Back in his pre-political days, Mark Robinson wasn’t spending all his online time trawling the forums of porn sites. He spent some time reading and commenting on small political sites too—where the opinions he shared, The Bulwark has learned, were no less unhinged.

“If the cops wanted to shoot an elderly black man they should have shot Al Sharpton,” Robinson commented in April 2009 on a NewsOne article about Sharpton participating in a police-brutality protest. “Closing his mouth would do this Nation good.”

“Obama IS a blackface step-in fectch-it [sic] for liberal white America,” Robinson wrote on the same site the same month.

“It’s Oprah the wicked witch, leading the way to sexing up the children!” he wrote beneath another article a few days later.

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These comments are previously unreported. And for good reason: They’re no longer accessible on the Internet, as the comments systems Robinson used to make them are now defunct. The Bulwark was only able to access them through an archive of old comments made on sites built with the content management system WordPress. Plugging Robinson’s personal email address (the same one that multiple outlets have reported on in recent days) into that archive, we were able to find his now-infamous “minisoldr” username and the comments he left.

These additional posts underscore just how wide-ranging Robinson’s use of the “minisoldr” alias was.

They also raise questions as to how an individual comfortable deploying casually violent rhetoric managed to ascend to remarkable heights of political power. Robinson may be an extreme longshot in the current gubernatorial race. But he’s also a sitting lieutenant governor. And, as Sharpton noted to The Bulwark, Donald Trump has not yet disavowed him.

“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,” Sharpton said in a statement to us. “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.”

Robinson’s campaign declined to comment.

The North Carolina Republican announced last night he has retained a law firm to “investigate the outrageous lies” from CNN, the outlet that first uncovered his porn-site comments. Whether he will actually file a lawsuit remains to be seen. (Robinson also reportedly declined other offers of outside digital-forensic help—a decision which, as we noted yesterday, reportedly contributed to his mass staff exodus last weekend.)

While Trump has not disavowed Robinson, the crowd of Republicans distancing themselves from him continues to grow.

“If Mr. Robinson doesn’t put forth facts as part of a lawsuit that would discredit the sources by the end of this week, then we’ve got to move on,” Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina told CNN yesterday. “We’ve got an election that’s 40 days away. We’ve got to move on and focus on President Trump’s success in North Carolina, legislative races, the Council of State.”

ANDREW EGGER is The Bulwark's White House reporter and co-author of the Morning Shots newsletter, which you can sign up to get for free.