sold at an auction in December.

Jones owes families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting nearly $1.5 billion in defamation and emotional distress lawsuits after calling the mass killing a hoax and calling the families “crisis actors.”

“Alex Jones will no longer own or control the company he built,” Christopher Mattei, a lawyer for the Sandy Hook families, said in a statement Tuesday. “This brings the families closer to their goal of holding him accountable for the harm he has caused.”

While a few months ago, Jones broke down and cried publicly and dramatically about the loss of his company, the day before the judgment, he was on tour in Pennsylvania with Tucker Carlson and fellow conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. On stage he was his usual self, shouting about the “globalists” and threatening to imprison his enemies.

Notably, Jones’s personal social media is not included in the auction, and he additionally urged his supporters to buy his Infowars assets, which could allow him to continue the show.

“It’s very cut and dry that the assets of Free Speech Systems (Infowars parent company), the website, the equipment, the shopping cart, all that, can be sold,” said Jones. “And they know full well that there are a bunch of patriot buyers, and then the operation can ease on.”

His fans, including fellow conservative commentators, gave their regards.

“What the federal government did to Alex Jones, is positively criminal,” wrote Candace Owens on X.

“I’ve always liked Alex Jones,” wrote Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. “He might have said things that were wrong and then he repeatedly apologized. How many times have you ever heard the mainstream media ever apologize about all the horrible things they have said?”

Donald Trump has cooked up another get-rich-quick scheme, and this time it’s at more than a  210 percent markup.

The Republican presidential nominee’s latest grift centers on selling silver coins, smartly promoted as “Trump Coins,” that feature images of the White House, Trump’s signature, and of course, Trump’s face.

The one troy ounce medallions, which went on sale Wednesday morning, are marked at $100 a pop before shipping—more than three times the price of a spot of silver at the time of publication, according to APMEX.

The website, RealTrumpCoins.com, lists an “investment disclaimer” on the tokens, warning that they’re intended as “collectible items for individual enjoyment only, and not for investment purposes.” 

“The coins are not political and have nothing to do with any political campaign,” the website reads, despite the fact that the website’s biography on X describes the company as an “official partner of the Trump Organization.”

The project is just the latest in a long series of Trumpian hustles this year, which have so far included launching a remarkably ugly sneaker and selling NFT trading cards of himself dressed in superhero costumes and astronaut suits. He also made some quick cash on a limited-edition, $60 God Bless the USA Bible co-promoted by “God Bless the USA” singer Lee Greenwood; took the parent company of his social media platform Truth Social public; and stamped his name on a new cryptocurrency platform headed by his two sons, Eric and Don Jr., which even Trump’s allies have criticized as a “huge mistake.”