Madison Cawthorn is the 25-year-old North Carolinian Republican candidate for the state’s 11th Congressional District. He’s facing off against Democratic candidate and retired U.S. Air Force Col. Moe Davis. Cawthorn is one of those unicorns the Republican Party likes to show off: a good-looking guy who isn’t 1,000 years old. Technically, Cawthorn doesn’t even remember Republicans like Lindsey Graham’s “good old days” of segregation. However, Cawthorn doesn’t seem to have let that lack of empirical knowledge affect how racist he can be.
According to reports, Cawthorn set up a website in order to attack Davis, his opponent. This website, moetaxes.com, is at first glance your run-of-the-mill conservative attack on a Democratic candidate, saying that said candidate is going to raise your taxes. Upon further review of the website, it turns out that Cawthorn is exactly as run-of-the-mill racist as seemingly the entire Republican establishment is these days. First reported by The Bulwark on Thursday, Cawthorn’s website tries to attack news reporters who have been critical of Cawthorn while being mostly positive about Davis, saying that they’re trying to “ruin white males running for office.”
Help candidates like Moe Davis win in November, and turn these red state legislatures blue.
On his attack website, Cawthorn has this section attacking Tom Fiedler, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former dean of the Boston University College of Communication.
Tom Fiedler, who works with Moe Davis' advocates, is working to tear down Madison Cawthorn.
After this report, the language on the website was quickly deleted and changed to read that Fiedler “quit his academia job in Boston to become a political operative and is an unapologetic defender of left-wing identity politics.” Cawthorn released a statement saying: “The syntax of our language was unclear and unfairly implied I was criticizing Cory Booker.” Weird. The most racist part was the concept that anyone was interested in ruining white males running for office, as opposed to ruining racist assholes who are running for office.
You may remember Cawthorn as the North Carolina politician who had to quickly delete pictures he had posted to his Instagram account showing him gleefully visiting Hitler’s vacation home, “Eagle’s Nest,” in Germany back in 2017. The posts, which included Cawthorn referring to Hitler as “the Fuhrer,” made news because Cawthorn said it was a dream to visit Eagle’s Nest. Cawthorn put the images back up, and whether or not he’s a budding neo-Nazi remains to be seen.
As Cawthorn himself pointed out:
So, what’s the deal with the paranoia about white males being oppressed? Sounds Hitler-y. This comes around the same time that over 150 former classmates of Cawthorn at Christian conservative Patrick Henry College signed onto a letter detailing “predatory” behavior by Crawford and saying he was not fit to be an elected official. That’s more than half the student body, by the way.
Davis released a statement citing both racist events and the letter from Patrick Henry College, saying: “Madison Cawthorn has proven time and time again that he is unfit for public office. From the predatory sexual behavior that caused his Christian conservative classmates at Patrick Henry College to implore NC-11 voters to reject Mr. Cawthorn, to his incessant lying to embellish his own personal story, to his repeated appeals to racism and bigotry, Madison Cawthorn has clearly established his poor moral character.”
Still, Cawthorn continues to have the full backing of the Republican establishment and conservative gun enthusiasts.
