A ‘Black Nazi’, sexting RFK Jr and an Oprah cameo: One weekend in US politics

It will be interesting to watch whether Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ interview with Oprah Winfrey will impact her steady progress in the polls. The interview made Trump predictably mad, and included a “shock” admission that she owns a gun and would happily shoot an intruder (something we’re sure was a moment of unguarded candour and not an attempt to counter any image of her as a milquetoast leftie scold).

But frankly, over the last few days, much more intriguing events have unfolded away from the main candidates, with prominent journalist Olivia Nuzzi and Republican North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson finding themselves at the centre of two masterpieces of scandal.

Here’s to you, Mr Robinson

From prologue to denouement, the story of Mark Robinson may be the platonic ideal of a political scandal. An evangelical ultra-MAGA who has courted controversy with his hardline social conservatism has already been alleged to have bought “hundreds” of bootleg porn videos back in the 1990s. But that wasn’t even the half of it.

An investigation from CNN claims to have uncovered scores of “inflammatory”, “gratuitously sexual and lewd” comments on a porn site called “Nude Africa” made by Robinson, or at the very least a user with the same email address and username (“minisoldr”), which he used across several social media accounts. Robinson took two days to deny making these comments.

Louis Money — the owner of the empornium Robinson allegedly visited nearly everyday back in the ’90s — has said that whatever Robinson should be judged for, a fondness for pornography isn’t one. Indeed, it’s not that Robinson’s an evangelical with an alleged voracious history of collecting pornography. It’s that he’s also called LGBTQIA+ people “filth” and “maggots”, and said transgender women who use women’s bathrooms should be arrested, while having supposedly written of his fondness for transgender (I mean, he uses a different word…) porn, calling it “fucking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!”

It’s that he’s campaigning for governor on a platform of “heartbeat” abortion laws, while having allegedly left a veritable cornucopia of identifying information on an account where he talks about how little he cares about whether a celebrity had an abortion, as long as he can watch “the sex tape”.

Oh, there’s also a bunch of slurs, coupled with some quite unbelievable general commentary on race: “Slavery is not bad. Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it back. I would certainly buy a few”, minisoldr allegedly argued, while elsewhere calling Martin Luther King a “commie bastard”, “worse than a maggot”, and much more.

CNN also said minisoldr announced, apparently unprompted, “I’m a black NAZI!”. And because this is a perfect scandal, there is the immaculate detail that Nude Africa chose, of all the fonts in the world, Comic Sans for its comment section:

Robinson has been endorsed by Trump in the must-win state of North Carolina.

What the hey

Journalist Olivia Nuzzi has combined sharp and sweeping storytelling with an unerring talent for being in the right place at the right time since parlaying her experience as an intern with disgraced New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner into a front-page story for the New York Daily News. And a wave of controversy followed her seminal New York Magazine piece in July about the “conspiracy of silence” protecting US President Joe Biden from facing proper scrutiny over his cognitive and physical decline.

As a result, one would expect her to be very careful about situations that have the potential to make her into the story. And yet.

On Friday news broke that Nuzzi was to be put on leave from her role with New York Magazine after a “personal relationship” had developed between her and Democrat turned independent turned Trump supporter Robert F Kennedy Jr after she had profiled him this year, and which she had failed to disclose to her employer.

The magazine issued a statement saying, “Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign”, but that an “internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias” and Nuzzi says she never reported on RFK Jr or used him as a source during that period.

The exact nature of the relationship is kind of vague at this point — Nuzzi has said the relationship was “not physical” — but the word “sexting” is being thrown around. Kennedy, for his part, has shown the kind of gallantry we’ve come to expect from Kennedy men, responded to the story through a spokesperson, who said: “Mr Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”