#2654: Madison Cawthorn

Yeah, ok, so we’ll need to include this one, too: Madison Cawthorn, who served as the U.S. representative for North Carolina’s 11th congressional district from 2021 to 2023, before being booted (his departing statement was a plea: “It’s time for the rise of the new right, it's time for Dark MAGA to truly take command”). Cawthorn is a professional jackass, asshole, liar and bigot whose main strategy seems to have to been to emulate the behavior of Donald Trump as much as possible (for instance with regard to Trump’s post-truth tendency to simply not care whether whatever he says is correct or not), though in a somewhat more aggressive fashion. To what extent he is a loon the way we tend to use that category, is contestable, but he is certainly a lunacy enabler. After leaving Congress, he continued to screw over his constituents.

 

Election denialism

Cawthorn was one of the most vocal and incessant 2020 election denialists. At a Turning Point USA conference in December 2020, Cawthorn promisted to try to contest the 2020 presidential election results when Congress counted the Electoral College votes in January 2021, and claimed, without a shred of evidence, that fraud had been committed. He subsequently pushed his narrative with whatever conspiracy theory he could get his eyes on to run advertisements and raise money for himself. “Voter fraud is common in America. Those who tell you otherwise are lying,” said Cawthorn, falsely claiming e.g. that in the 2020 election, “ballots were shoved into duffel bags and left in parks and gas stations”, that Nevada “allowed dead people and out-of-state voters to flood the electoral system,” and that mail-in ballots “are wildly susceptible to fraud.” “Fact-check that,” said Cawthorn, not really wishing that anyone did (voter fraud israre, mail-in ballots have been almost entirely free of fraud, and no widespread fraud has been found in the 2020 election, despite a number of frivolous and quickly dismissed legal challenges filed by the Trump campaign).

 

It is worth noting that Cawthorn has explicitly admitted that there was no election fraud, but that he doesn’t really care. Later he returned to denialist talking points, saying for instance that “if our election systems continue to be rigged [which he admitted it isn’t] and continue to be stolen [which he admitted it hasn’t been], then it’s going to lead to one place – and it’s bloodshed.”

 

Cawthorn also addressed the insurrection crowd before the January 6 Capitol attack; later he attempted to blame the riots on a “Democratic machine” of “agitators strategically placed inside of this group” (he doesn’t believe that himself either), but also called the insurrectionists “political prisoners” and victims of shocking injustice, because playing both sides regarding the question of whether the insurrectionists are good patriots or antifa terrorists seems strategically attractive.

 

For his 2022 campaign, he said that he would retain the January 6 committee if elected but use it instead to root out the mythical deep state; but with the regard to the insurrection itself? Well, Cawthorn has questions: “Was this a false flag operation used by the FBI, whatever three-letter agency you want to use? How many agents did we have inside, infiltrated in this crowd? What did Nancy Pelosi know and when did she know it? What did all the capital police leaders know and when did they know it? Why are we hiding all of these videos?” He knows the answers, of course, but he also knows his potential audiences.

 

Foreign policy

Cawthorn claims, without evidence (or making sense), that there is “a large group of cartels, kidnapping our American children and then taking them to sell them on a slave market, a sex slave market”.

 

Cawthorn is also a firm apologist for Putin’s Russia. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, he called president Zelenskyy a “thug”  and said “the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”

 

Miscellaneous

Cawthorn is, of course, also a climate change denialist.

 

He furthermore fancies himself a bit of an amateur evangelist, but has lamented how difficult it is to get Jewish people to stop being Jewish.

 

And he has, of course, asserted that Covid-19 vaccination measures were really a ploy to confiscate your guns and Bibles, no less.

 

Diagnosis: Well, we guess he’s not really a loon, even if his choice of strategies – for someone who claims to be all about strategies – turned out to be idiotic. But he certainly enables loons, like those who voted for him, and a comprehensive encyclopedia of loons probably needs to cover those, too. Hopefully neutralized.