The porn saga of North Carolina’s lieutenant governor is modern lawfare in a nutshell

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I’m honestly not sure which part of North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson’s freshly filed defamation lawsuit to focus on here.

The obvious lede is that Robinson — currently the Republican nominee for North Carolina governor — sued CNN for defamation yesterday. The suit targets the network for publishing meticulously documented allegations that Robinson made a series of bizarre and frequently bigoted comments on a porn forum called Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012, including referring to himself as “a black NAZI” (capitalization in original).

Robinson’s lawsuit claims someone likely impersonated him using information from data breaches, which is certainly possible — but based on the evidence would require a remarkably complex…