The Hitler-curious young Republican from Western North Carolina was sending a signal. As newly elected congressman, Madison Cawthorn announced he would build his staff around communications (comms). He was not going to Washington to represent constituents but to get airtime for himself and engage in ideological battle.
“Cawthorn is one of a new breed of Republican representatives who operate in the most fetid gutters of the new political pathways carved by Donald Trump,” write Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent. He would join Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (Fla.) as “professional media provocateurs who also happen to have gotten elected to Congress.”
The most lurid conspiracy theories pepper their interviews when they are not trying to kill off Social Security and the Affordable Care Act. Did you know a transnational cabal of elite, Satan-worshiping, cannibal-pedophiles supported by Democrats drink babies’ blood and maintain their youth by extracting adrenochrome from their skulls? No? I didn’t either.
That one has not popped up in Cawthorn interviews yet. Give him time:
But Cawthorn went too far when he responded to a question about whether the over-the-top melodrama “House of Cards” accurately depicted Washington:
The sexual perversion that goes on in Washington, I mean being kind of a young guy in Washington, where the average is probably 60 or 70. You look at all these people, a lot of them that I’ve looked up to through my life, I’ve always paid attention to politics … Then all of a sudden you get invited to, “Well hey, we’re going to have kind of a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come.” What did you just ask me to come to? And then you realize they’re asking you to come to an orgy. Or the fact that some of the people leading on the movement to try and remove addiction in our country, and then you watch them do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you.
While we can’t prove Cawthorn made this up, let’s just say the idea that he’s being invited to orgies by lawmakers in their 60s and 70s strains credulity. And Cawthorn’s long history of making up stories is precisely what turned him into a right-wing superstar.
True or not, Politico reports that at a meeting of GOP representatives, many were angered with Cawthorn for portraying his own colleagues as “bacchanalian and sexual deviants.” One complained that he’s fielding questions about orgies from constituents.
(How does young Cawthorn know what a “key bump” is? I had to look it up.)
These tales fall under the category of Donald Trump’s “Sir” and “A lot of people are saying” stories. But in less-experienced liars’ hands they tend to boomerang. It’s one thing to accuse Democrats of engaging in drug-fueled orgies but include your fellow Republicans and they get a mite peeved. Republicans already have an unusual fascination with sexuality they insist must be shoved back into the closet. They are passing bills all over the country to nip that gay-transgender stuff in the bud.
“Many of these, in addition to muzzling teachers, also seem designed to advance an underlying premise: that parents should constantly fear that their kids risk falling prey to perverts and deviants around every classroom corner,” Waldman and Sargent explain:
“A lot of these bills rest on the belief that at all hours of the school day, students are surrounded by constant threat of perversion, and that teachers are complicit in that threat,” Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist who closely tracks these laws, told us.
“These bills see schools as cesspools of deviancy” Sachs said, and as “places where students will be, quote, ‘tricked’ into thinking of themselves as gay or trans.”
Waldman and Sargent sum up saying, “The lure of depicting Washington as a kind of bottomless cesspool of degeneracy — a guaranteed right-wing applause line — led Cawthorn to accidentally hit his own colleagues with friendly fire in the form of charges of ‘sexual perversion.’”
The gun afficionado has a talent for that.
Cawthorn is drawing fire this week for accusing the nonprofit Rails to Trails Conservancy supporting a trail project in his district of being “super communist.” Some of the project’s key local supporters are Republicans.
A spokesperson for Cawthorn now insists he supports the trail project but “does not, however, support the confiscation of private property for those projects.”
Former Republican NC House member (and former national Sierra Club president) Chuck McGrady had a few select words for Cawthorn:
Cawthorn faces multiple challengers in the May Republican primary, including incumbent state senator Chuck Edwards (Asheville Citizen-Times):
Edwards explained that he went with a delegation from Brevard to Washington D.C. in 2021 seeking a grant that would partially have funded the Ecusta Trail.
“He applauded the trail, supported the trail and asked to be invited for the ribbon cutting,” he said March 29. “(He) referenced he would be using the trail himself and that he would offer a letter of support and now he’s playing politics.”
After November, Cawthorn may be taking his ball and going to play at Fox News.
(h/t BS)
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