Mark Robinson: "Poor, Poor Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby!"

 

Media Matters unearthed two different 2018 recordings of Mark Robinson (before he became our lieutenant governor) proposing elaborate conspiracy theories that the two most notorious sexual predators of the last century -- Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby -- were actually innocent victims of a plot to destroy them for their “so-called sexual crimes.” Robinson called on his followers to “stand up against” the supposed “plot to build up a climate of fear, to shut people's mouths.”

That's where I lose the thread of Robinson's logic. Silence them from saying what? Didn't realize that Weinstein ever had political opinions that ran counter to progressive ideals. I know that Bill Cosby had become a bitter critic of Black liberation, and I rather suspect that Robinson's outburst depended heavily on his identifying with Cosby's condemnation of "immorality" among contemporary young Blacks. Pot, kettle ... you know, but Robinson doesn't see the irony.

In one of the recordings posted on the Media Matters site, Robinson plays history professor, accusing “the left” of creating “a climate of fear” and employing Stalinist tactics, comparing the accusations against Weinstein and Cosby to when Stalin “arrested some of his top generals and top leaders” and “threw them in gulags .… So that the common man would be really afraid.”

Follow that logic. Prosecuting Weinstein and Cosby is meant to create a climate of fear in "the common man" about speaking up against ... tyrannical government? When were Weinstein and Cosby ever anti-tyrant? And who's the current Stalin in Robinson's analogy?

Or does he mean that prosecuting sex crimes among the rich and powerful spreads panic among "common" garden-variety sexual scoundrels, and does Mark Robinson have a guilty conscience? His attitude toward women is very much documented. Just last year, Robinson also made headlines when he declared in a speech, “We are called to be led by men,” not women.