When revelations surfaced last week about Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson’s salaciously strange past as a pro-Hitler, “Black Nazi” porn-site commenter, who reportedly loved watching fringe sex while berating trans people, gays and women and praising slavery, everyone’s question was: How in the world did Robinson get this far in politics?

The likely answer isn’t going to make Republicans happy, but Democrats have been perfecting their cartwheels as fresh tidbits have surfaced. The lieutenant governor’s weird porn record, first reported by CNN, has been repeated and ridiculed by comedians and commentators on platforms ranging from X to “The Daily Show.” His more outrageous remarks include that he thinks some people should be killed, that women shouldn’t lead, and that he prefers Hitler to the folks in Washington — presumably referring to the current president and vice president.

The scandal checks so many boxes of strange that one almost wonders whether Robinson is a prankster. How does anyone get away with saying such things? Porn sites aren’t public places per se, but Robinson reportedly used his own email address and provided other identifiers that made tracing his identity easy. (Robinson has denied these allegations.)

Several Republican politicians have jumped ship in the wake of the CNN report and are now endorsing Democratic candidate Josh Stein, currently the state’s attorney general. Even Donald Trump, who once referred to Robinson as “Martin Luther King on steroids” (insulting everyone with even the slightest sense of history), apparently decided against having Robinson join him at Saturday’s rally in Wilmington, N.C.

Inexplicably, the North Carolina GOP issued a statement declaring its unwavering support for the candidate.

So, let’s unpack this latter development. A man who, according to CNN, calls himself a “perv” and a “black NAZI!” on a porn forum called “Nude Africa,” who has said he’d like to reinstate slavery (and buy a few slaves himself), calls gay and transgender people “filth,” and who, commenting in a discussion about whether to believe a woman who said she was raped by her taxi driver, wrote, “and the moral of this story … Don’t f**k a white b*tch!” — is still worthy of support?

To the conspiracy-minded, such remarks are too awful to be true. The timing of the bomb drop is also interesting. Thursday was the last day Robinson could drop out of the race. And the biographical information that was used in part to identify Robinson — such as where he lived at the time he was supposedly posting, where his mother worked, when he served in the military and so on — can easily be found online. Could Robinson have been hacked? Does AI do hit jobs now?

But CNN relied on other, more-damning specifics to fortify its story. Robinson used the alias “minisoldr” on the porn site as well as on several other sites, such as a YouTube playlist that features videos of Robinson and a Pinterest account that lists his name as “Mark Robinson.” The minisoldr username also posted reviews of places and products that Robinson has publicly recommended.

Thus far, Robinson hasn’t filed a libel lawsuit against CNN.

With so much evidence exposing Robinson as too weird even for Trump, why would North Carolina Republicans pretend everything’s copacetic? Either they’re too proud or too weird themselves, which brings us closer to answering how Robinson got where he is.

He got there specifically because he’s outrageous — and, truthfully, because he’s Black. Republicans get very excited about their Black candidates, in part because there are so few and because they stand athwart Black history and shout, no! When someone like Robinson rolls into town, Republican operatives can’t believe their good fortune. A Black Trump is more like it. In saner times, there were legitimate conservatives who happened to be Black, such as the widely respected economist Thomas Sowell, scholar and diplomat Condoleezza Rice, and even Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to whom Robinson now compares himself, claiming that he, too, is the victim of a “high-tech lynching,” as Thomas once said about his confirmation hearings.

As our politics have become less civil, and rhetoric has devolved to the level of gutter talk, people gradually have become inured to all but the most heinous expressions of hatred, salaciousness and disruption. Robinson’s porn-site commentary may have seized everyone’s attention, but North Carolina didn’t need titillation to find Robinson unfit for office. My hunch is that the state’s Republicans didn’t call Robinson out sooner for his verbal effluvia because, frankly, they knew their base was lapping it up.

Kathleen Parker’s email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.