Amid controversy, Robinson makes promises to change state school board

During the third day of the North Carolina Republican State Convention in Greensboro last Saturday night, gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson made some key promises to the cheering crowd of 1,000, even though controversy continues to plague his campaign.

Robinson, 55, pledged that if elected governor, he would improve North Carolina’s economy, and reform the state’s educational system.

“It’s real simple, we fight for two things, change in two areas,” Robinson told attendees at the convention’s old North State Dinner. “Number one, our economy, number two, our education system. Economies are built on pillars. Those pillars are public safety, public education, health care, infrastructure and housing. If you don’t have those things, and those things aren’t healthy, your economy will not be healthy.

The controversial Black Republican continued, “North Carolina is literally on the cusp of exploding economically. It is time to direct that explosion in the right way and cause this state to be something even better than it already is.”

But when it came to public education, Robinson was blunt.

“Our education system in North Carolina is in shambles.” Robinson said. “This is not the fault of our school teachers. The way we treat the teachers in this nation and in this state is abysmal. It needs to be turned around, quick, fast, and in a hurry.”

Our standards are full of (Critical Race Theory). Our standards are full of (diversity, equity and inclusion). They do not give the proper direction to the local agencies that they need. That’s got to be changed.”

Robinson called Critical Race Theory “garbage” and “absolutely sickening,” even though CRT is not taught in North Carolina public schools.

“Our state school board is wrong headed and headed in the wrong direction,” the Greensboro native continued, pledging to appoint conservatives to the board who will focus on “classical education” like math, English and grammar. “When I take office in January, I get to flip that board. Not upside down but right side up.”

Robinson also promised to expand Republican efforts pertaining to school vouchers.

“These all-powerful bureaucrats who think they know more than you, know your children better than you, believe that it’s okay to feed your children a steady diet of communism and pornography — they’re not right,” Robinson said.

Robinson also promised to eliminate DEI policies from state government wherever he found them.

“I’m going to go through every document in North Carolina’s government, all of them,” he said. “When I find DEI, I’m going scratch them out — with a red pen.”

There were at least two ironies to Robinson’s address Saturday.

Even though he hailed efforts by the Republican-led N.C. General Assembly for resurrecting the state economically over the past 13 years, saying that “North Carolina is literally on the cusp of exploding economically,” a poll conducted by conservative publication Carolina Journal showed 58 percent of registered Republicans “…thought that North Carolina is on the “wrong track,” compared with 42 percent of registered Democrats and 52 percent of registered unaffiliated voters.”

Robinson also said that Republican state lawmakers were right about passing the discriminatory HB 2 so-called “bathroom bill,” several years ago which cost North Carolina hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business, opportunities and jobs to the state.

The second Robinson irony in his NCGOP convention speech Saturday was his sharing how he grew up poor “in a little rat-infested house” in Greensboro, not far from the convention center, and how later in life, he grew up working at a minimum-wage job at a nearby shopping mall.

He has also experienced several bankruptcies, a home foreclosure and misdemeanor charges, later dropped - for writing bad checks - in adulthood.

Though Robinson expressed pride in making it as far as he has in politics and in life, he offered nothing by way of policy to directly help other poor North Carolinians who are working hard, looking for a way up to help their families.

In fact, Robinson is on record as calling government safety-net spending as “a plantation of welfare and victimhood” that has mired generations of Black people in “dependency and poverty.”

But records show that state regulators are now probing his wife’s nonprofit taxpayer-supported agency, “Balanced Nutrition, Inc.” - which provided free lunches for poor children - for years of unaccounted spending totaling more than $100,000.

Reportedly Robinson, his wife, and other members of their family earned at least $830,000 from this enterprise which, according to tax filings and state documents, has collected approximately $7 million in government funding since 2017, despite his disparaging remarks about “a plantation of welfare and victimhood.”

Many of the most recent polls show Robinson in a dead heat in the race for N.C. governor against Democrat N.C. Attorney General Josh Stein, some show Robinson with either a slight lead, or being slightly behind.